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My visit to the Waffle House

I have never been to a Waffle House , until now. I love waffles, see our how to make waffles video here, and have even done waffle recipe home made baking powder experiments here. But I had never been to a Waffle House.

I love the name, and while on the road in the midwest, we needed breakfast, so I used my super-computer / smartphone to find one.

The waffles are not like those giant thick waffles that are ubiquitous at diners, the belgian style waffle; these waffles were thinner, which I like. The menu offers you an order of 1 or 2. I had one, but I saw lots of people have 2. They were good, but not wow. I wasn’t expecting wow, though. This wasn’t an artisanal local food waffle made from scratch, its a chain restaurant waffle.

Waffle House Waffles

What was really good were the eggs. So many times scrambled eggs, be they at a local diner or chain, are awful. Not sure how one can not cook scramble eggs badly, but many do.

Each egg order at the Waffle House are cooked individually in small cast iron pans with cheese. The eggs puff up nicely, I’m betting the cheese adds moisture to the eggs much like adding a small bit of milk to scrambled eggs does.

Scrambled Eggs with Cheese

Very nice people behind the couter, it takes a certain kind of patience to deal with the public, and these people had that. I think you should treat everyone equally, especially people in the food service world – they are, after all, touching the food you’re going to eat. And I see people who treat food service people with what ranges from impoliteness to down right rudeness, which I have zero tolerance for. Karma is boomerang, you know.

Coffee was a bottomless cup, AND when we were leaving, we were offered a to-go cup of coffee for free. Interesting.

What is your best waffle experience? Is there a special waffle restaurant in your town? Do you make waffles at home, if so, what is the secret to good waffles? Please tell us below:

November 12, 2011
Tiny House Directory free from Tiny House Blog

GardenFork became a fan of the Tiny House Blog on Facebook today, and at the same time signed up for their email newsletter.

get this free directory

As a bonus, when you sign up for their email newsletter, you get a neat downloadable PDF, the Tiny House Directory, an indexed list of websites, blogs, architects, builders, and kits of all sorts of tiny houses. Tiny houses include boats, yurts, wagons, trailers, tipis, straw bale houses, log cabins, prefabs. Neat.
I like that a bunch of links have been indexed and are all there on a few pages, so you don’t have to use a search engine to find stuff; Tiny House Blog has done all the work for you.

Andrew Odom, author of the Tiny rEvolution blog and a contributor to Tiny House Blog, got me interested in the Tiny House movement. He has a new post on hanging windows in your tiny house.

Not all of us will be living in tiny houses, but even if you are not downsizing, you can get great ideas of how to live with less stuff, and lessen your impact on the earth with the info on the Tiny House Blog and Tiny rEvolution.

You can sign up for our email newsletter right here:

Subscribe to our mailing list

How are you downsizing? Are you moving to a tiny house? Let us know below:

November 10, 2011
Beaver Lodge Canoe Trip

Yesterday after the giant storm of 20 inches at the end of October was really a great day it was super puffy clouds out there blue sky about 50° and I said hey let’s take out the canoe. So we put the canoe in the Ford F150 and drove down to one of our local ponds.

Were we went canoeing isn’t really a pond, though it’s called a pond, not sure why, it’s 145 acres. This area was originally a little beaver pond, the beavers had dammed up a small creek, and it became a very large marshy area. The state came in and made the dam into a spilway and created this really great lake perfect for canoeing. There are a lot of tree stumps and dead trees in the lake and this keeps powerboats out.

This lake is our favorite lake to go canoeing and the water shallow, is really clear, it’s really quiet and there’s almost never anyone else out on this lake where there.

parking the canoe to investigate the brook

We were on the far end of the lake and we heard this babbling stream that I had not heard before so we canoed over to the shore, which is full of brambles and Mountain Laurel and wild blueberries, and we hiked through the brush and found this really cool little brook. I think is called a vernal stream, it was really quite active because was all the snow melt from the 20 inches of snow we had in October. While checking out the broad we run across fresh signs of beavers harvesting trees and took some pictures. Beavers have front incisors that are constantly growing so they need to constantly eat wood.

There are a few beaver lodges in the lake and we always the check them out, and you never see the beavers, they can hear us coming, we’re pretty clunky with the canoe, banging the paddles against the side of the canoe. We came across one of the beaver lodges right in the middle of the lake and another that is against the shore of the lake.

I thought it interesting that beavers will actually build a beaver lodge on the side of the lake rather than the middle of it.

We learned a bunch about beavers on Wikipedia. What I thought was the really cool is that the preferred food for beavers in the summer are water lilies, and this lakeis full of water lilies, so there you go, the perfect place for beavers.

Canoeing is a great outdoor activity that doesn’t really cost that much money you can get a inexpensive used canoe, a few life preservers and you’re set to go.

Where do you guys like to go canoeing your area?

November 7, 2011
Baking Powder Recipe – How to make it

Rick and I talked on GF Radio about his ‘ah ha’ moments working with baking powder, and Rick wrote a post about how baking powder works on his Rick’s Column for GF. I added to the conversation that I had learned about how baking powder works, and why it needs to be fresh, from my friend Charlie, who helped me make this Southern Biscuit Recipe video for GF TV.

Charlie explained to me that baking powder needs to be fresh, and that the can of baking powder the average person has in the cabinet is probably stale. So Charlie made me a convert to making my own baking powder with this recipe:

1 part baking soda to 2 parts cream of tartar

The beauty of this is a lot of recipes call for 1 tablespoon of baking powder, so to make it fresh, just mix together 1 teaspoon of baking soda and 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar. Its best to buy cream of tartar online, Penzy’s Spice has it.

To show just what a difference fresh baking powder makes, check out these blueberry pancakes. I made these using the fresh baking powder recipe and the pancake batter had yogurt in it, which makes baking powder go into overdrive, because of its acid content.

pancakes made with fresh baking powder recipe

check out the rise from using fresh baking powder for these pancakes

Do you mix baking powder fresh? are there other kitchen products that we should be making fresh instead of buying them in a box or container? Let us know below:

November 4, 2011
Podcasts Worth Hearing: Negotiations

haggling price

The first haggler to mention a price loses, right? Wrong. The first person who proposes a price sets the tone & expectations of the entire bargaining session. Even if it’s just for self defense, I highly recommend Slate’s Negotiation Academy, a series of 10-minute podcasts, one per week, on the art of negotiation. Session 3 just published. http://slate.me/vanUPk

November 3, 2011
Free Leaf Compost, Thank You Neighbors – Rick’s Column

Tomorrow’s trash day and metal scavengers are already circling the neighborhood, but I’ve found GOLD! Gold, I tell ya’. My neighbors do all the work of sweeping and bagging these leaves for the trash guys. I just roll around the neighborhood picking up free compost material.

Mulch, then re-bag with the mower, and 6 bags of leaves make one nice compost pile (older woody stuff in bottom, a few limbs stuck through sideways for ventilation).
Cage is an end length of rabbit fencing and 3 old stakes. Should have some nice leaf mold by Spring.

November 2, 2011
Baking Powder, How It Works – Rick’s Column

Corn bread was pancake flat yesterday, which got me to studying the recipe and the ingredients. Then I realized I’d never understood baking powder. What is it? what does it do?

BP acts like yeast, releasing CO2 to make gas bubbles so the batter will be fluffy. Yeast do it by eating sugars and then farting CO2. BP does it by chemical reaction.

It’s like those baking soda rockets we made when I was a kid. Fill the rocket with acid (vinegar) wrap a little ball of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) in a piece of Kleenex to delay the chemical reaction, and stuff the ball of baking soda into the rocket with the vinegar and ram the plug home…and stand back. Eventually the CO2 would propel the rocket off the launch pad, usually landing on a roof somewhere.

Important safety lesson, do not stand over a charged rocket and look down with your remaining eye.

Baking Powder is comprised of a base (usually baking soda–sodium bicarbonate) and an acid (usually Cream of Tartar–potassium hydrogen tartrate, an acid salt) in powder form, which prevents reaction. There is usually a filler, too, like corn starch or potato starch, both to add volume when measuring out and to buffer and slow the reaction. Dry, these items will not react. But any liquid activates the baking powder and causes it to off gas CO2.

Here’s the lesson of where I went wrong:

Lesson 1: I put the liquids into the bowl first and then added the dry ingredients. This allowed the BP to cook off before I mixed the batter and trapped the gasses. If BP had been the last item added, I might have gotten away with this, but when it’s among the first to get soaked, I was sunk. (This is the reason you’re told on the box to mix the dry ingredients first–I failed to follow simple directions).

Lesson 2: I probably made the loss of CO2 all a lot worse by over mixing (again, this caution is on the box, so I failed to follow simple directions). BP, unlike yeast, releases a set amount of gas per reaction. If you mix the batter too much, you release all the gas from the batter and it goes flat. With yeast, they keep digesting sugars and farting CO2 until they die, which is why you can work a yeast batter loner.

We use baking powder instead of yeast because we like biscuits in 20 mins vs 2 hours with yeast. (this also is why they sell “Yeast Rolls” and “Dinner Rolls” side by side. I never thought that there was a difference.)

Lesson 3: there are double activation or double acting baking powders available. These act like single action baking powders when you get them wet, but also have a second reaction that is heat activated by baking, which give you a second chance.

Lesson 4: honey (as well as buttermilk) is slightly acid. So I should have cut back on the baking powder and substituted baking soda because I used 1/4 cup honey instead of sugar in the recipe.

Double acting baking powders have the same first acid, Cream of Tartar, but add another acid that is temperature activated as well, giving the pastry a second rise…or in my case, a second chance.

Eric writes about baking powder, pancakes, and the baking powder recipe here.

photo by EmmiP

November 2, 2011
Rice Cooker Repair – Rick’s Column

Our $10 Wal-Mart B&D rice cooker stopped working last night. I just opened it up and, using a multimeter, found an inline fuse blown.

I clipped the fuse off and reconnected the wire. I can’t imagine any real harm, since the circuit is gfi protected anyway. Am I missing something? Running a test batch of rice now to see how it turns out.

BTW: if you’ve always wondered about those center spring mechanisms, they’re pretty simple…and interesting. The center plunger is not charged with electricity (unlike a lot of toasters, which are actually engaging electromagnets when you put the plunger down–hence the futility of slamming the plunger down, it not a mechanical catch of some sort). Inside, the rice cooker there’s a magnet on an arm connected to the front mechanical operating slide, a bit like a toaster–up is warm, down is cook. The weight of the water and rice in the pan hold the plunger down and the magnet sticks to the underside, closing the high heat or cook circuit.

When enough water boils away, the spring pushes the plunger up, which lifts the pan and breaks contact with the magnet breaking the high heat connection. There’s a separate permanent circuit always connected for “warm” with it’s own little heating element. You have to unplug the whole thing to turn the warming circuit off.

—-
the system just “popped” open, turning off the high heat coil. Looks fine, but you always wonder…at least I do. OTOH, a rice cooker isn’t like a crockpot. We’d never leave it running all day. Any ideas? At $10 am I being penny wise and pound foolish?

November 2, 2011
Homemade Garlic Planting Tool Makes Planting Seed Go Faster

This homemade garlic planting tool helps if you are planting more than a few rows of garlic. Planting a few rows of garlic in your home garden is pretty straightforward. To plant garlic for a market grower is a bigger deal. I was asked by a neighbor who sells garlic to help him plant seed garlic before the coming snow storm. The storm dumped 20″ of snow on this field a few hours after we finished planting garlic. Watch our How To Plant & Grow Garlic video here.

While we were planting garlic I took photos to show you all how a market farmer plants garlic. This garlic field is not large enough for heavy equipment, so while the garlic is planted by hand, this homemade garlic planting tool might help small farmers reading this.

All the seed garlic bulbs are broken apart by hand, I don’t know of a mechanical method to do this, though I’m sure a machine exists for large scale garlic growers.

Seed garlic broken up by hand

First of all, the field is tilled with a small disc several times to turn over all the weeds and cover crops, then the rows of garlic are staked out with string. Each row is 5 plants wide, then there is a 24″ wide space between rows. This space should be the width of your rototiller, so you can till under weeds that grow on the walking paths between the rows of garlic.

disc rig gets the garlic field ready

The holes the seed garlic is placed in are made by this homemade garlic planter rig built by the farmer. It has 5 metal tips on it, with two pieces of wood jutting out perpendicular for proper spacing between rows. Two people move the garlic seed hole maker along the row. When pressing the rig into the soil to make the holes, each person places a foot on the rig to make the holes. The rig is rocked back and forth to firm up the walls of the holes.

Metal Tips on Garlic Planter, note row spacers sticking out side of rig, just above hole making tips

Garlic Planting Tool In Action

holes made by garlic planter rig

The seed garlic is put in each hole by hand – be sure to use knee pads – you’re on your knees a long time in this process.

The rows are then raked over, the soil filling up each hole.

I bet there are a few planting rigs farmers have made to automate this process more, my friend likes it this way, and his garlic field is not huge.

Raking soil over seed garlic

raking soil over seed

Do you have some tips for planting garlic? or better ways to plant garlic? Let us know below:

October 31, 2011
Fermentation Sauerkraut How To update

Inspired by Daniel Gasteiger’s new book Yes, You Can! and Freeze and Dry It too book on canning, freezing and more, we are now fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut.

And we are shooting a video on how to make sauerkraut. Above are the two jars we are fermenting for the video. I did one batch with just green cabbage, carrots and caraway seeds, and started a second batch of sauerkraut with a mix of red cabbage and green cabbage. From what i’ve read, it seems best to use an earthenware crock or plastic container; i used two large glass canning jars.

we are fermenting cabbage into sauekraut and making a how-to video on making sauerkraut

The fermentation jars are covered with a towel and sitting on the kitchen counter, I check them every day, and watch these bubbles come out from the cabbage. You can see some bubbles in the jar of red cabbage in the above photo.

I asked on our Facebook Page for suggestions on what ingredients to put into sauerkraut, and got some great responses:

Thom: I make two types, one with just cabbage,onions and salt and the other a spicy type with cabbage,onion,garlic,carrots,radish or daikon,pepper flakes,fresh ginger,dill and salt.

Dennis: love making sauerkraut, apple and cumin is a good combo!

Woodwife: Green Just cabbage and salt.

Josh: cabbage salt and sugar to sweeten it up a bit

Michael: Juniper berries

Joe: I all ready made mine for the year its canned and put up. I canned 12 quarts I use just salt and a little sugar and a few apples.

Janet: I haven’t made sauerkraut yet, but I plan on it. I listen to your radio show podcasts on Itunes and recently purchased the book “Yes You Can”. I can’t wait for it to come in the mail. Thank you for everything that you do!! It is truly inspirational and entertaining. Keep up the good work!!! 🙂
Sunday at 6:41pm · 1 person

Claudia: you wanna get Gundelsheim or Midlessa Sauerkraut, put a McIntosh apple (cut up), bay leaves and Juniper berries as well as sugar and a beef boullion cube and let it cook for about an hour, Oh yeah, cut up an onion and put it in there as well
Sunday at 10:58pm

Gerald: We do 3# cabbage to 1 tbsp salt. Pack it down til brine forms (maybe top off) Weigh it down so the cabbage stays under the brine. Cover and wait. Sometimes we add caraway seeds, but plain ol’ kraut is best. This year we used 80# cabbage total.
Monday at 8:02pm

Gerald: I have also used the lacto-fermented brine in your artisan bread to make it sourdoughish.

Neat, all sorts of ideas here. next batch will have apples in it. I’m curious about canning the sauerkraut afterward, does that reduce its health qualities? Let me know what you think below:

October 12, 2011
Kimchi Soup (Kimchi Jigae) Recipe

Kimchi Jigae, or kimchi soup, is a traditional winter stew from Korea. It’s like a very spicy hot and sour soup made with fermented cabbage — some call it the cure-all for all winter ailments. It’s simple to make and many of the ingredients are not considered as exotic anymore. You might be able to get everything at an Asian market, or like me substitute a few things. Sliced pork belly is a key ingredient to this soup, which I have left out. It gives this soup a silky texture and a deep smoky flavor. Instead I added butter before serving and used a dried chipotle pepper to give it that smoky flavor. The secret to this soup is low, slow cooking.

You’ll need:
1 cup or more kimchi, the thicker pieces sliced into thin strips
1/2 cup kimchi juice (right from the kimchi)
2 tsp gochujang (sweet Korean chili paste)
3 tsp red miso
1 small onion, sliced thinly
1 cup mushroom, sliced
1 cup carrots, sliced diagonally
1/2 cup pureed pear
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tbsp salt
5 cloves of garlic, minced
2 cups chicken or pork broth
2″ stem of pulverized old ginger root, or 1 tsp of powdered ginger
1 large dried smoked chipotle pepper
1 tbsp soy sauce mixed with 1/2 cup water
1 tsp rice vinegar
1/2 cup cubed firm tofu or glass noodle
1/2 cup light sesame oil
1/2 cup sweet butter
sliced green onion, garnish (optional)

If you plan on making your own stock, do it the day before, otherwise buy a good low sodium stock. So let’s get cookin’. In a large stock pot heat sesame oil then add mushrooms, carrots, and onion. Add salt, cover and sweat everything until enough liquid covers the bottom of the pot. Now add the kimchi and juice, stock (chicken or pork), soy sauce, water and vinegar. Bring to a boil then add ginger, garlic, red miso, chili paste, sugar, pureed pear, and dried chipotle pepper. Lower heat, cover and let everything simmer for about half an hour. If you have sliced pork belly add this to the pot , but do use regular bacon.

Let the soup simmer on low for another 20 minutes then add glass noodles or firm tofu, stir occasionally. Simmer for another 25 minutes, or when the kimchi is soft enough to fork through. Remove from heat and add 1/2 cup butter. Stir then let it rest for another 5 minutes, remove the ginger root and the chipotle pepper. Serve hot and garnish with sliced green onion. I like mine with lots of sweet corn on top.

September 20, 2011
Zucchini and Corn Fritter Recipe

This fried dish marks the last summer harvest — sweet corn and zucchini from Eric’s garden make for some tasty, savory fritters. Some find it difficult to make golden, crispy fritters that hold together. When something is deep-fried correctly it is not greasy and the inside is perfectly steamed. The usual suspects are soggy batter, over crowding the pan, and oil that isn’t hot enough for deep frying. The key ingredient, zucchini, must be coarsely grated and salted to remove some of the liquid, otherwise the batter is too wet. Use a high heat oil like Canola to get the right frying temperature, which is between 175 and 190 °C (345–375 °F). Frying in small batches ensure that the oil maintains its high temperature. Baking powder is optional, but it does lighten up the batter as it rises with heat. Are you ready to fry?

Squash and Corn Fritters
Yield: 4 fritters

2 cups coarsely grated young squash (or zucchini)
1/2 cup thinly sliced white onion
1 cup cooked corn (frozen or fresh)
1/4 cup Quinoa, (optional) or corn meal
1/2 cup unseasoned breadcrumbs
1 egg
1 tsp each thyme, oregano, powder cumin, dried onion flakes
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp powdered garlic
1/2 tsp baking powder (optional)
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 tsp white flour
1 tbsp sea salt
9″ Cast iron skillet
Canola or any high-heat oil

With a coarse grater, shred the green squash, add thin slices of onion (paper thin), Quinoa, and 1/2 tbsp salt and mix well. Press the mix in a sieve with a spatula then set aside for about an hour to drain most of the liquid. It should yield about 1/8 cup of liquid, which you will discard. If your squash is a bit seedy, use a tablespoon to scoop out the seeds and tough fiber.

In a hot pan, cook corn with a little water then add a little oil (or butter) and a pinch of a salt. When most of the water has evaporated and the corn is lightly browned, it’s ready. Set it aside to cool down to room temperature. The corn can be fresh or frozen. You can’t beat corn on the cob, but freezing actually improves corn giving it a sweeter flavor and a better texture. If you’re using frozen corn be sure it’s completely thawed and drained before cooking.

In a large bowl, add cooked corn, grated squash and onion, dried herbs and spices. Mix until everything is evenly incorporated. Then add egg, baking powder, salt and all remaining dry ingredients to bind everything. Mix well, cover and set aside in the fridge for at least half an hour. The batter should be thick, gloppy, and lumpy and it should hold together without separating.

In a hot 9″ cast iron skillet add oil to a depth of 1/4″. To check if the oil is hot enough, stick the end of a wooden chopstick into the pan. When bubbles form around the chopstick it’s fryin’ time. Scoop a heaping tablespoon of batter into the pan. Brown for about five minutes, gently press down with a spatula, then carefully flip it over. Don’t crowd the pan, fry only two or three at at time. When both sides are evenly browned, drain well on paper towels. If the oil starts to smoke, clear out the dukes and lower the temperature.

Keep the finished fritters in a warm oven and serve hot — garnish with fresh cilantro, fried onion or mushroom. How about some mango chutney or Branston Pickle? If you want to make this an authentic South Asian dish, add ground dried shrimp or diced cooked lap song sausage to the batter and served with pan-toasted garlic.

September 10, 2011
Honeybees landing loaded with pollen photo

We requeened this honeybee hive last month, and the bees are almost a pure yellow-gold color, its wild. This queen is a hybrid Italian honeybee queen that we bought from Warm Colors Apiary.

Right now the Goldenrod is blooming, and there is still clover in the fields, plus around here we have late season woodland asters. The honeybees landing on this hive have a bright orange red pollen on their legs.

Honeybees landing with pollen on their legs

you can see here the difference between the older bees from the previous queen and the younger bees from the new queen. The older bees have prominent black bands on their backs

©2011 eric rochow all righst reserved

September 6, 2011
Artisan Bread No Knead Bread Recipe update

I was asked to bring bread to a pot luck, and luckily, i had just started a batch of the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day the night before. With this method, take 6 1/2 cups of flour, water, yeast, salt and put it in a large container. You let it rise for a few hours then put it in the fridge.

Artisan Bread Using the No Knead Bread baking method

I’ve fine tuned my Artisan Bread Recipe link here making it a hybrid of the No Knead Bread Recipe and the Artisan Bread Recipe. I lifted out a hunk of the dough from the fridge, formed it into a ball on parchment paper, and baked it in dutch oven.

I also make slashes across the top of the dough to make those cool lines . You can see how we make the slashes in our No Knead Bread Artisan Bread video here.

The bread comes out great! I look like I know what I am doing, and its real easy to do.

This loaf has a small amount of rye flour mixed into the dough, and it has a nice hint of rye in each slice.

How have you refined your Artisan Bread in 5 or No Knead Bread recipes? let us know below:

September 6, 2011
Sheetrock Plaster Walls Pros & Cons

I’m betting if you are reading this post, you may be searching for information on how to sheetrock or drywall plaster walls. So, I thought I’d post some pictures to give you all a visual how-to on sheetrocking walls and talk about the pros and cons of this kind of wall repair. Here are some photos of a drywall – sheetrock job we recently did on plaster walls that were in really bad shape.

I get hired to sheetrock plaster walls when the client doesn’t want to repair and skim coat the existing plaster walls. To skim coat plaster walls is labor intensive, and to install drywall is faster and cleaner.

Plaster walls in bad shape, the client had removed the trim.

As you can see, the plaster walls were in poor shape, and some of the moldings were missing. We were fortunate in that the room was just slightly higher than 8 feet, so we could blend the edge of the drywall into the crown moulding. One of the issues with applying drywall over a plaster wall is how the drywall butts up to the existing mouldings, it doesn’t always work out very well.

We build out with scrap wood and drywall any holes in the walls

The drawback to sheetrocking plaster walls is that when the job is done, the walls look very rectilinear, they are very square and straight. To me, this doesn’t look right in a 100+ year old brooklyn brownstone or row house. But we do what the client wants, they are writing the check.

The sheetrock – drywall attached to the plaster wall

Plaster walls have an organic feel to them, they have imperfections, they are not straight and square, they undulate. When you skim coat a wall, you preserve that organic feel. When we’re done skim coating, it looks like a plaster wall in an old house; when you sheetrock a wall, it looks like a new condo.

Lucky for us, the walls of this room were a bit more than 8'

NOTE: the client had removed the wood trim and loose plaster, thinking they would do this job themselves. Its very likely they encountered lead paint when doing this. Check with your local codes on dealing with lead paint. Lead Paint is very unhealthy to breathe or eat.

Drywall affixed to the plaster wall, joint compound being applied to seams

sheetrock over damaged plaster walls

What do you all think? Do you have plaster walls in your home? have you ever repaired plaster walls? Let us know below.

September 2, 2011
The Best Banh Mi Vietnamese Sandwich in NY

Recently we were working on a paint job in Sunset Park Brooklyn, and we realized that Brooklyn’s Chinatown was just a few avenues away. Tony, ( who works with me in addition to writing recipes for GardenFork ) and I had previously visited Thanh Da II ( 5624 8th Avenue, Brooklyn NY ) in Brooklyn’s Chinatown after reading about this Banh Mi sandwich place in the NY Times.

Eric's Favorite Banh Mi Sandwich

There are now 4 Banh Mih sandwich places in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, the Ban Mih sandwich craze has reached the point where it was focus of a story on the NPR show This American Life.

According to Wikipedia:

Bánh mì or bánh mỳ (English pronunciation: /ˈbʌnmiː/, Vietnamese: [ɓǎːɲ mî]), literally biscuit or cake (Bánh) and flour or wheat (mì), is a Vietnamese baguette made with both wheat and rice flour, but more popularly known as a type of sandwich traditionally made with this type of baguette.[1] There are many global and regional variations of the sandwich, but the most common version features thinly sliced pickled carrots and daikon (known as đồ chua), cucumbers, cilantro, chili peppers, pâté, mayonnaise and various meat fillings or tofu. Popular bánh mì fillings include roasted or grilled pork, steamed or roasted pork belly, Vietnamese sausage, chicken, head cheese and ham.

The Banh Mi sandwich is a mash up of eastern and western cultures. The French brought their baguette sandwiches of vegetables to Vietnam, and the Vietnamese made it their own.

Thanh Da Banh Mih shop

We’ve tried a few of the place in our neighborhood, but the Banh Mi sandwiches at Than Da II win. They are really good. Especially the #4, a BBQ Pork Banh Mi sandwich that I order every time I go to Thanh Da.

dried mushrooms in brooklyn's chinatown

An added bonus to going to Thanh Da is getting to check out the asian grocery stores in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. I wish I had a tour guide when I walk the sidewalks and try to figure out what the merchants are selling. Some of the stores write out the items in English, but most don’t. Lots of mushrooms and dried items and tons of fresh fish.

Tony checks out the produce

what are these?

So if you are coming to New York, and want to get off the tourist track, come to Brooklyn’s Chinatown, and then walk over to Sunset Park for real mexican food.

September 1, 2011
Adirondack Guide Boat handmade from wooden boat plans

Last winter one of my friends showed me an Adirondack Guide Boat he was building in his basement. I just nodded, having seen many half finished ‘basement projects’ in friend’s basements, wooden boat plans being one of them.
Well this spring he finished his boat and it is looks just amazing.

homemade adirondack guide boat made from wooden boat plans

According to Wikipedia, the Adirondack guide boat is just that , it’s a boat that was used in the Adirondacks by professional guides who had paying passengers, usually from New York City, who wanted to go hunting or fishing and they traveled up to the Adirondack region of upstate New York to do so.

The Adirondack Guide Boat looks a bit like a canoe but they’re have oars and what’s really cool is that if you are rowing the boat, and then let the oars rest in the water the boat won’t change direction.

underside and keel of homemade wooden boat

My friend built a classic Adirondack guide boat, these days according to Wikipedia, today they are made of Kevlar and fiberglass, but he was a purist and used all wood.

(more…)

August 31, 2011
Puffballs & Mushroom Identification

How to identify mushrooms. I get a lot of requests for more information mushroom identification, so i’ve started with this post to show GardenFork readers different mushrooms I run across in the woods and in the city.
The Giant Puffball can be a common site in urban areas. You might see these large white balls that look like they are from another planet appearing on your lawn, or in a park or meadow. Puffballs like this are common on the East Coast, I’ve also seen them in the Midwest.
The Puffball Mushroom in the photo here is one I found in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. It was growing on the edge of a meadow near some trees.

Puffballs such as this are generally edible, though double check with several references and experts before getting out your knife and fork. I have found them to taste underwhelming, kinda like tofu. So maybe you can use them in a stir fry or saute with other vegetables, or in a soup.

Homesteaders, Urban Homesteaders, Foragers: Let me know how you cook puffballs.

Giant Puffball Mushroom part of the GardenFork Mushroom Identification series

August 22, 2011