new york glimpses: on the move

Chalk this one up as a victory for Portland: our food cart scene puts New York to shame. True, it's a city of 12 million people and probably 1 million food carts, but most vendors don't venture much beyond the hot nuts/soft pretzels/hot dogs triumvirate. Meanwhile, in our Portland neighborhood alone, there is a waffle taco cart, an ice cream and pancake cart, a grilled cheese bus, and a retro trailer slinging baked goods and juices. In every neighborhood, food carts circle their wagons on overgrown lots and in empty parking spaces, creating an impromptu culture of makeshift cafes. Now, that's not to say that New York doesn't have any good cart food - they do have their own awards ceremony, after all - just that they're a lot more mobile than their Portland brethren, making them harder to track down.

On our first day in town, we went with our friend Hannah down to the weekly vintage bazaar called the Brooklyn Flea. Yes, we did want to check out the mid-century baubles and funky thrift-store clothes, but we knew we wouldn't be lugging home a suitcase full of Fiestaware; we came for the food. After we returned from last year's adventure to Red Hook, we heard tell of some amazing Central American cooks grilling up food for the neighborhood's weekend ballgames. While we didn't venture to Red Hook again, the Red Hook Ball Field Vendors made the trip up to Fort Greene for the Flea. We zeroed in on their stand and ordered a bean-and-cheese pupusa, along with a sweet corn tamale. The pupusa was crisply grilled on the outside and was filled with a savory melted cheese that tasted delicious with the pickled cabbage and hot sauce mounded on top. The tamale was unlike any other we'd ever tried: it had no filling inside the soft, steamed masa, but tasted exactly like a meltingly sweet ear of mid-summer corn.


Keeping with the stuffed-and-filled theme, we queued up for two other flea market street vendors. First up was Elsa's Empanadas, where we quickly downed an order of spinach, cheese and raisin handpies. They were nice and flaky and the filling had the right balance of tangy and sweet. Tantalizingly, the Empanada stand was right next to Asia Dog, but A steered me away from a kimchi-garnished hot dog and over to dessert.

Salvatore Bklyn does handmade ricotta with hipster street cred. What caught our notice were their hand-stuffed cannoli. I have a real weakness for cannoli - we've even made them ourselves once, which entailed no small amount of deep-frying and pastry bags. Best to leave it to the experts. And these were certainly expert, with the right amount of outside crunch and a lightly sweetened, curd-y filling. The more I consider it, the more that I realize that stuffed foods are pretty much made for street carts. Well, those and foods-on-sticks. But as far as portable edibles go, it's hard to beat a cannolo.


From then on, our mobile eating stayed on a decidedly sweet note. Walking down Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, A nearly shrieked when she saw a buttermilk-colored truck passing our dishes of small-batch ice cream. Van Leeuwen ice cream uses simple ingredients to craft simple flavors. With our friend Hannah, we ordered a peppermint-chocolate chip scoop and a dish of red currant and cream. Both flavors had a fresh creaminess, despite being custard-based, but the currant ice cream was particularly memorable for its balance between tangy fruit and sweet milk.


The next evening, after making dinner with our friends Catherine and Quincy, we were struck by two realizations: we hadn't bought dessert, and we were just a few blocks from Dessert Truck's late-night parking grounds. You might recall our nighttime sugar-fix from last-year's visit, but if not, I should fill you in: Dessert Truck sells haute cuisine desserts in paper cups for six bucks. It's a brilliant business plan. On this visit, A ordered a goat cheese cake, while I opted for the pavlova. Individually, the components of the pavlova (crisp meringue, red fruit gelee, creme fraiche) were spot-on, but for some reason, they just didn't quite jive. I'm sure some of it had to do with the difficulty of breaking a meringue with a plastic spoon. That said, A's cheesecake choice more than made up for mine: a few blackberries and a drizzle of rosemary-scented caramel were a great accompaniment to the rich cake. This is one we might have to work on re-creating at home.


After a few days of going without a mobile-food-fix, Hannah informed us of a weekly fixture just around the corner from her midtown workplace: the Treats Truck. Late one afternoon, we strolled up Lexington to where it was parked, only to be generously barraged by samples. Normally, I take a free taste (and I think most people are like me on this matter) and walk away thinking, "Sucker...you didn't trick me into buying anything!" But hell, the Treats Truck proprietess more than tricked us; she up-sold us two brownies, when we'd only meant to get a double-peanut-butter sandwich cookie. I have to hand it to her, though - she knows her product. The PB cookie was really good, but imagine downing an entire box of Girl Scout Tagalongs, and you'll begin to get a sense of its mouth-parching stickiness. We also enjoyed our Mexican chocolate brownie, which tasted more of Ibarra hot chocolate than the overly-infused chile concoctions everyone else seems to love. Of everything we ordered, though, the pecan butterscotch bar ranks among the most addictive desserts I've ever had; it was decadently sweet and sticky in that slightly under-baked way. With sweets this good, I suppose I could be okay with having to follow a moving target.

The city that never sleeps is always eating.

For the privilege of eating our fill in New York, we paid with the clothes off our backs. Literally. That's thanks to Northwest Airlines (aka. "The Devil of the Skies"), who turned our hour-and-a-half layover in Minnesota into a fifteen minute mad dash to catch our connection. Needless to say, our bags couldn't run that fast. So if we happen to look a little haggard in our first few days of photos, you know why.

When we'd left Portland, the forecast for the weekend predicted some unseasonably-late snow, so we were pretty pleased to wake up Saturday at P's uncles' house in New Jersey to find 75 degree weather. If left to our own travel plans, we probably would have blown off the touristy sites in favor of more food, but P's uncle Warren swept us out of the house and into the city for a walking tour of Midtown. In the span of two hours, Warren gave us an in-depth architectural history of more sites than we would see for the rest of the week. Empire State Building. Check. Chysler Building. Check. Central Library. Check. Grand Central Station and a nearby Earth Day festival. Double check.

Not to worry - the rest of the day was spent tracking down food. After a pleasant outdoor lunch on Bryant Park, we rendezvoused with A's friend Hannah at her Brooklyn apartment. Still thinking of New York in terms of Portland-scale (a hang-up we'd have for most of the trip), we decided to take a "quick" jaunt down to Red Hook to find some key lime pies we'd heard about. Hannah, the most seasoned of the three of us, knew the trip would take over an hour, but she was easy-going and we were determined, so we ventured out undeterred. After a long subway ride, we were treated to an even longer walk across a warehouse-district of chop-shops and housing projects. Safe? Maybe not. Classic P & A trip? Most definitely. Still, Brooklyn is a funny place; where else would you emerge from a half-mile of identical project complexes to find a full organic farm and an IKEA?

At long, sweaty last, we reached our destination - Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies. This was a very good thing, because at this point Hannah was beginning to doubt not only our navigational skills, but the very existence of key lime pie in Red Hook. But there it was, hidden inside a tropical-oasis garden center on the end of a pier. The name of Steve's place is accurate because they serve nothing other than key lime pie, doing most of their business with grocers and special pie orders. So did we really venture to the furthest tip of Brooklyn to eat a whole pie? No - we came for the Swingle. This delicious confection consists of a miniature key lime pie, frozen, dipped in chocolate, and on a stick. It is cool, tart, creamy and refreshing. Simply put, it blows other stick-foods out of the water. The corn dog, the popsicle, the kebab - none of these delicacies compare to the glory of the Swingle. A is already planning home-spun Swingle tributes to enjoy over the Portland summer.

Thus revived, we decided to get dinner. Back up in Williamsburg, we headed to Fette Sau, a Brooklyn barbecue joint that is essentially a well-decorated alley. At the counter, we selected from assorted piles of meat and paid by the pound. At the bar, we ordered local microbrews by the half- or full gallon. This was bulk eating we could get behind. Our baking sheet full of food included pulled pork shoulder, spicy sausage, pork ribs, burnt-end beans, half-sour pickles, and yeasty rolls. The ribs were underwhelming, but everything else more than whelmed us. The pulled pork was sweet and tender and brightened by the vinegar sauce served on the side. We devoured the smoky-sweet beans and loved the half-sours (see the parallels between deli pastrami and bbq?). Still, it was the spicy sausage that stood out above the rest, especially when accompanied by the sweet Georgia BBQ sauce and sopped up with a bit of fluffy roll. They tasted like spicy kielbasa and P swears they were braised in Coca-Cola. Despite being washed down with some Black Wheat beer from Sixpoint Brewery, all of that salty food put us in the mood for some dessert.

You all know that we have a special place in our hearts for carts, so it should come as no surprise that we got our dessert from a truck. Not just any truck, but a truck with fine dining credentials. Started by a former Le Cirque pastry chef and his friend, Dessert Truck has been serving $5 gourmet desserts for the last year from a corner near NYU. These are gourmet desserts for the people. A and Hannah both opted for the obligatory peanut butter and chocolate concoction: a chocolate mousse with a creamy peanut butter center and caramel popcorn on top. It was delicious, playful, and reminiscent of childhood treats - an upscale Reese's peanut butter cup, if you will. It must be said, however, that P's choice took the cake (or, rather, the bread pudding). The decadent chocolate bread pudding (almost like an ultra-rich mousse) was topped with a creme anglaise and, not having had enough pork for one evening, P opted for the special bacon infused cream. Oink, oink.

This may seem like a bout of frantic eating (all of the food above was consumed in the span of four hours), but in all fairness, we were on deadline. The next morning we would be leaving the city for two days to visit P's grandparents in Scranton, PA, a place not known for its rich culinary legacy...

or is it?

_________

Steve's Key Lime Pies - Pier 41, 204 Van Dyke St, Brooklyn; good luck figuring out a close subway
Fette Sau - 354 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn; L @ Bedford
Dessert Truck - University Pl. nr. 8th St.; 6 @ Astor Place; N, R, W @ NYU/8th

from the dept. of mobile dining

When the weather is as unseasonably beautiful as it was last week, what better to do than to bike out (mobile) and sample some N. Mississippi food carts (also mobile)? Of course you can't think of an answer to that question; that's what makes it rhetorical. And we couldn't think of a suitable response either (even though we had plenty of other errands to take care of), so off we went on our new bikes to seek out some early spring bites.

After huffing and puffing our way over to North Portland (hey, it's been a while since we've ridden across town - rainy-old-Portland's a tough place to bike half the year!), we pulled up to Moxie Rx. Take all of the Americana kitsch of a roadside dinner and cram it into a sunny little turquoise-and-red trailer and you've got a sense of what Moxie looks like. Sitting on their lot makes you feel like you're somewhere in the South, maybe Texas. The food, though, is 100% Portland, focusing on "elixirs" and "tonics" (juice blends) and comforting breakfast sandwiches and pastries that would probably fill the prescription just as well for a hangover cure as for a bright-eyed early riser. We'd gotten there around noon, so many of their breakfast options were sadly sold out. We decided to share a homemade cheddar biscuit with an herbed egg and smoked salmon, along with a grapefruit fizz (fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, basil, soda water) to cool us off from the hot ride over. The biscuit was cute-as-a-button and very tasty; its cheese just beginning to melt from the heat of the egg. Our freshly-blended soda was just the refreshing sip that we needed and it made us anxious for summer weather. But we were still hungry (surprise!), so we climbed back on our bikes and pedaled a little ways up the street.

Junior Ambassador's looks more like a Home Depot storage shed than something on wheels, but that doesn't slow its emissary down from sharing his Mostlandian home cuisine with Portlanders. Springing out of the diplomatic successes of their early ice cream deliveries, Rudy (the T. in the M.O.S.T), started a food cart featuring panwiches (savory pancake-sandwiches) and fresh, unusual ice creams. We shared a Turkey Ruby panwich (turkey and red cabbage sauerkraut on rye pancake), which was toothsome and delicious. The pancake was much denser than a breakfast flapjake, probably yeasted, and more like a muffin or sponge-y blin. Before we'd even finished our panwich though, we already had our ice cream requests in: one strawberry chipotle and one maple "strip tease." The strawberry could have had more of the smokiness from the chipotle peppers, but it did have a nice, very subtle spiciness. The maple flavor, however, was a perfect 10 with just the right amount of sweetness. As for the "strip tease?" That would be a bacon strip, the crispy, salty bits of which perk up every single bite.

Now, rather than only regaling you with tales of what we already ate, this post has a participation portion! This Saturday, if you are in Portland, Willamette Week and foodcartsportland.com are hosting a food cart confab called Eat Mobile, featuring Altengartz Bratwurst, Asian Station Cafe, Biggs Bros Wings, Micro-Mercantes (homemade Tamales), India Chaat House, Junior Ambassador, Julia’s Mobile Cafe (Russian Food), Moxie RX, NW Hotdogs (Mercy Corps vendor), Tabor (czech food), Tita’s Pista. We can't tell you about a lot of these places, but we can definitely speak to the awesomeness of Jr. A's, Moxie and Chaat House. Since we'll be out of town (eating from New York carts, no doubt), the duty falls upon you all to go as our representatives and eat like you imagine we would.

It's only five dollars.
There will be one-dollar Bridgeport beers.
All of the money goes to help MercyCorps NW's awesome small-business programs (which help out a lot of local restaurants).

See the Willamette Week site for details/directions.

Here we go, a-waffling

Lately, the weather has been gorgeous in Portland. Not only that, but the weather has been gorgeous ON THE WEEKEND. Wonder of wonders. It's been the kind of weather that makes you forget its only February and spring is still over a month away: sunny, clear, and warm (in comparison with the usual winter weather, of course). We've been so excited to closet our rain gear and winter coats that we haven't much felt like spending time inside, which has necessitated more eating out than usual.

A few weeks ago we had one such beautiful Saturday and, though we were overflowing a bit in the leftovers department, we decided to have lunch out at a food cart we've been meaning to try. Despite my normal aversion to all things fast food, I am a sucker for the food cart. There is something very jolly about a little van or trailer packed with people and food (admittedly this is probably jollier for me than for those who are packed), serving tasty and often unusual treats. I also like the fact that I'm buying the food from the person who cooks it, enabling me to properly thank my chef for a satisfying meal. And, yes, it's fast...and sometimes that's fun.

Mississippi Avenue in North Portland has become a kind of haven for food carts. The neighborhood is one of our favorites and every time P and I stroll the streets I seek out the carts with my eagle eye, looking for any that I haven't seen before and reminding myself of the ones I am aching to try (ridiculously, up until a few weeks ago we had tried not-a-one). Here is the range I've noticed: Baked goods/juice , Filipino, Mostlandian, good old fashioned BBQ and a recent addition, a waffle cart.

The waffle cart, Flavourspot, used to have just one location, on North Lombard - a bit of a trek, which partly explains why we had yet to try it. However, they recently opened a second location on Mississippi, from which they now serve their sweet and savory waffle sandwiches - tasty waffles wrapped around an assortment of ingredients from lemon curd and whipped cream to sausage and maple spread.

I don't know if the world is divided into pancake people and waffle people in the same way that it is divided between those who listen to the Beatles and those who prefer the Rolling Stones (I like both, but then, I'm a bit of an anomaly); if it is, I fall decidedly on the side of the waffle. You may try to convince me otherwise, but in the great battle between waffle and pancake, I know where my loyalties will always lie. Where the waffle's texture is perfectly balanced between a buttery crisp exterior and a light fluffy interior, the pancake's is uniformly flat and spongy. Where the waffle delightfully stands up to the maple or other syrup you drizzle o'er its surface (and into its dimples), the pancake quickly becomes soggy and unappetizing. Try as you might to dress up a pancake, I will always see it for what it is: a poor substitute for a waffle.

Flavourspot offers some damn fine waffles. The exterior is perfectly crisp and buttery (but not overly greasy) and the inside is airy, but still chewy. The fillings range from traditional - butter and powdered sugar; to savory - a waffle take on a croque monsieur; to decadent - a waffle wrapped around an ice cream bar (seriously). I decided on the Sweet Cream with Jam (whipped cream cheese and Strawberry Jam) and P went with the (Veggie) Sausage and Maple. Both were fantastic and we devoured them quickly on the lawn chairs next to the cart. While immensely satisfied, we weren't yet sick, so we decided to share a third waffle: chunky peanut butter and nutella. I was plenty sick after that, but oh, the glory of the waffle...

I was so inspired by the success of our waffle cart outing, that I decided to make my own. Waffles are one of those foods for which mixes abound, and yet they are incredibly easy (and far superior) if you make them yourself. The key is the butter, which contributes to the pleasant crispness and lightness and also aids the release from the waffle iron. I modified a recipe from the Joy of Cooking to make my Poppyseed buttermilk waffles, topped with mascarpone and blueberry-lemon syrup. I've included the basic waffle recipe below, as well as the modified version.

I discovered the pleasures of waffles for dinner while studying in Norwich, England. A favorite restaurant of mine was The Waffle House, which served everything waffle, sweet and savory concoctions alike; the fresh spinach, potato and chickpea curry was my favorite for dinner. (Portland, too, boasts a waffle restaurant, but I have yet to try it.) You can use the basic recipe below to make savory waffles, just omit the sugar in the recipe. Serve them with sundried tomatoes, goat cheese and arugula, or with a rich mushroom sauce. I strongly abide by the traditional adage, "a waffle a day keeps the devil at bay."
_____________

Basic Waffles
from Joy of Cooking

[You can vary the amount of butter in this recipe. Joy offers three options: 4 tablespoons for reduced fat, 8 tablespoons (1 stick) for light and fluffy, 1/2 pound (2 sticks) for extra crunchy and rich. I happen to adore butter, but I went with the middle option and was perfectly satisfied with the richness of the waffle. Any more butter and I fear the waffle may have melted on my plate]

Preheat a waffle iron. Whisk together in a large bowl:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt

Thoroughly blend in another bowl:

3 eggs
1/4 cup to 1 cup (1/2 to 2 sticks) butter, melted
1 1/2 cups milk

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients. Combine with a few swift strokes of the whisk. Spoon about a half cup of the mixture into your pre-heated waffle iron and cook until steam has stopped emerging from the cracks in the iron and the waffle releases easily when the lid is opened.


Poppyseed buttermilk waffles
with mascarpone and blueberry-lemon syrup
Adapted from Joy of Cooking

To make the waffles:

Prepare the waffles as above, but decrease the baking powder to 2 teaspoons and add 1/4 teaspoon baking soda and a 1/3 of a cup of poppyseeds to the dry ingredients. Substitute buttermilk for the milk.

To make the sauce:

Put about a cup of berries into a pan with the juice of a small lemon and 1-2 tablespoons of agave syrup (substitute sugar if you don't have the syrup on hand). Cook, stirring, on medium heat until the syrup thickens.

Enjoy the waffles with a drizzle of blueberry-lemon syrup and a dollop of mascarpone.

[These would be delicious on a brunch menu if you're cooking for friends. The waffles keep well in a 200 degree oven. Or, you could do as we did and go it alone (together). That way, you can freeze the leftovers in plastic and enjoy them throughout the week, for a wholesome (read: decadent) start to your day!]