Part 1 the morning after, while eating a sausage, egg, and cheese everything bagel from Bergen Bagels Last night, I had the pleasure, privilege, and audacity to eat at a Brooklyn restaurant named Aska . I know it's cliche to refer to a fancy restaurant meal as a life-changing experience, but this was straight up paradigm-shattering. I've written before about food being a medium of communication, about how I strive to reduce food waste as much as I can, about sharing our cultures and stories with each other through the meals we create, but seeing how Chef Fredrik Berselius is able to do this at such an intricate, elegant, and elevated level is both humbling and inspiring. The experience started before the first bite. I walked into the 10 table restaurant, and they knew me by name. I was shown to my table (right in the middle of the place, looking directly into the open kitchen), and they even pulled my chair out for me and pushed it up under me. I was a little uncomfortable with...
Now y'all know I love to experiment, and I generally go into my experiments with a plan, an experimental design, if you will. But after playing for a few days with squid and not royally fucking anything up, I was feeling a little restless, so I decided to just say "yes" to whatever popped into my head. Dry fried ginger, pattypan squash, and red onion? Sure, that sounds like a good combo. Purple sweet potato, shishitos, and sweet onion dry fried? Why not? What if I dump some some butter into that ginger/squash/red onion pan? I bet that will taste good. How about I dust some chopped squid with salt and oat flour and squirt it with some fresh lemon juice? I'm sure that will be fine. And I bet what will be even better will be tossing that squid into the ginger pan. That's when I remembered how much I loved that squid that was cooked low and slow. Unfortunately, I was out of white wine, so I looked in my fridge and saw some high pulp Simply Orange orange juice. I poure...