Fakeout Coq au Vin

Tuesdays have become my cooking days. Living in Clifton, it's easy to give in to the temptations of the carry-out order. Indian, sushi, even buffalo wings - they're all just a phone call and a parallel parking spot away. I resisted last night by focusing instead on making Cooking Light's "Quick Coq au Vin." They must be using the French definition of quick, because it took me about an hour from start to finish. Still, that's faster than the real thing. Fakeout Coq au Vin includes these things:

• Chicken thighs
• Red wine, chicken stock, and tomato paste
• Carrots, cremini mushrooms, and thick-cut canadian bacon

The chicken thighs got some flour-salt-dried-thyme treatment in a ziploc back. They're browned on each side in a little olive oil, removed from the pot, and then the veggies and canadian bacon go in. They're sauteed in the little bit of chicken fat and olive oil left in the pan.

On a side note, I happened to have an excellent macro lens at my disposal for the night, so you're getting up close and personal with all of my dinner ingredients. Don't be shy.

After a saute, the red wine, stock, and tomato paste join the veggies in the pot. I cooked it all a little bit longer than CL suggested in the recipe, since it seems like a lot of liquid and I really wanted it to reduce to a thick sauce. And voila, it did. The chicken goes back in for another eight minutes or so, until it's cooked through so you don't die in the night with food poisoning.

Put it together with some grainy bread and you've made yourself a winner winner chicken dinner. Some of the canadian bacon got a little tough in the process, so next time I think I'll ditch the "Light" part and go all in on some good bacon.

There's plenty of room for variation too. Lots of comments on the CL site recommend adding some pearl onions. Several more brilliant people agree that real bacon is a good addition. Overall, a pretty basic recipe, but a really good one for Tuesday "not takeout, fakeout" night at home.

Dollar Sushi at Pad Thai

Dollar. Sushi. What's that? Sushi can't possibly be a dollar. And who would pay for dollar sushi? Doesn't that imply some kind of "Everything Must Go" sale on old ingredients?

I'm here to tell you that yes, Virginia, there is a dollar sushi night every Sunday and Tuesday. You may know the restaurant. It used to be called Delight Thai Cafe, then they closed for a while and re-opened as Mai Thai. And now, it seems that they've just gone with calling themselves "Pad Thai." It's a fitting name, since they had a reputation for really good Pad Thai. We stuck to sushi, so I don't know if it's still as good as it used to be.

The dollar deal is on nigiri sushi only, which are a large, single piece of fish (or eel or whatever) draped on top of a mound of rice. No fancy sauce, no wasabi mayonnaise, just the real deal. Full sushi rolls are still regularly priced, but supplementing our selection of three rolls with four pieces of nigiri for only a buck each was pretty nice.

The sushi roll call: Philly roll on the left, eel to the front and right, then a "salmon tempura" roll in the back. The roll contained asparagus, crab, maybe even avocado, and salmon of course. The outside was coated lightly with tempura batter and deep-fried, cooking the salmon just slightly and giving the whole thing a satisfying crunch. It was the least traditional roll, but probably our favorite.

The Philadelphia roll was fine, just about the same as anywhere else except that it was pretty light on fish and heavy on cream cheese. The eel roll was completely bland. Our nigiri tasted just like it should - not too fishy, pretty firm. The white fish was a little sweet and buttery. Kaitlin enjoyed the Tamago and Eel.

The best part? They seem to have done away with a once-full bar and now invite customers to BYOB. We brought a bottle of Riesling and the staff happily supplied us with a corkscrew, glasses, and an ice-filled wine cooler at no extra charge.

The verdict? Don't drive all the way to Montgomery just for dollar sushi night. And if you're serious about cheap sushi, the little place up the road called Kyoto is really hard to beat for a good deal. But if you're in the neighborhood and you're looking for something to shake up your usual sushi routine, give Pad Thai a try.

MoMA or Momo?

My business trips to New York are a mad dash to fit in as much stuff around the business as possible. When I started seeing all the press for the Tim Burton retrospective at the MoMA, I put it on the top of my "to do when not doing business" list for my next trip to the big apple.

Most of my free time fell on a Tuesday. The MoMA, as a general rule, is closed each and every Tuesday of the year. I had a little time on Wedensday, and then a little time turned into half an hour, and I was all the way down on Union Square and Tim Burton was scratched off the list.

Conveniently, I had planned ahead for such an event. I'd noted the location of Momofuku Milk Bar, a place I knew almost nothing about, except that "Momofuku" is some kind of shorthand for good food.

When at a milk bar, order milk. They sell soft serve in a variety of non-traditional flavors including "cereal milk" and the one I settled on, "salted caramel pistachio." For upwards of three dollars, I was handed a tiny dixie cup full of greenish, brownish ice cream and a wooden spoon. How New York.

But oh, how good. It was soft serve, but it was rich and so salty on the tongue. The pistachio and the caramel had a kind of peanut butter taste, except this was a peanut butter I would eat right out of the jar. I walked the long blocks back to my hotel, not bothered by honking taxis or by the vast puddles that a morning of rain left behind. Even in a city as alien and wonderful as New York, good ice cream brings me right back home.

At Lavomatic with CityBeat's Best of Cincinnati Card

I've been meaning to get to Lavomatic Cafe since, oh, I don't know, a year and a half ago when everyone else went. Thankfully, it's still rocking the Gateway quarter of OTR in late 2009. Alex and I made the trip down Central Parkway for a Friday night dinner.

I took the opportunity to put the CityBeat 'Best of Cincinnati' card to work. It's a program that offers members a 40% discount at a slew of local restaurants. There's a $25 fee to get your own card started, but once you've got one you'll add money to it like a gift card. The 40% discount comes out when you load the card with money. Take a look at all the rules here.

Full disclosure for you, me and the FTC: CityBeat gave me a card with $50 so that I could give it a try. They're offering the card now at a $25 discount (so, for free basically) if you use promo code boc4free when you sign up for one.

Like the great adorkandhispork once said, I don't like calling what I do reviewing a restaurant. There are plenty of people in Cincinnati who do that, and they do it very well. I'll just tell you about my experience and let you decide whether you want to take your dining dollars to Lavo or not.

The dining room is elongated like a train car and stacked with a bar on the first floor and more seating upstairs. The kitchen is partly visible from the doorway, like an invitation to hurry up and get something to eat. We started off with the tater tots: your standard tot, but with bacon, truffle, and a tomato-based puree. Delicious, sort of greasy, and pretty filling.

We moved on to more re-purposed diner favorites. Alex got the meatloaf cupcake and I ordered the grilled cheese. He cleaned his plate if that tells you anything about the quality of the meatloaf cupcake. My grilled cheese came alongside a bowl of thick tomato soup with a generous sprinkling of basil and garlic. Simple and very good.

Our server was fairly attentive, though the wait times for an appetizer plate to be cleared and a glass of wine to arrive were longer than we would have preferred. Full credit to our waiter, though, who had to make mini cardio workout trips up and down the staircase to deliver food and drinks from the first floor.

Take a look at the restaurant list if you're interested in the card. It's not a bad option for a holiday gift, especially if you get in on the $25 off promotion. If one of their partner restaurants is on your usual dining out hit list, then it would be a better value for you.

A couple of facts:

• There are no limits on what you can order
• Tip isn't included
• Can NOT be used on Valentine's Day, Mother's Day or New Year's Eve
  

No explanation necessary, Lavo rang up our dinner on the CityBeat card without a problem. My card with $50 would have cost me $30 (if we ignore the initial fee). Our dinner with beverages, an appetizer and dessert included came up just over $50. Essentially, we got a $50 meal for $30 (though we still tipped our waiter on that $50). In my book, that's a pretty nice deal.

As for Lavomatic, I couldn't be happier that I finally made it. Though you could easily spend more than $50 on dinner for two there, the options are flexible with many less expensive plates to share over a cocktail or glass of wine. Next time I'm in the Gateway Quarter shopping for a set of trendy kitchen towels, count me in for another meal at Lavomatic.

Tuesday Tarragon Cream Sauce

I asked myself what to make for dinner on the eve of Thanksgiving eve, and somewhere within my deep unconscious self a voice answered,

"Tarragon Cream Sauce."

I've never made a tarragon cream sauce. I'm not even sure I've had one in a restaurant. I Googled it. A recipe from Real Simple came up, promising to deliver a creamy tarragon sauce fit for a vegetable, chicken or fish dinner in three simple steps. And the first ingredient is a half bottle of wine. Sold.

Chopped onions, tarragon sprigs and said wine went into a pan, up to a boil, and back down to a simmer for 20 minutes. The smell of boiling wine is new to me - not many tarragon cream sauces get made in our kitchen. Something about the wine and herbs bubbling on the stove gave me that reassured feeling of "Yes! I'm cooking! Nothing has gone wrong!"

Step two calls for a cup of heavy cream and more simmering. I like the very hands-off pacing of the recipe. It gave me plenty of time to devote some attention to a block of brie cheese and more of the wine. As the sauce thickened a bit, I put a garden-variety piece of Atlantic salmon on the stove.

Once the sauce was done, I added the rest of the tarragon and some salt. Voila. I brought the sauce and the fish together to get acquainted. They got along fabulously.

On its own, the sauce is slightly bitter (all those onions, all that wine) but finishes creamy-sweet. Coupled with the salmon, it was a really good, really simple Tuesday night meal. And an excellent excuse to pick up a bottle of wine.

Carbohydrate High

I've decided to start preparing for the Boston Marathon. Not for any personal goals or to achieve some sense of self-fulfillment. I'm going to run a marathon out of necessity, because I've been eating enough carbohydrate-packed foods to power a whole team of distance runners. It started with waffles at Findlay Market. Those waffles. Smothered in berries and whipped cream.

Findlay Market played host to a tweetup that same day, and the friendly people of Daisy Mae sent each attendee home with a free vegetable of our choosing. Alex and I each asked for a sweet potato. What we got was a bulging grocery bag full of them.

I hauled them back home, promising that I'd transform them into something delicious to accompany the pasta dinner we'd planned for Wedensday. Days ticked by and I still wasn't sure what to do with them. First I settled on pie, then casserole. And then, remembering a visit to the Sugar Cupcakery, I broke out the muffin tin and whipped up a starchy, orange-tinted cake batter.

The recipe was snatched from Coconut & Lime which, despite a couple of typos, yielded some nice results. Plus, their photos looked insanely good.

So what's the secret of a great pasta dinner? Let someone else do all the hard work, (in this case, Bouchard's Anything's Pastable at FM) like making the noodles and sauce. We just heated everything up, threw in a vegetable and called it macaroni. Well, spaghetti with alfredo sauce, actually.

Bouchard's put together a tasty pasta dinner. A mix of whole grain and white noodles was a surprisingly nice combo. And my mother would be so proud to see me willfully eating peas. Amazingly, we still had room for dessert.

Full Disclosure: I used canned frosting. Yes, canned. I live in a teeny apartment and have no mixer and no willpower to make frosting by hand.

Does all this carb loading add up to too much of a good nutrient? I don't think so. Let me just go get my running shoes...

Confessions of a Fall-aholic

My name is Allison, and I’m a fall-aholic.

Hi, Allison.

It started with lattes. The day that Starbucks brought the pumpkin spice latte back, I was traveling. I landed at La Guardia, knew I had precious little time to waste getting to my next gate, so I bolted for the nearest Starbucks kiosk. I threw people out of my way. I pushed old ladies with walkers aside. I kicked puppies. I couldn’t be slowed down until I had a hot, sugary pumpkin latte in my hands.

I quickly moved on to other forms of pumpkin - pumpkin beer, pumpkin ravioli. Pumpkin loaf, pumpkin scones, pumpkin soup. I thought I could give it up any time I wanted. It’s just pumpkin, I told myself. It’s a vegetable. I’m not hurting anyone by gorging on squash.

Soon, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t getting the same rush from my bowl of three squash soup and a cold Dogfish Punkin Ale. So I did what any junkie would do and went right to the source – real, unadulterated pumpkins.

I found Alton Brown’s recipe for pumpkin bread, and it started to sound like a challenge. I can do this, I thought. Forget canned pumpkin, that’s for wimps and soccer moms. I took a knife and a grater to the flesh of a modest pie pumpkin from Kroger.

An hour later, with pumpkin seeds scattered over the table and the floor, my kitchen looked like the scene of a grizzly pumpkin massacre. And what did I have to show for it? A sack full of discarded pumpkin bits and three cups of the shredded good stuff.

A quick toast on a cup of seeds and I was ready to start assembling the dough. As a proud graduate of the Alton Brown School of Not Over-Mixing Your Dough, I was able to manage a loaf pan full of gooey, pumpkiny goodness. Into our finicky gas oven for an hour and fifteen minutes.

The smell of cinnamon wafted from the kitchen, a constant reminder each time I inhaled that there was something delicious in the oven that I couldn’t have yet. Even when the loaf was baked, and a paring knife inserted in the center came out clean, I still couldn’t have a slice of pumpkin bread. Alton insists that it must be cooled all the way – something important happens to the starches, I don’t know.

Wait I did, and when it was finally time to slice into the from-raw-pumpkins pumpkin loaf, it became clear to me what I would do next.

Eat it with Pumpkin Cream Cheese.

Behold the double-pumpkin overload.

If you too are a pumpkin junkie, you can take a look at the recipe here. There’s a nice video too in which, through the magic of television production, AB grates no actual pumpkins. But if you’re foolish like me and you have an afternoon to kill, it’s one hell of a pumpkin fix.