New York Street Food: Korilla BBQ

So if you read this article the other day, maybe Korilla BBQ would have caught your eye. I happened to be near where they park their truck on Mondays, and I had their bulgogi burrito one week and their pork tacos (below) the next. Korilla, according to their story, is “a portmanteau of Korean and Grill.” Yeah, kind of. Except what’s the a doing on the end? As far as I was concerned, it was about a gorilla, maybe a Korean one, but their mascot appears to be a slightly angry version of Tony the Tiger. According to Wikipedia, “the tiger replaces the lion as King of Beasts in cultures of eastern Asia, representing royalty, fearlessness, and wrath.” OK, fine, and I guess that explains the cartoon tiger’s scowl. It doesn’t explain why you get Korean BBQ served inside a burrito or tacos, but that’s kind of besides the point. What matters is that it/they are delicious. The burrito’s kind of small for $7, but actually I don’t even know what $7 is worth anymore. That was a lot of money for lunch when I was a lad, but it seems pretty normal in New York now, and it is good, though not a patch on Luardo’s on Whitecross Street in London. It’s fun to get kimchi in a burrito, and the sticky rice and bulgogi were delicious, but I just missed the black beans and guacamole. The tacos, on the other hand, were outstanding. You get three of them, and they are double-wrapped to make sure they don’t disintegrate under the weight of all the meat and goodies you get on top. That thing on the left is a spicy and delicious pickle – it’s huge! These tacos aren’t enormous either (about two big bites each) but they’re extremely satisfying. If the orange van with the tiger and the dudes who all talk like Leo Fatzpatrick from Kids while they blast trance music under an overpass and treat your lunch like a new designer drug that’s going to blow your puny mind and the three tacos for $7 came by once a week, I’d definitely eat there often.

The van:

The tacos:


Really good.

The Contos

One of our number has another blog, in which he chronicles meals which include a fried egg on them, it's called 'put an egg on it!'. We noticed early on that one of his favourite places to put an egg is a vegetable stir-fry with noodles. When I first saw this I thought he was flat outta his mind, then I tried it and I realised he is a genius. This dish is now a staple in our household, and in honour of him we call it 'The Contos'. We ate it last friday:


(that isn't a super orange yoke, but a dash of chilli/ginger/garlic sauce - it was gooooood)

Put a tortilla chip on it, Dad!

Fatherhood, and the attendant exhaustion from sleep deprivation, can make you do weird things.

Case in point:

Take this delicious Swedish treat. You can eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or as a snack at ANY time of day or night:



DAY: Sunday lunchish. (My breakfast, Dad’s late morning snack. He’d already been up several hours by this point looking after his two babies.)



NIGHT: Next day, ca.11PM. Just back from the airport. That cheese didn’t stand a chance of making it to the next day! Note the delicious Swedish smoked porter. It is at this point that I cannot resist showing my haul of Swedish treats, even though my camera battery was dead and I couldn’t hold my cell phone still because I was so excited:



Crappy pic. But so awesome!

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I was enjoying my first snacks of the day when Dad went back to the kitchen and reemerged with last night’s guacamole-delivering vehicles. He then proceeded to crumble them over his snack:



Also we were drinking coffee:


Hey, it’s not the first time this blog has gotten freaky with the sandwiches. And that Swedish cookbook has loads of weird and awesome sandwiches, including this sandwich gateau! So get over it. Dad says it’s awesome.

The Pasta Papers

Yes, yes, more pasta. So what I’m drunk. On pasta.

This recipe is (again) courtesy of Mr Slater, with whom I have beef as a result of a dastardly plum cake recipe, but you’ll see what I mean as soon as I can sort out all those photos. This is fast, easy, and delicious, and it’s a perfect way to use up all those cherry tomatoes you bought because they were on sale and are now dangerously ripe.

Pop your tomatoes in a large baking tin with a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and drizzle the whole lot with e.v.o.o. Grill them until they blacken. Seriously. Not charred all over, but in some places the skin must be black. While this is happening, boil your pasta in A LOT of water, and make sure that that water is adequately salted. Nothing spoils pasta like a lack of salt in the cooking water.

When the tomatoes are burnt, mash them up a bit with the back of a wooden spoon and pour in some double cream and a handful of torn basil. Stir it all around, salt and pepper it, and grate over some parmesan liberally. You can probably skip the double cream if you want, but why would you want that?

The best vegetarian bacon pasta ever!

OK, so this was a total accident, which is why the photographic evidence is so poor. Or lacking, rather. This was Saturday night’s dinner and was so good that I couldn’t stop laughing with pleasure and rocking back and forth as I ate it. Seriously. It’s that amazingly good. Also, it’s incredibly simple. This is what you will need:

Half a red onion (preferably one that’s been sitting open in the refrigerator for a few days)
Half a red pepper (ditto)
Half (in fact, less, maybe a third?) a thing of mascarpone (ditto)
Dried oregano
Dried, crushed red chilies

Chop the onion and pepper and, while the pasta is boiling, sauté in extra virgin olive oil. Add the oregano and chilies. When the pasta is just about done, take the pepper and onion off the flame and add the mascarpone with a bit of the pasta water to loosen it. Drain the pasta and toss it in the pan, stirring it all around and coating it with the mascarpone mix. I ate the first bowl without parmesan because I didn’t think I could handle that much pleasure. By the second bowl my head was exploding and the parmesan was like a rocket of DMT up my spine and into my brain.

It tasted like it had bacon in it, but it’s completely vegetarian. Maybe you have to wait until everything is just about to go off. I definitely sniffed the mascarpone several times before using it and thought about throwing it away all together. Boy am I glad I didn’t. Do this recipe and die.

Sweet, sweet superfood...

I say potato, you say potatoe. You cannot spell.

Here is a delicious thing:



Scrub your sweet potatoes but leave the skin on. Cut ’em into big chunks. These were kind of unwieldy, but I like that. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt, pepper, and chili powder. Don’t be scared of the chili powder – it gets into the skin and gives a depth of flavor that I cannot begin to describe here. [Imagine licking a brick from a pizza oven.] Shake it all about and bang it in the oven for twenty minutes on hot. After twenty minutes, throw in a sliced onion, stir about, and leave for another twenty, twenty-five minutes.



Add fresh baby spinach. Washed. Thoroughly. Do you know how many bugs come out in the second rinse?


Crumble some feta. Never enough feta. And more pepper.

I forgot the kalamata olives, but boy would they have been good here.

Fourth of Juillet

Hamburger + Boursin = oh so delicious.

Philip vs the Chefs 1: Nigel

In which I try to replicate some glorious dishes from famous kitchen folk.

Up first, a recipe from Nigel Slater, from The Kitchen Diaries. The book itself is a gorgeous object, especially the endpapers. Go get yourself a copy if you don’t have one already. This recipe is a bit perverse, because it combines ingredients that I’d never considered putting together. I’d had prosciutto e melone, but before reading this I would never have mixed melon and mozzarella, nor lemon juice and mozzarella, nor olive oil and melon. Put it all together, though, and it’s extraordinary.

His version:



My version:



side by side (why not? I took the picture, but yes, it is a bit redundant):


It was a hot summer day when I made this and I was sweating by the time I finished slicing up the melon and tearing up the mozzarella. I was so excited I had to stop and get my camera and when I took the first bite I couldn’t believe how fantastically good it was. I totally burst it against my palate fine.

If you want to do it yourself, get a ripe (verging on the overripe) cantaloup; some prosciutto crudo; a ball of mozzarella (di bufala, if possible); juice from an unwaxed, handpicked, organically grown lemon complete with stem and leaves; olive oil that has been pressed between the toes of a virgin, extracted only on the first and third Thursdays of alternate months except during a new moon, vernal equinox, or postal strike; Lake Retba salt; and a pinch o’ parsley. Mix it all together and serve on a bed of wild greens.