London

I went to visit my girlfriend who's studying abroad in London. We went into Borough Market on her birthday. This place is incredible, and I can't wait to go back.
We started at Neal's Yard Dairy where we bought some Irish Cooleeney. It's a soft cheese made from unpasteurised cow's milk (delicious unpasteurised cow's milk).


It's pretty much a cheese paradise.

Right next door is Monmouth Coffee.


In the greenmarket area is the famous Raclette guy. Cheese bubbles under a heating element and is scraped off onto potatoes and gherkins. It's delicious and greasy.




The toasted cheese sandwich is also available here. It's the grilled cheese sandwich that every other grilled cheese sandwich wants to be.


We also ate a venison sausage sandwich with grilled onions and lettuce (we chose the cranberry and bitter orange sauces...with a bit of tabasco for good measure).

Since everything costs double in the pound-dollar conversion, I did some cooking to save some money. This dish was inspired by something I ate in Bordeaux. It was a shrimp salad in an avocado half over salad. I used chicken instead, and mixed mayonnaise, ketchup, fresh chilis, garlic, and lemon juice and stuffed an avocado. This was put over an arugula salad drizzled with olive oil, lemon juice, and balsamic vinegar.

Whew...I underestimated how spicy the chilis would be. Who knew British people can handle spicy peppers?

The next day (after a visit to Waitrose), I made a spinach and smoked English cheddar omelette with jalapeno home fries.

Nougatine

In New York I had a prix fixe lunch at Nougatine (the casual dining room adjacent to Jean Georges in the Trump Tower). At only 24 bucks, it's a steal.


First course was carrot and citrus soup with cumin crisp. Segments of orange and grapefruit accompanied the creamy carrot soup with that delicious cumin cracker thing. There were also bits of candied ginger and that um...green stuff.



Next I had the pineapple glazed short ribs with ginger and mushroom ravioli and mint. Outstanding.


For dessert, chocolate cake with cocoa nib ice cream. It's much more complex than it sounds, but it's hard to describe.

First meal in New York

So I'm here in New York staying at the Westin Times Square for the Chamber Music America conference. Though Times Square itself is a wasteland in terms of food (unless you count the fanciest McDonald's on the planet as noteworthy), I popped up to Columbus Circle to check out the Time Warner center. I popped up to the fourth floor to marvel at the Per Se menu and to stare at the doorway to Masa. To console myself for not having the $300+ necessary to eat at either of these places, I went downstairs to Bakery Bouchon. Though pricey, the food is good (not to mention my department is picking up the tab).

I had a roast beef sandwich, and although the beef itself was not the best I've had, the palladin bread it came on was pretty damn tasty, as were the garlic aioli and carmelized onions. It also had fontina cheese, and arugula, and came with two cornichons.

Then there was the macaron.
There was a trio of special winter macarons, and I had a hard time deciding between blood orange and chestnut. I ended up choosing blood orange. Good lord it was fantastic. Crisp outside, chewy, dense, almondy on the inside, with a delicious blood orange jelly/marmalade in between the cookies.

The latte was nothing spectacular.