Adventures in New York City!

Well! Last week, I was on vacation in Boston and NYC. What a great time!

Tuesday night, I went to Peking Duck House on Mott Street. They have long since been my favorite place to go for good peking duck. However, as you may be aware, peking duck should be served in three courses.

The first course is my favorite. They bring the duck to the table before slicing it. The slice off the skin (the less meat included, the better) which you then wrap in (moo shu) pancakes with scallions, cucumber, and a hoisin-based sweet sauce. Yum yum. The second course is the duck meat, stir-fried with other tasties usually including miscellaneous veggies and bean sprouts. The last course is duck-based soup with cleansing bok choy and tofu.

Anyway, what has caused Peking Duck House to completely fall out of favor is that while we were still eating the first course, the second and third courses arrived within minutes of each other! When we asked them to remove the soup from the table (it was too small to support it all anyway), they brought it back probably ten minutes later and it was lukewarm. PAH!

Grand Central Oyster Bar is my favorite place to head to for Blue Pointe oysters. Yum. These oysters are so good that you don't even need to top them with anything. However, I have to admit that I got a recipe for oyster stew that is based on Grand Central's recipe, and I like my own better!

Oyster Stew
Ingredients
- Oysters -- I get em shucked. The smallest amount I can get is a pint, so I usually just make it two days in a row.
- 1 cup milk
- 1 cup cream (but I use half n half or, when I'm feeling "healthy," I use another cup o' milk)
- pinch paprika
- pinch celery salt
- pinch pepper
- 1 tbsp unsalted butter
- 2 pots

1. Scald milk and cream in a pot.
2. When the milk is almost done heating, put 1 tbsp butter in one of the pots. When it is melted, add the oyster liquor and let cook for 30 seconds or so.
3. When the liquor is hot, add the oysters. I like to use the larger of the pots for the oysters so they have more room to breathe. When the edges start to curl on the oysters, they are done!
4. Turn heat off milk mixture when it's hot. Don't let it boil!
5. Add paprika, celery salt, and pepper.
6. Pour oysters and the liquor mixture into the hot milk mixture.
7. Mix and serve immediately!

Wednesday night, J and I met our good friends T & M for dinner at Les Halles! Good food, good company. What more could a girl ask for? Here was what I had:

- 1 bottle tasty Cotes de Rhône (four of us! I am not a drunkard!)

- Escargots (which Anthony Bourdain will tell you no one anywhere actually serves fresh snails instead of canned, but I think I read in Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook that he does...)

- Hâchi Parmentier de Canard: duck meat confit of saddle, wings, and neck shredded in duck jus, truffle oil, mushroom puree, mashed potatoes and fresh herbs. The waiter insisted that there was foie gras in this dish which made it irresistible to me, but I didn't taste any so I really think he was mistak

- Onglet a l'echalôte: hanger steak with shallot sauce. Very tender, though it was a little more medium than the medium-rare I ordered. Also, I thought the shallots in the shallot sauce was really too overpowering for the steak, but was fine on its own in a taste test.

- Creme brulée

- Coffee

So after gorging ourselves that night, you would think that J and I would learn. But no. Thursday afternoon, we headed out to Danny Meyer's famous Shake Shack for lunch.

The lines at Shake Shack are notoriously long, so long that you can check the Shake Shack webcam on their website to see how long the line is! At around 2pm on a Thursday, the line wasn't that long, but long enough that while I was standing in it, starving, that I didn't want to have to stand in it again just in case! So... that's when J and I both ordered a double shack burger (8 oz), fries (mine with cheesy goodness), and a nice thick chocolate shake. After eating all that, we had to sit on a bench in Madison Square Park for like 30 minutes to get our bearings again. Whew!

Well, I missed out on crabs while I was up in the great northeast, so you can be sure that I'll get some somewhere while they are still in season!