A Tiger In The Kitchen

Teochew Mooncakes: A Big Tease

This time last year, I was in Singapore, learning how to make mooncakes, learning about my family.

The lessons in the kitchen were both informative and intense. Along with their braised duck recipes, the women in my family imparted their tales, their advice. I won't go into detail -- you'll just have to buy the book when it comes out in February.

But I found myself thinking about my aunties and their life lessons as the Mid-Autumn Festival (which falls today) approached and mooncakes began appearing in Chinatown stores. The celebration, also known as the Mooncake festival, marks the day that the moon is supposedly the brightest during the year. In Singapore, we also call it the lantern festival because it's the night that children wielding lanterns in the shape of dragons, dogs, even Hello Kitty, take to parks and playgrounds to create a river of bobbing lights. 

In China, the celebration also commemorates the 14th Century rebellion against the reigning Mongols. Members of the resistance spread word about their planned uprising via notes tucked into cakes, which they smuggled to sympathizers.

While I learned to make traditional mooncakes in Singapore -- filled with lotus seed paste and salted egg yolks -- my aunties also taught me a version that's indigenous to my Chinese ethnic group, the Teochews. Filled with sweet mashed yam and wrapped in a decorative rippled fried dough, these "mooncakes" were simpler, less cloying -- and just lovely with a hot cup of Oolong. 

Red Hook Lobster Pound: Maine, Transported

It's never easy for me to admit that summer's over.

Once 70-degree temperatures take hold, nostalgia for those seemingly endless sweltering days and salty breezes at the beach sets in. This tropical Singapore girl starts yearning for spring, which is just too many months away.

This year, however, the husband -- looking out for his own mental well-being, no doubt -- has a solution for the seasonal bitchiness moodiness. "The new seating area at the Red Hook Lobster Pound appears to be open," he says one day. 

Instantly, the air brightens. As soon as we can plan it, we're on a bus to Red Hook, racing toward a lunch of lobster rolls, plump and buttery...

The Lambs Club: Nouveau Old New York

 

Quintessential old New York looks something like this: Just as you reach for the handle of the giant iron door that will lead you into a restaurant, a man in a crisp suit pre-empts you, smoothly gliding it open as he ushers you in.

The dining room is dim, cool and filled with the hushed murmur of well-dressed guests. The banquette seats are a crimson leather; the chairs are a modern mix of leather and metal. You slide into your seat, basking in the warm, flattering glow of the lamps built into the banquettes, taking a moment to smooth down the starched tablecloth before your waiter -- in a Rat-pack white jacket and slender tie, of course -- saunters over.

The creators of The Lambs Club have gone to great lengths to transport you to a different time. The decor is art-Deco, the feel is modern "Mad Men." In the kitchen, Geoffrey Zakarian (Le Cirque, Town) is at the helm.

For its reincarnation, this new restaurant had some good bones to work with. For starters, it is housed in The Chatwal New York, a new luxury hotel located in one of the iconic buildings of Manhattan's Theatre District. This building -- designed by Stanford White, architect of New York's famous Washington Square arch as well as summer homes for the Vanderbilts and Astors in his time -- first opened in 1905 as the base for the Lambs, the first professional theatrical club in the U.S. The Lambs's membership roster was impressive -- Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Cecil B. DeMille, Fred Astaire -- and the restaurant's decor, featuring framed glossies of actors, offers a nod to some of these members.

This being New York fashion week, we're a little surprised at being able to snag a table at the Lambs Club at the last minute. But it's been a soft opening, our spiffy waiter tells us. He hands us our menus and off we go ...

Eataly (Il Pesce): A Mixed Bag Of Fish

Eataly can be a hard place for the hungry.

For starters, chaos rules the moment you set foot in the door of this cavernous Whole Foods-meets-tony-food-court Italian emporium in New York City that opened at the end of summer. Believe me, you'll need all the strength you can muster to bulldoze your way past the bodies before you can get at any food.

And while you're pressed up, body against body, there are the displays of cheeses, desserts, milk and coffee you'll be breezing past. You'll want to stop, of course -- but the mosh pit all around owns you. All you can do is cast longing glances, hoping for some private time with that fetching taleggio later in the evening perhaps, as the crowd carries you helplessly along.

Our destination on this particularly mobbed Saturday evening is Il Pesce, the fish restaurant within this 50,000 square foot-place that partner Mario Batali has famously billed as a "temple," where "food is more sacred than commerce."

Amid the sections where you can buy pasta, bread, cookbooks or stand around tall tables in a "tasting piazza" and nibble on cured meats, there are a few eateries devoted to specific categories -- vegetables, pasta, fish, meat. Our dining companion for the evening, the insatiable Gael Greene, has already eaten her way through a few of those places. "I was curious to try the fish restaurant ..." she says.

So, Il Pesce it is ...

Kong Bak Pau: Braised Pork Belly Sandwiches

 

Picnics have never been my favorite thing. Bugs, heat, grass, dirt -- need I say more?

The picnics of my childhood in Singapore, however, were another thing entirely. The urge to organize one would only occasionally grip my family. But when it did, we'd find ourselves by the beach on a clear Sunday, inhaling the salty breeze as we unpacked plastic bags of food on wooden picnic tables. We'd have sandwiches and fried snacks; an uncle would fire up the beachside grill for the chicken wings we'd marinated.

So when my hungry Let's Lunch group decided on fall picnic food for our monthly virtual lunchdate, I immediately thought of my bygone Singaporean excursions.

The perfect food for this occasion? My mother's kong bak pau -- a sandwich made up of a Chinese mantou bun filled with braised pork belly ...

Asian Feastival: Southeast Asian Cooking Tips

If one does have to work over a holiday weekend, this is not a bad way to do it: Eating and, well, talking about eating.

On Labor Day, at the Asian Feastival in Queens, I had the privilege of spending a lovely hour on a panel with New York chef and restaurateur Andy Yang (of Rhong-Tiam Express, a tiny Thai takeout place that he opened after closing his one Michelin-star restaurant Rhong-Tiam in January) and Kian Lam Kho, a private chef and caterer who blogs about Chinese home cooking at Red Cook. The food festival, which included tasting booths and cooking demonstrations by experts such as the effervescent blogger Maangchi, was designed to showcase Asian food from all regions.

Outside our cozy conference room, the booths and cooking displays meandered through Taiwan, Korea, China, the Philippines. Inside, however, our panel had a specific angle: Deconstructing Southeast Asian Flavors.

While I had felt that I had already learned a lot in the year I spent traveling to my native Singapore to learn to cook for my upcoming memoir, A Tiger In The Kitchen, I ended up picking up a few handy tips from our lively discussion ...

Hotel Delmano: The Last Toast of Summer

 

Labor Day weekend in the City and it can feel as if the world has fled to the beach.

For the less privileged, this is prime playtime in New York, however -- packed restaurants are emptier, exclusive bars suddenly become accessible.

With Hurricane Earl nowhere in sight, the sky is a saturated cerulean; a light breeze cuts through the waning warmth. We are in Williamsburg, my writer friend Mr. B and I, for an afternoon of nursing our disappointments at not being at a beach ourselves. But mostly, to catch up on this Writing thing that we do.

"I want you to check out this bar," he says, "I think you'd really like it."

And so we find ourselves sliding into seats outside the Hotel Delmano, watching the too-hip rompers and ankle boots and tousled-just-so hairdos amble by.

The thing here is the cocktails. It's mid-afternoon -- but a holiday weekend, we reason -- so we decide to oblige ...

Portuguese Sweet Bread: True Crack Bread

 

There has been no small amount of grumbling in this household recently.

The complaints are rather monotonous -- they all go something like this: What happened to the bread baking?

It is true that not too very long ago, there had been great ambition on this front. The idea had been to make a bread every week along with dozens of bakers around the world in a quest to bake our way through The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

But then, of course, life intervenes. (In my case, that would be the months spent traveling for research and then writing The Book.)

Gradually, my smoke-filled kitchen (thank you, ciabatta) and bygone bagels were becoming faded adventures in our memory.

During a break in the hubbub, however, I decided this nonsense had gone on long enough. The bread-baking bible was dusted off and my trusty KitchenAid mixer was resuscitated.

On the docket was a bread I'd been curious about: Portuguese sweet bread, a type of loaf, lovely, soft and sweet, that's popular in Hawaii and New England. (It was introduced to those regions by Portuguese immigrants.)

Now, in the times that I'd tried it, it had always reminded me of the slightly sweet buns and loaves I grew up eating in Hong Kong and Singapore. It was time to see how this recipe would turn out in my own kitchen ...