Grab the Good Life with Rocco DiSpirito
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October 17, 2005 - WOR 10/17/05
WOR 10/17/05
***IMPORTANT***
Rocco's Cookware has RETURNED to QVC! Please go to:
ROCCO'S KITCHEN
Grab The Good Life everyone! It's Monday and we have a great show lined up for you today! Ted Allen, culinary guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and author of his first book "The Food You Want to Eat" will be here!
Plus: Abby Hitchcok from Camaje Bistro will be here to talk about Dining in the Dark!
And we have Adam Platt, Restaurant critic for NY magazine on the show!
And you all at 800-321-0710! The show is NOT the same without you!
So summer is NOT over! well it is but I have to say I was in Devin Pennsylvania and it is so beautiful. I was there because I was shooting a commercial at QVC for my new book. So my weekend was great but Mike our producer all had some fun at this place he goes to right?
Mike Fig: Yes, I go to this place called 5 Burros, it really has the best Tex Mex and my buddy Ronan bartends and we have a great time. The food is perfect and the place is authentic. It is located in Forest Hills Queens so check it out!
5 Burro Cafe
72-05 Austin Street
Forest Hills, NY
Phone: 718-544-2984
greatfood@5burrocafe.com
Rocco: I used to work on Austin Street at this bagel shop where I used to mix the cream cheese and it was so hard to mix for a scrawny little runt like me.
Mike: You developed your muscles there?
Rocco: hmm..not really...but anyways. So listen I have been telling you guys about this pasta I have been working with at home. I have found the Linguini Fini Dececco is a nice all around nice pasta because it is wide enough to capture sauce and thin enough to cook quickly. Plus it is easy to eay. I was working with some store bought pestos, and you know that Pesto just means paste, not just a condimente made with basil. Listen to this one:
Bacon and Shitake Mushroom Pesto with Pasta: I was working with a Basil Pesto with lemon in it. So I had some left over, and I decided to get some thick sliced bacon (smoked and cured) and vut it up in large chunks. I added a lot of it to my lemon basil pesto and let it simmer and render, added some shitaki mushrooms (which were cleaned and ready to go when I bought them) and I threw it together with the pasta and it added a whole new life to the dish. The bacon and shitaki was amazing.
Chili Pepper Pesto: Then I was making a bacon and chili pepeprs (in jars, pickled and hot) mix here. I cut the chili peppers in half, add onions, tomato puree and peppers to the bacon.
You get this incredible mixture of smoked bacon, salt, vinegar and spice from the spicey peppers! Try this out there is so much you can do!
Let's welcome Adam Platt to the Show!
Rocco: Hey Adam what's shaking!
Adam: Very good Rocco.
Rocco: So I have been dying to get to Thor and wanted to know what you thought of it!
Thor
107 Rivington St. near Essex St.
212-475-2600
Adam: The name of this unlikely new restaurant in the Rivington Hotel is an acronym derived from the words The Hotel On Rivington. Thor also happens to be the Norse god of thunder, of course, and like so much on the Lower East Side these days, the Rivington, and the restaurant in it, seems to have been flung down among the old bodegas and unisex hairstyling parlors like some thunderbolt from the sky. With the opening of Thor, that's changed. The restaurant is the brainchild of Kurt Gutenbrunner, who runs the excellent Austrian restaurant Wallsé in the West Village and Café Sabarsky on the Upper East Side. Gutenbrunner is a classicist who bathes his recipes in a kind of refined, Greenmarket lightness, and at Thor, his biggest project to date, he lets his imagination run wild.
Rocco: What was your impression of the decor?
Adam: The big, airy room is decorated by the Dutch designer Marcel Wanders in sleek, Euro-modern fashion. The wallpaper is patterned with tiny kaleidoscopic black, white, and yellow squares, and the rows of black café tables are set with tiny white calla lilies. A steady nightclub beat thrums ceaselessly from the dimly lit lounge area, and dinner proceeds under a giant skylight, through which you can observe the fire escapes of ancient tenement buildings, lit up in the night sky like old Greek ruins.
Rocco: So how was the food?
Adam: My first meal began with a barrage of cold plates (there are nine in all), including a variety of decent salads (the best being romaine with white anchovies and a poached egg), fresh chunks of hamachi tuna (mingled with slices of even fresher tomatoes), and a fairly standard wheel of foie gras terrine garnished with slices of peach. There are Kumamoto oysters, decked with diced tuna and American caviar; a very nice red-beet terrine encased in a chiffon of goat cheese and horseradish; and a fluffy dome of white-tomato mousse with a thin tuile at its bottom, which seems to dissolve like meringue on the tip of your tongue. If you're wondering whether there are many other places to get white-tomato mousse on Rivington Street, the answer would be no, not really. If you hunger for more starch, there's also a crackly potato rösti among the side dishes, and a smooth risotto folded in a professional, uptown manner, with mushrooms, and a rich rendition of that Austrian specialty, quark spaetzle, speckled with Greenmarket chives. At many ambitious restaurants, dinner tends to start off ambitiously, then slowly fizzle as things progress, but at Thor the opposite seems to be true.
Rocco: So you sound like you enjoyed it then!
Adam: It may have a downtown name, but don't let that fool you. Like lots of the food at Thor, it's as good as anything you'll find uptown.
Rocco: Thanks for being here Adam!
Adam: See ya next week!
Let's welcome Ted Allen to the show!
See Ted on his book tour
New York, NY
October 19th
7 PM, Barnes & Noble, 675 6th Avenue,
(212) 727-1227
Talk and Book Signing
Rocco: Ted it's so great to finally get you up here!
Ted Allen: Thanks Rocco!
Rocco: So is this your first cook book?
Ted: Yes - by myself. I have written a bunch of books for Esquire but this is my frist one. This one was tough. Do you constantly write?
Rocco: At leats one a year and the recipes just keep increasing, 5 Minute Flavor has 175 recipes.
Ted: Wow - I was nervous that when it came out the recipes wouldn't work out, but they were tested out by Food and Wine magazine and they said they were perfect.
Rocco: So how are you balancing filming Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and writing this book.
Ted: I had help from Cythia Linus a great recipe developer who helped write it while I was filming. These recipes are almost completely new -easy recipes with fresh ingredients, a very interesting range of food from Mac and Cheese to fried chicken to ...
Rocco: What's your Fried Chicken secret? Cause you know everyone has one...
Ted: I love buttermilk. So it is buttermilk, cumen and some cayan.
Rocco: So I was on your show recently and we made a shrimp dish, do you have any shrimp dishes?
Ted: It was an amazing dish and here is my shrimp idea: grilled shrimp and fennel with olives.
Rocco: So you started out as a journalist in Chicago right?
Ted: Yes - I got a job at Chicago Magazine as a general editor guy but they started sending me on food related stories. One time I had to review Charlie Trodder's new book when it came out, which was a revolution in cook books. We tried to cook his recipes but they were so difficult.
Rocco: So let's talk about your book.
Ted: On a scale of one to ten, the difficulty is about a 3. Some of the recipes are fast (they can be cooked in 20 minutes). We show you easy recipes with chicken breast for dinner. They are easy fast recipes.
Rocco: When did you get into cooking?
Ted: Well when I got into my 30's I didn;t do the bar thing so much, so I decided if I learn to cook people will come to hang out with me and it worked!
Rocco: So let's take some calls and welcome Abby to the show Ted!
Ted: Sure!
Let's welcome Abby Hitchcock to the show!
CamaJe Bistro
85 Macdougal St
New York, NY 10012
Phone: 212-673-8184
Rocco: hey Abby it was great to see you at that horse event your dad runs over the summer!
Abby: That was so much fun! But I'm not into horse that much.
Ted: Carson from Queer Eye loves horses, he rides them all the time!
Rocco: Abby so when is your cookbook coming out?
Abby: When I can get time I have so much going on!
Darlene from Long Island: Abby I love Camaje and you're so sweet - I took a knife course there and it was so much fun, thank you!
Abby: No problem and thank you so much!
Darlene: And Ted can I ask you about Cayan, you daid you used it in your friend chicken. Do you use Cayan Pepper or Cayan from Queer Eye!
Rocco: Hahahaha - too funny!
Ted: He's pretty hot.
Rocco: You want his phone number Darlene?
Ted: It's great when people come up to you and say Hey great show, hwo do I get a hold of Cayan.
Dave in New Jersey: I'm coming to dining in the dark tonight Abby, we are hesitant on how it's going to work, so how does it work?
Abby: You are blind folded outside so you never get to see the inside -
Rocco: Saves you a lot of money on the decor! Now the blind fold you are going to where I have here, it's very dark!
Abby: Yep - what this does is makes people concentrate on the flavors and smells. And never fear, no one breaks any glasses or anything!
That's all for today, see you tomorrow!
