Category Archives: Stories

The Blizzard to End All Blizzards?

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Given the current “weather event”, I couldn’t resist this repost. Exactly ten years ago in January 2016, I published the following story. In essence, it was a comparison of two brands of Southeast Asian hot sauce. It probably could have made its point in one or two sentences but the devil (always associated with hot sauce) is in the details, so here’s the original post!

Fancy Food Show Sriracha

It is written in some ancient tome, or so my rather hazy understanding would have it, that during times of inclement weather the more sagacious among us hunker down in our kitchens and prepare mass quantities of pain perdu. Otherwise why would so many well-meaning mediarologists exhort us to make a beeline for our local supermarket in a frenzied quest for whatever remains on the shelves of bread, eggs, and milk?

So following the spirit of the law, although not the letter, I made the obligatory pre-disaster pilgrimage to stock up on essentials. I returned home and gingerly set my lumpily filled bags down outside my door. I was fumbling with the keys to my apartment when my neighbor, affectionately known to the denizens of my building as Windy, emerged.

Windy had a wiry frame and wore owlish Harold Lloyd glasses. His shaggy gray hair was usually half hidden beneath a weathered Australian cork hat. Somehow the corks were always in motion, even when Windy stood still, bobbing about as if propelled by some unseen force.

“Hey, Ethnojunkie! Got plenty of bread, eggs, and milk in there, right?”

“Um, yeah. I mean, no, not really. I’m not planning on making French toast.” The contents of my limp plastic bags were redistributing now, making themselves more comfortable on the dingy tile floor as I continued to grapple with the lock.

“All ready for the mother of all storms?”

“I thought that was Sandy.”

“Yep,” he continued, ignoring me. “The Blizzard of ’16. Snowmageddon. Snowzilla, they’re callin’ it. The blizzard to end all blizzards. Snowpocalypse….”

“Been watching a lot of TV, Windy?”

“…Gonna be a real snownami. A snowlapalooza.”

Windy himself could generate a gale greater than even the most virulent hurricane might ever aspire to. Having pretty much exhausted his supply of snowstorm metaphors, he went on to do what he did second best: pry.

“Got yer emergency preparedness kit ready?” He craned his neck and peered into my bags to inspect their contents. I slid them out of his line of sight with my foot.

“Sure thing,” I lied. “I’ve got wind-up batteries, sustainable “last-forever” wick-free candles, and solar powered #2 pencils, sharpened, of course.” At that moment, one of the bags shifted and my bottle of Sriracha tumbled out.

A bewildered look passed across his face as he squinted at the bottle with a gimlet gaze. “What kind of emergency were you expecting?” he sniffed. He was right. My idea of an emergency preparedness pack was somewhat skewed. “What’s in that bottle anyway?”

“It’s Sriracha. Like a kind of hot sauce,” I replied, stuffing it back into the bag and finally pushing my door open.

“That’s not Sriracha! Sriracha has a rooster on it! This one’s got a shark!”

“Right. Well, it’s a different brand. Sometimes I like it better than Huy Fong, the one with the rooster.”

“What’s the difference?”

Seizing the opportunity to go on about ethnic food, I began, “Well, they’re all chili, garlic, and vinegar, plus sugar and salt, but that’s where the similarities end. This one is a little sweeter….”

He interrupted, “No, no, I mean what’s the difference which one you get? Sriracha is Sriracha. Okay, I gotta go back inside and watch the storm.” He pivoted on one Birkenstock and marched back into his apartment, corks bobbling wildly, never allowing me to inquire as to whether he thought mayo is mayo or cola is cola.

I scooped up my bags and lugged them into my apartment, bemused by the interchange. But my reflection on our conversation wasn’t because of Windy’s dismissal of my brand preference. If Windy knows about Sriracha, everybody knows about Sriracha. Years ago the darling of a few culinary cognoscenti, the stuff is now ubiquitous.

Huy Fong brand (with the rooster imprint) was developed in 1980 in California by a Vietnamese-American; by 2010 Bon Appétit magazine had crowned it “Ingredient of the Year”. I’ve spotted it gracing the tables of diners and restaurants having no pretense of being Asian. It’s in every supermarket – they even sell it at Bed, Bath & Beyond. And now it’s available in individual packets like ketchup or mustard, not to mention their line of Sriracha popcorn and chips.

Shark brand, the favorite of Andy Ricker of Pok Pok fame, is a product of Thailand and is markedly distinct from Huy Fong.

So pitting the rooster against the shark, let’s examine the differences (with apologies to Windy).

Huy Fong is tangier and sharper (think horseradish kind of sharp) with a coarser texture and tiny bits of chili within. Shark is thinner, sweeter, more garlicy, more vinegary, a little herbal and significantly brighter.

Incidentally, Huy Fong also makes a chili garlic sauce, available in 8 ounce jars, that’s thicker than their Sriracha (you would spoon it out rather than squirt it); it’s earthier, more garlicy, less sweet and less vinegary. Just for kicks, I tried mixing the two Huy Fong products together and I thought the combination was great – not to mention that if you try this at home, seasoned Sriracha aficionados will ask you which brand you’re using. Simply smile coyly and say it’s your custom house blend; it’ll be our little secret.

Rooster vs SharkShark CloseupChili Garlic Sauce

Which do I like better? It depends on what I’m doing with them, but I lean more towards Shark for straight-out-of-the-bottle applications. And yes, there are plenty of other brands as well. Perhaps I’ll write about those when my emergency preparedness pack needs replenishing during the next Blizzard to End All Blizzards.
 
 
Stay safe, be well, and eat whatever it takes! ❤
 
 

How I Got Into Cooking

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I’m frequently asked how I got into cooking. Now, I suspect that what follows is something of an apocryphal tale: I certainly can’t vouch for its veracity since it took place, in theory at least, when I was five tender years of age and I have absolutely no recollection of the event. But this, according to the saga circulated by my beleaguered mother, was my initial foray into the culinary arts.

As she would tell the story to her cronies, one wintry Sunday morning – I’m using the word “morning” loosely since I’m told it was 5:00 – I awoke hungry. Realizing that my parents were still very much asleep and recalling their disagreeable response to being roused in the darkness, I decided to address the absence of a ready breakfast by taking measures into my own little hands.

I had watched my mother prepare our morning repast on many occasions. She would fill a large pot with water, pour in some flaky stuff from a red and blue cardboard canister graced with a quaint rendering of an avuncular looking fellow sporting a black hat (the container would later be reincarnated as an annoying percussion instrument), and stir monotonously and apathetically with an oversized wooden spoon. Sure enough, some minutes later, a bowl of steaming, stick-to-your-ribs mush would appear on our war-torn kitchen table.

Seemed simple enough.

I managed to clamber up a chair to fetch the oatmeal and the spoon, but the pot proved too heavy to wrangle. So, demonstrating the improvisational skills that would later prove invaluable to this budding jazz pianist, I made straight for the bathroom. Leaning over the edge of the bathtub, I turned on the water – full blast – and proceeded to dump the entire contents of the box into the roiling cascade. Noisily wielding the spoon, I stirred with such vigor and reckless abandon that it awakened my mother who came charging into the bathroom to see what all the commotion was about.

What happened next? I wish I could tell you. By that juncture in my mother’s narrative, she and her captive audience had usually broken into paroxysms of laughter. (And I suspect the unpleasant denouement would best be left to the imagination anyway.)

But the reason I told you that story was so that I could tell you this one: I am willing to wager almost anything that even then, my foamy concoction would have tasted better than my mother’s most determined attempts at cooking. And that directly addresses the gist of the initial question – why did I get into cooking?

Simply put, childhood trauma. My mother’s cooking could best be described as child abuse. Recognizing her ineptness in the kitchen and having no desire to rectify the situation, she decided that Swanson’s TV Dinners™ and Morton’s Chicken Pot Pies® would serve as our quotidian fare. Oh, and the occasional bowl of canned mixed vegetables. Did you ever hear of Veg-All? I have a hazy (and most likely inaccurate) memory that there was a prototypical version that, for some unknown reason, had little wax paper disks between each of the vegetable types: beige corn, gray string beans, grayer peas…you get the idea. There may have been diced potatoes in there too. Or something that was sort of a lighter shade of gray than the rest. And mushier. After a while they eliminated the paper, probably having discovered that their customers were ingesting it, preferring it to the “vegetables”, I imagine. Or perhaps being unable to distinguish between them.

Any poison she could find at the grocery store was grist for our table. I’ll never forget the fateful day when she returned from the supermarket brandishing a box of Butter Buds, a sort of faded yellow, gritty, granular substance that looked exactly like something from my Gilbert chemistry set. (I had the F model – the one with the Bunsen burner. I learned how to make hydrogen sulfide gas, rotten egg smell that overwhelmingly stunk up the kitchen. It beat the stench of her cooking hands down, though. But I digress.) “We’ll use this instead of real butter,” she clucked, offering neither an explanation nor an apology. That was the day I learned what industrial waste tastes like. It’s a wonder I don’t glow in the dark after consuming all those chemicals.

So there you have it – the when and the why. And QED that in this case, revenge is a dish best served delicious!
 
 
Stay safe, be well, and eat whatever it takes! ❤
 
 

An Eggnog Excursus

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year! That time when folks dust off words like ’tis and ’twas as Bing Crosby inscrutably croons, “Christmas is a-comin’ and the egg is in the nog!” (Whaaa…?)

But it makes an appropriate musical background for reading the tell-all eggsposé revealing what I do with holiday nog.

Click here for a Deep Dive into An Eggnog Excursus!
 
 

Panettone! Pannetone! Pannettone!

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(Click on any image to view it in high resolution.)

One of these things is not like the others, or so the song goes. In this case, the outlier is the first Panettone, the only orthographically correct version of the subject of this post. To tell the truth, the two imposters share the spotlight only by way of capitulation to less-than-forgiving search engines (and not as a sly reference to the 90s R&B/soul group) because it is my mission to ensure that everyone falls in love with this gift to the culinary arts as deeply, passionately, and yes, obsessively as I have.

You’re all familiar with panettone, right? That Italian (Milanese, specifically) sweet, fruity, fluffy cake that’s usually consumed for the holidays (Christmas, specifically) but can be enjoyed year-round by ardent aficionados (me, specifically).

If you’ve read my story, An Eggnog Excursus, you know that part of my obsession stems from the fact that this bewitching beverage evocative of joyous childhood memories is only available for an all-too-brief period each year. Unlike eggnog, some brands of panettone are available year-round, generally dozing in supermarkets and even bodegas, but they tend to be lackluster as compared with the treasures that miraculously appear during the holiday season. It’s like envisaging a standing rib roast for Christmas dinner and then being served pot roast instead. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a world away from what you had been eagerly anticipating for the better part of a year.

So in an effort to assist with your choice of panettone from the myriad available this time of year, please check out this deep dive into Italy’s sweet Christmas present to the culinary world!
 
 

July is National Ice Cream Month! Celebrate Globally!

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The story began here:

Every August, as a routinely flushed, overheated child, I would join in chorus with my perspiring cohorts, boisterously importuning, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” Little did I realize that rather than conjuring dessert, I was conjugating it and probably laying the groundwork for a lifetime of fascination with foreign languages and world food.

We lived in close proximity to one of the best dairies in town; it was known for its wide assortment of locally produced natural flavors, certainly sufficient in number and variety to satisfy any palate. Perhaps my obsession with offbeat ice cream flavors is rooted in my frustration with my father’s return home from work, invariably bearing the same kind of ice cream as the last time, Neapolitan. Neapolitan, again. My pleas to try a different flavor – just once? please? – consistently fell on deaf ears. “Neapolitan is chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. That’s three flavors right there. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it.” Some kids’ idea of rebellion involved smoking behind the garage; mine was to tuck into a bowl of Rum Raisin….

There’s lots more to the story, of course. Click here to get the full scoop! 🍨
 
 

Dos Leches y Uno Rompope Cake

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There’s a delightful couple who live in my building whom I’m privileged to regard as especially close friends. Their toddler recently celebrated his second birthday and they graciously saved a piece of cake for me. Since we are all hardcore foodies, we often pass goodies along to each other.

Now, if you read me, you know that I’m a fan of neologisms; I’ve even created a few such as: to “doorknob” (verb) – the act of hanging a bag containing a tasty treat on the recipient’s doorknob to be retrieved upon their arriving home (or waking up). Example: “I just doorknobbed you some homemade chocolate chip cookies.”

This action is often accompanied by a text message containing relevant details. In this case, my friend wrote, “Just doorknobbed you a piece of birthday cake. The bakery called it Tres Leches Cake; it really wasn’t very wet, but that’s what they called it.”

The cake and its icing, custard and strawberry fillings were wonderful, but there was not uno drop of leche to be found, let alone tres of them.

Fortunately, I had a little sweetened condensed milk and heavy cream left over from baking Thanksgiving pumpkin pies but no evaporated milk to complete the trio. I did, however, have eggnog in the fridge and since I’ve raised lily-gilding to an art form, I decided to go for it. I added a few fresh strawberries and the result is what you see here.

Another win for Team Eggnog! See why we need to have it year-round?
 
 

It’s Thanksgiving: Merry Christmas!

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For many folks, Christmas season officially begins the moment Santa Claus floats down Sixth Avenue (sort of a horizontal chimney, I guess) at the finale of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And as if a holiday miracle had occurred, somehow stores were already flaunting a plethora of Christmas goods even before he chortled his final “Ho!” All the fall décor had vanished like the Ghost of Thanksgiving Past to be replaced by a full complement of Christmas merchandise. Or did they just leap from Halloween to Christmas skipping over Thanksgiving entirely because as holidays go it’s just not profitable unless you’re a food market?

Leaping and skipping aside, I decided to get a jump on the festivities and dash away to the newly opened Wegman’s at Astor Place in Manhattan – for all intents and purposes a take-out restaurant disguised as a supermarket – to check out the “first fruits” of the season. I was eager to see if they too had begun to display Christmas wares like eggnog, eggnog ice cream, and other eggnog infused desserts.

Nope. Not a jot or a jingle.

I asked a helpful staffer and he replied, “We don’t sell that here.”

A modern upscale supermarket that doesn’t sell eggnog at Christmastime? Heresy! He suggested that I try their Brooklyn store. Bereft but undaunted, I took the two subways and one bus required to get there.

Now, the Brooklyn store keeps its holiday items sequestered away from their conventional cousins – eggnog has its own display far from the milk – but I couldn’t locate its frozen creamy counterpart. I found a helpful staffer. “Hi! I bought some eggnog ice cream here last year,” I began, “but I don’t see it in the ice cream case.”

“We don’t sell that here,” she replied helpfully. “Try the Astor Place store in Manhattan.”

“They…sent…me…here,” I intoned, parsing my words.

But at least they were offering their panettone (which I covered last year in my “Panettone” story) as well as the marzipan stollen you see here. It was only okay.

I’m hoping to post more treats as we dive further down the holiday rabbit hole. But it’s still early and like any sweet fruit, the season needs time to ripen.
 
 

Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival – 2023

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A visit to any Chinatown bakery this time of year will reveal a spectacular assemblage of mooncakes (月餅, yue bing) in a seemingly infinite variety of shapes, sizes, ornamentation, and fillings, all begging to be enjoyed in observance of the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated this year on September 29. Here are two pandan mooncakes, one with preserved egg yolk and a mini version without, from Chinatown’s Fay Da Bakery.


And here’s one of my favorites, Five Mix Nut Moon Cake, from Golden Fung Wong Bakery at 41 Mott St – one of the stops on my Manhattan Chinatown ethnojunket, of course!

Since 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit, known for his elegance among many other characteristics depending upon where you do your research, I decided to purchase an assortment of these elegant delicacies in order to share them, virtually, with you.

For a deep dive into the holiday and these delicious treats, you can get the skinny – er, poor choice of words there – in my Chinese Mooncakes Demystified page detailing their similarities and differences in an attempt to shed some light (moonlight, of course) on their intricacies.

中秋节快乐!
 
 

July is National Ice Cream Month! Celebrate Globally!

Posted on by

The story began here:

Every August, as a routinely flushed, overheated child, I would join in chorus with my perspiring cohorts, boisterously importuning, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” Little did I realize that rather than conjuring dessert, I was conjugating it and probably laying the groundwork for a lifetime of fascination with foreign languages and world food.

We lived in close proximity to one of the best dairies in town; it was known for its wide assortment of locally produced natural flavors, certainly sufficient in number and variety to satisfy any palate. Perhaps my obsession with offbeat ice cream flavors is rooted in my frustration with my father’s return home from work, invariably bearing the same kind of ice cream as the last time, Neapolitan. Neapolitan, again. My pleas to try a different flavor – just once? please? – consistently fell on deaf ears. “Neapolitan is chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. That’s three flavors right there. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it.” Some kids’ idea of rebellion involved smoking behind the garage; mine was to tuck into a bowl of Rum Raisin….

There’s lots more to the story, of course. Click here to get the full scoop! 🍨