|
|||||
|
By now, the Flushing malls, with their compact food booths from which emerge some dazzling regional Chinese dishes, are a well-known stomping ground for the culinarily curious. The New World Mall, which opened last year, is hidden on the lower floor of a nondescript office building on Flushing’s bustling Main Street, the predominantly Chinese area’s teeming commercial hub. Enter the building, and the first floor holds few surprises. There’s a wireless provider and a Haagen-Daz ice cream shop. Very humdrum.
 Making pork and scallion dumplings at Tianjan Food, New World Mall, Flushing, Queens. Photo: Laura B. Weiss.
But if you ride down the escalator, which is planted straight ahead of you just after you walk inside the building, you’ll encounter a mad riot of neon signs and mobs of hungry locals.  New World Mall, Flushing Queens. Photo: Laura B. Weiss Yes, it’s a food court with booths stationed around the edges, the center filled with long tables. Except this spot is lined with roughly two dozen stalls serving up all manner of Chinese, Korean and Japanese delights. It seems that every family living in or around Flushing’s Chinatown—the second largest in New York after Manhattan’s—has descended on the place. There are families with children. There are teenagers huddled around tables. Elderly people pick at their steaming bowls of soup noodles.
 Hand-pulled noodles with crispy duck at Lan Zhou Hand Made Noodles, New World Mall, Flushing, Queens. Photo: Laura B. Weiss.
Recently, I roamed around the mall, scarfing down savory hand-pulled noodles with fried duck at Lan Zhou Hand Made Noodles; the broth was savory but not earthy or deeply flavored enough for my taste. Then I tried feathery scallion and pork dumplings at Tianjin Food, easily the lightest and most flavorful I’ve eaten outside China.
 Dumplings from Tianjin Foods, New World Mall, Flushing, Queens. Photo: Laura B. Weiss.
I finished up with a steaming bowl of congee, a Chinese porridge that’s often eaten for breakfast; sweet chunks of pumpkin floated just beneath the glistening surface. If you want to try some Asian food dishes in familiar surroundings, the New World Mall provides a gentle introduction. And, of yes, the food court boasts clean bathrooms for that necessary pit stop before you head home. How to Get There: Take the Number 7 train or LIRR to Flushing/Main Street.
 Knives by by sfllaw via flickr. Tired of sawing through onions and watching your garlic hop around the counter? All it takes is $15 for the itinerant knife grinder, Mike Palotta, to sharpen three of your very dullest chef’s knives. Except don’t wrap your knives in a flimsy dish towel (sorry, that’s the way my mom did it) and run down the steps, then gallop down the street, to catch up with Mike’s roving green knife grinding truck. Read more on West Side Rag about how Mike is still plying his trade after more than half a century.
 Photo: BookofCooks. Friends have told me that my cakes and cookies are pretty terrific. So let’s say that I’ve decided to try to cash in on my baking hobby. Do I really want to go to the bother and expense of setting up an elaborate web site to launch my fledgling effort? The answer is, not if I can avoid it. But let’s say I want to stick my toe in the water as a food entrepreneur. BookofCooks, an Etsy-like site that allows budding caterers, personal chefs and food sellers to peddle their wares, lets you do just that. Though BookofCooks, which launched in October after a two years in beta, is still sparsely populated, it takes only a few minutes to set up a storefront. You upload a picture of your product, a pitch and contact information, and presto, you’re in business. That’s what Jacy Cakes of New York, specializing in custom wedding and other special occasion cakes, did. The baker set up a digital shop and promoted it with an arresting come-on: designer shoes made entirely of sugar. Who’s on BookofCooks? Caterers and personal chefs, as well as aspiring bakers and cooks who are eager to sell you their wares. So far roughly 2,000 storefronts have been erected and several hundred transactions have been logged on BookofCooks, says site co-founder Julian Mellicovsky. For your digital shop, you can chose the free option or one of two paid premium plans which come with some additional features. The aim is to help you sell products to people in your local area. For purchasers, the proposition isn’t entirely clear. Why would I buy, cupcakes from some random Manhattan or Brooklyn baker, when I’m tripping over established cupcakeries everywhere I turn? If I’m in the market for a personal chef—Wow, that sounds like a lovely idea!—I’m going to want to get personal references, not just pick someone totally at random off a website. Still, if you’re catering an event or looking for someone to cook dinners for you on a regular basis, the site’s meant as a first point of contact for locating nearby talent, says Mellicovsky, who may soon add personal testimonials to lend additional credibility to vendors posting on the site. You can search by city and type of food. Each storefront provides a description of services offered, contact information and a link to each seller’s web site for more details on products and prices. Merchants check off whether they deliver or are willing to cook at your home. The question is, are customers looking for a Yellow Pages of local food talent? BookofCooks is hoping they’ll be fine with what boils down to little more than an online bake sale.
Happy New Year to all! Yes, I know Food and Things hasn’t been too active lately. But now I’m back and I’ve decided to change the blog’s focus. West Side Rag is covering the Upper West Side, including the food scene brilliantly. (I’m one of its columnists.) So it’s time to move on and cover the wider world of food–everything from culinary travel, to events, to recipes, to new blogs, apps and cookbooks. So that means I’ll be writing about food adventures around New York—and around the country. I’ll cover food stall finds in Flushing, Queens and fried chicken joints in Memphis. Chef Renee Marton’s recipes will continue to appear on Food and Things. Plus, I’ll be posting about my own cooking adventures, mishaps, stumbles and all. As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. For a daily dose of Food and Things, follow me on Twitter @foodandthings.com.
I almost tossed the sugar cookies I baked for New Year’s Eve into the garbage. The recipe was from Mark Bittman, the NY Times food writer and cookbook author. The round-faced Bittman is usually a reliable source for most cooking and baking challenges—from how to prepare kale to putting together a no-fail buttery pound cake. But this time, it looked like the trusty Mark had failed me. A few minutes out of the oven, this particular batch of sugar cookies could have passed for water crackers they were so bland and tasteless. Since I was baking treats for a New Year’s Eve party at Chef Renee Marton’s, I set to work to try to rehabilitate them. (It wasn’t Bittman’s’ fault it was mine; I over-mixed the batter.) For sure, when you bring a dish to a chef’s house, you want to get it right.
I thought to myself, OK, add some sugar and fat. So I rolled each cookie in powdered sugar. I whipped up some chocolate ganache and smeared it between two cookies to create a richly fudgy sandwich. That was the only filling I made. Everything else—the nutella, the dulce de leche, I pulled from my fridge. Then I glommed a tablespoon or so of sauce onto each cookie, smoothed it with a spatula, and smushed two cookies together to create a sandwich. The result? The powdered sugar boosted the drab little ovoid’s richness and heightened the sweetness just a tad. The filling seeped into the cookies transforming them into sumptuous little morsels. By the time midnight rolled around, my near-disaster cookies were fit to be eaten—even by a chef. What was the best part of this cookie-making enterprise? When Chef Renee drifted by a little after midnight and announced, “Everyone’s raving about your cookies.” Click here for Bittman’s sugar cookie recipe or use your own.
|
Follow Food and Things
  
|
||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Food and Things - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
