When the Li-Bruynell-Hull vacation team pulled up for Pizza Night at the Orange Peel Bakery on Martha’s Vineyard, the sun was so bright that I forgave the weather for the past three days of rain, the stone oven so beautiful that I snapped pictures unabashedly, and the people so friendly that I wondered if I’d somehow teleported to the West Coast. In a word, it was heavenly. Special thanks to Amanda for the recommendation!
Here’s how it works:
I love parties. I’m in the process of planning a big family joint birthday party for my mom, sister and dad that may or may not involve an entire roast pig. Who doesn’t love a good party? Obviously, the best parties include copious amounts of food and alcohol. At many London parties and events of the last month or so, my alcohol consumption has drastically outweighed the food consumption. Often, my memories of the event can get a bit fuzzy. Luckily, I took pictures.
Here’s a photo from the Bibendum wine event at the stunning Saatchi Gallery. Can you spot the foodrambler?
Amidst approximately 149803454 bottles of wine spread over something like 10 galleries on 4 floors were all sorts of cool installations by local designers:
Equally alcoholic was the fabulous Yelp’s Burst Birthday, a surprise-filled soiree in an old metalworks building complete with a grassy garden tea party room filled with tea cups of gin and teapots of tonic amidst tiered trays of sugar-stacked snacks. I’m still dreaming about the plate below of melty chocolatey caramelly Millionaire’s Squares…
The room was carpeted in real grass (hand laid by our dedicated friend Lizzie!) and populated by a small community of garden gnomes, one of whom came home with me at the end of the night. Chris and I named him Chomsky. We’re nerds.
The Yelp party also featured a real tube-car-as-a-bar slinging free cocktails and bunch of market-style food stalls, including fantabulous frozen yogurt, a sort of bizarre spiralled potato chip on a stick, and my most favoritest roast hog people.
Last up, I got a chance to taste the new Pizza Express menu by Francesco Mazzei, the chef from an award-winning London restaurant called L’Anima that I’m hoping to go to someday. Shockingly, I’d never had Pizza Express before – it’s a very popular chain in the UK – but I was quite impressed with what I tasted of the new dishes. I liked the spicy Calabrese pizza the best – a thin and crispy crust, fior di latte mozzarella, watercress in basil pesto, a few more chilies and peppers, and most importantly, nduja sausage. Anything with nduja on it is a friend of mine.
Mmmm…looking at pictures never fails to make me hungry. I’ll take a spicy pizza, a few Millionaire’s Squares, a bottle of that rich and chocolatey Malbec, and a teacup of G&T. It’s 2am. Bibendum, Yelp and Pizza Express, do you deliver?
I’m up in the middle of the night with a serious head cold. A friend suggested it might be haggisitis – which turns your internal organs to pulp and mixes them with oatmeal – but I’m pretty sure it’s more of a deepfriedmarsbar syndrome, where your sinuses and lungs get encased in a thick, viscous batter. Either way, it’s really not a pretty picture.
Because I’ve self-medicated with an assortment of pharmaceuticals and can’t really read anything, I opened my Google Reader for the first time in about 6 months to look at all the pretty pictures. Oooh, pretty pictures. I will share some of them with you now.
First off, a great photo from a great article called Northeast China Branches Out In Flushing in the New York Times.
Wait a minute. Those are sticky-sweet caramel sugar strands stretching off chunks of deep-fried sweet potato? And that’s Chinese food? Holy crap. My world is rocking right now and it’s not just me overdosing on cold meds. Perhaps my deep-frying obsession is coded deep within my DNA. Irene Bean sent this article to me at about the exact moment the drool hit the keyboard upon reading it myself. Go read about the cuisine of the Dongbei (literally ‘East North’) region and look at the slideshow: I promise you’ll do some serious drooling yourself.
Next, up: Boston Creme Pies from Design*Sponge
Ooooooooooooohmyyyygod. Despite being proudly Boston born and bred, I’ve never really liked Boston creme pies. But seeing this photo made me want to scoop up that cheeky little cake and smooosh it into my mouth in one bite. Look at how mini it is! It would totally fit. Design*sponge is one of my favorite design blogs and their foodie/recipe series ‘in the kitchen with’ has some of the most gorgeous food styling I’ve ever seen, along with some great recipes. My camera whimpers a little in shame every time I look at the photos. But my heart sings a bit with joy at the beauty of it all, so I do my best to temper the rising bile of inadequacy. I mean, really…how has a messy, half-eaten plate of radishes ever looked so good?
This spectacularly beautiful radish explosion is better described as a Spicy Heirloom Radish Salad and the recipe can be found ‘In The Kitchen With’ Penny De Los Santos.
My last photo (because I reeeeeallly needed to go to bed like 3 hours ago, but I am not up of my own volition. Damn the batter in my head!) is from Slice: America’s Favorite Pizza Weblog, which is part of the jolly, fat, and friendly Serious Eats family. If I manage to stay up to date with my Reader, it will probably be due to the daily dose of deliciousness from Serious Eats.
Scrolling through the several hundred posts I missed over the past few months, my eyes starting to glaze over, my brain beginning to succumb to the dripping ooze of fry batter, I was shocked out of my stupor by the following photo:
Hey! I know that pizza! I know that pizza damn well, and glancing at this photo again has me tempted to book a flight to New Haven, Connecticut as we speak. Rather, as I type. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not a huge fan of Connecticut. But seriously, Sally’s Apizza is some of the best pizza you’ll ever have. It’s absolutely orgasmically good. It’s also the home to one of my favorite food stories…
Assuming you have a generally adequate level of vision and sense of spatial reasoning, I think you get an idea from the above photo how large the ‘Large’ pizza at Sally’s is. 16 slices! It’s about the size of a small stovetop, a mid-size bath mat, two normal ‘Large’ pizzas, or perhaps a very big catskin rug if your cat were one of those hilariously overweight cats whose pictures make me laugh on a regular basis. Regardless, the Larges should more aptly be called Enormously Huges, and then the Large pizzas from every other pizza institution would not suffer the intense shame of comparison.
I went to Sally’s with four girlfriends – Rachel, Lex, Olivia, and Helen, all champion eaters and all wanting a different kind of pizza. I wanted to try the classic White Clam, Rachel swore by the Eggplant Parmesan, Lex refused to leave without the Mixed Hot Peppers No Mozz, and Helen preferred the Pepperoni and Onion. So of course, after waiting in line for almost two hours, we decided to get all four. In Large. For five girls. We had so much pizza, they had to bring over another table to put it on. The guys at the table next to us started heckling – like straight-up shit talking – but we shut them up when we took down approximately 3.15 of them and had just enough to divide for leftovers the way we intended. It was one of the most satisfying eating experiences of my life – mostly because the pizza is unquestionably amazing and we waited two hours for it, but also seeing the grudging looks of respect in the eyes of those dudes.
Or maybe it was horror. I might have been too high on tomato sauce to know the difference.
Oh, and then Lex ordered another one to take home. Seriously people, it’s that good.
Also…you’d think if I could ingest almost 16 slices of pizza, I’d be able to ingest enough Tylenol PM aka Lemsip Max All Night Cold & Flu Tablets to knock myself out for the night, wouldn’t you?
i’m on a straight up no-holds-barred godzilla-style food rampage throughout the bay area before i leave for london. last night’s ravenous feeding involved the truly kickass pizzaiolo in oakland. i met the chef/owner, charlie, when he hired the go game to run an event for his staff. i won’t blow up any spots, but let’s just say charlie and team dirty sanchez showed quite a lot of…spirit. did you happen to spot a dude in a girl’s raincoat and no pants running around the mission last week? there sure are some crazy peeps in this hood.
charlie used to work at chez panisse, so his food is also sustainably sourced, based on fresh ingredients, and well-known to be fucking ridiculously delicious. i love their philosophy, as stated on the website:
Whenever we can, about 98% of the time, we buy only locally grown, organic, seasonal meat and produce. We buy from small farmers we know and love, people we eat with, drink with, and share our lives with. We buy whole animals from ranchers we know and trust: We buy organic flour, milled in Oakland by people who bring their children to Pizzaiolo for dinner. We change the menu every day to reflect the offerings of these remarkable local food purveyors in their freshest most beautiful form.
so, is the food remarkable, fresh, and beautiful? a resounding and wholehearted fuck yes. just check out the new potato pancetta rosemary fontina pizza:
i am so that girl who takes pictures of her food in restaurants now. i never thought i’d get to this point, even after starting a food blog. i figured i’d mostly take photos of things i cooked at home since i’m not trying to write restaurant reviews or anything (i don’t think anyone would hire me considering the only descriptive words i know are variations of the word AWESOME). but i keep coming across food that’s so un-fucking-believably good that i have to whip out my camera and piss off my roommates by taking photos before they’re allowed to tear apart a fresh-out-of-the oven delfina pizza.
continuing the mission taste tour of so-crazy-good-it’s-unfair places on my block, we went to pizzeria delfina tonight after a wine tasting across the street. for the second night in a row, i embarrassed annie and gina by snapping pictures of our food (at least i turned off the awkwardly loud shutter sound this time). how could i help it when the special ‘purgatorio’ pizza looked like this:
oh holy shit. don’t you just want to lick your computer screen? are you not uncontrollably drooling and quietly moaning out of desire for this spicy tomato and eggy goodness slice of perfection? if you remain unmoved, do you even have a soul or does a cold and unforgiving automaton heart beat inside your stomach-free robot body? let’s try this one:
well HELLO little deep fried crab polpette friends (italian meatballs). you are so adorably cute and round with your little herb sprinkles that i want to put you in my pocket and take you home to be my friends and then EAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU. but it would be unfair to you and painful for me to get attached and then consume your delicious fried little selves, so i will just eat you now and spare us both the awkwardness of a short-term relationship that we both know is not going to end well. at least not for you.
ready for more food porn and bizarre conversations with my dinner? i did mention i just went to a wine tasting, right? this chardonnay/barbera/pinot noir – fueled food porn obsession is getting out of hand but please don’t judge me. addiction is a serious disease.
Family Styles 