Katie and Alex's Blissfully Crack-like Applesauce

I'm totally in the mood for fall cooking lately. Here's what I made today. Adapted from a food network recipe.


3 lbs. apples of various types, peeled, cored and chopped
1/2 c. water
1/2 - 3/4 c. sugar, to taste
2 T honey
1 T spiced rum
1 T butter
2 t cinnamon
2 t maple syrup

Add all ingredients to pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for about an hour, break up with a fork or potato masher.

Places I've Been: Long Time Gone Blowout Edition

I've been on a little hiatus from this blog, as you've probably noticed. It started when my former Spain roommate and traveling partner Erin came to visit me a few weeks back, and it just spiraled from there. (Haven't made it to the gym much either lately. Oink.) But in the meantime, I've been to lots of amazing restaurants and bars that you should consider popping into if you're ever in town:

RESTAURANTS
Serendipity 3, on 60th Street between 2nd and 3rd avenues (Upper East Side), is the restaurant from the movie "Serendipity." The place is filled with Tiffany lamps and there's an extremely random gift shop. Their specialty, pictured above, is frozen hot chocolate. Don't ask. Just drink.

UN Delegates' Dining Room, at the UN headquarters, 46th Street and 1st (Midtown East), is a good place to go if you're a tourist but don't want to feel touristy. Serves food from around the world, and the dessert table alone is worth the $20 buffet price tag. A good view of the river, plus you can eavesdrop on important people having important conversations. Reservations and dressing up are required. Get there at least half an hour early because you have to go through security.

Meson Sevilla, on 46th between 8th and 9th (Hell's Kitchen), is a tapas bar that has most of the good stuff I remember from Spain (mainly, tortilla and croquetas). But more importantly, there's cafe con leche — the champagne of coffees — and, naturally, sangria.

Veselka, at 9th Street and 2nd Avenue (East Village), is open all night. The service is terrible, but it's cheapish for manhattan. And there are pierogies. Like ten different kinds of them.

L'Express, at Park Avenue and 20th Street, is a French restaurant that's open all night. Menu has one page of food, three pages of beer and wine. I wasn't terribly impressed with the food (I had calamari), but hey, it's open all night. Also, probably the only French restaurant where you can hear "Ice, Ice Baby."

BARS
Ulysses, on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, is what CitySearch calls a gold-diggers' goldmine, and they are not making it up. If you want to meet yourself a hedge-fund sugar daddy, this is the place to be. And it's open until 4 a.m. every night, so take your time and be picky.

I'm not quite as impressed with Beauty Bar (14th St between 2nd and 3rd, East Village) now that I know it's a chain. But it's a cute little place, with old hair-dryer chairs and a dance floor. Go there to get a martini and a manicure for $10. Hospital-grade sterilization it's not, but I didn't get eaten alive by fungi and the polish lasted me a good week.

SUSHI
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a certain subset of New Yorkers who love their sushi. And since that same subset tends to settle in Hoboken, there are more sushi places here than you can possibly imagine. On Hudson Street is Sushi Lounge, as well as a place directly across the street. Pretty self-explanatory: eat sushi, listen to lounge music. But if you want better sushi, head a few blocks down to Sushi House, at 1st and Bloomfield (There's one around 14th and Washington too, but I've never been there).

Random cultural note

In New York, knowing about that little (insert ethnicity here) bakery/restaurant that's been in the same family for 114 years is a skill with equal social value to having actual cooking/baking skills. Or possibly greater value, if said establishment has a unique specialty item that's obscure and yummy and ethnic.

Easily Amused: Health Food Store Edition

One of the joys of living in Post-College Yuppieville is that there are lots of natural food stores. At least two large ones and a smaller produce store that calls itself a farmer's market within three blocks or so.

But the reason I like these places so much is not so much because of the healthy food, although that helps. It's because I spent the last four-and-a-half years grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, and even after six months I find actual variety to be utterly amazing, and thus if I'm not careful grocery shopping turns into recreational food shopping. Today I went to one of these stores looking for a bottle of vanilla extract and I came out with a $2.60-on-sale box of organic macaroni and cheese (Annie's, though. totally worth it) and a jar of marinara-and-zinfandel spaghetti sauce (which actually tastes like wine). Oh, and the vanilla was a) organic, b) fair-trade and c) cheaper than the bottle of pure vanilla extract I bought at Wal-Mart, used a teaspoon of and left in Eau Claire.

The best, though, is Trader Joe's. There's only one around and it's in union square, but it's totally worth the trip every now and then because most of it is random stuff that you can't find anywhere else. Also, it's relatively cheap.

While I'm usually lazy when it comes to cooking, I am in the process of baking cookies. From scratch. From a recipe in the Times that came with this article. I say "in the process" because the article says you should let the dough sit for awhile (upto 36 hours if you have the time. I'm settling with overnight.) So tomorrow I'll see if the wisdom of The New York Times makes for a better cookie or if I should have stuck with prepackaged refrigerator dough.

Sushi

A few days ago I went to a sushi-making class (by the same lady who put on the last cooking class I went to.) I don't think I will attempt to make my own anytime soon, though, because:

a. Making sushi is hard. Those ones that are sitting on their sides and falling open? Those were my first attempts (they tasted pretty damn good though ... smoked salmon and cream cheese and green onions. I call it the New York roll.)

b. Too paranoid about using the right kind of fish and keeping it fresh enough.

But I figured when you live in a city where the number of sushi bars is eclipsed only by the number of people who spend every moment of their lives trying to appear cultured, sushi is a good thing to know about, kind of like wine. Also, after spending a LOT of time last summer at sushi bars, I think I'm finally to the point where I'm not just choking it down but I actually like it.

Oh, and it's GORGEOUS outside. The trees are starting to get leaves on them, which makes everything cheerier-looking, especially in the 'hood.

Ugh.

If you are ever at a New York deli, never, ever eat anything containing breaded chicken or (especially) slices thereof. Because I promise you it is not chicken. More like greasy chicken-flavored rubber that will fill you with loathing upon consumption. I have had this experience in at least 3 or 4 delis that were otherwise at least tolerable.

Moving on ... I love how Wisconsin is, yet again, a battleground state. It trips the hell out of me to see Appleton and Oshkosh and Madison datelined in the New York Times, and even more so, to see my alma mater get a mention. (On that note, this fine publication is also doggedly following the campaign season in Blugold country).

I know that the primary system is designed for the maximium benefit of special-interest groups, and it does drag on for an excruciatingly long period of time. But it does have the side effect of forcing politicians to go to electoral pip-squeak states like Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and at least pretend to listen to their concerns. And since there was no coronation after Super Tuesday, the pandering continues. As Lauren Fox of Shorewood, Wis., puts it, "having zoomed from ignored to adored in one day, we might as well put on tons of sparkly eye shadow and enjoy ourselves, because no one will remember our name in the morning."

Of course, being that it's Wisconsin they'll be back to pander some more before the general election. I already miss living in a purple state, at least for now. But I've always had a love-hate attitude toward politics. It's the ultimate reality show, in that it has pretty much the same ratio of reality to utter ridiculousness as most reality shows. But follow it too closely and you'll start to lose brain cells and possibly your lunch.

But to end on a positive note, I the best story I edited today (well, besides the Wisconsin one, which was from the same series) was about the caucuses in small-town Maine. I think Jennifer Finney Boylan has a brilliant take on the Democratic race:

Toward the end of the event, though, someone asked, So what was it like, to grow up as the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Well, she said, one day, when she was 6 and living in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, Chelsea decided she’d like to have a coconut. So the Clintons went out and got one. When they got it home, though, the first family faced the traditional problem when it comes to coconuts: how do you open one up?

Chelsea allowed as how her father and she had gone outside, and thrown the coconut again and again onto the hard asphalt of the governor’s mansion’s driveway, hoping to make a dent. But the coconut, alas, refused to yield.

Finally, Hillary came outside with a hammer.

The point being, Chelsea said, that her mother knows how to solve problems.

In the 2004 election, voters repeatedly said that they’d rather have a beer with George W. Bush than with John Kerry. This election, it seems as if the question for Democrats is this: Whom would you call if you really, really needed to open a coconut? Hillary Clinton, with the Hammer of Experience? Or Barack Obama, with the Machetes of Bipartisanship and Change?