NJ Dining: A Taste of Greece 2.0 (UPDATED)

A Taste of Greece
935 Kinderkamack Road, River Edge NJ
(201)967-0029

Back in April of 2005 one of the first restaurants that I chose to profile during my 2-year stint as NJ Quick Bite writer was A Taste of Greece, a tiny Greek takeout in River Edge. One of the things I liked about this restaurant was its attention to detail and authenticity in its dishes, choosing to buck the “homogenized” Greek restaurant trend found in most Northern NJ Greek eateries with its real Pork Gyro and use of real imported Greek ingredients.

The original owners moved on two years later. One of them, Vasili Mastrokostas, went on to open Vasili’s Taverna in Teaneck. For a brief period A Taste of Greece was ran by the owner’s children and retained most of its original staff, and was recently sold to a new owner, Themis, a young, friendly, service-oriented and health-obsessed marathon runner. Themis took a rather unattractive, small takeout and put some money into the place, adding nice ceramic tile and other positive aesthetic changes, such as new wooden tables and chairs.

Themis has kept much of the restaurant’s original flavor (including its signature pork gyro) and has added more fresh and healthy Mediterranean dishes such as more grilled seafood plates. I actually think the place is a better restaurant now and is more compatible with my current lifestyle, and along with my other favorite Mediterranean options in the local area, such as Joeyness and Bennies, has now become one of my favorite places to eat well and eat healthier.

A Taste Of Greece on Kinderkamack Road in River Edge, Photo April of 2005.

A Taste of Greece’s new owner, Themis. Themis is extremely accommodating to special requests (such as low-carbing the entrees) and is himself a health and fitness nut.

You too will want A Taste of Greece. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

NYC Dining: Eating Healthy at Le Pain Quotidien

Le Pain Quotidien
124 Seventh Avenue
between 17th & 18th streets

Other Locations: (Various)

Web Site: http://www.lepainquotidien.com/

Two weeks ago I was in the city during the evening for the PEPCOM Holiday Spectacular press event, which was held at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, on 17th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.  I was hungry, and I knew that the show was going to be busy and serving lots of fried and carby appetizer-type crap I probably shouldn’t be eating. I also knew that I would be racing around like a lunatic taking photos and talking to PR people for two hours, so I should probably eat something before going in there.

Anyone who is familiar with the Chelsea neighborhood near the Metropolitan Pavilion will probably tell you its slim pickins in terms of good food choices. So I walked down to 7th avenue, looked around, and noticed this particular branch of Le Pain Quotidien. I’m not usually one to visit bakery type cafe restaurants these days — since I’m limiting my bread and carb intake, and there’s usually too much temptation to eat something I shouldn’t. But I was literally starving and it was better I ate there than eat what was likely awaiting me at the Pavilion, along with an open bar.

I had never been to a Le Pain Quotidien before, but I was hungry and intrigued, so I went in and had a look.

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Diet Dunkin’

So here’s the scenario. Sunday morning, 8AM. The power goes out, and we’re hungry.

What do you do?

Do you…

A) Open up the fridge, pull out your Egg Beaters, veggies, and let out out all the cold, and make yourself breakfast (assuming you have a gas range that you can light with a match, which we do)

B) Say to your wife “@!$% this stupid diet. I want a @!$%ing double fried egg with sausage patty, cheese and bagel sandwich with extra ketchup and hot sauce. Lets go to the deli. NOW.”

C) Do “B”, fail miserably, but convince her you want to try Dunkin Donuts’ new low-cal breakfast sandwich instead?

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

The Evolution of Re-Engineering Chinese “Takeout”

Since I embarked on my “course correction” in October of 2007 and becoming 67 pounds lighter, and with Rachel herself carrying 50lbs less — we’ve been doing a lot of Asian-inspired stir-fry cooking at home as our “go to” typical dinner when we are very hungry but want to eat something healthy. Where we used to order from our favorite Chinese American local delivery places, we now cook our own healthier, albeit different versions, with higher amounts of vegetable and protein content and much less fat. To be perfectly honest, I actually prefer eating this way now, even though I really miss my egg rolls, fried rice, lo mein, and egg foo young soaked in gravy.

The photos I am going to show you should give you an idea of how we’ve been approaching our typical, non food porn meals. You will notice a common theme is that we incorporate a lot of green vegetables as well as tofu in our cooking, and many of our sauces are stock based. We also now use a large, nonstick wok and “paint” it with a small amount sesame oil using a silicone basting brush instead of free-pouring oil, which also cuts down on the fat content quite a bit. We also use a lot of alternative whole grains to just plain brown rice as the beds for our stir fries, such as Quinoa, Kamut, or Barley.

Here is one of the earliest attempts to actually “re-create” a takeout dish, Beef with Oyster Sauce and Chinese Broccoli. Note that we are now using portioned controlled amounts of brown rice instead of white rice.

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Whoa! Gambas a la SIGMA 50mm.

Since getting the new Canon XSi, I’ve taken quite a few nice shots. However, I knew that I couldn’t really take advantage of the camera until I got a professional quality primary, fixed focal length lens. The 18-55 telephoto that came with my camera kit was serviceable, but as those of us who do a lot of food photography know, the flash is not your friend. Really nice food photos are taken in ambient or natural light, and when you are in a restaurant environment, you REALLY don’t want to use a flash. And we also know that ambient light in environments where food is served can be challenging for food photography.

The downside of a telephoto lens is that the glass isn’t as big — the 18-55 kit lens for the XSi is 58mm wide, for example, so you don’t get as much light captured as say a 77mm wide lens. Having telephoto also reduces how wide you can open your aperture — the almighty F stop — which is key to natural light photography. A fixed focal length primary lens also allows you to shoot at a lower ISO rating in less light than a telephoto lens. So to summarize, Bigger glass, wider F stop, better food photos.

Having done some research on primary lenses, I finally settled on the newly released 50mm SIGMA F1.4 EX DG HSM. This comes in a Canon or a Nikon mount, and it streets for about $480.00. DPreview.com has a short write up of it here. Hey, I didn’t say the thing was cheap. Compared to the Canon L Series 50mm F 1.2 though at around $1400.00 which I originally wanted but Rachel would kick my ass if I went out and bought, I thought it was a bargain given this is state of the art lens technology. Canon also makes a 50mm 1.4 which sells for around $350.00, but it’s an older design, and I had a hard time getting one from online resellers without it being a special order item.

Here’s a photo of some grilled jumbo shrimp we made tonight, shot at f/2.5 ISO 500, using just the light in my kitchen. I’m barely scratching the surface of what this lens can do. Like driving a Ferrari, its a high performance product with quirks that the driver needs to adapt to. I’m finding that I have to bracket my exposures in aperture priority mode to finally get the image I want. With practice I should be able to tweak my depth of field just the way I want it. Hey, I’m a total gimp at real photography. Cut me some slack.

Ready for some primary lenses, octopus, and jumbo shrimp? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

It’s Planking Season!

You know how some things are so fad-like that you never want to touch them until years later when people aren’t really interested in them anymore? That’s kind of what I feel about cooking fish on planks. Planking is so… well… 1997 Emeril.

Still, what is old is new again, and just because I deem it so, it’s cool. It’s also a way to add a lot of flavor to a dish without adding a lot of extra calories in the process.

This weekend we visited our friends the Liebermans on Long Island. Mark Lieberman is my oldest friend, who I’ve known for 30 years. He was my best man at my wedding way back when, so when he tells me we have to come over and eat his planked fish, well, then I guess we better.

If you don’t plank, you’re gonna walk the… well you know.

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more planking action.

Who says Latinos only eat carbs?

My Brooklyn homegirl Daisy Martinez prepares some nice Latino salads on the CW11. Click on the photo to view the video.

Nice Weather = WEBER (XIII): Father’s Day 2008

This year, Father’s Day was a little bit different. We usually do the steaks and hamburgers and hot dogs and chicken on the grill thing, with baked potatoes, beers and the usual stuff at my in-laws (my own parents now live in Florida, free from the ravages of brutal New York winters). However, Rachel and her mom decided that we would have Father’s Day at our home this year, so we cooked for the occasion — in our now more health-conscious style.

For appetizers, I bought some Quahog clams at the Asian market, cooked them a bit on a grill until they opened and yielded their juices, and then chopped them up with some garlic, scallion, chile pepper, cherry tomatoes, and mixed them up (with the clam juices) with cubed whole grain bread in order to make a stuffing, which I sauteed in a pan. I then placed several cooked shrimp in each metal tray and scooped the stuffing on top, to make my own version of Baked Stuffed Clams.

After baking in the Weber for a few minutes to get a nice brown crust on top.

Ready for some more Father’s Day vittles? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

LARB!

Ah yes, the pleasures of the Thai Yum. When it turns summer and disgustingly hot, and you feel like your energy has been sapped from the oppressive weather, spicy and tangy Asian salads can be a refreshing and satisfying boost — and for the most part, they’re pretty healthy too.

Larb is one of my favorite Thai dishes. Chances are, if I am going to a Thai restaurant for the first time and they have Larb on the menu, its what I am going to be ordering — it’s one of those “benchmark” dishes because its so simple to make. Anyone can make a good Larb at home, because it doesn’t require difficult to obtain ingredients (fish sauce is easy to get these days) or technical skills to prepare. Larb was a huge subject of interest back when I was still involved on eGullet — it was one of those huge monster threads that kept on going, and going. The general rule of thumb is that If it’s a protein, you can larb it. I have to give fellow blogger tommyeats the credit for starting it, it was inspired genius.

Larb, Laab, Larp… doesn’t matter what you call it, let’s eat it! Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Re-engineering the Classics: Charlie Deal’s Kung Pao Chicken

I’ve been wanting to do a post series on re-doing classic dishes in a healthier way for some time now. To start it off, I thought nothing would be better than giving props to someone who I thought that nicely re-engineered one of my favorite Sichuan Chinese dishes, Kung Pao Chicken.

Charlie Deal’s Jujube Restauant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is known for its inventive Asian Fusion cuisine. The dish which struck me the most there was his Kung Pao, which is radically different and much more healthier than the one that is made in most Chinese restaurants, which typically has a great deal of oil and not really that much vegetable content in it, if at all. Most versions as served in the United States at Chinese-American restaurants just consist of Chicken, Peanuts, Hot Peppers, and maybe some chopped up celery as an accent flavor. In my opinion, the definitive version of the dish is published in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land Of Plenty, which is one of the best and most authentic Sichuan cookbooks there is.

Here’s one of my favorite traditional versions, from Chengdu 1 restaurant in Cedar Grove, NJ:

As you can see, it’s in a brown sauce, thickened with cornstarch, with basically no vegetable content in it other than water chestnuts and maybe some onion. It’s tasty, but not optimized for my current diet. It’s also heavily dependent on sopping the sauce up with rice, which leads to more carbyness ingestion.

Here’s another variation that I had at a Korean-Chinese place that I really enjoyed. Again tasty, but healthy, no.

Here’s another really good version of the classic at Mary Chung’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There’s no veggies in this at all. I can’t believe I used to eat like this all the time.

Here’s Charlie Deal’s version at Jujube Restaurant. The difference is dramatic — the vegetable to protein ratio is much higher, and he is using a lighter sauce, which is essentially just soy, Chinese Black Rice Vinegar (which gives the dish its amazing tang and brightness) and seasoned with Sichuan Peppercorns, a small amount of sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and dried Sichuan hot peppers. Another thing I like about this dish is that during dinnertime he does it in a completely vegetarian version using Soy chicken, which cuts down on the fat tremendously.

I loved this dish so much that I ate it on two of the three visits that I made to the restaurant so far. I also was determined to try to replicate it at home and make it part of our usual Asian stir fry night repertoire.

To make my version of this dish, you will need the following

8 oz “Soy Chicken” or Firm Tofu (that has had the water pressed out of it)
12 ounces Chicken Breast, cut up into small pieces (or omit to have completely vegetarian)
1 Bunch Scallions, chopped, whites and greens separated
1 large thumb Ginger, minced
6 cloves Garlic, minced
1 small Napa Cabbage
1lb of Baby or Shanghai Bokchoys or one big regular Bokchoy, chopped, hard and leafy parts separated
8oz of Mungbean Sprouts
8oz of Snow Pea Pods
1 oz peanuts
1 Tbsp Chinese Five Spice Powder
1 Tbsp Sichuan Peppercorns
1 Tbsp Cornstarch
10-15 Dried Sichuan Red Chiles or any other small dried red chile
1 Tbsp Sesame Oil
3 Tbsp Soy Sauce
2 Tbsp Chinese Black Rice Vinegar (Chinkiang grade preferable)
White Pepper to taste

Want to learn how to make this great dish? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more..