Welcome or welcome back to Kitchen Table Kibitzing, a community series that posts nightly at 8:00 Eastern. remembrance and nomandates came up with the idea for this series during Netroots Nation 2013.
As we envision it, KTK is a community for those who wish to share part of their evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, interesting videos (hey, palantir!), and so forth. We would also appreciate links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate.
Please note that pie fights will be unwelcome in this community, just as in most other series at DKos. There's lots of space at the rest of the site for fighting with other Democrats, progressives, and liberals, and we don't want those battles dragged into this series.
Finally, readers may notice that most who are posting diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but that definitely does not mean that newcomers will be excluded or unwelcome. We're happy to welcome guests to our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
Since I am still, for one last evening, at the seashore, yet this is "Kitchen Table Kibitzing", I thought I would cheer up my food-pr0n-loving friends and post my meal photos from this trip, featuring seafood that is local to New Jersey (and some that is not, and some food that is not seafood at all!)
If you unaccountably have not been following my every random comment this week, I am staying on Long Beach Island, an 18-mile-long barrier island off the coast of New Jersey that has been my family's preferred "shore" retreat for decades. LBI was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy, although not as badly as the other island to its north (where the roller coaster ended up in the ocean). Nonetheless, there are still homes and businesses struggling to make repairs here, as well as ones that have been or are slated to be demolished entirely; not everyone will be back. Everyone has a storm story just like everyone had a 9/11 story. But: food.
There's a good farm stand and plant nursery on the island, and there are lots of restaurants. There's local sweet corn and tomatoes and blueberries (as well as local pie and crumbcake), but we've been going out a lot more than staying in. I'm a LOT more likely to order seafood here than at home, because it's caught right here and it's seriously fresh. Let's begin!
|
Egg bagel with honey-walnut cream cheese, with coffee. Bageleddi's bakes bagels all morning, and makes their own cream cheese too. Not just, mixes stuff into cream cheese -- makes the cream cheese.
☼
I was disappointed in these panko-crusted fried scallops with wasabi cream sauce, but will not name the culprits. I will say only that once you overcook the scallops so they're tough, all the wasabi in the world cannot conceal that fact.
☼
These crab cakes, on the other hand, were terrific. The first of two good dinners at the Greenhouse Cafe, which is definitely NOT who made those tough scallops.
☼
Breakfast at The Chicken or the Egg involved no seafood! This is the Tuscany omelet, with fresh tomato, basil, and mozzarella plus onion and prosciutto.
☼
At first, I thought maybe The Lobster Claw had changed its name to just "Claw". Then I realized the "Lobster" part of their outside sign had been painted on a big plywood lobster on the roof who had apparently been a casualty of the storm. This was the first place we went that had not managed to get everything fixed up in time for the summer. The kitchen was up and running, and the connected fish market was doing business, but the dining room was an echoing, concrete-floored space with one wall painted. It didn't stop them from serving, and their broiled seafood platter was pretty good. The flounder and scallops and crab are local; the shrimp, not so much. The shrimp were okay, but they were clearly identifiable as "not from around here" when compared with the stuff that was.
☼
Brunch at Subbogie's. Their big plywood octopus is on the leeward side of the building, so maybe that saved him. I had the crabcake BLT with sweet potato fries. I don't know why I'd be surprised that bacon improves even a crabcake, but it does.
☼
This is Wednesday night's dinner, the other good meal at the Greenhouse Cafe. They make penne with vodka sauce and allow you to add various kinds of protein. I picked their large, tender sea scallops.
☼
This morning we went back to the Greenhouse Cafe for breakfast. Here are my Eggs Oscar, just like Eggs Benedict only with crabmeat and asparagus instead of Canadian bacon. Their home fries are also fabulous.
☼
Bonus: my dad's breakfast! Blueberry-banana pancakes with fresh strawberry syrup. He said they were great, and I could see they were bursting with blueberries!
☼
That is all the food I was able to photograph, my dears! I assure you, after the NYC Kossack meetup on Sunday, I will not be seeing, much less eating, a food extravaganza like this for a while! What have you been eating? How do you feel about food pr0n?