Not just brain food, it’s served with pimentos!

and you can eat it with Wikibread!

Ah, New York City, city of awesomeness, how I love you and your incredible variety of cuisines. That’s where I am now for a training seminar tomorrow and Friday. Whenever I’m here I like to try new and interesting places to eat, whether upscale or cheap eats.

As I’m currently in the Flatiron district, I made sure to take note of a few interesting-sounding places in the 10003 ZIP code. Tonight I just wanted a little bit of simple comfort food, so I walked over to the Chat ‘n’ Chew, a fun little down-home American diner on East 16th.

The atmosphere is happy and friendly, with a soundtrack of pop music ranging from ska to rockabilly to 80s synthpop to early Salt ‘n’ Pepa and Beastie Boys and an interior decorated in vintage Americana without being exceedingly kitschy.

I didn’t want tons of food, so I ordered the Teenie Weenie Mac & Cheese. Of course, I was also curious about the sweet potato fries, which I’d read were quite good, so I ordered those as well, thus negating the “not ordering tons of food” intent. Oops. One order of sweet potato fries contained about five times as much as I could possibly eat, making them a good option for a shared appetizer. They were pretty tasty, and they were served with a homemade chili ketchup that I got up my nerve to try. Surprisingly, I kind of liked it. I don’t like condiments in general and have historically loathed ketchup, but this had a slightly spicy flavor that went nicely with the fries.

My mac & cheese was the kiddie-sized version of the Quintessential Mac & Cheese, “from our trailer park days - with the crunchy top”. That was about the perfect amount for me. It was yellow-orange and creamy, topped with breadcrumbs and shredded cheese and probably finished with a kitchen torch in its little bowl. Yum.

There was a decent assortment of tasty-looking pies and cakes, but I couldn’t even nearly finish what was on my plate as it was, let alone order dessert. Coca-Cola chocolate cake sounded appropriately down-home, as did Jack Daniels pecan pie. Maybe some other time, when I have someone to share with.

This place reminded me a little bit of the Friendly Toast in Portsmouth, NH, a kitsch-filled gem of a diner that has attracted Bostonian friends of mine in the middle of the night on a whim. I think the sweet potato fries at the Toast are better (try the Orleans fries with brown sugar, Tabasco, and sour cream…they are to die for), but this cute little place was doing a bustling business late at night and looks like a neighborhood favorite.

Tomorrow I might change directions and have breakfast at Brasserie Les Halles, an outpost of which is only a few blocks from my hotel.

So I bought some fennel yesterday. It was the second time in my life that I had ever bought fennel, the first time being just before the gum infection that meant I was eating nothing for a week and a half. It wilted and had to be disposed of. Yesterday, I saw it again, so it came home with me. Now, my entire knowledge of fennel was this; it has a flavour akin to anise, and it seems to be a bulb (it might not have been, but it looked like one, and turned out to be).

I was looking at it, and trying to think on what I might do with it without resorting to the intarwebz; just to see what my totally uninformed brain did. I peeled a layer off the bulb and tasted it. Nice. Slight sweetness, with an odd flavour that I’d call umami if I was more informed about the flavour (I’m just getting my head around it). The savoury/meaty import of it made me think it would really do well with some time in the frying pan, with simply some pepper, salt and olive oil. I sliced it, and started to cook it at a low temp, turning from time to time and letting the sweet/sugar part of the cut edges caramelize, which it does nicely. A taste determined I was on the right way, but I needed vegetables to be either very crisp or much softer than it was, so I added some of the fresh made turkey stock, and turned it down to simmer for a while.

Those of you who have ANYTHING resembling a clue will realize that what I did was reinvent frickin’ braised fennel. I’m honestly not sure if this is inane, or proof that I’m developing some genuinely good instincts on the food front. After the slow braise (when the turkey stock had cooked away I let them cook for another minute to bring back a bit of the caramelization), I took the pieces out, dipped one cut edge in parmesan, and served it to myself on almond pilaf. It was astonishingly good. I came to the computer to see how other people cook it, and came across this at Epicurious, which is, aside from my parmesan addition, and using my fresh turkey stock for all the liquid, ingredient for ingredient the recipe I just ‘invented’.

I’m sure people will say that’s nifty, but I feel sort of sheepish.

I loathe them, but we got about 30 robot spams tonight, and it was still going on when I added this, so I had to. I’ll look into better spam blockage tomorrow, but right now this was what I was able to add in 15 minutes. My other option was to require registration to post, but I’d still get all the spam to delete, and have to sort through for people making legit comments unregistered.

When I worked at Subway, for about 3 months, maybe 20 years ago, I found that I had to leave the restaurant when we were chopping onions on the big slice-o-matic thing…my boss, at first, didn’t believe me; he told me it wasn’t an actual issue. Until I wound up with my eyes swollen shut and unable to open them after being assigned slicer duties. Then he let me out of chopping them, and I worked the front. Except that my eyes started streaming, as I stood there at the front trying to serve people. He still seemed to think I was faking it, somehow. How, I haven’t the foggiest, but they didn’t bother him, so he seemed to think I could overcome it.

I’ve tried everything on this earth to overcome my Onion Issues, but nothing nothing nothing works. If I want onions, I will pay in tears. I love the flavour, and caramelized onions are one of the best things on the planet, but still, there is pain.

It hadn’t bothered me for a while; I mean, it hurt when I chopped ‘em, but it wasn’t so bad, but tonight it was back twenty years; for some reason the two sweet onions I needed to chop tonight were just going to destroy me. Right now my face is about 105 to the touch (I’m not feverish, it’s skin-only), and though it’s been 15m and I went to another room, changed my sweater, closed the door, my eyes are still running.

This had better be a damned find risotto.