Smoked Salmon and Potato Breakfast Casserole

       The food pantry that our church sponsors is called The Brown Bag Program and provides lunch for about 80 people a day.  It costs about $3.25 to fill a bag and, like every other charity in the City, we’ve been feeling the pinch of the recession.  The numbers needing help are up and the help is down.  To publicize our plight, we hosted a breakfast at Christ and St. Stephen’s and I made this delicious and different breakfast casserole.  What’s great about it is that you can do the whole thing the night before, chill it and bake it in the morning.

I’m sharing the recipe for 6 servings because if you’re not feeding an Army, salvation or otherwise, you won’t need the quantity I was making.  But you certainly can double it for a crowd.  For the recipe all you have to do is scroll down.  And if you’d like to contribute to The Brown Bag Program, all you have to do is follow this link: http://www.csschurch.org

Braised Pork Chops

I love a good braise almost as much as I love a good Pork Chop.  And in a November ‘09 column in the New York Times, Melissa Clark put the two together to create this dish.  If you follow Melissa at all, you know she gets an idea about what she is going to cook, checks out her pantry and her freezer and, if that fails to yield something she wants, she’s off to the supermarket.  In this case, she wanted a cold-weather meal, a satisfying long-cooked dish that’s soaked up flavor for hours.  Or, at least, something that tastes that way.  So she hit upon big, thick bone-In Pork Loin Chops.   Because they cook in no time, her braise had to be as big as the chops.  What she put together were ingredients that seem to marry with pork—garlic and rosemary—and, because the meat would not braise for hours and hours, she goosed up the sauce with tomatoes and, hold your breath, anchovies to give it a salty, hearty taste. 

Review of Bill’s Bar and Burger and a recipe for Chicken Parmigiano Burgers

  

 This weekend for the first time in what seems like months, we were finally able to walk anywhere without feeling that we were in a race against the cold.   So we jumped on the opportunity to visit the High Line. This is an only-in-New York invention: A ‘park’ on an abandoned elevated railroad spur on the far west side of Manhattan.  It’s currently runs from 20th St to just below 14th St and it packs people in as it wanders through the new Art Gallery district and through the modernist Architecture that’s building up around it.  A nice walk it was and by the time we got to the end of it, we were hungry.

Fortunately, Bill’s Bar and Burger is right there at 22 Ninth Avenue.  It opened in October and it’s been the toast of this burger-loving town ever since.  It’s been thoroughly covered by everyone who covers food in New York .  My favorite quote on the hand-out postcard at the bar:  “It was magnificent.  It restored my faith in hamburgers and the country that produced them.”- Vanity Fair (!) Wow.