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Notes from the Weekend: June 27
Notes from the Weekend is a Monday feature that sees the members of Team Meal Ticket compiling all the food/drink highlights uncovered during prime eatin' time, Friday to Sunday.
Notes from the Weekend: June 27
Notes from the Weekend is a Monday feature that sees the members of Team Meal Ticket compiling all the food/drink highlights uncovered during prime eatin' time, Friday to Sunday. Consider this a place for good deals, great dishes, wicked cocktails, recipe triumphs (and tragedies), bizarro conversations and more. We're eager to share our notes, but especially excited to read yours.We encourage you to leave notes from YOUR weekend in the comments. Have at it! (View past NFTW installments at citypaper.net/notes.)
Adam Erace: AE
Drew Lazor: DL
Jessica Leung: JL
Esther Martin: EM
Nicole Rossi: NR
Breakfasted at Cafe Estelle (444 N. Fourth St.) for the second Friday in a row. The garden we told you about last week is really looking good, almost as good as this breakfast pizza topped with potatoes, provolone, egg and guanciale. —AE
Friday: Ended a long work week with some beers, ribs and turkey tails at Percy Street Barbecue (900 South St.) — everybody talking about it last week got me in the mindset! Fave bartender Neira made us a super-summery drink off their cocktail list: the "Tex-Sandia," gin, strawberry liqueur and lemon finished with a super-frozen watermelon ice cube on a tiny spoon. Sweet and cute. More on frozen watermelon stuff below ... —DL
Conversing with a coworker last week, I mentioned how much I love Naked brand smoothies, so she encouraged me to try their Green Machine. (That's the one with the murky, unappealing swamp-type color.) Friday morning, I dropped almost $4 (ridiculous) on this mystery drink. Besides listing broccoli, spinach, wheat grass and parsley among its ingredients, the Machine also boasts spirulina, chlorella and blue algae, aka things that definitely don’t sound like they should be in food. It goes down a lot sweeter than expected. You hardly taste the veggies — all I really got was green apple, some banana and a little bit of pineapple (lots of fruit in it, too). It has plenty of nutrients and it's 100 percent fresh fruit juice. Highly recommended! —JL
Post-Percy, embarked on our maiden orgeat syrup-making voyage in the Official Meal Ticket Test Kitchen my kitchen. Orgeat (or-zhgat ... or is it or-zat? can't get a straight answer) is just a dope-sounding foreign way of saying almond syrup — the recipe we followed called for nothing more than slivered/blended almonds, sugar, H20 and some shakes of orange blossom water. Though kindly bartender Jonny M. of Khyber Pass Pub did arm us with a premade bottle of Fee Brothers orgeat in case ours was a disaster, we didn't even crack it. Keep reading to see why we even attempting to make this stuff in the first place. —DL
Woke up Saturday at the shore, where we toasted up a loaf of Ric's cinnamon swirl bread for breakfast. Gooey, sugary goodness in every twist and curve. Then headed over to Cousin Melissa's for a barbecue with fam and friends featuring dry-rubbed ribs, chicken legs basted in grapefruit-balsamic barbecue sauce and a grilled squash/tomato/garlic scape thing I hooked up. Strawberry pavlova, water ice and homemade chocolate and vanilla Chipwiches for dessert. —AE
I pick up bread every morning from Artisan Boulanger Patissier (1646 S. 12th St.) to make sandwiches for one of my jobs. (Once a woman walked out of the bakery with me and said, "The croissants here are so good I come from Jersey every morning for them.") On Saturday morning I decided to try what I thought was a strawberry- and cheese-filled croissant. Oh. My. Gosh. It wasn't cheese — it was custard. A flaky pastry filled with sweet red strawberries and creamy, luscious custard. I actually had to sit down and eat 10 times slower than normal to take it all in. The sugar high was probably a little much for 8 a.m., but damn was it good. —EM
On Saturday, I headed up to NoLibs for the grand opening of Brown Betty's new location (722 N. Second St.). I started off my first meal of the day with a delicious moist lemon cupcake (and a bite or two of the sweet potato and red velvet, as well). La Colombe was at the event handing out iced espresso, which I happily sipped on, too. Good stuff all around. —NR
OK this is why I needed to produce orgeat: It's a key ingredient in cocktails of the tiki persuasion, which just so happened to be the masterfully executed theme of Friend of Meal Ticket KR's Saturday-night birthday pool party. Wheeee! Downed quite a few Eastern Sours (my favorite) and Arawaks and Mai Tais out of thematic Polynesian glassware before we kicked the orgeat bottle. On the food tip, I ate about ten thousand 10 glazed ham sandwiches on King's Hawaiian sweet rolls and way too many Shrimp Snacks (the one deliberately fishy-flavored thing pretty much everyone can agree on). —DL
After filling up on sweets/treats, I walked down to Penn's Landing to check out Taste of Philadelphia. Decided to indulge some more by ordering a paper basket full of fried cheese curds. If it sounds kind of unappetizing to you — you're wrong. Not at all. Think of the freshest mozzarella sticks you could possibly ever come by. That good. —NR
Ended my Saturday night, and continued through the wee hours of Sunday morning, on a friend's boat in the Delaware with bottles of Champagne and bags of Sun Chips and Tostitos. Keepin' it classy. As you can imagine, the view of the fireworks was pretty incredible. My hangover the next day? Pretty damn horrific. —NR
Late brunch at the Rio Grande Diner in Rio Grande, N.J. on Sunday. (Holy plats-du-jour placemats!) Was it necessary to get fries with brown gravy alongside epic cinnamon-raisin pancakes? No, but don't judge. It was Sunday. —AE
Sunday, I sprung up with surprisingly little hangover jangling around my head and walked down to Xochitl (408 S. Second St.) to try their recently launched brunch. Some reeeeeal good stuff here, very ow-I-drank-too-much-last-night friendly: Peep the fresh mackerel ceviche on housemade tostadas, the huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs with bacon, cheese, peppers and spicy chile de arbol, side of tortillas) and the best summer ensalada I've had in many moons — avocado hunks, plus cuke, jicama and watermelon matchsticks, all dressed in a creamy, nutty pumpkin-seed dressing. That I could eat for-ev-er. —DL
I ended Sunday night with a cold bottle of Dogfish Head Festina Peche, a Meal Ticket favorite. Light, refreshing and only 4.5 percent ABV, it's perfect for me, as I can’t chug beers for hours like normal college students (my face turns a nice shade of cherry Kool-Aid — I'm one of those Asians). Rounded out dinner with some Berry Burst Ice Cream Oreos, which I saw in the store and couldn’t pass up. I thoroughly enjoyed them — classic Oreo cookies with a sugary strawberry frosting sandwiched in between. My roommate claims they taste like creamsicles; our opinions may conflict but I still say give them a try. —JL
Sunday dinner at the Blind Pig Tavern in Cape May's historic hotel, Congress Hall, home to legions of white pants-wearing blondes, gin martinis (at least on this particular night) the funny and pregnant Tina Fey, who dined at the table across from us. Upper Darby, represent! —AE
Sunday night: Homemade watermelon pops! Watermelon, Thai basil, lime/lime zest and a little of that orange blossom water from the orgeat, to be exact. Shoutout to Family Dollar at 17th and Washington for supplying the eight-pop mold, which cost a relatively reasonable one dollaaaaaa! —DL
Had Picaditas from Mexico on the Square because Taqueria Veracruzana apparently stopped delivering to my boyfriend's neighborhood (with good reason, he lives far away). I'm considering breaking up with him because of it.— molls to the wall- DL, sweet mani.— bje55
- Hahah. I cannot lay claim to that sweet nail job. That's all M. She made the pops too. — Drew Lazor
- Friday night I prepped for Tiki Party madness by purchasing obscene amounts of rum, pineapples and shrimp snacks. My personal favorite tiki beverage was the Wiki Waki Woo, mostly for the name but also because it involved three different types of liquor. Can't go wrong with that, right? Sunday I attempted to remedy an insane tropical hangover with a bacon egg and cheese croissant from Artisan Boulanger. It wasn't successful but it was delicious. That night I ate left over shrimp snacks and drooled over sexy vampire sheriff Eric Northman.— kibby
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