NYC: Weekend Eats: New Amsterdam Market, Otto, and ABC Kitchen

Jasper Hill Farm: Moses Sleeper (Raw Cow's Milk Cheese)

Hope everyone had a great weekend! I'll get all the France posts up soon, but here's a taste of NYC in the meantime :)

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After my Open House yesterday, I went down to the New Amsterdam Market for some quality alone time. The market is at the Fulton Fish Market all the way downtown and it took me an hour to get there from Chelsea with all the subway and bus changes...everything was out of service! Man. Once I was there, I dove straight for a beautiful loaf of Cabernet Rustica ($3) from Orwasher's Bakery. This bread is one the four types of wine breads that Orwasher produces from their Upper East Side bakery.

I then walked a few stands over to Saxelby Cheesemongers for a quarter pound of Moses Sleeper from Jasper Hill Farm, a bloomy, soft, and mild raw cow's milk comparable to camembert (though this is more earthy, mushroom-y) and priced at $20 per pound. Oh! And if you're a fan of blue cheese, Jasper Hill Farm also makes my favorite blue of all time: the Bayley Hazen Blue, nutty and grassy, a dry blue. You might recall this as the cheese I used to sneak into the movies with a bottle of wine, hehe ;)

And just to balance out my lunch, one last stop at Table Tales for a small serving of penne pasta with Sunday Gravy ($5), a truly warm and hearty concoction of slow braised pork, sausages, and beef meatballs, and San Marzano tomatoes. I also got a jar of their Tomato-Basil Sauce ($6) for a simple weeknight dinner. I brought my pile of food to a nearby bench and had an afternoon feast with views of the water. Not bad, huh? ;)

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Two seasonal favourites at Otto. This is the single restaurant I visit most often in NYC, and for good reason! Seats at the bar are best, for it's a completely different (inferior) dining experience when you're at table in the dining room (loud! impersonal! chaotic!). But onto the good things! First, the Bucatini alla Pastora ($12), an addictive saucy pasta finish with plops of creamy, silky fresh ricotta. You'll want extra bread to go with this dish...soak up alll the gravy. They featured this same dish around January last year, so here's hoping it will appear frequently as a weekly special during the cold months.

...and the Heirloom Caprese Salad ($16). Sliced local tomatoes, a drizzle of olive oil, sea salt and a whole ball of fresh mozzarella, quartered. All the other Otto salads are priced at $8, so this one is a double splurge, but definitely worth it.

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ABC Kitchen: Chicken Liver Toast

Monsieur P and I have been on a movie watching spree lately, watching one a week for the last three weeks! Can you believe that tickets are nearly $13 a person for the theatres??! Crazy. We saw The Social Network the first week, then Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps the following week. I absolutely loved the first Wall Street, but this sequel was mediocre at best. The only thing I enjoyed about the movie was seeing the loft that Shia LaBeouf's character owns. He sells it for $4.5M in the movie (with original asking of $6M). But in "real life" that loft is not a 1-bedroom loft, but a 10-bedroom penthouse loft at 31 West 21st Street for sale at $15M. Mind boggling.

ABC Kitchen: House Cut Fries

This week we saw The Town which was a solid, action/suspense film. In one scene of the movie they mention Dorchester, a not-so-safe neighborhood in Boston that happens to have a ton of great Vietnamese restaurants. My parents and I drove to that neighborhood when we visited Boston in August and there was a shooting in the neighborhood that very evening. Scary, and won't be returning, but our dinner at Pho Hoa Restuarant was quite good.

Our movie finished just after 11pm and we walked a block south to ABC Kitchen for late and light dinner. Cocktails and a few shared dishes...Chicken Liver Toast ($9), and a bowl of House Cut Fries ($6) tossed with fried parsley, ketchup on the side. They were kind enough to split our potions of Housemade Ricotta Ravioli ($14) onto individual plates, served with sauteed field greens, olive oil, and lemon.

My favorite dish of the night was the Roasted Carrot and Avocado Salad ($13). The carrots were spicy and tender, the avocado perfectly ripe. A mix of toasted, crunchy seeds and croutons topped the salad along with a dollop of sour cream. Who needs dressing when you have sour cream, right? :) Note, the photo above is also of a half-portion.

...And that was my weekend! Now onto another week...fingers crossed this will be a good one!

Addresses:
New Amsterdam Market
Sundays 11am-4pm at the Fulton Fish Market
Check website for schedule as they're not open every Sunday

Otto
1 Fifth Avenue
NY, NY 10003
(212) 995-9559

ABC Kitchen
35 E 18th Street
NY, NY 10003
(212) 475-5829