Rokhat Kosher Bakery: Bukharian bakery in Queens frequented by Andrew Zimmern and a whole lot of Bukharians

Over the years, I've developed a love-hate relationship with Queens, New York. For city folk, it's sort of a foreign land, a strange region comprising Astoria, a big globe of the world somewhere or the other, and a whole bunch of buses. A place of much less sophistication and the home of the Mets, the biggest bunch of heart breakers I've ever fallen in love with, admittedly, things do work a bit different in Queens. For example, logic:

Really, city planning? Eight blocks in two streets?

However, there is one thing that Queens thoroughly beats Manhattan out in, and that's in the variety of ethnic food. Long regarded as the most ethnically diverse place in the world, various ethnic neighborhoods exist all over the borough as a result of mass immigration, with Guyanese in Richmond Hill, Jamaicans and South Asians in Jamaica, Latinos in Jackson Heights, Chinese in Flushing, Koreans in Bayside, Greeks and Arabs in Astoria, Albanians in Glendale, Polish in Middle Village...the list goes on. And naturally, restaurants and grocery stores have arrived with these immigrants, offering other New Yorkers the taste of foreign cuisines, and fellow immigrants the taste of home.

So that brings me to last weekend. After crashing at a friend's place in Forest Hills, I woke up on a Sunday morning with the realization that I had not yet written my weekly blog post, and was looking at a horrible weekend subway schedule back to civilization. However, once more, a memory of Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods saved the day:

http://www.travelchannel.com/tv-shows/bizarre-foods/photos/bizarre-foods-america-queens-ny-pictures?page=3

A 24-minute walk from where my friend and I were, we jumped on the R train to 67th Avenue, and walked over to Rokhat Kosher Bakery. This particular section of Queens is called Rego Park, and is a largely residential area with a heavy population of Bukharian Jews, a Russian and Bukhari speaking immigrant group that migrated out of Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union. As we walked deeper into the neighborhood away from Queens Boulevard, there was less and less traffic, and we were soon surrounded by the signature brown apartment buildings so quintessentially Queens.

After about three blocks, we turned the corner to a surprise: a street with a convenience store, a laundromat, and of course, Rokhat Kosher Bakery.

Walking past a group of older Bukharian men chatting animatedly at the front of the store, we were greeted by a harried teenager working at the counter, the sight and smell of an assortment of baked goods, and a rush of warmth from the stoves at the side of the bakery.

After asking the shopkeeper for recommendations, we decided to get two pumpkin patties, two beef patties, and two lamb patties, which came out to a total of $11, so $5.50 each. We also were given a few small containers of "sauce", and a quick look into the tandoor-like oven at the side of the bakery:

After snapping a few pictures, we stepped outside to near the dumpster next to the bakery to dig in. First, the pumpkin patty:

The grated pumpkin was cooked in a sort of curry before being stuffed in crusty dough, which went perfectly with the "sauce" that came with our order, a tangy, watered down sort of marinara sauce.

Next, we tackled the beef patty. This will never beat the time honored Jamaican beef patty I grew up eating, but it was pretty good. Nice solid chunks of beef, albeit dry, mixed in with sautéed onions.

And finally, the lamb bun. This was probably my favorite one of the three; the dough fell apart a bit more with each bite, and the lamb was sautéed perfectly with onions, with an almost sweet flavor to the meat.

And next to our eating area was the entrance to a section of the bakery selling bread and sweeter baked goods:

Already stuffed, we skipped this part of the meal. But next time you're around the Forest Hills/Rego Park area of Queens for whatever strange reason that dragged you out of Manhattan island, try it out for us!

Freda's: Caribbean Food in Manhattan Valley

Every now and then, you discover a restaurant that becomes "that" restaurant. The place where you perpetually end up ordering food from on lazy weekday nights, where you bring out-of-towners to on reunion lunches, and that you suggest as a date destination when you're feeling particularly unoriginal. The reasoning lies somewhere between you being just too lazy to find something new, the fear of change, and of course, the guarantee of a good meal. For me, that restaurant is Freda's Caribbean & Soul Cuisine, a small mom-and-pop West Indian restaurant between 109th Street and Columbus Avenue.

A small and unassuming little operation with a dining space big enough to seat about 20 people, the only two changes that I've seen in my past four years in Harlem has been the installation of couches and a small price hike on the menu.

As a bit of background information, Caribbean food (if one could really generalize the cuisine of the entire Caribbean region) in New York City generally refers to the food of what can be best categorized as the former member countries of the West Indies Federation: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago. (And Guyana, although we'll tackle that in another post) This cuisine has been influenced by the cooking methods of the indigenous people in the region, colonial Europeans, West African slaves, Indian indentured servants, and Chinese contract laborers. At Freda's, these incredibly diverse influences are combined with popular American soul food dishes, such as mac n' cheese and candied yams.

Prices have gone up $1 or $2 in the recent month, but rest assured, the portions provided are more than generous. The lunch special is still about $8, $9, so going during the afternoon is always a treat.

Note: this is an older menu I pulled from http://www.menupages.com/restaurants/fredas-caribbean-soul-cuisine/menu

For this routine visit, I went with the baked chicken with callaloo, beans and rice, and mac and cheese.

As per usual, the callaloo was perfectly stewed, a good foil for the more solid heaping of mac n' cheese and the fall-off-the-bone tender chicken.

My father, one of my go-to eating partners, went for the curried goat, collard greens, carrots and cabbage, and rice and beans.

A notable mention: the collard greens that I've had at Freda's are probably the best I've had anywhere; they're not too salty, and have that great stewed and savory/sweet taste that in this case goes perfect mixed in with nice fatty chunks of goat.

The bottom line? If you want to try really authentic Caribbean food, head over to 993 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10025. The staff is friendly, the food is good, the setting is cozy, and there's always some trashy TV show playing on the flat screens. Hey, I'm not complaining.

Pane con la milza- Sicilian spleen sandwich

Ah, spleen. We've all heard about it, been disgusted by it, and for some resourceful farmers in Tompkins, Saskatchewan, predicted the weather with it. According to "Pig Spleen Website", “Environment Canada has thousands of dollars worth of weather instruments and all I have is a $2.00 pig spleen. I can compete with them and better their accuracy.” Gus claimed 80-90% accuracy. Jeff’s (and Gus') spleens are obtained from southwest Saskatchewan for prediction purposes. The forecast is recommended for a 200 mile radius from where the pig was grown."

I mean, can you really argue with the meteorological expertise of Jeff and Gus?

But unfortunately, most spleen-related discussions end when it comes to the topic of actually eating the blood filtering lymph node. In NYC, one would struggle to find even the most hellbent on nose to tail cooking restaurant serving spleen on their menu. However, here at No Frills NYC, we follow a simple rule taught to me by my mother when I was a child: "No matter how the food looks now, once it goes into your stomach, it all looks the same".

This being said, I came across the idea of cooking pork spleen while shopping with my father at Golden City Supermarket, a Chinese supermarket in Flushing, Queens. As we walked through the offal section to pick up our regular pig ears and tongues, a dark shrink-wrapped package of what appeared to be giant leeches stuck out of the sea of kidneys and livers.

Not too appetizing, I'm sure. After bringing this bloody mess home, I embarked on a search on the internet to find a good recipe involving spleen. Not surprisingly, I couldn't find anything at all, save for a few recipes that just involved boiling the crap out of the meat. And that's when I remembered this section of Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods: Sicily:

With no beef spleen or Sicilian cheese available, I decided to improvise.

You'll need:
1) A pack of pork spleen
2) Some sort of grated Italian cheese (I used Trader Joe's Pecorino Romano Grated)
3) Bread
4) A lemon wedge
5) Lard
6) Ginger

The first thing to do is to scrape off the fat at the back of each spleen. Afterwards, put a pot of salted water on the stove top to boil.

When the water starts to boil, plop the spleens in for about 15 minutes, or until they are fully cooked.

Next, cut and flatten some ginger to go in the water with the spleen. This is the Chinese method of cutting the gamy taste out of meat.

After letting them cook all the way through, take the spleens out and cut them into thin slices about the same size as the slices of gyro meat you would see in a shwarma.

All I need in this life of sin, is me and my Chinese cleaver...

Now here comes the fun part. Grab up your lard (I only have bacon fat, scraped from the pan every morning), and use a few spoonfuls to quickly pan fry the spleens for about two minutes each side. Traditionally, this recipe would involve stewing the spleens in lard for hours, but I went with a more conservative approach to maintain the integrity of my unclogged arteries.

Then, pile a generous heaping of spleen on a couple slices of toasted bread, with a good sprinkling of cheese.

And voilà, there it is! Served with a wedge of lemon, and you have your pane con la milza, sort of. You'd need to be a bit of an adventurous eater to go for this, but it's actually quite good; the sourness of the cheese and lemon goes very well with the taste of the spleen, which can be best described as a cross between between blood cake and liver.

In sum: pork spleen looks a bit off-putting and is probably not suitable for that very special home-cooked dinner date you were planning for your significant other. But it's nutrient packed, tasty if you're into offal, and cheap. So why not?

Streecha: authentic, grandmother-cooked Ukranian food served cafeteria style

I know, I know; it doesn't look like much. Between the trash bin and the air duct underneath the plain restaurant sign resembling more of a lost dog poster you would see taped to a telephone pole and the nondescript door at the bottom of the staircase below the barbershop-esque "Open" sign, this little mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall doesn't exactly scream out "good food". But fret not New Yorkers, this is Streecha, a Ukrainian restaurant staffed by actual Ukrainian grandmothers cooking authentic Eastern European food in a church basement reminiscent of your elementary school's cafeteria.

Frequented mostly by Ukranians and the occasional discerning diner, Streecha's entrance and dining hall is just as elaborate as its storefront:

With walls covered in Roman Catholic symbols and paintings of the occasional Ukrainian poet, the front desk is staffed by a friendly American-Ukrainian woman, with a short and simple menu taped down at the front:

Unfortunately, they were all out of their immensely popular pierogis, so I went with a cup of borscht and a stuffed cabbage, and my friend Anastasia went with a rose jam doughnut. (Yep, that's right. It's a jelly/jam doughnut, with the filling made from rose petals.)

After ordering, we were given our food in less than two minutes, brought to us in paper carnival bowls seated on red cafeteria trays. I first turned to the stuffed cabbage, and after the first bite, my previous disappointment about not having pierogis disappeared. The chewy cabbage exterior covered with a generous heaping of sweet onions sautéed in butter went perfectly with the rice and pork stuffing, with just enough meat to give you the impression that you're eating a pork stuffed cabbage roll, but not so much meat lest you forget the humble Ukrainian farmer traditions behind the dish as a vegetarian meal stuffed solely with rice due to high costs of meat.

To wash down the cabbage roll, I reached to the side for my borsht. This is definitively not fine dining; it's served in the Dixie cup's stepbrother that no one talks about, and the floating bits of onion, carrot, cabbage, and beet give you the feeling that you're knocking back some strange, warm Eastern European version of the cerviche. 

But once again, the Ukranian grandmothers running the kitchen at Streecha came through; the borsht was sweet at the front, but not clawingly so, and then sour, with a rich beet flavor one only tastes in the best of borshts. 

And that leaves the pièce de résistance, the topic of much linguistic debate after John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech and one of the hallmark breakfast meals of the grab-and-go, nine-to-five commuter: the jelly/jam doughnut. In this case, "jam doughnut" would be a more fitting name, but let's not get into semantics. When you bite into it, the powdered sugar gives you a temporary white mustache as you chew through the fluffy, cloud-like pastry. Then you get to the injection of rose petal jam, completing a trifecta of flavors that provides the sweet doughnut taste you were looking for, but not the increased heartbeat you get after finishing a diabetic shock-inducing, overly sweet Dunkin Donuts jelly doughnut. 

You can find this gem tucked away in the East Village on 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue at 33 E 7th Street, open from Friday - Sunday from 10AM to 4PM. And when you go, maybe you can try out the pierogis that weren't available the day I went; the Ukranians who introduced me to this place swear by them.

My father's aged soy pepper sauce recipe

Growing up, I never really had too much at-home exposure to spicy foods. With a Hong Kong-born father and a Taiwanese mother, seasonings were light and flavors subtle, unlike the strong flavors showcased in Szechuan cooking associated with Chinese food in America today.

My father learned this recipe from his mother, and it isn't going to give you the runny nose, sweaty brow, and tongue numbing sort of heat burn that mala does. However, it's a very simple and tasty recipe that goes great with dumplings, noodles, and just about anything else you would add soy sauce to, striking a balance between the natural pepper flavor and the sweetness of soy sauce.

You'll need:
-A bunch of zhitianjiao (指天椒, "facing heaven peppers")
-A bottle of not as salty, somewhat sweet soy sauce

The English name for these peppers is "facing heaven peppers", referring to the way they grow with their tips pointing towards the sky. For whatever the reason, these were the peppers that my father used in this recipe since his adolescent years. If you can find some, I would definitely recommend them; they are much milder than your typical blazing hot Szechuan pepper, so won't be overpowering. However, feel free to use your scotch bonnets or jalapeños instead, but you will probably need much fewer peppers.

You'll also need a soy sauce that has a sweeter flavor, rather than salty. I went with this particular soy sauce brand, which has a sweet mushroom flavor but is still a tad bit saltier than the soy sauce you would get from the sushi boxes at your local supermarket.

Next, you want to roast the peppers over a fire for a bit. The rationale behind this is that the fire would depart some sort of toasted flavor to the sauce.

Chopsticks: the Chinese version of the tongs (and the fork, spoon, knife...)

Then, cut up the peppers into small pieces and drop them directly into the bottle of soy sauce. You should probably pour out some of the soy sauce beforehand into a separate container to have some space for the peppers.

And you're done! Shake up the bottle a bit, and let it sit in your fridge for a while. It tastes better the longer you let it age, so my father normally left it for about a year (the bottle on the left was bottled on 2/24/2013). I would suggest not touching it for about three months, just to let the spice from the peppers soak into the soy sauce. Enjoy!