from Brooklyn Plated. We’re going on a culinary adventure through Ipswich and Salem MA this weekend. We plan to take part in the witch trial reenactments – I can hardly contain my excitement.
How great is that platter?? My friend Emily sent it to us for an anniversary gift, which falls around the same time as Plated’s anniversary too!
Filed under Food Anecdotes, General Rantings, Kitchen Things
Today Brooklyn Plated is one year old! I’m so happy to celebrate this (and as with most celebrations, we’ll likely go out to dinner – oh the irony!).
Thank you so much for following along this year. It means a lot to us. Now that the holidays are approaching, we’ll have tons of new and delicious meals, reviews and desserts to share.
Thanks again! 
Filed under General Rantings
Whatever is an oyster crab? Once in a long while one discovers a tiny little crab living in an oyster. Due to ocean patterns and filtration systems, sometimes tiny crabs lodge themselves into other oyster shells. They are affectionately called “lodgers”. Apparently it is a rarity to find one. Recently, when home shucking some oysters, we found two! What better way to enjoy this delicacy than to fry it up and chomp on it. To explain in a bit more depth, we found this fun article from December 15, 1907 published in the New York Times.
Filed under Fish, Food Anecdotes, Recipes
93 Whitney Ave
New Haven, CT 06510-1236
(203) 624-3373
Sometimes it’s hard for New Yorker’s to step outside of their comfort zones. This city can be so convenient, full of the best of everything just outside your door. For years we lived on the Upper West Side and were convinced that we lived two blocks from the best Chinese food in the city. I also lived near the best bakery, had the best wine store, best French bistro and the absolute best bagels. (That last part about the bagels is absolutely true.) The fact is I was really just lazy and the food was OK, but nothing to write home about. Nothing changed when we moved to Brooklyn. It takes quite an effort to get out of our neighborhood; thankfully new restaurants keep opening up on Dekalb Avenue.
Today we bring to you a restaurant that is worth writing home about, and one worth leaving the neighborhood for. Caseus in New Haven states that every cheese has a story. Unfortunately for us, we’ve never actually ordered the cheese. I mean…who goes to a renowned artisan cheese spot and does not order the cheese? Yes, it’s sad but true. The reason is quite legitimate however. The food at Caseus is so amazing, that we always get over excited, over order and end up rolling ourselves out the door.
What Caseus does so well is daily specials. Each day the menu has a special theme. Wednesday: Bacon, Thursday: Corn, Friday: Lobster Roll, Saturday: On the Bone. When in doubt go with these. Here are a few hits we have also come to love:
To start get the Charcuterie Board, which comes with a selection of seasonal, cured meats, salumi and paté. The chicken liver paté and American prosciutto are exceptional. Add the House bread and butter as well. Each day they make a new butter with flavors like chocolate, honey, or chipotle. Follow this with Poutine a French Canadian dish of cheese curds, pommes frites and veloute. Its like French cheese fries.
For entries we chose On the Bone: Duck Confit one night and Lobster Roll on another night. The Duck was perfectly cooked and tender, the Lobster Roll was very unexpected in a house made Barbeque sauce. I was skeptical at first, but the tangy barbeque with sweet lobster and corn ended up as a perfect match. Southern soul food meets New England classic. We also tasted the Mac and Cheese with chevre, raclette, comte, more cheese brioche crumbs and fresh shucked spring peas. Yum. It comes as a literal pile so get it to share. The Heirloom Tomato and Scallops has become a favorite as well. Sweet tomatoes add to even sweeter, plump scallops with crisp grilled pecorino bread. Steak frites is a classic done to perfection.
For the closer we tend to get the zeppoles, fried dough balls with powdered sugar. These are not the fried dough of county fairs. These are choice desert, not at all greesy with chocolate and caramel dipping sauces.
Caseus is an unassuming little place, but the space, almost more a café from the street is actually quite vast with a “cave” on the lower level for a more country cheese farm feel. We prefer the upper level as below can get a bit claustrophobic. They also have outside seating with heat lamps. The staff is knowledgeable and extremely friendly. Our waitress remembered us from a month’s visit past and the owner came out to chat with us as well. They gave us framboise beer and desert on the house for Jess’s birthday to top the night. Although we have never actually had the cheese plate, I can be sure it is as outstanding as the rest of the menu. Caseus in New Haven CT is a culinary experience. Get on a Metro North and get yourself there before it’s too hard to get a table. After a write up in Bon Appetite magazine it’s already a wait for a reservation. After a review in Brooklyn Plated? Forget it.
–JV
Filed under Uncategorized
Music: Big Wave – Jenny and Johnny
You know what I did this week? I catered my first movie! It was lots of work in our tiny kitchen and I felt like a train conductor on the cooking line (that was terrible) but I think I liked it! I didn’t take lots of pictures because, as I mentioned, I was on a tight schedule. It was pretty satisfying knowing that 10 people somewhere in Queens were eating Plated food…and hopefully enjoying it. Did I mention they were all vegetarians? Have you seen my posting on Duck Confit where we actually cook meat in duck fat? Needless to say, vegetarian cooking is a challenge. I made a lot of standards but a few new things…here was one:
These pictures are terrible...
I mean, wow.
If you want to know more about the movie, visit Lambsgrove Productions and see their upcoming projects page. There you can find a link for their trailer on Kickstarter.
Also, I know we’ve been posting slowly lately but as the holiday season nears I know we’ll be entertaining more and more so look out for new recipes soon!
Filed under Duck, Food Anecdotes, Pasta, Recipes, Sauces
Yes, yes…we hear a lot about Redhook these days. Pretty much every major magazine featured a piece on this neighborhood this summer…but you know what? this area deserves it…it’s this neat little gem nestled into the coziest corner of Brooklyn. It’s filled with great shops and even better food and when I go there I feel like I am transported to a 19th century portside enclave complete with anchor garbage cans and nautically named locations.
On Tuesdays you can find me helping out the lovely illustrator and shopkeeper, Jane Buck of Foxy and Winston. You’ll recognize this place by the darling shop window full of onesies and cards – where occasionally you will find Hope… the cutest beagle ever, this is her favorite spot. One Tuesday in July, my pal Cia met me in Redhook and we did a tasting tour down Van Brunt street. Here are some of the highlights!
I started with lunch at Fort Defiance. I ordered what I normally order there; the smoked salmon on multigrain bread with crème fraiche, cucumber and watercress (although they are known for their Muffaletta).
We made our way to the Redhook Lobster Pound where we ordered one Connecticut style Lobster roll (warm with butter) and one Maine style Lobster Roll (cold with a little mayo). Usually I’m all for Connecticut style (seeing as though I’m from there) but their Maine style sure is yummy.
Since we were just steps from Baked we stopped in for a Chocolate Chip Cookie. SERIOUSLY yummy.
Even though we were pretty stuffed at this point we went to The Good Fork for some cocktails and their well known dumplings. Annnnnd we slipped in a lovely grilled calamari salad as well. Couldn’t hurt at this point!
We finished the night with a twilight tasting of Domaine de Canton at Dry Dock. It was a good day.
I think we covered all the basics, besides IKEA and Fairway that is. If you haven’t, I hope you can visit Redhook some day. It really is one of my favorite one stop neighborhoods in all of NYC.
Filed under Appetizer, Beverage, Food Anecdotes, Travel Spot
Music: Acid Tongue – Jenny Lewis
Growing up on the Great South Bay of Long Island, nothing defined my childhood more than the beach, the boat and the waterways of my home. In the summers when I was young one of my favorite culinary adventures was to go clamming with my cousin off Squaw Island. For anyone who does not know what Squaw Island is, well it is essentially a little mound of earth that is only visible during low tide about a ten-minute ride southwest from the Amityville Cut just past Snake Channel. For anyone who doesn’t know where Snake Channel is, well it’s just west of the Tobay Beach marina. Hang a right at The Four Corners and…OK, none of you know where any of this is but I can attest that is some of the most beautiful stretches of local beaches, marshes and bay I have ever seen.
Filed under Appetizer, cookbooks, Fish, Food Anecdotes, How to..., Recipes, Sides, Travel Spot
Hello Friends!
It’s been too long…and for that I’m sorry.
It was a long summer filled with kitchens that were too hot to cook in, travels to exotic locale (not really) and enjoying the summer in the city. But stay tuned! We’ll be back! I’m taking this week to make a few updates and then we’ll be back at ‘cha – and better than ever.
Thanks for your patience! And for not chewing my head off for making our hiatus announcement earlier. I know you are all tired of reading about homemade beer 
Toodles! Jess/James
Filed under Uncategorized
Music: The Yardbirds – I’m Not Talking (if you only understood the irony here!)
Oh boy do we have a special treat today! Good pal and guest blogger, Bill Kiernan, has decided to share some of his secrets for homemade brewing. He’s been doing this for a few years now out of his home in LI and recently, he made a batch to celebrate James’ birthday (We called it Jamesonian IPA). Please enjoy his musings on home brewing and feel free to comment!
_____
On Long Island, the spring fumbles in this year and I find myself brewing an IPA for James’ birthday. Any excuse to brew is welcomed, and when it’s for a friend, well, insert mush. There are varieties to home brewing, from stove top with a big pot to developing a veritable nano brewery in your garage, I find myself safely wedged into a bracket of the “want to make a good beer” but do not wear my “beeriodic table of Alements” shirt while doing so. I would prefer to allow you to establish a meaning of the previous analysis.
Here, take a drink: an IPA is a pleasurable beer, especially during the spring and summer. India Pale Ale has unique histories, and one would say histories dependent on whom you speak with: read online and you will learn history of IPA rife with luck of shipwrecks and landlubbers loving the barrels of beer which washed upon shore (I guess I could liken this historical anomaly of human behavior to that first hit from a hypodermic needle that washed ashore on Rockaway); ask your local know it all craft beer distributor “so they made the IPA to survive the voyage from Britain to India?” and he’ll look at your forehead as though a piece of your brain were waving off the comment as an act of the ass rather than his constituents. Regardless, it’s a good beer, which is generally more bitter than a Pale Ale. The degree of bitterness is measured in IBU’s which is a cute enough acronym for International Bittering Units, which is such a bold and forbooding measurement, it’s best left at IBU.
The bitterness comes from hops, which are beautiful cone like vine plants, which, forsooth, New York used to be a Mecca of. There are extensive varieties of hops and even more variety to what they can do to your beer. Depending on which hops you use and when you add them to your boil or your beer as you ferment it your beer could be more bitter than flavorful. Add a variety of hops closer to when you end your boil you get more aroma, typically. Let’s just say it can get pretty complicated. Throw in some toasted oats, orange peels, a sprig of lavender from the garden or some st. johns wort, who knows what could happen. If you are going to do an all grain brew, as opposed to an “extract” set aside a good part of your day, prepare to smell like some hopped up feign, and double check your equipment. All grain brewing is not as insane as studying neutrinos in Antarctica but it does require a bit of close analysis and attention.
Start with the grain.
For this IPA, we are using 9lbs of Pale 2 Row malt and 1lb of Carafoam malt.
We are using 3.5 oz of Cascade variety hops and 1 oz of Amarillo variety hops.
All your grains are milled together in such a way that the grain gets cracked but not pulverized.
Heat up about five gallons of water to about 175 degrees. In what is called the mash tun, in this case a large cooler, slowly add your grain and scalding hot water from a difficult to manage gigantic six gallon pot of water. Ideally, your water will loose about 10 – 15 degrees in the transfer to the grain. You want your mixture to be apprx 150- 155 degrees. You really are creating a mash, and at this temperature saccharization, which is a process that converts the starches in grain to fermentable sugars, occurs. Let it rest for an hour to 75 minutes. The longer the time, the more sugars extracted. Meanwhile heat up another four gallons of water for the sparge. Yes, the sparge.
Welcome back. When you open the cooler you will smell a rather sweet, malty goodness. You want to quckily raise the temperature to about 165 to wash more of the sugars out of the grain. So to do this, you will add that water, which is hopefully around 190 degrees. Check the temp and do your best to get around the strike temp of 165. Now allow a couple of minutes to pass to allow the grain bed to settle again.
Now take a small Pyrex or other such glass container and drain some of the beer out then pour is slowly and lightly bAck to the cooler. You are trying to create a flow that is free of grains.
Then begin to drain the cooler into a pot which can hold approximately six gallons. You may get as much as 7 -8 gallons from your sparging, depending on how much water you needed to get the temp.
The boil.
If you have considerable amount you might boil it down some before you start your official boil time. But you should essentially start with about five or so gallons and boil for approximately an hour. So with this beer our hop schedule (the time we add hops) looks like this;.
60 min add 1 oz of Cascade
30 min add 1 oz of Cascade
15 min add 1.5 oz of Cascade
At burn out 1 oz of Amarillo
You want to adhere to a schedule for the addition of hops because doing so will create the beer that you are aimming for. You can use a calculator to help you determine the all impressive IBU. For an IPA around the mid 70′s of IBUs good. The hops added earliest are for bittering, whereas the later additions are for flavor and aroma.
After you have boiled for an hour with the addition of your hops at scheduled times, it’s time to cool down. Most home brewers have a chiller which is really a copper coil that cool water runs through. You want to be sure that anything you put in your beer after you stop boiling has been sanitized.
After your beer ha cooled down you want to aerate your beer, usually by pouring it back forth several times using the tub you will ferment in. Now simply add your yeast, sprinkling it on top, close up your fermenter (in this case a five gallon restaurant grade plastic tub with an air lock. After several weeks the yeasts have eaten all the sugars and pooped out alcohol.
Look, go to these websites for some more specific instructions. You can do this. http://www.homebrewinginstructions.com/
Filed under Beverage, Drinks, Food Anecdotes, General Rantings, How to..., Recipes
Music: Kingdom of Rust – Doves
We spent a nice long weekend in Connecticut with my family. One of the best things to do when you’re in the woods is grill food! Because it was a holiday weekend, we decided to create the most insane burger we could think of paired with french fries and chocolate milkshakes. Just so you know, I’m still full…
The fries were a little healthier than one would expect. My father adapted this recipe from Cooks Illustrated and instead of frying the potatoes, you bake them in oil. They came out crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. We cut 8 Idaho potatoes in strips and tossed them in some salt, pepper and 4 tablespoons of oil. We baked them on 350 for 20 minutes and then checked them. We tossed them and flipped the fries to their other sides until those were browned as well. When they are perfectly crispy, throw them in a brown paper bag for a few minutes to absorb any extra oil.
For our burgers, we basically just topped them with a bunch of yummy stuff. We bought the our burgers from a local meat market, Amity Meats in Woodbridge, CT. We topped them with blue cheese, sauteed mushrooms, Niman Ranch thick-cut bacon, melted onions, shredded lettuce and sliced tomatoes. Slap that between a bun or some toast and voila…you got yourself a burger! On the sides we served baked beans, sauerkraut and corn on the cob.
When I was a little girl, my mother worked at night, leaving my father and I hours of play time. He would make me play drums for our living room band and we would finger paint on the kitchen floor (only to have my mother come home later and panic). I was sort of a picky eater and he would serve me food out of oversized sea shells. Our favorite meal was fries and chocolate milkshakes (my father’s first job was as a short order cook). My grandmother gifted us these silver straws with little hearts on the end of them that made sipping shakes all the more fun. I was overcome when they pulled out these straws were placed in our shakes this weekend. Brought back a lot of memories!
Filed under Drinks, Food Anecdotes, Meats, Potatoes
