Best French Bistro New York

Keith Richards Shepherds Pie Recipe

 

The BADASS COOKBOOK

IT'S COMING SOON 

  

SHEPHERD’S PIE alla KEEF

  Keith Richard’s That Is !!!  

Yes Keef, as in Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, the World’s Greatest Rock-N-Roll Band ever! But you know that. This is the way Keith likes his Shepherds Pie, as does The Dude, and you will too. If it’s good enough for Keef, it’s good enough for the Dude, and you too. Abide!

RECIPE :

 Keith Richards Shepherds Pie  

INGREDIENTS:

  3 pounds Potatoes, peeled and diced
  1 tablespoon Butter Salt & Pepper to taste
  2 large Onions, chopped 2 pounds Ground Beef 2 large Carrots, grated
  2 – 12 oz. cans Beef Broth
  5 tablespoons water 1 tablespoon Cornstarch  

Put potatoes in a large pot of salted water. Bring the water to the boil. Lower to a simmer and cook the potatoes until tender, about 8 minutes.  

Drain potatoes once cooked.  Put cooked, drained potatoes in a large mixing bowl with the butter and season with salt and black pepper. 

Mash potatoes with a potato - masher or whip with an electric mixer. If using a hand potato-masher, mash potatoes with masher, then mix with a wooden spoon until nicely whipped. Heat a large frying-pan. 

Add 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil. Add ground-beef, cook over medium heat for 4 minutes. Add onions, continue cooking for minutes on high heat. Lower heat to low flame and cook 4 minutes more.  Add carrots and beef broth to pan. 

Mix cornstarch with water and add to pan. Cook over low flame for 8 minutes.  Add peas to pan, cook for 1 minute.  Pour Beef Mixture into a glass or ceramic baking dish. Evenly top beef with the mashed potatoes.  

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 12 minutes, then place under the boiler until potatoes get nicely browned. Take care not to burn the potatoes once they are under the broiler.  Let cool slightly for 3 minutes and serve.


   

KEEF'S FAVORITE COOKBOOK

   

GOT ANY KAHLUA ?

aka  The BIG LEBOWSKI COOKBOOK

Best CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES EVER

RECIPE:  WORLDS BEST CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

• 1 1/2 cups All-Purpose Flour 
•  1/2 teaspoon baking soda 
• 4 ounces (1 Stick Butter)
• 1/2 cup Sugar
• 1/2 cup Light Brown Sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
• 8 ounces Best Quality Dark Chocolate Chips
•  
• PREPARATION:
•  
• 1.  Sift together flour and baking soda and set aside. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter until lemony yellow, about 2 minutes. Scrape down sides of bowl and paddle. Add sugar, brown sugar and salt. Continue creaming mixture on medium speed until it is smooth and lump free, about 1 minute. Stop mixer and scrape down sides of bowl and paddle.
• 2.  Add egg and vanilla and beat on low speed for 15 seconds, or until they are fully incorporated. Do not over-beat. Scrape down sides of bowl and paddle.
• 3.  On low speed, add sifted flour mixture. Beat slowly until all of the flour is incorporated. Scrape down sides of bowl. Add chocolate chunks and mix in.
• 3.  Heat oven to 350 degrees with the rack positioned in the lower third of the oven. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment. Spoon heaping teaspoons of dough 2 inches apart onto baking sheets. If not baking right away, remove small handfuls or spoonfuls of dough from mixer and plop them down on the middle of a sheet of parchment or wax paper, creating a log about 1 1/2 inches wide and 12 inches long. Fold parchment over, creating a sausage. Chill for at least 1 hour, preferably overnight. Using a serrated knife, slice chilled dough into 1/3-inch-thick rounds and place them 2 inches apart, in staggered rows, on parchment-lined sheets and proceed. (Dough will keep nicely, tightly wrapped, in the refrigerator for 1 week, or in the freezer for up to 1 month. Thaw frozen dough at room temperature for 30 minutes before slicing.)
• 4.  Bake one sheet at a time for 12 to 15 minutes, until lightly browned, rotating the baking sheet front to back halfway through. Remove from heat and slide parchment off baking sheet and onto a work surface. Allow cookies to cool for at least 5 minutes before serving, or for at least 20 minutes before storing in an airtight container. They will keep for up to 3 days at room temperature.
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New Sicilian Cookbook

Publication of GRANDMA BELLINO 'S ITALIAN COOKBOOK

RECIPES FROM MY SICILIAN GRANDMOTHER

NOW AVAILABLE

Available on Amazon Kindle .. Available in paperback July 31, 2015

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hello! I am pleased to announce the publication of my latest book, Grandma Bellino's Italian Cookbook  -  Recipes From My Sicilian Grandmother ..  It is now out and available on Amazon Kindle, and will be available next week in Paperback , publication Friday July 31, 2015  .. It's been a labor of love to get this one out. Well, they're (my books) all a labor of love, and this one is no exception. The book is comprised of recipes from my Sicilian Grandmother Giuseppina Bellino who left Lercara Friddi Sicily with her husband Philipo (my maternal Grandfather) in 1904 for the shores of New York and a new a better life in America .. My maternal grandparents Philipo and Giuseppina settled in in the Yorkville section of Manhattan and lived and worked there for a few years before moving to the Italian enclave of Lodi, New Jersey where my grandfather Philipo set up a shoemaker shop on Main Street in Lodi .. My grandfather worked hard and he and his wife Giuseppina had five children; my mother Lucia, her sister Lilly, and their three brothers Frank, Tony, and James .. My grandfather worked hard, but never made much money .. Often times their low earnings reflected in the family meals which where heavy on Soups and Pasta, and not all that much meat or fish on its own, never-the-less the Bellino's had a good healthy life .. My grandmother had wonderful recipes from back in Lercara Friddi, and she made friends in Lodi with women who came from Abruzzo, Napoli, Lazio, and Calabria and had regional recipes of their own. The ladies became friends and talked about and swapped the local recipes, so although this book is made mostly of Sicilian recipes from Giuseppina, there are Neapolitan recipes and one from Calabria, and Abruzzo as well. There are also recipes from Giuseppina's offspring and grandchildren like myself, my cousin Tony and my sister Barbara. The dishes and recipes in this book are filled and come from love, and do hope that people will cook and enjoy this eclectic collection of Sicilian and other italian recipes, some that are popular and well known, along with others that are rarer and less well know, yet wonderful never-the-less. I sincerely hope you all enjoy Grandma Bellino's Italian (Sicilian) Cookbook, the stories and recipes within.

Daniel

The BELLINO 'S

Phillipo, Lucia, Tony, Giuseppina

Lodi, New Jersey

1941

SUNDAY SAUCE 

WHEN ITALIAN-AMERICANS COOK

by Daniel Bellino - Zwicke

Did Anthony Bourdain Invent Food Porn

Tony

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Anthony Bourdain

KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

The BOOK THAT MADE TONY FAMOUS

BUT DID HE INVENT FOOD PORN ???

Well Tony popularized the term FOOD PORN, and did so without a doubt more than any one single person in this World. Yes Tony did, and is still doing so, with his wonderful Food Shows (Food Porn) : NO RESERVATIONS, PATS UNKNOWN, The LAYOVER and other Bourdain Shows, all absolutely wonderful, and as only Tony could do,     "Fugettabout it FOOD NETWORK, you can Only DREAM of Doing something as Masterful as Mr. Bourdain." Keep Dreaming ..

So Who Did INVENT FOOD PORN, you want to know? Well a writer named Rosalind Coward in her book FEMALE DESIRE (1984)  ...

Here you go, the passage Mis Coward wrote, using the term Food Porn for the first time in the History of the World ..

"Cooking food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude. It is a way of expressing affection through a gift... That we should aspire to produce perfectly finished and presented food is a symbol of a willing and enjoyable participation in servicing others. Food pornography exactly sustains these meanings relating to the preparation of food. The kinds of picture used always repress the process of production of a meal. They are always beautifully lit, often touched up." 

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ANTHONY BOURDAIN on The LINE at LES HALLES

NEW YORK , NY

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FOE GRAS

TONY'S FOOD PORN

PAPAYA KING HOT DOGS

One of TONY'S FAVORITES

FOOD PORN

TONY'S FAVORITE FOOD PORN

A BOW of NOODLES in SOUTH EAST ASIA

PHO in VIETNAM

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BARBECUED PIG

PORK

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TONY'S IDEA of HEAVEN !!

FOOD PORN

THE BADASS COOKBOOK

SECRET RECIPES

 

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FOOD PORN  - Lust for the Gastronomic, from Zola to Cookbooks ...

by Anthony Bourdain 2001   Food porn, the glorification of food as a substitute for sex, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Nor, perhaps, is the "objectification" of food: displays or descriptions of food -- and its preparation -- for an audience that has no intention of actually cooking or eating any of it. Few people leafing through that ultimate volume of chef porn, the unspeakably lush, jaw-droppingly beautiful "French Laundry Cookbook," would ever attempt to re-create its recipes. We keep it on a special place on our bookshelves, safely away from any food that might mark its seductive and colorful photographs, as our parents might once have kept Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" or "The Olympia Reader" away from general reading. Like the best of pornography, the best of food porn depicts beautiful "objects" arranged in ways one might never have previously considered; star chefs, like the porn stars before them, doing things on paper which few amateurs would ever try at home.

If early works about sex sought to appeal to a sense of yearning, a longing for physical gratification, so did Emile Zola's 1873 foodie masterpiece, "The Belly of Paris," which places its starving hero at the epicenter of French food, the Parisian central marketplace of Les Halles. In page after page of lavishly detailed descriptions, the line between sex and food becomes permeable, the charms of charcuterie, fish, meat and vegetables threatening to supplant sex entirely. Among wildly enthusiastic accounts such as "surging piles [of vegetables] akin to hurrying waves, this river of verdure rushing along the roadway like an autumn torrent . . . tender violet, blush rose, and green yellow" comes this bodice-ripping vision of a pork store:

"There was a wealth of rich, luscious, melting things. Down below, jars of preserved sausage-meat were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these, small plump, boned hams, golden with their dressings of toasted bread crumbs and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Next came larger dishes, some containing preserved Strasbourg tongues, enclosed in bladders colored a bright red and varnished so that they looked quite sanguineous beside the pale sausages . . . [T]here were black puddings coiled like harmless snakes, healthy looking chitterlings piled up two by two, meat, minced and sliced, slumbered beneath lakes of melting fat . . . [F]rom a bar overhead strings of sausages and saveloys of various sizes hung down symmetrically like cords and tassels, while in the rear fragments of intestinal membranes showed like lacework, like some guipure of flesh." While Zola's prose might well inspire tumescence, I doubt that its effect on reader behavior differed much from a return visit to a favored passage in "The Story of 'O.' " It's as hard to imagine that readers of the former rushed out and began assembling the ingredients to make boudin noir or tongue en gelee as it is to imagine readers of the latter went to purchase a corset or a riding crop. In both cases, it is the voyeuristic aspect that appeals, not the prospect of real blood and meat, nor real tangles of sweaty limbs.         


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New York Best Pizza DiFara

DiFara Pizza 

Dom DeMarco

The MASTER

"Yes," Eating Pizza Made by The Maestro DOM DeMARCO

Is a Religious Experience !!!

Much has been said of the now famed Pizzeria (DiFarra Pizza) on Avenue J in Brooklyn, New York the Capital of Thee Best Pizza in the whole United States of America, bar-none, even Manhattan. Brooklyn lays claim to the Top two Pizzerias in the country, the top of the list 1 and 2, number 1, The Best and number 2, the second best. Well no, I don't know if I should put it that way, as it sound s as one is better than the other, which is not ht e case, as they are both equally good, equally Great and equally the Best Pizza and the Best Pizzerias in the United States, though they are are little different than one another. The Pizza at both Totonno's on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York and Di Farra Pizza on Avenue J in Brooklyn are both otherworldly specimens of some the Finest Pizza on other and the Undisputed Best Pizza in America.

Wow, got off on a tangent about both Di Farra and Totonno's when I just intended to talk about Di Farra Pizza, Dom DeMarco the Maestro of Di Farra's and the Religious experience that it is to go there, watch Dominic masterfully make Pizza after glorious Pizza (without the help of anyone else), to watch in awe and anticipation and Salivation til you finally get yours (after about a hour or hour and a half wait), you hold it in your hand like a precious baby, and then to sink your teeth into it, savoring each wondrous bite after the other. "Yes," it is truly a religious experience, that is, if you are a great lover of this wonderful invention, created in Napoli, spread throughout the the Italian Peninsular and then across the Atlantic to America from Italian Immigrants where Gennaro Lombardi opened the First Pizzeria in America on Prince Street in New York City some 100 years ago or so.

Back to Di Farra and Pizzaiolo Extraordinaire, Mr. Dominic DeMarco. It is Dominic that makes Di Farra what it is, it certainly isn't the Pizzeria itself which is ultra plain and even appalling to some. Mr. DeMarco's pizzas are just about as close to absolute perfection in the Pizza Making World, a world in which New York City excels and has only one rival in Naples, Italy and the whole of Italy itself. Mr. De Marco has the magic touch, with perfect dough, the perfect balance of ingredients, tomato and other ingredient ratio to cheese, and this include Mr. Demarcos judicious use of Olive Oil which is right-on and a little magic touch that whoever complains about it, just does not know there Pizza and Italian Food on a whole. We Italians love our olive oil. And those who complain are unaware that it is a condiment that adds the final last touch to many dishes before they are eaten. Dominic knows this and should not be discourage against his generous use of it by those who do not understand the proper essence of the Italian Table. So please, keep your traps shut, if you don't like it don't eat it, this countries finest examples of the Pizza Art.

And on to the religious experience of Di Farra, Dom DeMarco and the mans artistry with Pizza. There is nothing quite like it in the entire Pizza World. There does not exist, to my knowledge any place in the world that has an elderly man making a hundred plus Pizzas a day in a place that has endless lines, day and night. Pizza that are so perfect, words can not describe People line up for greatness and artistry, and for a couple of slices of the most marvelous pizza this side of Naples, and to watch this passionate little old man work his heart out, not getting, not allowing anyone else to make a pie at his beloved Pizzeria. The man is elderly. He's worked his whole life. He makes such a magical thing that people line up each and every day to see him and eat one of his many masterpieces. With business like this, he could hire to other Pizzaiolos to help him, doubling or tripling his business and and financial intake. He could hire two guys and make pizza aloing with them, or sit back and get three guys to do it. At his age, he's entitled to. But know, Dom DeMarco loves what he does, he loves his Pizza, each and every one that passes that counter and into thousands of appreciative hands. The man feels that no one else can make a Pizza the way he does and wants to serve to his customers. No one else who has his skills, his passion and love for the Pizza, thus he does it all himself. And this my friends is the reason that going to Di Farra's to watch Dominic the maestro in action, all by himself while hundreds of people line up every day, waiting an hour and a half to two hours just to get a Pizza (not just any old Pizza mind you). "It's a Religious Experience." Truly! A show and there is nothing like it in the World, Dom DeMarco, a man and his Pizza, America's Best, and something to rival that other World Pizza Capital, Napoli.

by Daniel Bellino Zwicke

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Worlds Best Chocolate Chip Cookie

 

RECIPE:  WORLDS BEST CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

• 1 1/2 cups All-Purpose Flour 
•  1/2 teaspoon baking soda 
• 4 ounces (1 Stick Butter)
• 1/2 cup Sugar
• 1/2 cup Light Brown Sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
• 8 ounces Best Quality Dark Chocolate Chips
•  
• PREPARATION:
•  
• 1.  Sift together flour and baking soda and set aside. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter until lemony yellow, about 2 minutes. Scrape down sides of bowl and paddle. Add sugar, brown sugar and salt. Continue creaming mixture on medium speed until it is smooth and lump free, about 1 minute. Stop mixer and scrape down sides of bowl and paddle.
• 2.  Add egg and vanilla and beat on low speed for 15 seconds, or until they are fully incorporated. Do not over-beat. Scrape down sides of bowl and paddle.
• 3.  On low speed, add sifted flour mixture. Beat slowly until all of the flour is incorporated. Scrape down sides of bowl. Add chocolate chunks and mix in.
• 3.  Heat oven to 350 degrees with the rack positioned in the lower third of the oven. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment. Spoon heaping teaspoons of dough 2 inches apart onto baking sheets. If not baking right away, remove small handfuls or spoonfuls of dough from mixer and plop them down on the middle of a sheet of parchment or wax paper, creating a log about 1 1/2 inches wide and 12 inches long. Fold parchment over, creating a sausage. Chill for at least 1 hour, preferably overnight. Using a serrated knife, slice chilled dough into 1/3-inch-thick rounds and place them 2 inches apart, in staggered rows, on parchment-lined sheets and proceed. (Dough will keep nicely, tightly wrapped, in the refrigerator for 1 week, or in the freezer for up to 1 month. Thaw frozen dough at room temperature for 30 minutes before slicing.)
• 4.  Bake one sheet at a time for 12 to 15 minutes, until lightly browned, rotating the baking sheet front to back halfway through. Remove from heat and slide parchment off baking sheet and onto a work surface. Allow cookies to cool for at least 5 minutes before serving, or for at least 20 minutes before storing in an airtight container. They will keep for up to 3 days at room temperature.
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          [caption id="attachment_520" align="aligncenter" width="390"] BLUTO & POPEYE[/caption]