Hickory Meatballs for the Holidays

The folks over at Hickoryworks asked me to formulate a recipe for the holidays utilizing their Shagbark Hickory Syrup and their Hickory Smoked Sea Salt, and I was glad to oblige.

Shagbark Hickory Syrup has a distinctively different taste than Maple Syrup. It’s not as cloyingly sweet, has a nice smoky flavor, and compliments well with savory dishes.

For the holidays I wanted to come up with something seasonal and we brainstormed and the result were these Turkey Meatballs, which are in a Hickory/Apple Cider/Mustard BBQ sauce.

The Red and Green chiles with the apple in the turkey mixture give the dish a nice holiday feel, and the hickory/apple BBQ sauce over the kielbasa rounds completes the dish nicely.

If you don’t make these for the holidays, don’t worry. I also had the Superbowl in mind when I came up with these too.

The meatballs in this recipe are cooked on a sheet tray for easier party prep, but you could just as easily pan fry them or even smoke or grill them using a meatball grill basket (you can find these at Williams-Sonoma and at other high-end kitchen catalogs)

Shagbark Hickory and Apple Party Meatballs

For Meatballs:
1 lb Kielbasa, sliced into rounds
1/2 cup finely diced Onion
4 cloves Garlic, finely minced
1/2 cup finely diced Red Pepper (Bell, Cubanelle or Jalapeno)
1/4 cup finely diced Green Pepper (Bell, Cubanelle or Jalapeno)
2 lbs ground Turkey (or a combination of Turkey and Pork)
1/3 cup shredded Apple (peeled first)
1/4 tsp Hot Pepper Flakes
1 Tbs dried Oregano
1 Tbs dried Parsley
Ground Black Pepper, to taste
2 Eggs
1/2 tsp Hickoryworks Smoked Sea Salt

For Sauce:
1 Tbs Cornstarch
2 Tbs Cider Vinegar
1 Tbs Dijon Mustard
1/2 tsp Hickoryworks Smoked Sea Salt
1/2 cup Apple Cider, natural unpasteurized is preferable
1 cup Hickoryworks Shagbark Hickory Syrup
Hot Sauce to taste

Preheat oven to 400F. Line a rimmed half-sheet pan with parchment or foil. If using foil, spray with non-stick spray or olive oil.

Cook the Kielbasa slices in a skillet to brown them and render some fat. Set them aside on a paper towel lined plate, leaving a tablespoon or two of fat in the skillet. Lower the heat and saute the onion and garlic for about 5 minutes.

Add the red and green peppers (use the type you like and spiciness desired) and continue cooking for 2 more minutes. Scrape out the skillet and allow the vegetables to cool.

Combine ground meat, apple, and seasonings (except salt). When the vegetables are cool, mix them into the meat, adding the eggs and smoked salt at the same time.

Form into 1 inch balls. Place the balls on the prepared sheet pan, leaving space around each one. Spray the top with olive oil. Place into the hot oven and cook for 10-15 minutes. Do not overcook as the white meat turkey can easily dry out.

While the meatballs are cooking, prepare the sauce. Mix the cornstarch with the vinegar to remove any lumps, then combine with the rest of the sauce ingredients.

Add to the skillet and whisk while bringing to a boil over high heat. Once the mixture comes to a boil, reduce heat to low and taste for seasoning. It might need more Hickory salt or cider vinegar.

When the meatballs are done, add them and the kielbasa slices to the glaze and carefully stir to coat and keep warm. Reserve the liquid that the meatballs exude. Strain and use to thin the sauce if it gets too thick.

To serve, first spear a meatball with a toothpick, then a kielbasa slice for it to sit on. Place on a warmed serving tray. The Kielbasa slices keep the meatballs upright, and they’re delicious!

New Orleans Dining: Crabby Jack’s

Note: While reading Brett Anderson’s quest for the perfect Roast Beef Po’ Boy series in the New Orleans Times Picayune, I realized that I had some un-published photos from a March 2010 trip to New Orleans which might be of interest. As I am going to be in New Orleans during Christmas week this year, I figured this would be a good a time as any to bring this to the top.

Crabby Jack’s
428 Jefferson Hwy, Jefferson, LA 70121
(504) 833-2722

Crabby Jack’s is Jacques-Imo’s little sister in Jefferson, specializing in Po Boys and fried seafood platters. It’s a little lunch-only place situated right next to the Louisiana Seafood Exchange, so you can be assured that the oysters and shrimp and crawfish you are getting are as fresh as can be.

Owner Jack Leonardi manning the fort. Since Katrina, he’s been a bit short on help, and he’s quite obviously a few crawfish short of a boil.

This big pile of crawfish is left out for customers to pick on. Samples!

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

NJ Dining: Amici Family Restaurant

This was originally posted in June of 2011. I’ve added some new photos and raised it to the top given the restaurant’s recent review by Elisa Ung in the Bergen Record.

Amici Family Restaurant
127 S. Washington Ave. (Entrance and Parking on East Clinton Ave.)
Bergenfield, NJ 07621
(201) 374-1996

Those who are familiar with this blog understand that I have a love/hate relationship with Italian-American cuisine.

As I have said on previous posts, while this is an area of culinary specialization that Northern New Jersey is particularly known for, that doesn’t mean that we do it particularly well.

When people ask me “What Italian restaurant or what Pizza do you like to eat at in Bergen County” I usually say “None, I go to the Bronx and eat on Arthur Avenue.“

The reasons for this are numerous, but it comes down to the fact that the Italian-American restaurant and pizzeria as it is represented in this part of Jersey is usually pretty awful. SYSCO tomato sauce, cheap commercial mozzarella and tired owners that no longer care about the food they are making anymore. That about sums it up.

Forget about what you’ve seen on the Sopranos, Italian-American food in Northeast Bergen County is uniformly mediocre.

And thus explains why it is difficult for a restaurant that serves this kind of food to distinguish itself. You rarely see these neighborhood places written up in the Bergen Record or the New York Times because Pizza places and red sauce joints are a dime a dozen.

Sure, you might get the occasional gem like Di Palma Brothers (which is actually in Hudson County in North Bergen) or a solid pizzeria like  Lodi Pizza, Trattoria Sorrentina (again, North Bergen) or Bartolomeo in Englewood but these are rarities.

It’s nearly impossible to get me into a new Italian-American restaurant or a pizzeria, because I’m expecting right from the start that it’s going to suck.

So when I saw that the aging, failing Terrana in Bergenfield — which never produced more than just serviceable Italian-American food and was a restaurant we avoided eating at for the 10 years we’ve been residents of nearby Tenafly — was being taken over by new owners and being re-launched as Amici Family Restaurant, my interest was piqued.

I’m willing to try a new Italian place at least once, especially if it’s just five minutes from my house. If it was bad, I just wouldn’t go back, just as I have done with 90 percent of the ones I’ve been to in the immediate area.

Amici Family Restaurant looks like a typical red sauce joint that serves average pizza from the outside. Don’t make the mistake of passing it by. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

BLT Season

Mid-May is about when I start eating BLTs again. It begins when I start seeing decent imported tomatoes come in to the local supermarkets and produce stores, and reaches its peak in July and August when the farmers markets are in full swing and my own garden grown Jersey tomatoes start coming in. August is when my own tomato plants are in overdrive production mode and BLTs start to become major meals as opposed to just lunches.

Also See: Bacon, Lettuce and Tomatocast with Christine Nunn

The above sandwich was made with the amazing slab smoked bacon from the Swiss Pork Store in Fair Lawn, NJ, hand sliced, using vine-ripened Israeli tomatoes and romaine lettuce hearts.

Big Apple BBQ Block Party 2011: Behind the Scenes Pit Tour

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/24980764 w=550]

We go behind the scenes at the 2011 Big Apple BBQ Block Party and visit the pits at Memphis Championship BBQ, Blue Smoke, Martin’s, Ubon’s, Pappy’s Smokehouse, Dinosaur BBQ, Ed Mitchell and Salt Lick — all while the weather conspires against us. We promise there’s plenty of Hi-Def food porn in this 32 minute video.

For photographic coverage of previous Big Apple BBQs, I’ve compiled four years of it, over 900 photos worth, in this single Flickr album.

NJ Dining: El Caney (UPDATED)

El Caney
49 West Church Street, Bergenfield, NJ
(201)374-1107

FaceBook Fan Page: (El Caney)

Sometimes, the best food isn’t served in restaurants.

In this particular case, I want to smack myself in the head for only just finding out about a tiny little take-out only place only minutes away from my house that has been open for an entire year. I’m usually pretty on the ball about this kind of stuff, but somehow, El Caney, literally a shack in Bergenfield across the railroad tracks which was serving perhaps some of the best Cuban food I’ve ever eaten had escaped me.

Well, let me correct myself. It WAS a shack. As Roy Scheider said in the movie Jaws, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” In Spanish, that would be loosely translated as “Necesitamos una Canoa mas Grande”

El Caney is back, but it’s no longer a shack. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Las Vegas Dining: Craftsteak

Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak
MGM Grand Hotel and Casino
Las Vegas, NV

Web Site: MGM Grand Hotel and Casino (Craftsteak)

Vegas. I’m not sure what possessed me to go on vacation in a city that I generally can’t stand. Don’t get me wrong, I love going to the shows, I love the desert flora and fauna, but I hate going through casinos filled with smokers and the constant blaring sounds of the slot machines. It just isn’t my kind of scene.

And while the signature hotel restaurants are by definition excellent (and indeed very expensive) I don’t generally like to dine at them. After all, I live in the New York City metro area and I have access to some of the best restaurants on the entire planet, many of which are the original concepts of which the Vegas restaurants are actually based on.

I had planned to take advantage of the nice 70-80 degree weather that week by chilling out at our timeshare’s pool and spa, and keep our costs down by hitting inexpensive casual restaurants away from the activity of the Strip.

But then my buddy Matt Seeber got a hold of me on FaceBook.

Matt, who earned his toque in New York’s Fiamma Osteria (may it rest in peace) and the short-lived but excellent BID, left the East Coast a number of years ago and headed west to Vegas, where he re-united with his former boss Tom Colicchio, from Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern years before.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, we all know how Colicchio’s star soared from there. He’s been a very busy and successful guy, opening up 15 restaurants all over the country. And he’s on like this TV show and … stuff.

With Collichio’s blessing, Seeber  took the reigns as Executive Chef of Craftsteak, the anchor steakhouse at the MGM Grand Hotel.

“Dude, you gotta come on over and see what we’re doing over here, man. Seriously, you’ll have a good time.”

Ok, so as much as I hate Vegas, there was no way I was going to pass that invitation up.

I have to apologize in advance for the quality of the photographs. Craftsteak has very muted lighting, and as I was on vacation, I only brought a simple CASIO Exilim point-and-shoot  instead of my usual overkill SLR and prime lens rig, so I had to toss a lot of material on the cutting room floor, particularly the restaurant interiors.

There’s plenty of of good photos of the interiors on MGM’s Craftsteak website, so you should really go check those out.

Still I think that you’ll get a very good feeling about the cuisine and the experience at the restaurant from the photos below.

Bar/single dining area at Craftsteak

Ready for a serious, Vegas-style steakhouse experience? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

NJ Dining: Honey

Honey Mediterranean Gourmet & Market
1150 Teaneck Road, Teaneck NJ
(201) 530-5083

Restaurants sometimes have good reasons for calling themselves something they are not. In the case of Honey in Teaneck, it’s because that marketing is often more effective than full-monty disclosure. Which is very, very sad, because I think Honey is one of the most interesting ethnic restaurants to open in our area in a very long time.

Why the deception? Honey’s cuisine is Persian — which originates from the country that in the modern day is called Iran.

While the restaurant bills itself as Mediterranean, modern day Iran is nowhere near the Mediterranean Sea. Iran borders the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and cuisine-wise bears only a passing resemblance to most Mediterranean food.

Sure, Persia once controlled the territory which is now modern day Turkey, which does border the Mediterranean, but that was between 550 and 330 BCE , when the Achaemenid Empire controlled most of the civilized world.

The history of Persia is complex and one of the most fascinating in ancient history. Its cuisine is unique, delicious, and exotic. And in this part of Northern New Jersey we’ve had the unfortunate situation of previous Persian restaurants failing, such as Shiraz in Edgewater.

Up until Honey’s opening, we’ve only had access to Afghani food at the very excellent  Teaneck Kebab House,  Pamir in Morristown and Kabab Paradise in Lake Hiawatha. While sharing a similar cultural history as well as a similar language with Iran, Afghan food is very different in terms of their cuisine. Aside from Honey, Negeen in Summit is one of the few other legit Persian restaurants in the area.

[Editor’s Note: Shahrzad in Edgewater, which took over Shiraz’s space, also opened in June of 2010, after this post was originally written]

Like other Muslims residing in this country Iranian-Americans are often the unfortunate recipients of bad behavior and harassment from ignorant people who vandalize restaurants and businesses as a result of misdirected anger and hatred.

Because of this Persian cuisine in this part of the country frequently goes unappreciated. Los Angeles by comparison has a thriving Persian community, but in New Jersey not so much.

Teaneck just got its Persian on. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

NY/NJ Dining: Johnny’s Smokehouse

Johnny’s Smokehouse
50 East Central Avenue
Pearl River, NY 10965-2307

As with sports, art, literature and music, there are tragic figures in the culinary world.

There is one such man who is known among foodie folks in the Northern New Jersey area whose very name conjures up joyful memories.

A man who is a veritable Jedi Master of Barbecue, a rogue samurai chef who had to shut down his beloved River Edge, New Jersey restaurant for the sake of his personal health and well-being.

A man who returned with his talents to two other barbecue restaurants, only to have to move on yet again.

And for three years, he dropped off the face of the earth. We do not know where he went. All we know is that he is… BACK.

Who is this mysterious barbecue man? And where has he re-appeared? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

NJ Dining: BUCU Burger Bar & Bakery

BUCU Burger Bar & Bakery
35 Plaza, Route 4 West, Paramus, NJ 07652
(347)470-2828

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

I must admit, when I heard about another “alternative” burger restaurant opening up in the Bergen County and Essex/Morris area which we call Northern New Jersey (All three soon will will soon be renamed and merged into a giant mega-county,  incorporated by the state legislature as Burger County, given the current ground beef to population ratio) my first reaction was “Oh, not another one. Do we really need more burger places? Do we? Really?”

In the last year we’ve seen the openings of Smashburger (Clifton and Hackensack), Zinburger (Clifton), Cheeburger Cheeburger (East Rutherford), Elevation Burger (Montclair) and Bobby’s Burger Palace (Paramus) not to mention the first Northern NJ outpost of Sonic and additional Five Guys locations. It’s been a Burger Bonanza.

So how does this new restaurant’s concept differ? Burgers & Cupcakes. Cookoo? No. BUCU.

Bucu’s Storefront on Route 4 in Paramus. Click on the “Read The Rest of This Entry” link below for more.