
Christmas Eve buffet

Food, sustainablity, and some other stuff
For my (N’s) birthday last year, we ate at Claro, a Oaxacan restaurant in Brooklyn. I was originally interested in them because they make their own masa (and downstream products, like tortillas) from specially-sourced heirloom corn and use some amount of local produce and meat. They aren’t fully vegetarian (unlike For All Things Good) but do have a good selection and a fair amount of seafood.
J liked the idea of going to Claro because they have a Michelin star.
I don’t really remember what we got. One salad offered that we didn’t get had ground grasshoppers in the dressing.
Everything was really good! We also got to sit in the restaurant’s nice backyard garden.
This is a partner post to the bean search. I discovered recently that fancy masa is available. It can be heirloom, direct-trade, single origin, organic, etc, all those normal fancy food options.
I was inspired to search for fancy masa after J and I went to a (vegetarian!) Oaxacan restaurant in Brooklyn that makes their own masa using fancy corn. They use the masa in their food products but they also sell it fresh (I got some). Going to Brooklyn all the time for fresh masa isn’t super convenient, though. Fortunately, the company, Masienda, that supplies the fancy restaurants also sells direct to consumers!
While researching them, I came across a couple other fancy masa stores too. These are the options I found!
None of these companies is particularly local to me (in New York). I believe they’re all based in California, although most of the beans and corn are grown in Mexico.
These are the cookies used for making tiramisu. Sibling C is going to make it as a birthday cake!
This recipe is from Joy of Cooking (1976).
Friend A who I went to grad school with (also likes cheap/free food, has been climbing with us recently) gave us some mooncakes she made! :’) They were presumably for the Mid-Autumn Festival, which happens around the autumn equinox and is coming up! The days are definitely getting shorter.
The mookcakes are actually the “snow skin” version (recipe that Friend A used), which uses a mochi-esque wrapper. Apparently snow skin mooncakes are easier to make than the traditional baked kind, so a better choice for at-home creation.
Over the weekend, we visited Russ & Daughters, a famous and fairly old (1920, continuously run by the original family and at the original location) Jewish “appetizing store“, meaning that they sell things that go with bagels, along with bagels. We went right before Rosh Hashanah, so the main shop was super busy — 45 min just to go into the store to order! We went around the corner to their café location instead. The café also had more meal-food selection.
We got blintzes (we’ve made them at home too), latkes, and a bagel with cream cheese, lox, onion, tomato, and capers.
I got a melon!!! I didn’t even see it until the other day.
I started the garden pretty late this year, so the plants didn’t have a super long growing season and had to deal with hot weather early on in their lives.
The late start might have also made bug threats worse. The radishes mostly succumbed to some small gray bugs. I was able to harvest three bottoms but the leaves had been sucked dry.
The fence needs some shoring up, especially at the curb. Cars aren’t very careful with their doors and the fence isn’t incredibly sturdy…
Modified from The Joy of Cooking (1973) “quick cherry crunch”. I made this to use up some really tart apricots and old peaches with a bad texture. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it, but it was really good!
The original recipe just put half the streusel below and half above the fruit, no milk, egg, or nuts added.
J and I saw several arepa stands at a street fair. They didn’t look amazingly high quality (at least one stand was just heating up pre-packaged arepas), so J took it as inspiration to make our own!
Arepas are Venezuelan and Colombian, mostly. We made the simplest variety, which is a cornmeal pancake cut in half and stuffed with mild cheese. The cornmeal has to be either pre-cooked (masarepa; the traditional way) or nixtamalized (masa harina; will be slightly less fluffy) to form a dough properly. You can’t just use regular old cornmeal, but instant polenta might work.
We were following a recipe for baked tofu pitas and I decided to make it more difficult and more delicious by making falafel instead. Buuuut our only chickpeas are old and don’t cook super well even with soaking and an hour of pressure-cooking, let alone being fried. So I substituted with red lentils instead.
I was trying to figure out what legumes are safe/traditional to cook in this manner. Seems like lentils are fine, as are chickpeas of course, urad dal (used in Indian breads like dosa and idli), mung beans (used in Korean bindae-tteok), cowpeas and black-eyed peas (used in akara), and fava beans (used in another version of falafel).
This recipe is pretty good. The cooking notes are useful and the intro has interesting historical info.