Staff Blog
SNACK TIME: Braving the curse of Empyrean, perfume your home with quince, Vitamin C intoxication, Dear Mom, thank you for saving me from Thanksgiving, the prestige tasting of the universe tonight at Per Se
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| The enigmatic quince |
| chocolateandzucchini.com |
Every Wednesday, Meal Ticket pokes around the food blog world to see what’s simmering.
- In The Insider, Michael Klein looks in to the liquor license application in the former Empyrean Coffee space at 1921 Walnut. Seems like Monkey Bar owners, the brothers Vasiliadis, are looking to expand their Rittenhouse presence by turning the “odd shaped mansion” into Kashmir, an “‘ethno-lounge kitchen’ reminiscent of a ‘Parisian boudoir in Tangier’ featuring comfort food from all parts of the world.” If Monkey Bar is doing well enough in this anxious economy to inspire them to open another venue, the bold brothers might be the men to tame the curse of that long-vacant space.
- Clotilde Dusoulier of the elegantly Francophilic Chocolate & Zucchini explains the mystery of the autumn quince, a fruit that “unlike the pear and apple, its comelier cousins, it opposes the blade with an almost wood-like resistance.” Clotilde suggests sharpening up your knives to peel and core this enigmatic fruit before poaching it gently with vanilla beans. Sensual living bonus: a bowl of quince ripening on the counter will perfume your home with an “irresistibly sweet, floral, candy-like scent”, an extravagance the puritanical apple would surely consider unseemly.
- For those who don’t know they’re finished until they are on the verge of a stomach rupture, the CHOW food team has concocted a simple recipe for a mandarin orange digestif. The 151 grain alcohol infused with mandarin peels should speed feast victims from food coma to buzzed burping in no time.
- Thanksgiving contrarian the Urban Vegan encourages readers to adopt a turkey this year, and shares photos and a thank-you note from her turkey adoptee, Apollo. Wonder if 10 cents a day means little Apollo will be going to a less fowl school this year.
- The always-newsy MenuPages blog gushes over tonight’s performance by two gastronomic giants at New York’s Per Se: Thomas Keller (The French Laundry, Per Se) and Grant Achatz (Alinea) are preparing a tasting that will have Big Apple foodies committing suicide, as attending means their lives have certainly peaked. At $1500 per person for the 20-course meal, the event “sold out fairly quickly.” A few seats are left for the second extravagant performance, at Alinea in Chicago on Dec. 2.
Thanks for the quince-ey advice. Other than my Bulgarian neighbors asking me for them to make into rakia (local potent brandy), I had no idea what to do with the dozens of quince (is there a plural form?) growing in our back yard. Not that home-made rakia is ever a bad thing. But now I actually have something utilitarian – aromatics! Much better than actually injesting something that grew amidst all this noxious Sofia air.