November 2010
45 posts
Let me tell you something.
Tortilla de patatas is the best thing on earth to eat. The best.
I fell-quickly, dramatically, hopelessly-in love the first time I tasted it. It’s everything you could ever want in a neat little package: it’s eggy, it’s potato-y, it’s salty, olive oily, hot or not, crispy on the outside or soft, runny on the inside or spongy. It’s everything good and comforting...
How to turn a pig's ear into a delicious sauce:
While hefting wobbly spoonfuls of gelatinous pig-ear stock from a bowl to a saucepan the other day, I thought that the rest of the world might be interested in more than this middle step on the way to delicious pig-ear sauce. The ears themselves are soft and wiggly, and they break apart at the touch of a spoon. They sell like hotcakes here, but somehow I don’t think they’d go over...
A quarter-century for one, a quarter-ounce for...
Children and grandparents: don’t read this. Seriously. You’ve been warned. Well, this is it: I’m 25. I’m on a break from another day at the restaurant on this beautiful Saturday (ok, today is Monday, but we’ve been without Internet recently, so I couldn’t post this), after being stuck inside doing things like cutting braised cow snouts into unthreateningly small pieces and making a...
O, be some other name!/What's in a name? that...
Katharine. Katharine. Kath-a-rine. Kath-uh-rin. It’s seemingly harmless and easily pronounceable by tongues of every stripe. Except that apparently it’s not.
A lot of my friends here have taken to calling me “Kath,” a name formerly reserved for my family, but since everyone here has a nickname, it was easy enough to go along with it. At work, however, even...
Sink or Swim
I’ve survived the beginning.
I’ll be here at Restaurante Ni Neu (that would be Basque for “myself,” as in “Restaurant Myself”), until the spring, working for free like everyone except three people. I’m doing what is called a stage, an apprenticeship of sorts in the culinary world. I’ll be moving around to each of the different stations to learn...
