Brooklyn Taco Experiment

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Brooklyn Taco Experiment, a cook-off hosted by Nick Suarez and Theo Peck who together have created "The Food Experiments."  Cheese, chocolate, and beer are all endeavors they have conquered, and yesterday marked their foray into cocina Mexicana: TACOS!  All of the thirty competing chefs were giving the same tortillas to serve their fillings on, to even the playing field, so the competition was all about the fillings.  The above picture represents a mere seven of the thirty tacos I ate yesterday.  Needless to say, I left the cook-off venue, The Bell House, bursting at the seams, but extremely satisfied.

For my review of this event on Serious Eats, click here.

Serious Eats!

Since I moved to New York City, my appreciation for food has intensified.  I have discovered food as the ultimate hobby and form of entertainment.  As my interest grew, so did the number of food blogs that I bookmarked and checked regularly.  The site that quickly became my go-to source of food entertainment, news, commentary, and resource was Serious Eats.   One section of the site in particular, Serious Eats: New York, gained my loyal readership. 

Now I go to the Serious Eats office after my 9-5 job at the Peacock channel (Conan O'Brien, I'm so sorry) and help the team continue to churn out great content.  I just started at the first of the year and look forward to much writing (and eating!) in the near future.

I'll post links here to any articles I write that appear on Serious Eats.  For now, you can go here to take the quiz I made testing your knowledge on winter vegetables.  You have to create a login in order to take it...but it will take two seconds and I suggest you do it because I'm making a new quiz every week--posted every Monday on the site!

Mushroom Bhaji : Quick Easy Dinner, Part II

I am upholding my vow to make delicious dinner for myself even though time is hard to come by these days, considering my recent accelerated schedule. A couple days ago I blogged about my sardine adventure. While I would consider that quick meal a success, I decided to make a vegetarian dinner this time around since I was still having visions of the little delicate sardine spines I handled. Ehhck.

I got the idea for this recipe from a Serious Eats post. Mushroom Bhaji is an Indian dish that is mushrooms in a tomato-onion sauce. Go here for the recipe and the perfect description of this dish, which categorizes it as one of those "winter-appropriate, filling vegetarian dishes—the kind that are comforting enough to scare away the cold weather and yet, not so heavy they'll fill out your sweater."

I changed the recipe around a bit, adjusting it to what I had in my apartment, but I think that my final creation was very similar what it would have been if I followed the recipe exactly. I also put a dollop of plain yogurt on it, knowing that with the cayenne powder and chile pepper flakes I included I would need something to balance the spice. I sprinkled it with dill rather than chives because I had (and still have) an overwhelming amount of dill left over from the Spaghetti with Sardines, Capers, and Dill recipe.Below you can see my Mushroom Bhaji, just moments before I inhaled it.