A Leslie Wong Blog

Spot Prawns are the largest shrimp on the west coast of North America. I stuck a ruler in the photograph at the left so you can see that these shrimp are no shrimps. They are over 8 inches (20 cm) long.

The Spot Prawn (Pandalus platyceros) have four white spots on the abdominal segments – you can see one of them in the photo near the top of the first segment. A few of these happen to have roe, also.

According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, “Spot prawns change sex as they grow. They spend the first part of their lives as males, then change into females.”

As with many of the aquatic species at the aquarium, they also make good eatin’.

16:40 PST.

Dubrow’s Cafeteria, 515 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY, circa 1983

On my drives from New York City to the Catskills to go fishing on the Beaverkill River, I always took Route 17, because it was a little more interesting.

Off the George Washington Bridge, I’d take Route 4 in New Jersey and then NJ 17 near the Garden State Plaza. Once I crossed back into New York near Suffern, the surroundings started to change from urban to rural.

On Route 17 in Southfields, New York, was The Red Apple Rest. I probably first went by there in the late 70’s. I took this photograph around 1979. The Red Apple Rest closed in 2006.

Josepth Berger at the NY Times wrote about the Red Apple Rest’s location: “What made the Red Apple so essential a summertime port of call was not so much its food as its location. Before the New York State Thruway opened in 1956, the ride up to the mountains along the old Route 17 could take four or five hours and the Red Apple Rest was almost exactly halfway. While there were three or four other pit stops, the Red Apple, watched over by its founder, Reuben Freed, became the place to go.”

I saw Tony Bourdain’s show where he was chowing down on soup dumplings at the Nanxiang Xiaolong Mantou Dian, a restaurant in Shanghai.

It made me hungry and reminded me of the time when my mom and I went to Shanghai.

My mom and my two aunts (her two sisters) made dumplings one night for twelve of us. It was a labor intensive process because there weren’t any dumpling wrappers from the store nor a Cuisinart to make the dough in 5 seconds. They kneaded the dough and then rolled it out into wrappers. The dumplings were perfect.

That’s what I thought of when I was walking by a freezer case at 99 Ranch and saw these Pork and Leek Mini Buns. My brain connected back to an event I could grasp. I also hoped these wouldn’t be dried out inside like the other ones I bought once. These were about one third the size of the ones my family made but they were juicy. I’d buy them again and not just for the memories.

There seem to be a lot of lame April Fools jokes on the internets today, but this one wasn’t, when it first came out in 1957. Things were different then.

I may have first seen the Spaghetti Tree when it first aired in 1957; it seemed plausible at the time.

Besides being a major sporting event, I look at the Superbowl as a yearly opportunity to pull out the DeLonghi deep fryer and fry everything in sight. The day before, I go the supermarket and buy everything that is fryable.

A couple of days ago, the NY Times, published an article on the Bacon Explosion and for the first time in 19 years, I decided to give the DeLonghi a rest. But The Times seems more concerned with the blogging phenomena, I’m more concerned with pork, so I went to BBQ Addicts for the recipe. The simplicity of the Bacon Explosion pushed me over the edge. Four ingredients and four pounds of pork. How can you go wrong?

The ingredients:

2 pounds thick cut bacon
2 pounds Italian sausage
1 jar of your favorite barbeque sauce
1 jar of your favorite barbeque rub

The most difficult part is the bacon weave and keeping yourself from eating the pound of cooked bacon you’re supposed to put inside the roll.

MookiBlaylock over at digg.com writes, “Joey Chestnut has reclaimed the top spot as winner of the annual hot dog eating contest in Coney Island after first tying with arch rival Takeru Kobayashi in a 10-minute chow-down and then beating him in a five-dog eat-off.The men tied at 59 frankfurters in 10 minutes, before being made to gobble another five dogs in a last-minute tiebreaker.“

read more | digg story

(Photograph courtesy of Vidiot)

Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan.

I found this photograph by Bernice Abbott (1898-1991) at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, whose image database was “developed to provide free and open online access to thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of The Library”. You can even order prints.

In the late 80’s, I ate at the last Automat in Manhattan at 42nd and Third and by then it was tired. I like the more advanced technology of Kaiten-zushi (conveyor belt sushi) anyway. You don’t have to get up to retrieve your food – kinda like dim sum without people.