Charred Broccolini and Asparagus Pasta
Plus: Paddington's Citrus Marmalade, Mediocre Pancakes, and Dinner at Sailor.
Hey everyone,
Yesterday I had a thought. I was about to make a pasta with broccolini and asparagus that I had leftover from something else and instead of doing it the traditional way — where you cook garlic, add the veg, then stop the cooking with pasta cooking water — I went in a different direction.
Maybe it’s because I’m on a grilling kick and it’s too cold to be grilling outside (down in the 30s at night), I decided to char the vegetables in a pan with just olive oil until they were golden brown.
Winston wasn’t too thrilled with this idea. As I should’ve expected, without a hood over our stove, the smoke detector went off and I had to open all the windows. So was it worth it? Absolutely: the vegetables got fully cooked this way and tasted charry and grilly and still had a little bite. I just squeezed lemon over them and salt and then cooked the pasta and made a kind of aglio e olio sauce in the same skillet (after removing the veg) — just garlic, olive oil, chile flakes, pasta water to stop it when the garlic turned golden, and then finished the pasta in there. Added lots of Parmesan before stirring everything together.
‘Twas a real treat! The vegetables remained bold and fresh-tasting and the pasta had all the goodness of the garlic, oil, and Parmesan, plus some extra lemon juice.
But that wasn’t the prettiest thing that I cooked this weekend. The prettiest thing? That award goes to this Cara Cara, Blood Orange, and Kumquat Marmalade that I made with a bunch of leftover fruit.
This was such a pleasure to make and so, so, easy. Really you just cut up a bunch of citrus and then cook it with sugar and water for 90 minutes.
I typed up the whole thing HERE (the blog lives!) and I also made a video.
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Can’t wait to spread this on toast with a little butter and some tea.
I was on a real cooking kick this weekend, maybe because I joined a new gym last week, went for five days in a row, drank a smoothie every day for lunch, and was generally eating pretty healthy? I’m giving myself the weekends off.
Hence: these mediocre pancakes!
I was really craving pancakes, so I used Mark Bittman’s recipe, which was totally fine made with regular milk (which I had), but nothing compared to pancakes that I’ve made in the past like these Blow-You-A-Whey Pancakes with Labneh, these Buttermilk Pancakes, or these ricotta pancakes.
If you’re going to make pancakes, it turns out, you may as well make them spectacular or it’s not worth it. (Still, I ate all three.)
Luckily, I had a spectacular dinner on Saturday night after we saw the Mark Morris’s Burt Bacharach show at BAM. Look how pretty BAM is at night.
The show was lovely — especially the singing. Afterwards, we walked to the hottest reservation in town: dinner at Sailor in Fort Greene.
I have funny little habits that I deploy during the day when I don’t want to be writing: (1) I look for cheap Broadway tickets on tdf (I’m like a hawk and it’s how I see so many Broadway shows); (2) I look for hard-to-get reservations on Resy.
Sailor’s been the hardest because it’s gotten rave reviews across the board. Finally, the stars aligned and I saw a 9:45 PM reservation right after our show which ended at 9:15… how perfect was that?
Now when a restaurant is this hyped, generally the meal winds up being disappointing. But that wasn’t the case here. The food at Sailor was truly sublime, starting with the justifiably famous Toast with Green Sauce and Parmesan.
Imagine the spikiest, lemoniest salsa verde slathered over the perfect piece of toasted bread, drizzled with olive oil, and then coated in the featheriest sprinkling of Parmesan. I could’ve probably eaten twelve of this… and it’s the one dish I think that I just might be able to recreate at home?
Otherwise, we shared the Arctic char rilletes which were oh so buttery, and this stuffed radicchio:
Study that dish for a moment and you’ll be certain, as I was, that it’s filled with meat and dairy: both the stuffing for the radicchio (like a stuffed cabbage), and then the glossy, rich sauce which had to be made with demi-glace (reduced veal stock) and lots and lots of butter. Well, it turns out, this dish was VEGAN. As in not an animal product in sight. I asked the waitress about it and she said the sauce was made by reducing red wine and then reducing vegetable stock. It was wild.
But my favorite bite of the night was this extraordinary take on roast chicken.
As a connoisseur of roasted chickens (and a frequent practitioner of the art) I was blown away by how chicken-y this was. The glaze wasn’t honey or some other outside flavor — it was just distilled chicken juices. And then the sauce underneath! It was like concentrated chicken jus with garlic; it was so sticky and intense, it made me want to whip out my Mastering the Art of French Cooking and learn how the French roast chickens and make a sauce the right way, finally. Root vegetables be damned.
Dessert was a big slice of their ginger cake which was most excellent — especially with the vanilla bean whipped cream — but not as good as David Lebovitz’s ginger cake, which is the ultimate expression of the form.
We loved our dinner at Sailor, especially Craig who’s all about ambiance and Sailor had it in spades (including a superior playlist featuring “Take on Me” and “A far l’amore comincia tu” by Raffaella Carra; I had to Shazam that one). If you’re lucky enough to get in — and they’re open for lunch now — go go go.
Let’s look at some links:
Don’t miss this eclipse (The Atlantic);
Is Greenpoint’s Ilis worth it? (Eater NY);
Go ahead, order the king crab (Found NY).
That’s all for today, folks!
See you back here on Thursday….
Your pal,
Adam
Oh I just love the flavors in the pasta! Made my mouth water reading about it.