Olive Oil Outage
In theory, the newest Veronica Foods olive oil store has just opened up in Stuyvesant Plaza, right around the corner from Chipotle, and a couple of doors down from Different Drummers Kitchen.
I mention this because I’m just about out of olive oil. Well, that’s not entirely true. I still have a reserve of very tasty lamb infused olive oil from my recent poaching project. That stuff is amazing spread on toast, and it’s even better on popcorn sprinkled with fennel pollen and sea salt.
My impossible goal is zero waste. I want to eat and drink everything in the house before we move to New Jersey. Albany Jane is hopefully going to help me by liberating the frozen turkey from the chest freezer, and if you can forgive the pun, that takes a real load off my chest.
Yes, replenishing the olive oil would be easy to do. But there’s another complicating factor.
One Day in Albany
Albany is just not that big. It gets a little bit bigger when you start including the neighboring suburbs. But when you add up the nearby cities to the north, east and south (and their respective suburbs, towns and hamlets) the place gets a whole lot more interesting.
People pass Albany by all the time. Tourists come to Saratoga Springs and they drive by. Tourists head up to Lake George, or the Adirondacks, or Montreal, and many don’t stop here along the way.
Albany gets a bad rap. Some of that is our own doing. Some insist that we have great restaurants here, and for the most part that’s simply not true, especially when comparing our top places to similarly priced options in the big city. Overselling and underdelivering is never pretty. But there are good things here. Things that you can’t find in other cities. And many of them can be wrapped up in a single day of eating your way around the city.
It’s no easy task, but here’s your itinerary.
Melancholy
Yesterday I pushed a four drawer metal filing cabinet up a set of rickety stairs into my attic. Mrs. Fussy was in the attic to guide it into position. But before we even attempted it, we had a little fight about her ability to take accurate measurements without the use of an actual measuring tape.
Fights are normal for moves. Moving is stressful for everyone. But it’s all water under the bridge.
This weekend involved multiple trips to Goodwill and multiple trips to the storage facility. We had to replenish our supply of moving boxes. And now the house is really starting to look empty. It was a productive weekend, and the work needed to get done. But I’m bummed to have missed out on a weekend of exciting eating.
SOS – Viva La France
Happy Bastille Day. It’s funny because just yesterday we bought tickets to Paris. As if we didn’t have enough going on, soon after we land in New Jersey, Mrs. Fussy and I are going back to gorge ourselves on butter and bread.
In completely unrelated news, as we were packing, I found myself looking at a stack of old pants in my closet and none of them happened to fit. Goodwill will be getting a bunch of slacks from the Brothers Brooks, that place that used to be a safari store, and Dockers (which used to be one of my clients).
Anyway there is a lot of food news that has been sent my way that I want to share with you. Some of it may be old hat, since I’ve seen it listed in other sources. But hopefully most of it will be new and interesting. Why more people aren’t sharing communiques from Adventure in Food Trading is a mystery. Their love notes about food are always magnificent.
But without further ado, here’s a torrent of food “news” and events.
Kids Love Bacon Fat
Summer break is really a mixed blessing. This year Young Master Fussy didn’t want to attend any structured camp. Frankly, I had no interest in pushing the issue. During the summers he likes to take a break from the regimented world of school, and I can’t blame him.
The upside is that while Little Miss Fussy is at her camp, I get to spend some time alone with my boy. The downside is that I cannot just pursue my own interests willy nilly.
But I’ve been enjoying going around trying to find ways to make the summer a treat for him. Naturally many of those involve food. So earlier this week I offered him the chance to have anything he wanted for lunch. However, it didn’t work out quite the way I had planned.
Nominations for the Tour de Wings of Troy
There’s a lot of bickering in Troy about which place makes the best wings. I say The Ruck. Others insist it’s the Ale House. And then there are those who swear by the Towne Tavern (which isn’t even officially in Troy, but the wings are just that damn good).
Plenty of other places get mentioned as well, but these two locally famous taverns would be the clear incoming favorites.
I don’t care a lot for bickering, especially when something is so easily testable. So very soon, a few select readers of the FLB will be invited to participate in a tour of the five most promising Buffalo-style wing producers in the Collar City. But before we send them on their merry way to do God’s work, as usual, I’m going to open up the floor to nominations.
AskTP – Packing It In
The storage locker is filling up. Boxes are being filled. Strollers have been sold. House repairs have been made. Everything is moving along nicely. We even now know where we will be living in Princeton.
Be advised that August will be a very transitional month. I’ll be roaming around the northeast doing a lot of traveling. There may be some interruptions of the FLB in transit. But I do look forward to sharing any insights into food I get from my time on the road.
Now I’m looking forward to sharing reader questions and matching them up with the answers they so richly deserve. From the beginning I committed to eventually answering every question that is asked in the comments section of the blog, just so long as it is asked using proper punctuation. And every other week, I write this feature to clear out the backlog.
For those who just like to scroll through these posts, each new question is tagged with the mystery link of the day. So if you are bored, or if I’m boring you, and perhaps feeling a little adventurous, I invite you to click away.
Now without any further ado, onto the questions.
[Insert State] Cuisine
Growing up in Miami we had something called Floribbean Cuisine. Just like it sounds, it was Florida meets the Caribbean. So there were tropical fruits, plenty of citrus, and fish that could be found within our surrounding waters. For the most part it was light and went well with the heat and humidity of south Florida.
Granted, it’s probably less famous than California Cuisine. Living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco, I was exposed to this style of cooking at restaurants and from chefs that claimed to start the movement, and even more at places run by their disciples. Chez Panisse would seem to have the best PR department. And there is some debate whether the credit should go to Alice Waters or Jeremiah Tower.
For the record, I’m in Chef Tower’s camp. But there were many chefs in California who were working with similar ideals. Take Bradley Ogden, for example, who is quoted as saying, “Keep it simple; use the freshest ingredients available and put them together in such a way that the flavors, colors, and textures combine to bring out the best in each other.”
In some ways, California Cuisine has gotten wrapped up in New American Cuisine. And really, I’m not interested in parsing the differences. There are just a few things that I want to get straight.
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