While New York broadly has excellent food from across the world, one cuisine we are frequently disappointed with is Indian (I concede I have not tried some respected places in Queens). With one of us being Indian and both of us traveling in India, we have an admittedly high bar but none the less, never found a particularly good place. Always on the lookout for a good place and to quench our (and especially my) constant desire for spice, we tried Brick Lane Curry House and I attempted its Phaal Challenge. Phaal is reportedly the spiciest curry dish and the challenge entailed eating an entire order on your own for the grand prize of a free Kingfisher, a certificate of completion, and your name and picture on the Phaal of Fame.
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So we’re back from Italy and despite stuffing ourselves throughout Tuscany and Rome, upon our return, we immediately wanted to try and make a few dishes we had over there. Our first night in Florence, we had a massive steak. We were ordering in kilos so ended up with (we think) just over three pounds of pre-cooked steak for the two of us. Needless to say, we still managed to finish it. Before the steak, we had a dish of drunken pasta, it was basically spaghetti cooked in red wine rather than in water. While extremely flavorful, the dish was a bit of a single note with an intense red wine flavor and not much else. This recipe, adapted from here adds in a few extra flavors.
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I had not made lasagna in a bunch of years, but wanted to do something a little bit different. As evidendced by our eggplant parm pizza recipe, we’re kind of fans of eggplant. I figured, if eggplant parmesan was good on its own or on pizza, it should work in lasagna as well. I still included some meat in the sauce, but this could easily be a vegetarian lasagna if you excluded the sauage. When I made this lasagna, as I had most times cooking lasagna in the past, I made some extra and froze it. I’d highly recomend this as a reheated lasagna really does taste nearly as good as a freshly made one.
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dpetc Italian, Recipes, Uncategorized
I made this soup one weekday when I was feeling kind of sick. It was actually incredibly easy and tasted fantastic, much better than a lot of the hout & sour soups you get in restaurants. it’s particularly fun to make because you’re familiar with the basic taste but can tweak it to your liking. In my case, I added a few additional splashes of vinegar, several extra turns of black pepper and the noodles, which all contributed to it being a non-standard hot & sour soup.
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dpetc Asian, Recipes, Uncategorized
Few things are better than a really good slice of pizza. At a recent dinner, we really wanted to make a side of eggplant parmesan, but ultimately decided it would have been a bit much. Figuring two good things together are usually good, we made some eggplant parm. pizza for appetizer instead. We ended up charring the bottom of the crust a bit too much, but overall this worked pretty well. The most important thing is to make sure that the eggplant is well seasoned. Especially make sure to salt it appropriately if using an unsalted ricotta on the pizza.
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My two favorite things are probably food and movies. Also being a sucker for animated movies means that watching Ratatouille is basically 2 hours of bliss for me. I was also understandably quite excited about Julie and Julia. Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci are all both extremely talented and fun to watch on screen. Given the obvious food connection, it seemed like a great excuse for me to do some movie-related blogging. Last week I was perusing my usual rotation of movie blogs when I found a post on www.cinematical.com giving away tickets to an early screening of the movie the Monday before it opened. I jumped on it, won one of the pair of tickets and was off to the movie. Read more…
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So, P and I are not big dessert people. As we’ve written in some of our restaurant reviews, dessert is definitely the least important course in our mind. This creates some issues at dinner parties, as most people obviously enjoy dessert so we still need to come up with something good. In the past we had fried several different desserts and went back to that crutch again here. If you’re unaware, chilaquiles are a Mexican dish where tortilla chips are sauteed in salsa and topped with any combination of meats, cheeses or vegetables. We thought this would be a good inspiration for a dessert if we changed around a few things. Overall, the frying is obviously a bit of work, but certainly less work than a lot of desserts and was passable enough given our lesser talents.
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One recipe that all cooks/chefs should be extremely comfortable with is a basic tomato sauce. People make their sauces with all different kinds of bases; some use celery and carrots, others will use only fresh tomatoes, hand squeezed, others believe only tomato, garlic and onion should be listed as ingredients. Everyone needs to decide on their own tomato sauce as it will sure as a base for many a dish. Once I got comfortable with the ratios that I personally liked, it became a must have in the kitchen. I prefer to always have a can of crushed tomatoes in the pantry just in case. Once you make this sauce or perfect one to your own tastes, I’m confident that the days of bottled or jarred tomato sauces are well behind you.
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Dinner Parties, etc is a blog about food – eating it, cooking it, entertaining with it, but mostly just enjoying it. There are two of us who write for this blog – “P” and “M”. We are both young 20’s guys living in New York City, and though we both have “real” jobs, eating, cooking, and entertaining is really what keeps us going. We’d like to share our love of food and wine with you in this blog. You can expect synopses of dinner parties that we host (as well as tips for your own), recipes from our cooking adventures, New York City restaurant reviews, and random musings on topics as diverse as wine and movies. Please feel free to contact us with any feedback, requests, criticism, and of course compliments at contact@dinnerpartiesetc.com.
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