Haricot Verts Wrapped in Prosciutto

The ingredients: A good bunch of organic haricot verts (string beans), four cloves of garlic, and as much prosciutto as your heart desires.


Circumcise the tips of the haricot verts (on both ends), slice the garlic, and put em into a decent size pot with enough water to reach about half the height of the contents. Sprinkle with some salt and add some olive oil.

Do not cover! Bring it to a boil, then simmer until most of the water evaporates. Careful- the oil will spatter.

Depending on how well you like the beans done, you want to take them off the stove right before that. Pour them into a cold bowl and let cool for about five minutes. Then wrap them in the prosciutto!


Voila! Tastay!

Feel free to judge. I'm open to improvement.

The Greenmarket at Union Square

The Greenmarket at Union Square was particularly nice today, especially because of the recent warmer weather. Today's my brother-in-law's birthday, so I figured I'd check the market out for anything I might cook tonight. But, seeing as I already had some string beans and prosciutto in the fridge, nothing really appealed to me. It was still nice to walk about, though.

If you've never been to the Greenmarket, they have an amazing selection of organic produce from local farmers in the Tri-State area (of New York). The selection is seriously incredible.


Oh this was fantastic. Rick's Picks pickles you're seeing in the image up there. The first thing that drew me to the table was the design of the jars. Go figure. But then there were free samples! Leave it to Felix to find the free samples =D

The crisp flavor made my knees buckle and I knew I had to pay the nine bucks for a jar. Hey, someone's gotta make a living. I think it was well worth it, tho. Great stuff! The guy mentioned an open house at the store this Friday. But where's the store?

Cleaver Art from DeviantArt

Lunch Time by garrit

Cleaver Lesson 1: Smashing Garlic

The sharpness of the blade matters not in this exercise. Like I said in an earlier post, I recommend a Chinese cleaver. Remove a clove from the head of garlic, place it on the cutting board, place the blade flat on top of the clove, and SMASH! Pound your fist on the blade (carefully) and you've got a flattened piece of garlic. The shell is easily removed, or in some cases, it will remove itself, sticking to the blade (pictured). Easy, huh?

You really can't do this with any other knife unless it has a wide enough blade. You could hurt yourself!

Gilroy Garlic Festival

I'm east-coast all the way, but I just might take a trip to the big CA for a whiff of the Gilroy Garlic Festival next summer. Since 1979, the festival has been stimulating the self-proclaimed Garlic Capital of the World with none other than humanity's favorite breath-destroyer. Or maybe just my favorite. I've scared many guests with the sheer amount of minced garlic I use in my dishes.

Gilroy Garlic Festival

Internet Explorer Blows!

Bear with me while I try and fix some problems with the page's code. I'm having no end of problems trying to get this page to work correctly with Internet Explorer. Strangely enough, it works quite fine and dandy with FireFox. If you're using IE, you're not seeing this page as it's supposed to be.

Please, please, PLEASE get Firefox. Use the link on the top right. It's free and it's so much friggin better and it's going to make it that much easier for me to edit this site if most of the audience here is using it. Thanks!

Chinese Cleaver Reigns Supreme

Fuck white people cleavers. They're heavy, and they're only good for breaking dense bone material. Consider a real Chinese cleaver, which is perhaps the most versatile kitchen tool, ever. They're light enough yet large enough to handle a variety of tasks, like chopping vegetables and smashing garlic, for example. And if you really want, you can still slam your fury into breaking bones with them.



And like any product when it comes to pure East vs West, rice-imbued products are damn cheap! If you're lucky enough to have an Asian market close to home, check it out and just see how cheap their real Chinese cleavers are. I've seen them as low as 20 bucks. You, of course, will have to buy something to sharpen it with, like a whetstone. A whetstone!!! Did I spell that correctly? It doesn't matter! It's a whetstone!!! You can't help but look menacing sharpening a huge cleaver with a whetstone.

Water enhanced with no calories!

This was a whoa moment in Union Square when I saw this.



Jana (pronounced "yah-nah") is producing bottled water called "Skinny Water" that suppresses your appetite! That's right! You can now become anorexic that much faster! Dear God.

Denver must be organic- grass is legal there

New York Times op-ed contributor Nina Planck says to look beyond the "organic" label on food products.

"Organic and Then Some"

Grocery shopping in Flushing, Queens

My family isn't so traditional on the holidays, so naturally, we went to Flushing, Queens (the other Chinatown, if not better) for lunch and some grocery shopping to prepare for the evening's concoctions.

Lunch was at a Taiwanese joint on Main St whose name translates to "North Port". It was absolutely delicious. Wish I had taken photos of that. Dishes included rich and greasy foods that utilized Chinese celery, fried tofu, kidney, liver, squid, spicy things, and others. The fried tofu was probably, hands down, our favorite dish. My dad said that the way to tell a really good Chinese place is if they appear to know how to make good tofu dishes, seeing as tofu is quite difficult to turn into culinary wonders.

Below, you'll see that I've posted some photos from our trip to one of our favorite supermarkets in Flushing, whose name I think translates to Golden Mountain ("Jin San"). "Jin San" is awesome. It's old, it's fucking crowded, and it's got a lot of authentic Chinese goods.

Only in New York, in either Flushing, Queens or Chinatown have I been able to find really really fresh shrimp for really great prices! Look at that! Those are large shrimp for only $4.99 a pound! And it's ceviche quality fresh shrimp!

Time for hot pot! That's when slanty-eyed people gather around a butane gas stove on the dinner table. Add a pot full of boiling broth, some thinly sliced lamb, beef, pork and other meats to the mix, and voi-fucking-la, you got hot pot. And it's self-serve so it's also self-gratifying.

Seaweed! Get over it! It tastes good! Especially when chilled overnight with minced garlic and a bit of light soy sauce.

Winter Melon! One of my favorite Chinese vegetables. My mom will usually cut it up into chunks and add them to really light, brothy soups. They're full of water, so they retain heat extremely well when you turn the burner off. Once cooked, winter melon has a very light texture and flavor, almost like cooked cucumber, but more delicious and sophisticated.

These are wonders. They're parcels of sticky rice and pork and nuts and lots of other tasty things. I'm illiterate when it comes to this stuff, so I really don't know how to discern which ones are which. They're delicous though, and that's all that matters! They're prepared usually by steaming the parcels, followed by unwrapping the goodness and consuming.

Smoked and cured pork and duck products!

A view from outside of "Jin San". It's all selling very fast and as you can see, there's only one chicken, a hunk of fried pig, and a pig's head left. They're going to have to re-stock that soon!

Hello world!

Cleaver Fever opens! I guess we'll have to see where things go from here...