Things Culinary
- Mike Dickey
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
"The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food."
So, this past Sunday in Manhattan P and I stopped into an Irish pub a few blocks from the Museum of Natural History for a cold one. Realizing that having a drink on an empty stomach was a bad idea, Peg noted an advert on the wall advising that the bar offered hot dogs.
We ordered a couple, figuring at $2 a pop they were going to be forgettable, but also hoping that no New York establishment would serve a really bad hot dog.
As it turned out, the dogs were of the steamed, bland variety one might encounter at the ballgame. Mustard and ketchup out of those little foil packets. Untoasted bun. You get the picture.
This led us to ponder on whether there's a niche in the City for a soon-to-be-retired CRNA who's also a gourmet cook, and a lawyer who'd like to do pretty much anything but practice law as I do. Maybe we open a storefront in our neighborhood down the island, selling gourmet hot dogs (Feltman's only!) with exotic toppings, all resting on gourmet buns prepared fresh daily by some bakery happy for the business. A reuben dog on rye, or fresh pumpernickel! Imagine the praise in the NYT as we fill a culinary gap that somehow remains in this hot dog crazed town.
As I was making plans for my future that include a stained white apron and matching paper garrison cap, like Arnold on Happy Days, along comes the WSJ to burst my bubble.
It turns out there's a whole fancy hot dog industry out there, and of course New York is at the center of it all.
And now there's this thing called a hot dog tower, introduced at the Breckenridge ski resort, that's sweeping the culinary world.
And this one even includes corn dogs. Be still, my heart.
So the gourmet hot dog field is already too crowded for a couple sexagenarians hoping to find a place in the notoriously difficult restaurant business. Maybe some other venture will present itself.
On a semi-related note, insofar as it deals with good food that isn't fancy, this piece in the NYT this week about the perfect BLT left me thinking of the amazing upstate tomatoes that should be hitting the vegetable stands right about now.
Some of the takeaways:
-salt the tomatoes after slicing and before folding into the sandwich, otherwise they'll make the bread mushy. I've seen P do this with eggplant; I'm guessing she knew about this trick applying to BLTs as well.
-don't use fancy bread. A BLT should not be served on a brioche. Toasted white bread is the right answer.
-carefully arrange the lettuce so it's flat--otherwise, all your ingredients may come sliding out the back on the first bite.
. . . and
-use lots of iceberg lettuce, so you get a nice crunch with every bite.
This is all making me very hungry. That Grape Nuts breakfast is suddenly feeling woefully inadequate.
And it reminds me of an afternoon years ago, when P and I were first starting out and she flew back from KELM to Panama City after a summer spent working up here. It was about this time of year (now that I think of it, very shortly before Hurricane Michael), and to show her affection she descended the escalator at KECP not carrying flowers or a box of chocolates, but a bag of the finest, vine ripened tomatoes I'd ever experienced, having been raised in the burbs and only eaten mealy grocery store imitations. It was such a sweet gesture. And boy did we have some great sandwiches that weekend.
Time to pull it together for a busy work day. I thought we'd have the plane ready for pickup yesterday, but I'm getting ghosted by the mechanic so maybe not. Peg has a four day weekend from here, maybe with an early start, so if there's no plan to pick up the Columbia and fly it back home we may need a plan B. Perhaps back to the City for a gourmet hot dog or BLT.
Comments