Queens Eats #1

I'm always looking for good places to eat in Queens with my parents, here's an option to try:

Regional Chinese Fare Hits Flushing Like a Ton of Bricks

The C&Z cake.

So instead of making dinner for friends on Saturday, I was invited to a friend's B-B-Q that was not to be missed. I had been rifling through my recipe books and found the perfect thing to bring in the form of a C&Z cake - chocolate and zucchini cake that is! My friend Christina had given me Chocolate and Zucchini, Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen, as a gift when I visited her in San Francisco last summer. The author of Chocolate and Zucchini is Clotilde Dusoulier, a Parisian girl-woman, who discovered her love of food and cooking when she lived in San Francisco for two years after college, and who currently resides in Montmartre. She started her blog of the same name in 2003 to create a forum in which she could record her explorations in food and cooking and it found a bit of a readership to say the least.

The recipe I used from the book is a little different than the one I found on her blog (see below) in that it called for 2 cups all purpose flour and did not give the option of using 1 1/2 cup all purpose and 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour and also mentioned confectioner's sugar or melted bittersweet chocolate as optional toppings whereas the blog recipe includes a hazelnut topping which I have not included here.

Chocolate & Zucchini Cake

- 1 1/2 C (180 g) all-purpose flour
- 1/2 C (60 g) whole wheat flour (of course, you can just use 2 C / 240 g all-purpose flour, I was just trying to be good)
- 1/2 C (40 g) unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 C (110 g) butter, softened
- 1 C (160 g) light brown sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp instant coffee granules (the Nescafé type, the stronger the better)
- 3 eggs, at room temperature
- 2 C zucchini, unpeeled, grated (about 280 g, two medium)
- 1 C (170 g) chocolate chips

(Serves 10.)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (360°F). Grease a 3 quart (3 L) springform cake pan, and flour it or sprinkle with cocoa powder : this is to help the cake unmold easily, especially if you're not using a magic non-stick pan.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

In your food processor, combine the sugar and butter, and mix until fluffy. Add in the vanilla extract and espresso powder, then the eggs, one at a time, mixing thoroughly between each addition.

Spoon in the flour mixture, reserving the last half-cup of it. Mix thoroughly, the batter will be thick.

Add the grated zucchini and the chocolate chips to the reserved flour mixture, and toss to coat. Fold in the batter, and blend thoroughly, it's fun. Pour into the prepared cake pan, and flatten the surface with a spatula.

Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean. Turn out on a rack to cool for half an hour, then unmold. Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar, glaze with melted chocolate, or decorate with a few slices of raw zucchini (you don't have to eat them, though).

The moment my cake was ready I headed over to Williamsburg and I arrived at the B-B-Q with the cake still steaming hot. It was devoured in a matter of minutes...I got a chance to try a piece myself...delicious!

Urban Organics: First Dinner.

I started Urban Organics a little over a month ago and haven't really been doing anything with the items other than making salads and steaming. This week I wanna be more ambitious and make a lovely dinner for friends. Here's the list of items I got yesterday:

ARTICHOKES
GREEN LEAF LETTUCE
ZUCCHINI
SPINACH
RUSSET POTATOES
DANDELION GREENS
VALENICA ORANGES
BANANAS
TANGELOS
GRAPEFRUIT

I have started a small collection of cookbooks and of course there's Epicurious and the internet to search. We'll see what I come up with!

Collaborations: Rei Kawakubo for H&M

How excited and surprised I was to find out last week that Rei Kawakubo is working with H&M -Hennes and Mauritz- to create a Commes Des Garcons collection that will debut in stores in November! The line will first premiere in Tokyo, where H&M will be opening its first stores this fall. Rei Kawakubo will be designing not only womenswear - as her guest designing predecessors: Karl Lagerfeld, Victor and Rolf, Stella McCartney, Roberto Cavalli have done- but also menswear and children's wear, as well as accessories and an unisex fragrance. I can't wait to see snatch up some avant garde pieces for my goddaughter and load up on stuff for myself..to finally be able to afford Commes, how lovely.

INSPIRATION: Spring 04 Commes Des Garcons

I have a project for circle skirts that I will start work on shortly and it reminded me of Rei Kawakubo's collection for Commes Des Garcons for Spring 2004. Her idea for the collection was "designing from shapeless, abstract, intangible forms, not taking into account the body." How fun is that?!
More images from the collection here.

Gristedes burned down.

A normal and refreshingly spring-like Tuesday and I'm coming home from attending a bike class at Time's Up (see earlier post). As I head out of the train station at Clark Street, all I can see is caution tape enveloping the whole of Henry Street from Clark Street down to Pineapple Street and Gristedes is completely dark across the way. My night vision isn't so good (without the aid of glasses/contacts) but I'm standing on the sidewalk and I can tell that all the windows are cracked. The sound of broken glass echoes in all directions and there are a bunch of men clearing up the glass and debris. The only vehicle parked on the other side is a giant truck with its backside gaping open and an equally huge dumpster. I am not alone in being aghast and stupefied by the scene in front of me. I hear a girl say, "I was just here three hours ago, what the fuck happened?!" to her friend as they head into the St. George's Hotel, the dorm facility located right next to the train station. I am wondering the exact same thing but there is no one around to tell me the answer so I head towards the beacon of light that is Peas and Pickles to find out from the kindly Korean owners. They tell me it was some electric malfunction -from further investigation online, it seems that the electric malfunction occurred in the deli area- that occurred around 6pm and which caused a fire that spread through out the store in a matter of 20 minutes! The fire trucks had come and the firemen were responsible for breaking all the windows in order to release the smoke. Thankfully there were no injuries! I headed home but not without chatting with someone else on the street who remarked, "Anything can happen in a day." I totally agree.

See pictures and news on brooklynheightsblog and mcbrooklyn.

Time's Up Bike Repair Workshop #1

What a lovely spring day it was yesterday. After work I headed down to the West Village to attend Time's Up's Bike Repair Workshop #1 at their new but temporary location in the West Village called the Hub, at 73 Morton Street, between Greenwich Street and Hudson Street. Time's Up is an environmental organization that promotes biking as a sustainable means of transportation and they provide free classes for people to learn how to fix their bikes. This first Tuesday of April was Basics for Beginners. There were about 10 of us gathered around in chairs and stools in the back of a space reminiscent of a mechanic's garage filled with bicycles of all shapes, sizes and conditions. Our instructor Mark, wearing a black Guinness beer t-shirt, boxers hanging slightly out of the back of his grease-soiled jeans, drinking Canada Dry seltzer every so often -he reminded me slightly of Demetri Martin- used his own bike, propped on a stand, to teach us the basics: the anatomy of a bike, the difference between an aluminum and steel frame, how to take off wheels that have a quick release mechanism, the difference between a freewheel and a fixed wheel, how to fix a flat tire, the rule for pumping your tires -MAKE SURE TO PUMP YOUR TIRES ONCE A WEEK- and how to chain lube the chain which should also be done once a week. He also advised that we should have the following items always on hand:
-patch kit
-tire iron
-mini-pump
-wrench
-needle-nose pliers
-multi-functional tool

I am considering bringing my mutant bike to the open workshop on Thursdays but where to store the monstrosity?

The Time's Up Website.

Cai-Guo Qiang's Collaboration with Issey Miyake

I went to the Guggenheim with my parents this past Saturday. It was the first time I've gone to an art museum with my dad - I have previously gone to see the David Smith centennial in the spring of 2006 with my mom - and it was surprising because even though I knew I would enjoy going with them simply for the pleasure of spending time with them, I also benefited from my dad's knowledge of Chinese allegory in looking at Cai-Guo Qiang's work.

Cai-Guo Qiang is a Chinese artist of Fujianese descent in his 50s who has exhibited widely and grown to international prominence over the years with his continuous work in gunpowder in the form of drawings as well as site-specific explosion-happenings. Not knowing anything about his work, for Qiang's mid-career retrospective entitled I Want To Believe, I was only prepared to see the procession of life-sized wolves heading with disastrous conclusion toward a transparent glass wall, a representation of the Berlin Wall, that I had seen in Time Out and New York magazine, as well as what all the posters in the subway showed which were a troupe of white sedans festooned with multichannel light tubes dangling from the central ceiling of the museum. I was not prepared for his beautiful drawings, some quite small in scale, some monumental in size, that were made by placing gunpowder down on the paper and then exploding it. I was also extremely captivated by his series called Projects for Extraterrestrials, specifically Project 10, where he attempted to conceptually extend the length of the Great Wall of China by 10,000 meters by using gunpowder that he laid down and then exploded - what a magnificent spectacle that also has much deeper implications.

Going back to the title of this post, what I loved seeing the most at the exhibit was a continuous piece of white, intricately pleated fabric that was displayed as a hanging spiral which had the brownish, brackish remnants, charred in some places, of exploded gunpowder. This fabric was the result of a collaboration between Cai-Guo Qiang and Issey Miyake for Miyake's Pleats Please series, which he had begun in 1996, inviting different artists to use his fabric as the medium for their imagery. Cai-Guo Qiang chose to use the fabric in an action performance piece called Dragon-Explosion in which he laid down the fabric on the gallery floor in the shape of a dragon, the Chinese symbol of life, sprinkled gunpowder across it and ignited the gunpowder.