Sarkozys visit Ben's Chili Bowl

They ate two hot dogs each at DC's most famous greasy spoon.

Breakfast tacos

On the heels of my successful execution of huevos rancheros, the NYT runs a story on Austin's dominance when it comes to breakfast tacos.

Rabbit

I've enjoyed it in French bistros since I was a kid, but bunny is the new darling of the slow food movement. Here, aspiring farmers in Brooklyn pay $100 to learn how to kill rabbits.

Chicken rice, sort of

Of all the wonderful things we ate on our trip to Southeast Asia, perhaps the most luscious was chicken rice, Singapore's national dish. Created by the Hainanese from China, chicken rice seems plain but is actually a little taste of goodness and heaven. The grains of rice are fried in garlic, sesame and chicken oil, then steamed in the chicken's broth. The sliced chicken is served atop the rice with a fiery chilli-ginger-garlic sauce, as well as cucumbers and a bowl of broth to quell the heat. The dish pictured below is about $2 USD at the country's most highly regarded vendor, Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice.

I figured this was one dish I wouldn't be reproducing at home, as the traditional preparation calls for slowly boiling a whole chicken, frying rice grains in the chicken's oil, then steaming the rice in the stock generated from the chicken. Even if I wanted to do that, there's the matter of finding the luscious, high-quality chickens used in Singapore. I had never tasted chicken like that in the U.S. I figured I'd look for a good version in some North American Chinatown, or take another 26-hour flight to Singapore.

So I was interested when I spotted this recipe for Hainanese chicken in the NYT. It was buried in a column about stuff you can do with boneless, skinless chicken breasts. The author had gotten the recipe from Zak Pelaccio, owner of a West Village Malaysian fusion place called Fatty Crab, and it looked far from authentic. You poach the breasts in commercial broth seasoned with ginger and garlic, then simply pour the broth over steamed rice. Additionally, the 30-minute NYT recipe adds all sorts of tasty but nontraditional garnishes, like chopped basil, cilantro and scallions. It looked like it could be an acceptable cheat.

Well, it was pretty delicious, especially considering the laziness of this approach. The savory broth flavored the rice nicely and the tangy ginger sauce was super. I garnished the bowl with scallions and cilantro as the recipe directs, but it wasn't necessary for flavor, and I will probably skip it next time if only because they don't do that in Singapore. My husband said the biggest shortcoming was in the consistency of the chicken, which came out tender from poaching, but didn't approach the silkiness of the chicken we had at Tian Tian. Here's my version of the recipe, for four:

1. Whack an inch-long piece of skin-on ginger root with the blade of a chef's knife to crush it, then slice it into coins. Crush four cloves of garlic and pull off the skins. Cut a Thai chilli in half. Put the ginger, garlic and chilli in a large pot, add a quart of chicken broth, and simmer for 10 minutes.

2. Add four boneless, skinless chicken breasts to the pot in a single layer. Make sure you have enough liquid to cover the chicken. Bring the broth back up to a simmer, then turn off the heat, cover the pot and leave for 12 minutes. Slice into the thickest part of one breast to check for doneness. If not done, bring the broth just to a simmer again, turn off the heat, and cook for a couple more minutes. Remove chicken from broth and slice.

3. While the chicken is poaching, peel a 3-inch section of ginger and cut it into chunks. Put the ginger, 6 peeled garlic cloves, and 2-6 Thai chillis in the food processor. Add dashes of fish sauce, vinegar and lime juice and 1/4 cup of broth from the pot, pulse fine, and pour off into a bowl.

4. Whisk 3 T. soy sauce with 2 T. brown sugar in a small bowl. Slice a cucumber thinly.

5. To serve, heap rice into four shallow bowls and arrange the sliced chicken and cucumbers on top. Spoon some broth over the chicken and rice, then drizzle with half the sweet soy sauce and a bit of sesame oil. Pass the remaining soy sauce and ginger-garlic-chilli sauce at the table.

Emboldened by this relative success, I may even take it a step further next time and fry the rice grains in garlic and sesame oil, then put it in my rice cooker with chicken broth. Stay tuned!

NYT: Men who hate homeowning

As a new homeowner, I empathize with this miserable-looking guy perched poolside at his nest of discontent. The Times yesterday featured Minneapolis resident Alan Berks as an emblem of growing male dissatisfaction with homeownership:

Alan Berks the renter had spent his evenings with friends at African dance nights and jazz clubs. Alan Berks the homeowner lost an entire day rearranging the living room furniture. “I did find a spot for the couch that made me happy,” he said. “I was proud of myself. But where the couch is — that’s how I’m going to measure my happiness from now on? I remember thinking: ‘This is how people live? Why am I doing this?’ ”

Berks's other plaints are uncomfortably familiar. I can't walk to as many things as I could from any of my Boston-area apartments. Neither my husband nor I can or want to fix anything — if we hadn't learned by our late 20s, what made us think we would suddenly develop an affinity for home maintenance? Home should be a refuge, not a place that makes demands of you. And like Berks, looking back, I too wonder sometimes why everyone encouraged us to buy a house. He says it well: “I understand why the government or society wants people to have homes — they fix them up, and their commitment stabilizes neighborhoods. I get it, the whole beneficial aspect of homeownership. But individually, I’m not seeing it as a moral good.”

We also had an incident eerily similar to that of the guy in the article whose neighbor took pity and came over to mow the lawn — only in our case, even more ignominiously, it was the neighbor's teenage son.

I do wonder what makes the Times attribute this particular sentiment to men, especially when the data don't appear to reflect that. Men and women under 40, the article points out, report equal levels of satisfaction with homeownership. The fact that single women over the last year bought houses at higher rates than single men, along with a raft of anecdotes and gender-stereotyping assertions, appears to provide the basis for this "trend" story.

Teriyaki

The Times had a funny story yesterday about "teriyaki" in Seattle, a term that city uses to describe pretty much any food including those of Thai, Somali and Vietnamese origin as well as a horrifying-sounding corn dog drizzled in teriyaki sauce.

The Washington State Restaurant Association has identified 83 Seattle restaurants with teriyaki in their name, including I Love Teriyaki and I Luv Teriyaki. In Seattle, teriyaki is shorthand for a range of dishes, from teriyaki burgers, piled with chopped beef, to pineapple teriyaki, platters of chicken paved with canned pineapple.

Coincidentally, I made teriyaki for dinner last night, loosely following a salmon recipe from the America's Test Kitchen cookbook Cooking for Two, given to us for our wedding by our friends Kate and Tim. I have tried a number of other versions, but this was probably the best teriyaki I ever made, boosted by the delicious accompaniment of cabbage and shitake mushrooms.

1. Mince 2 scallions, 3 cloves of garlic and small piece of ginger. Combine these in a small bowl with a teaspoon of sesame oil. Whisk together 1/4 c. soy sauce, 1/4 c. sugar, 1 T mirin, 1 tsp. cornstarch and 1 tsp. sesame oil in a second small bowl.

2. Slice half a head of bok choy and some shitake mushrooms. Heat 1 T. vegetable oil over medium high in a large skillet. When oil is hot, saute the mushrooms for 2 minutes, then add the bok choy for another couple minutes until it wilts.

3. Push the vegetables aside to make a hole in the center of the skillet. Pour the scallion mixture in the well and mash it into the bottom of the skillet for a minute until fragrant, then stir the scallions etc. into the boy choy and mushrooms. Pour the vegetables off into two serving dishes.

4. Return the skillet to medium high heat with another T. vegetable oil. Sear 2 8 oz. salmon fillets skin side up (or skinned side up if yours are skinless) for 5 minutes. Flip them over and cook another 2-5 minutes depending on thickness and preference. Transfer them from the skillet onto the beds of vegetables.

5. Wipe the skillet with a paper towel and add the soy sauce mixture. Cook for 2 minutes until it thickens into a glaze, then pour over the salmon.

Eat at Uncle Monkey's

One of my most beloved childhood pastimes was playing restaurant. This game involved devising prolix menus featuring "delicious, scrumptious, mouthwatering, aromatic" crab cakes or whatever I was serving that night. Apparently they are hiring consultants to do that nowadays. Tuesday's NYT piece on menu psychology discusses the adjectives, prices, fonts, page placement and other strategic variables that can entice diners to order an item:

People like the names of mothers, grandmothers and other relatives on their menus, and research shows they are much more likely to buy, say, Grandma’s zucchini cookies, burgers freshly ground at Uncle Sol’s butcher shop this morning and Aunt Phyllis’s famous wedge salad.

Research subjects also spent significantly more when no monetary symbols appeared on the menu, as in "14" rather than "$14." Apparently these dollar signs trigger negative emotions related to the pain of paying and induce diners to behave more prudently. Personally, I feel like seeing a simple "14" and even more so "fourteen" is a big tipoff that I'm in a fancypants type of place and about to drop a lot of dime.