NYC for Xmas!

So I headed home for Christmas and planned a whirlwind trip of NY and the surrounding areas.

First off.  I stopped in Richmond for snackiepoos on the way up, and shock shock, Harrison St Coffee was CLOSED.  Oh well, I hit Panda Veg.  I ordered the home style tofu, a spring roll and the sesame balls.  The tofu was not the tofu I'd had at the buffet, and I ended up throwing most of it in the trash, but can I expound for one moment on the joy and beauty that is sesame balls?  Okay

, so you have these little balls that get put

 in the deep fryer and expand to 3x their size.  Nothing amazing there.  What is amazing is the crispy, sesame seed coated outside, which yields to a hot, doughy, sticky bun with dense, molasses flavored peanut butter core.  I didn't want to eat all of them before I got out of Virginia, but I totally did.  They were fantastically delicious.

My first night, I had dinner at new restaurant Dirt Candy.  Dirt Candy is a very small restaurant on 9th ave, devoted to, as they 

say "leaving the 

vegetables to professionals."  A 3 person operation, it is a 

little snug, but uses that size issue to its advantage.  The front-of-house man is very helpful, 

charming and friendly.  He asked us and all parties seated after us if anyone at the table was vegan and made reccomendations on dishes accordingly.  The menu is very small-- 9 items total. We ordered everything on the menu except spinach soup and carrot risotto.  Here's how it went down:

The "snack" of jalapeno hush puppies was tasty, but I wish that chef

 Amanda Cohen had devised a more inventive way of combining the popcorn sized snacks with the perfect condiment that is maple butter.  If Cohen ever decides to make brunch, this would be the perfect thing to serve with, well, every breakfast item possible.  It would be ideal on waffles, pancakes and toast.  It does complement the puppies, but swabbing them across the butter is a little awkward.  I'd like to see a chef who seems interested in advanced techniques like Cohen try something like flash freezing the butter, then surrounding it with hush puppies.  

The star of this meal, as far as I was concerned, was the appetizer.  My father ordered the greek salad-- I didn't try it due to the cheese, but the

 portabello mousse.  Can we talk about this mousse for a moment?  Honestly, I was scared, but t

he waiter sold me.  My love for mushrooms can turn to hate very quickly, particularly when they are pureed, mixed with gelatin and served in futuristic style cubes.  BUT these totally scored.  The mousse tasted like mushrooms, almost more so than the thinly sliced pile that accompanied it on the plate.  The pear confit was a surprising

 burst of sweet that worked out.  The crostini

 added salt and a little crunch to what would otherwise be a mushy dish.  I really loved this.  I probably could've eaten two of them.  I kind of want to 

make portabello mousse squares for my friends, but I don't think they'd understand.  My mom ordered the regular garden salad, which looked pleasant but was really saved by the grapefruit

 pops.  The grapefruit pops are essentially grapefruit sections, coated in a hard candy shell.  They were divine and have resparked my interest in grapefruit brulee.  Hooray butane torches.

I went and saw Playing Dead and Autumn People at Mr Beery's in Farmingdale.  Playing Dead are friends of a friend who played the Stately on Labor Day Weekend.  They serve up radio friendly rock which holds echoes of local Long Island heroes 

Taking Back Sunday.  Autumn People are devoted psychadelic noise rockers.  I didn't expect to like their set as much as I did, but I really liked the show.  Fabian's voice is unexpected, the bass player can really write a bassline and their drummer managed to continue playing as feet, beer, instruments and band members came hurling at him and knocking over his drumkit.

The next day was Christmas, and for Christmas I made the I'm Fucking Hungry Fajitas for my main dish, and a slight variation on VWAV's Tuscan White Bean soup.  Add about 2 cups of spinach, then tell me how much you love me.  My family was, sadly, pretty wary, but my dad tried some and drank a whole lot of soup the next day.

I also made an apple-grapefruit pound cake.  I love pound cake.  It's very beautiful, but doesn't keep extremely well because it's so moist, and because the grapefruit on top starts to go bad.  Photo at right shows the Cake, and a slab cut off of it, for your delicious joy.  I did kind of nick and modify this recipe from my friend Rachel, so I'm going to share my changes with you.

Fruit Pound Cake

Cake:

1.5 C flour

1 C sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 C apple cider (or go half and half, cide and grapefruit juice)

1 Tbsp grapefruit zest

1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tsp almond extract

Icing:

1/2 C shortening

1/2 C margarine

2 T apple cider vinegar

2-2 1/2 C powdered sugar

Grapefruit zest to taste

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a pan.  Mix all dry and wet ingredients separately, then mix together quickly, for no more than 2 minutes, then get it in the oven.  If you use a bread pan (to make a little loaf cake like me) it will need about 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. If you use an 8x8 pan bake about 30 minutes. You can also double the recipe and make a big honkin' cake with two 8x8s.

While your cake is cooling and shortening and margarine are approaching room temp, peel and section a grapefruit.  Then you can mix the icing ingredients together, adding more sugar if it's too loose and more cider if it's too stiff.  Ice the cake as you would any other.  Part of the beauty of this cake is that you can sub in/out almost any fruit and be alright.

On the way home, I got to go to my favorite place in the world: Vegan Treats. 

(Warning, this post is about to become a love song)

How do I love vegan treats?  Let me count the ways.  Observe the look of almost-mindless ecstasy as I bite into the love of my life, the Berliner.  Oh, how I miss jelly donuts.

I have lots of pictures of this donut because i wanted to remebmer it forever, but I won't make you look at them.  I also got a slice of chocolate covered strawberry shortcake, two (yes I know) cinnamon buns and a couple of mini cakes to taste.  They were so pretty!  How could I resist?

The cinnamon buns were exactly as I remembered-- overbearingly rich, smothered in icing, soft and chewy...so totally effing wonderful.  I shared them with my bandmates and it got everyone's seal of approval.

I'm just going to leave off with photos of all the wonderful treats now, but I propose a question or a challenge-- does anyone have any *idea* how they get their icing so fluffy and wonderful?  I know transfats are involved and don't really care.  Most baked goods are not that healthy anyway, and a little transfat to make the difference between satisfying and I-will-eat-this-until-I-cannot-physically-swallow-any-more seems like a fair trade.  Maybe it's because my real dream in life is to have a Vegan Treats Satellite here in Durham.

DC Trip Skip n Fall!

So, this weekend, Dork and I headed up to DC sans Sick (sad sad) to go see Wire at the 9:30 club. I scanned DCVeg.com, Happy Cow, Vegnews, as well as citysearch and google in order to find the best vegan eats and vintage shops in the city.

Here is what we hit:

Panda Veg, Richmond VA
We were HUNGRY after like 2 hours on the road, so we popped into Richmond, hoping to hit up the Harrison St Coffee Shop, which unfortunately closes at 3 on Saturdays (And opens at 11. Why would you open for 4 hours, Coffee Shop?). Lucky for us, there was an all-you-can-eat vegan buffet at Panda Veg, which was open 11-11. So, naturally we stopped in.

Notice the buffet-- when we arrived it wasn't quite so full. I grabbed a few pieces of "Beef" with broccoli, what they called seared tofu (but was actually more sweet and sour tofu), some spring rolls, some fried rice and some really ghetto looking lo-mein.

The beef/chicken sub they used was something of which I am not a fan. Now the tofu on the otherhand was really crispy yet chewy inside, sweet and just about perfect. The spring rolls were obviously homemade (none of that homogenously shredded cabbage and celery) which made for slightly more difficult eating but totally worthwhile and delicious eating. The fried rice looked great but was a little bland but the ghetto vermicelli rice noodle lo mein was amazingly flavorful. I was already pretty full by this time but then they brought out some doughnuts, general tso's "chicken" and some weird potato thing, so we went for 2nds. Dork thought the doughnuts were awesome, but I found them to be weird, salty and generally unpleasant. I am just not into the fake meat here, but those potato things were really tasty. After we felt like we were gonna puke, we went to the bathroom (something I'd reccommend avoiding at Panda Veg) and hit the road again.

After we arrived in DC, my good friend Sean dropped us off by the 9:30 club, but we hit DC9 first. They have a really reasonable happy hour-- $3 well drinks, $2.50 bud/bud light and $3 beer of the week, which was ABITA! We moseyed over to the 9:30 at around 9:30 and found Wire just climbing onstage and getting ready to play. Sorry Tone! My phone screwed up a little while I was trying to take photos but resulted in a really cool one, at left. I've also included another, more normal wire shot.

After the show, we headed over to the Black Cat owned Food For Thought. (See their punk rock "Don't forget to tip" sign). It was a little confusing--you need to show ID to get into the cafe--but we figured it out, went in and ordered. On recommendation from several sources, I ordered the vegan lasagna and Dork ordered a deep fried chili dog. We decided to try and split a piece of chocolate peanut butter cake. While we were there, waiting on our food, some guy spilled ketchup all over himself, we laughed and eventually he came to join us while he waited on his friends. When they arrived, they slid into our booth and we ended up hanging out with them all night. One of them works for a DC cultural site called Brightest Young Things, which is pretty cool and I'll definitely check out the next time I'm heading up there. As far as the food goes, Dork loved the hot dog (girl likes anything deep fried, I swear), the french fries we were offered for the lack of chili and we both thought the lasagna was really really good. Wish we could say the same for the chocolate peanut butter cake. The cake was dry and the icing was thin and syrupy. It's definitely a good spot for reasonably priced (a slice of cake and a piece of lasagna were exactly 10 bucks) late night eats, drinking and hanging out, but I'd skip on the dessert.

The next day we attempted to go to Java Green for brunch, but found them to be closed on sunday, which is kinda silly, since a place that has a separate brunch menu really ought to be open on the most popular brunch day of the week, shouldn't it?

We ended up visiting Asylum in Adams Morgan, after a whole heck of a lot of driving around lost. I ordered the French Toast (omg I haven't had french toast since I was like, 8!) with a side of homefries and Dork got a breakfast burrito. We divvied the food up (two slices toast to each, and half a burrito). Be careful when ordering off the Vegan Brunch menu-- it says in very small print that the sides you can order ARE NOT vegan, and Dork was really jonesing for Texas Toast. Good thing we asked, huh?

We both tore into the breakfast burrito first, probably because french toast just feels like dessert. The breakfast burritos were a mess of saucy-potato-tofu-goodness with salsa. The potatoes were probably the same as the homefries, which were sort of vile (I think homefries and I think cubed potatoes, seared to crispy with a little onion, lots of salt and lots of grease). The fries were not crispy in any sense, a little spicy and covered in one of the ickiest fake cheeses I have ever eaten. The burrito just drowned out a lot of the gross in the fake cheese I think. The french toast was really the star of the meal for me. It was like I remembered, pillowy bread with a little chewy texture, cinnamon and powdered sugar, drizzled with maple syrup. I had about a quarter of it before I even remembered to add the syrup. Asylum is a sort of gothic bar most of the time, judging from the red velvet and wrought iron decor. The wait staff were pretty distant and hard to get ahold of (our food came about 15 minutes after order, but it took us nearly 20 to get our order taken), but the food is cheap (all entrees were under $10, most of them closer to $6) and we were happy.

Last stop before we left was the much-lauded Sticky Fingers Bakery in Columbia Heights.
I inspected the case and decided that buying 12 cupcakes would be the easiest way to truly sample their wares. Pictured at left, I bought: 2 coconut cream cupcakes, 2 PB&J, 2 Choc Raspberry, 2 Strawberry Shortcake, 1 Fluffernutter, 1 Cookies n Cream, 1 Smores and 1 Almond chocolate. Since we were there and I'd been talking about it for like a month, we also ordered a cinnamon bun so I could get my cinnafix. I grabbed a lasagna for the road and Dork picked up a tofu and cold sesame noodles. Cupcakes run between 2 and 4 bucks a pop. The prepared foods are a little more expensive (sandwiches are in the $7-$9 range, which, for pre-made/pre-packed sandwiches, is a little steep) and they were unfortunately out of the infamous and beloved Teese.

Dork and I sat down in the quaint, cute, pastel pink shop to split our cinnabon. The shop is well lit, has wifi and apparently a huge following. I read on their site that Sticky Fingers plans to expand to NYC. Given their cozy aesthetic and the fact that they seem to be making a killing, I bet they'll do well.

My previous experience with cinnamon rolls was very limited. My first cinnamon roll since vegandom was the pre-packaged kind. I then found that Cosmo's Vegan Shoppe will ship them, but the bakery from which they procure the buns isn't my fav. The latest and greatest was a quick dip into Bethlehem PA's Vegan Treats on the way from Philly to NYC and those are the buns I love. Gooey, rich, messy, moist and nauseating, they are everything my little heart imagined a real cinnabon would be like. I'm sad to report that Sticky Fingers' buns were not up to this golden ideal for me.

We drove back to NC and upon arrival realized we were *famished*, so we heated our pasta up. The lasagna at Sticky Fingers is GOOD, man. A little more herb and spinach lends it a healthier, more complex flavor than the Black Cat version (which was still really good), and their sesame noodles were nutty and delicious, but not too heavy as is the danger with peanut sauces. For dessert, we split a Strawberry Shortcake cupcake, which was very tasty. I ended up running directly to the Cave after that for a show with Teh Vodak and The Can Kickers, so I slipped the cupcakes into the freezer before I left.

I came home after that and decided to sample half a coconut cupcake and half the chocolate almond. *sad news* The cupcakes do not hold up well to freezing. The cake itself almost immediately (over the course of about 4 hours in the freezer!) took on the day-old baking soda strong taste that I've found to be most prominent in wacky cake. Thoroughly bummed, I ate about 1/3 of the cake part, then ended up scraping the icing and licking it off my fork. The coconut and strawberry shortcakes were good, but the almond chocolate icing was divine. Even so, I still prefer the creamy perfection of Vegan treats and I don't think I'll buy a dozen cupcakes again. Just the one will do. But maybe I'll buy more than one piece of lasagna.