Wistful cravings - ahi poke

A short post (and some food porn) to catalogue my worst fresh food craving of the winter: Hawaiian poke!

Raw fish that's cold, spicy, and was still swimming this morning. Paired with salty seaweed salad and a ripe mango or lilikoi (passion fruit), there's nothing more light, fresh and energizing.

  

The fish in Hawaii is so fresh that I frequently found myself haggling over the price of a fresh catch out of someone's pickup truck. Excellent quality poke and sashimi can be found at your local gas station or grocery deli. Shoes not required for purchase.

One last Hawaiian reminiscing on this winter day: our amazing, breeze-rustled, solar-powered outdoor kitchen. It barely kept anything cold, god bless it, but it held tanks of drinking water and gave us shade from long afternoons working the orchard.

And at night we drank beer there, by bonfire light.

(Such are my dreams when I find myself staring into a fridge full of wilted kale, potatoes and frozen vats of soup ... Here's to an early spring.)

Leave it to NYC ...

... to make humble Mexican street food into an exclusive, VIP-only engagement.

Since moving to New York eight years ago, I've been on the hunt for authentic Mexican. We're a city that does all sorts of Latin food really well - especially Dominican and Puerto Rican. But somehow cheap, simple, fresh Mex or Tex-Mex seems to elude New York, as we continue to smother our dishes in bland red pastes and nondescript melted cheese. Yuck.

Having heard good things about La Esquina, on the corner of Kenmare and Lafayette, I headed there for a strong margarita and some taquitos. The cafe is set apart from the "taqueria", which is the highly visible neon diner many New Yorkers will recognize. But both locales (as well as the thumping, reservation-only basserie in the basement) serve the tacos we were after.

La Esquina taqueria

An order of the grilled fish tacos came smothered in salsa verde, and the daily special - braised ancho-chile brisket tacos - were topped with pickled onions and jalepenos that were the stars of the entire meal. Both were tasty, but I suspect could not hold a candle to $2 street tacos in Austin or L.A. 

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the service and ambiance were completely inappropriate for fun, messy peasant food. When will New Yorkers learn to turn up the lights, open the windows and have fun with their food? One more meal attended by a sad waif of a waitress and underpinned by thumping ambient electronic bass and I might just keel over.

End rant.

 Braised brisket tacos at La Esquina.

Night out in Tiny Asia

I love a good, greasy dim sum cart, but Chinatown, NYC, USA, is so much more than that. Here are some of the top non-dumpling-related things to do in Chinatown:

Masterful pho at Nha Trang

1. Try other flavors. While they may not be as bright and prolific as the Chinese joints, restaurants in a range of Asian persuasions abound in Chinatown. There’s Malaysian, Korean and Vietnamese – my favorite – including one pho spot, Nha Trang on Baxter Street, that even San Francisco and Seattle friends admit is top notch. Alternately, try the unbeatable bahn mi at Bahn Mi Saigon Bakery.

 

2. Get a massage. No, not that kind of massage. We’re talking Tui-Na, which literally means “push-pull” – a vigorous, sometimes painful massage in which one usually lies under a blanket. There are scores of these places around Canal, but a friend recommends the mysterious, much sought-after Helen at the Fishion Herb Center on Mott.

3.   Shop for produce. A terrific range of fresh, interesting fruits, vegetables and seafood line the streets of New York’s Chinatown. It’s one of the best places in the city to get low prices on specialty items like lychees, daikon radish and bok choy. Contrary to popular conception, fish in Chinatown is super fresh – in fact, it comes from the Hunts Point fish market just like fish in most of New York’s other restaurants and markets. Competition – and, often, the fact that you have to gut it yourself – keeps costs low. (A note of warning, however: stay away from live fish. Those come from local “independent” fishermen. I’ve seen lots of Chinese dudes with hooks in the East River – coincidence??)

Chinatown fruit stall - photo c/o WNYC

4. Go out on the town. Blame the cheap rent, the proximity to the LES, or the kitch-cool wandering streets – Chinatown is a haven for the dark and loungey. There’s the dismal converted massage parlor, Happy Ending, the ever-present Winnie’s karaoke, and a string of new speak-easies, including Apothoke – which I visited for the first time recently. Fashioned after the old Euro-imperialist Saigon lounge, the bar is all low light, muted jazz and bottles and jars. The drink menu is arranged in the old Chinese style into categories: Health and Beauty, Stress Relievers, Pain Killers, Stimulants, Aphrodisiacs Pharmaceuticals. (I had a shiso martini with edamame puree - seriously!) It's quirky playtime in a faux opium den.

 Fun at loungey Apothoke

Haiti, une année après

 

(Video care of the kind folks at www.unicef.org)

I know too many facts about Haiti by heart: less than half of kids go to school. Almost no one has running water. Restavec children work for adults who aren't their families, in return for a meager living. And all this has been true since before the massive earthquake one year ago.

Two hundred thousand Haitians died during and after the 12 January earthquake last year. Aid and development workers lost many among their ranks in Port-au-Prince - more than 100 UN staffers were killed and entire offices decimated. And the city, with its centuries-old poverty and slums, had no means to deal with the tragedy.

Those of us at intergovernmental agencies and NGOs feel the hole in our hearts acutely, working as we do with the devastation - and the recovery process - on a daily basis. Please check out this update from the heads of  UNICEF in Port-au-Prince and at New York headquarters, and please donate again if you can. 

Haiti, mon pays,
wounded mother I’ll never see.
Ma famille set me free.
Throw my ashes into the sea.

Mes cousins jamais nes
hantent les nuits de Duvalier.
Rien n’arrete nos espirits.
Guns can’t kill what soldiers can’t see.

In the forest we are hiding,
unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers angry yelling,
in the river we will go.

Tous les morts-nes forment une armee,
soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
bring about our second birth.

Thanks for nothing, HTML

Learning to write code - any code, even as simple as basic HTML - is like finally being let into a secret society. It's like suddenly realizing that the reason you don't understand anyone around you is that you speak English, and they all speak French. It's a eureka moment. There's a language in those shiny LCD heads of theirs!

For many of us who wrote high school papers on three-hole looseleaf, only to arrive at college to discover the internet, much about the Interwebs remains a mystery. We're young enough that we're expected to know it - intimately - but we're sadly just on the wrong side of that fence. As a professional writer and editor, tech is a daunting part of what will increasingly be my career. Merde!

Thanks to easy-to-use editorial content management systems (I'm looking at you, Red Dot), I've largely been spared the horrors of true coding. But around the world, many editors aren't so lucky, and the smarter among us should probably learn to build and maintain simple websites from the ground up. (Now I'm looking at you, intergovernmental field offices.) That's why I'm learning the ropes. And it's kinda fun! Try it out on a silly blog or homepage. You can start with blogger, wordpress or tumblr templates and go from there - or cut and paste code from other sites you like.

Welcome to the skull and bones, writers!