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Dark Chocolate Cures Cancer!

Well, not really, but recent studies find that eating a little bit of dark chocolate each day slows the hardening of arteries in smokers, increases arterial blood flow, and even lowers blood pressure.

This is not to say that binging on dark chocolate is a good idea. While just a little bit supposedly contains more antioxidants per gram than red wine, green tea or berries, just a little bit definitely also contains an unhealthy amount of fat.

Milk chocolate and white chocolate don't seem to have any mention of health benefits, as expected, because you know, they're the devil, and they don't even taste that good.

Chocolate Grahams: Stupidly Simple, Sinfully Delicious

Dark chocolate. No wussy, faux-creamy milk chocolate. Call it dark, ebony, sassy- with more than 50% cacao, you've got a winner. If you're not into dark chocolate, convert. Everyone's doing it.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. A double boiler is essentially a medium size bowl sitting on a small pot of boiling water. Make sure the bowl isn't the cheap kind that will get destroyed at high temperatures- you probably don't want to use a really expensive one either. Using a double boiler allows you some more control over the heat that makes direct contact with the melting/melted chocolate, ie it should be dummy proof such that the chocolate doesn't burn.

Prepare some parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Dip whatever size graham crackers you want into the melted chocolate, remove, and place on the parchment paper. Repeat with remaining crackers.

Let the cookies stand for about an hour or place in a refrigerator for a few minutes to solidify the chocolate. You're done!

It's so stupidly easy. The key is to use a really high quality chocolate. Why skimp out on the good stuff for the holidays? Ghirardelli is a high quality safe bet for cooking and baking chocolate, but you can always experiment with those big hunks of chocolate at specialty food stores like Whole Foods and Fairway.

Improvisation: Raw Milk Cheddar Pasta With Fresh Lemon Pepper Chicken

So dinner tonight was interesting. We didn't feel like getting take out or going to the supermarket to plan a meal. It's way too cold outside. Skimming through Tyler Florence's Eat This Book, I found nothing that would work with what we have in the fridge or the pantry.

That meant one thing: I had to improvise. But I'm used to that! So what do we got? Half a block of raw milk cheddar, chicken breast cutlets, a variety of vegetables, and lots of leftovers. There's always garlic, ginger, cilantro, scallions, and onions on hand, so that helps. We had leftovers last night, so I figured I'd go nuts with the cheddar, the chicken and some other random stuff.

The meal I formulated in my head was something like a chicken alfredo- a creamy cheese sauce with pasta and some sort of sliced chicken on top. I've never made a cheese sauce before and lazy me, I didn't feel like going through recipes online or in our library to find one, so here goes...



I marinated the chicken cutlets with some salt, olive oil, a LOT of chopped garlic (practically a whole head), fresh squeezed lemon, and a lot of coarse crushed pepper. Essentially a lemon pepper marinade.



I heated a large pan on high heat with some olive oil, added the cutlets and seared both sides. Keeping the heat on, I put the cutlets aside on a plate and deglazed the pan with an American viognier that I'd been meaning to use for the past two weeks. I let that reduce for about five minutes, added some flour to thicken the sauce, and then added pieces of the raw milk cheddar. I also added roughly a cup of 2% milk (what we had in the fridge), and let it simmer and reduce some more.


Once I thought it tasted about right, I added the cooked fettucine I'd been preparing on the side, and topped that with some chopped red pepper and chopped parsley.



I was also preparing an easy side- a brothy soup. I just took a carton of low sodium chicken stock, added roughly the same amount of water, added some thinly sliced onion, kale, and sliced broccoli stems. To serve, I garnished it with some thinly sliced radishes.



Voila! The sauce didn't turn out to be as creamy as I was expecting, but it was still tasty. The chicken was also a little overdone. Oops! But all in all, it was very good. The raw milk cheddar combined with the viognier gave it a really bold flavor that I haven't ever experienced in a cheese sauce. And the lemon pepper flavor on the chicken wasn't too lemony, nor too peppery- just right. Pardon the glass, I didn't have proper wine glasses on hand.



The wine was absolutely amazing. I really have to credit my friend Phi with telling me about viogniers. I don't know too much about wine, but I think that going with this 2004 Maryhill Viognier was a great choice. The flavor wasn't so strong on the alcohol, a little fruity (pears?), and simply enjoyable. I wish I hadn't added so much to the sauce because I found myself wanting more when I finished the bottle. Gotta get me some more of that!

When Supermodels Should Have Permission to Eat

Heidi's lookin a little too good to be pregnant. Season 2 of Project Runway premieres Wednesday. It may seem totally unrelated to Cleaverfever.com but don't babies need like, food? An involuntary abortion might be a bad thing.

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.