• News bites

    • 11.17.08

      The best of the second-best bacon

      The San Francisco Chronicle tasks its Taster’s Choice panel with ranking the turkey bacon brands. Short version? If your fork can’t touch pork, Oscar Meyer’s Louis Rich brand wins by, like, a lot. And if you shop at Kroger, definitely skip the house label. (via) (photo)


    • 11.10.08

      Carol Cooks Keller

      “It takes a special kind of nutjob to attempt every recipe in The French Laundry Cookbook,” Carol Blymire writes on French Laundry at Home, where she did exactly that. Start with her recap and retrospective, then work your way back through all the brilliant success and maddening kitchen sadism. (via) (pic)


    • 11.07.08

      Cakes we can believe in

      Zilly Rosen, a cake artist from OBK’s home base of Buffalo, NY, leaves us nearly without words with her 1,250-cupcake Obama portrait. Read how she did it at Cupcakes Take the Cake.


Shortcut to Mexico: El Rincon, Sodus

The tamales were packed with a dense load of chile-tinged pork
When’s the last time you ate corn tortillas the way abuelas make them at home, the corn dough patted thin between two practiced palms, then griddled?
Never. If you’ve only eaten Mexican food in Western New York restaurants, that’s your answer. Until yesterday, that was my [...]

Souvlaki today

That’s not spaghetti sauce, but Hellenic-inflected souvlaki sauce
I’ve seen a lot of souvlaki lately, but I wanted to mention one that stood out of the crowd.
Order the souvlaki home style at Ambrosia (467 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo, 881-2196) and this is what you get.
First off, it’s a skewer of seasoned, grilled pork, instead of the beef [...]

Breakfast fish fry?

No cole slaw or potato salad - but plenty of crunchy, piscine satisfaction
Kevin Purdy, a journalist working in Niagara County, wrote the following post.
Once in a very great while, I’m able to side-step my worst smart-ass tendencies and show myself that some assumptions about food might be, in a few cases, completely wrong.
Point in case: [...]

Saigon surprises

The convenient handles are chunks of actual sugarcane - you can crush it between your teeth to extract raw sweetness
Here’s two more dishes that you can get at Pho Saigon (1551 Niagara Falls Blvd., Amherst) and nowhere else in the area.
Shrimp paste on sugarcane and grilled pork on rice noodles are Vietnamese basics that each [...]

Fist food: Fatty duck, NYC

Lots of appetizers are finger food. This bad boy deserves a new category: Fist food.
The second dish I had at Fatty Crab in Manhattan was as unapologetic an appetizer as you’ll find.
A big duck breast is brined, then steamed to par-cook it and leach off some of the fat. Then it’s tossed in a salt-and-spice [...]

Taste of heaven

Meet the Junkyard Dog. Even if there was just this one sandwich, it would have been a good afternoon. Photo by Sabrina May.
Kevin Purdy, a journalist working in Niagara County, wrote the following post.
A former editor of mine had an undying belief that nearly every story his newspaper produced needed an information box, a [...]

Seared memory: Fatty Crab, NYC

Watermelon, deep-fried marinated pork belly, and pickled watermelon - three standout tastes that egg each other on to heights of greatness
We eat every day, most of us, so it becomes a kind of muted Muzak in our lives, always there off in the back corridors of our attention.
Every once in a while, if we are [...]

Ugly fruit: Funky celeriac salad

The purple chive blossoms, adding a slightly bitter onion note, should be used sparingly
Nature is full of lovely creations, but celeriac is not one of them.
The ungainly, knobby celery root often ends up treated like a potato with spunk, mashed or creamed or gratineed for a different tuber experience.
Faced with one on our Native Offerings [...]

Read ‘em and eat: WNY’s best barbecue

The pit ham at Suzy-Qs threatened to create a category by itself
Here’s the link to my barbecue story in First Sunday.
The pictures in the previous item are from Kentucky Greg’s on George Urban Blvd. in Depew, which took top honors in spare ribs.
Donnie’s Smokehouse on Jefferson in Buffalo ruled in baby back ribs.
Top brisket was [...]