Turkey in the Smoker, 12 degrees to go, 16:40 PST.
Thanksgiving 2009
Dubrow’s Cafeteria
Dubrow’s Cafeteria, 515 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY, circa 1983
Red Apple Rest
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.
Joseph 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.“
Pork and Leek Dumplings
I saw Anthony 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.
Spaghetti Tree
There seem to be a lot of lame April Fools jokes on the internets today, but he Spaghetti Harvest story wasn’t, when it first came out in 1957. Things were different then.
I remember seeing the US rebroadcast of the story when it aired in 1957. It was originally produced by the BBC television series, Panorama; it seemed plausible at the time.