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POM Still-Almost-But-Not-Quite-Wonderful
Well, evidently I was wrong when I said I’d never get free stuff from PR people again.
Photo credit: Dave’s CupboardYet again, like a bazillion other food bloggers, I also got POM’s two new flavors — POM Nectarine and POM Kiwi — in the mail. And in this second go-round of product placement, I think I’ve discovered something rather important:
I don’t actually like pomegranate juice.
I like fresh pomegranates. And I like pomegranate juice when it’s mixed with something else, like POM tea. (Oh man, remember when the POM tea used to come in that completely impractical glass? I had like, 20 of those glasses.) But just the juice… no. It’s too astringent, too mouth-puckery drying for me.
With that in mind, I have to admit, I genuinely enjoyed the POM Nectarine flavor. It tasted like pomegranate, but the sweetness of the nectarine juice made it softer and… juicier. After drinking it, I actually felt less thirsty, as opposed to the blech-now-I-have-no-saliva feeling of straight pomegranate juice.
Sadly, POM Kiwi was a bust. The kiwi flavor, what little there was of it, tasted unripe and sour — not a good match for the already sour pomegranate.
If you’re keeping score thus far:
regular POM juice – horrible
POM Kiwi – not good
POM Nectarine – actually kind of goodSo… POM .333 Wonderful: Hey, If This Was Baseball, That’s Like Almost As Good As Lou Gehrig
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Greenmarket Grub: San Marzano Tomatoes
What a rubbish summer 2009 was for tomatoes. I can’t remember eating even one really good tomato this year, which is just so depressing. Still, these San Marzano plum tomatoes were a flickering bright spot in an otherwise bad year. Unlike a lot of tomatoes, San Marzanos are really meant for cooking—and if you’ve ever popped open a can of these tomatoes, you know why. Sweet and a little bitter, they’re often compared to a good bittersweet chocolate, which seems fairly apt. They’re nearly all meat inside, with only two narrow seed chambers (compared to four or more in other tomato varieties) making them exceptional for cooking. And with summer being so definitively over (if you can say we even had a summer this year), I knew exactly what to make of these tomatoes: soup.
Tomatensoep (Dutch-style tomato soup)
Chop two leeks, two onions, and one peeled carrot and saute in butter (or oil) over medium heat, making sure not to brown the vegetables. Add two pounds chopped, peeled, and seeded tomatoes and a peeled, diced potato. Add enough liquid to cover everything. (I used a combination of water, a bouillon cube and a Parmesan rind.) Add a couple bay leaves and a handful of chopped parsley. Let simmer until all the vegetables are tender, fish out the bay leaves (and cheese rind, if you used that) then blend into a puree. Add salt and/or pepper to taste, as well as some milk or cream, if that suits you.
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Ting!
Several years back, I discussed my love of Ting, a sugar-sweetened Jamaican grapefruit soda. It’s been getting harder to find lately, at least here in Washington Heights.
A couple weeks ago, I stopped in to the Kmart on 34th Street (which is really quite nice, as far as Kmarts go) and while downstairs, looking to grab a bottled water to stop my child from dying of thirst (as she assured me would happen), there it was:
And not just Ting, either… something else:
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Greenmarket Grub: Concord Grapes
This isn’t a word I use often, but I must ask: aren’t they just gorgeous?
If you’ve only ever tasted supermarket grapes (as I had until last year), you have no idea what you’re missing. It’s an intensely… grapey flavor. After one grape, you will suddenly understand what artificial grape flavor is striving towards and yet never really getting it right. Those grapes are from Wager’s Cider Mill from out near the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.
I have to admit, I love the grape people. They sell from a small table on the outer edge of my neighborhood Greenmarket, and spur you to try the grapes (knowing, as I just said, you’ll be amazed at how they taste). I’ve had Concord as well as Seneca and Yates varieties of grapes from them so far, all slightly different but equally delicious.
Still, my usual Greenmarket problem arises: my urge to buy grapes can often outstrip my ability to eat said grapes in a timely manner. So, what to do with all these lovely grapes?
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My secret (breakfast) food shame:
My last secret food shame post is over two years old (and is the most commented post on this blog), so I think it’s time to confess another:
Not even Golden Grahams but knockoff Malt-O-Meal version Golden Grahams. “Don’t eat the fake Golden Grahams,” my husband will warn my kid. “They’re Mama’s. And you don’t want to mess with her cereal.”
What’s your secret cereal shame?
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Cheese is the new wine: Wisconsin Buttermilk Blue Cheese
Okay, look. I’m not a blue cheese sissy.
Yes, for many years, having only tried bottled blue cheese dressing, I thought blue cheese was putrid — at least until I tried a frisee salad with pears and blue cheese at a Legal Sea Foods in my early twenties. Fortunately for me, those were the wild west days of the dot.com boom (I was, at the time, getting paid $35 an hour to fix all the HTML accents aigu on a website for Nestlé) or else I never would have been okay with ordering a $14 salad and therefore never found out real blue cheese is actually quite good.
But I’m getting sidetracked.
Buttermilk Blue from Wisconsin is, for lack of a better description, the blue cheesiest blue cheese I have ever eaten, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The white (I guess you could call it) of the cheese has a creamy buttermilky tang, but the blue is like… have you ever eaten too much wasabi and it makes your sinuses hurt? That’s what the blue of this blue cheese is like — like a big blue cheese punching you in the face. I was into it for a couple good bites and then I was lying on the kitchen floor whimpering, “No más.”
I tried it a number of different way, but I could not find a way to make this cheese not overwhelm me, and now, sadly, it is languishing at the back of the fridge waiting to get tossed out.
Ingredients: Whole Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes, Penicillium Roqueforti.
Country of origin: USA (Wisconsin).
Aged: Two months or more.
Price: $11.96/lb. at Fairway.
Final verdict: You better REALLY frigging love blue cheese.
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101 Simple Salads: #15
Two years ago, Mark Bittman came up with 101 easy-to-make summer meals, and being an aficionado of all things in list form, I decided to make my way through the lot. I got through about two dozen, almost all of which were great (and, I discovered, I really quite like anchovies).
Well, now there’s a new list — 101 Simple Salads for the Season — and I’m giving it a go.
Here’s our first entry: 15. Cut cherry or grape tomatoes in half; toss with soy sauce, a bit of dark sesame oil and basil or cilantro. I love this — the tomato juice-soy thing is incredible.
I honestly think I may never eat tomatoes any other way ever again. It doesn’t seem like it would be that great, but the salty/savory/pungent combination of the soy sauce, sesame oil, and cilantro is a perfect match for tomatoes at their peak of sweetness.
Oh, Mr. Bittman. Between this list and your recent semi-retraction on your canned beans stance that got me so riled up, I think I might really like you again.