[Sca-cooks] Mostly OOP, therapeutic food-shopping gloat

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the list!

It's been one... no, _two_ of those weeks.

Caesar, having made the transportation of the peurile junior to the
exurbs of the Nova Eboracum, to wit, the Campus Martius in the
transsonic province to the North (awright, Brennan is camping in
Connecticut with his class), I, Adamantius, have effected the
peregrination to the Emporium de Gustibus...

Okay, it's like this: the kid is off on a camping trip, and my wife and
I found ourselves last night in the neighborhood of that most unassuming of
Gustatorial Disneylands, Fairway Foods on Broadway and 75th Street in
Manhattan, under kidless (read long attention span, whine-free)circumstances.

Our booty included a 3-liter tin of Fairway's own brand of cold-pressed
extra-virgin Umbrian olive oil (woo-hoo, $13.99), a bottle of blood
orange vinegar, green and black Cerignola olives from
Sicily, and an interesting bottle of Fattorie Giacobazzi Saba,
Specialita di Modena, which turns out to one of those Roman wine
products (sapa, the more concentrated form of defrutum and caroenum)
which has probably been happily produced all this time in Italy without
outsiders taking that much notice or interest. Not unlike verjuice in that
respect. Essentially this is a port-like concentrated must, possibly
aged in oak (well, it _is_ from Modena in Emilia-Romagna) like a
balsamic vinegar. They also provided a recipe sheet.

I also picked up a small jar of anchovy filets in extra-virgin olive
oil, after deciding that I really didn't want a kilo of anchovies --
only because they don't last forever and would suffer some quality
degradation before I could use them all. They also had imported Tonno
Genova, an extremely high-quality tuna packed in extremely high-quality
olive oil, on sale for something like a dollar a can. Upon getting it
home, I read the fine print and now see it is distributed by the Chicken
of the Sea folks, and bears a "Dolphin Safe" seal on the label that I
never noticed before. Somehow this takes some of the fun off the
product. Still good tuna, though.

Items sighed over or otherwise noted, but not purchased, were an
astonishing variety of Belgian ales and lambics, balsamic vinegar from
Modena, but made from figs instead of grapes (or perhaps in addition to
grapes) and apple cider balsamic vinegar. I did splurge, somewhat
inexplicably and impulsively, on some Brooklyn Pennant '55 Pale Ale (a
reference to the final National League Championship won by the Brooklyn
Dodgers in 1955, two years before their shameful abandonment of their
fans and migration to Caid, of all places, but we can ritually vilify
Walter J. O'Malley another time). Up until the 1950's, New York City,
and Brooklyn, especially, was the home of numerous small, local
breweries, which would probably qualify today as microbreweries for
size, output, and quality. Contrary to popular belief, New York City
actually has quite an excellent tap water system (although what happens
to the water between the mains and the pipes in some older buildings is
anybody's guess), and for all the hype about water from the Rockies and
various other places, a brewery really couldn't do much better than to
use the kind of hard water that comes out of my kitchen faucet. The
Brooklyn Brewery ( newish company, probably founded in the eighties)
actually built a fine reputation for ales brewed in New York City from
that very tap water, although I suspect city taxes to be mostly
responsible for their subsequent move closer to the Adirondack source of
NYC's tap water. But we can ritually vilify Walter J. O'Malley later.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com