Tourists in Brooklyn

There are those evenings when you go out without a reservation and think you might never eat. We went to a restaurant with friends, and a soon to expire gift certificate. But there was a 2 hour wait. So we went to another restaurant, then another.

Our mistake was to be in Williamsburg, a great place to eat, but maybe not so much if you don’t live there and don’t know the next best place to try. Also, it was Saturday, amateur night.

We thought our goose was cooked.

Finally, we wound up at The Fat Goose. It looked promising: exposed brick walls, chandeliers, tin ceiling, only half full.

But all those tables were spoken for.

The host was very gracious, and sat us at the bar. He said in 15 minutes, if a certain table didn’t show, we could eat there.

Fourteen minutes later, they walked in.

Meanwhile, we were contemplating drinks. Fat Goose has a very trendy cocktail menu, but the new winter menu was all rum and bourbon, neither of which I like.

There were 2 IPAs on tap, including my fave, Smuttynose. But both were out. We sampled the Ommegang wheat beer, which no one really liked.

So we drank wine.

Conversation was difficult with our group, since we were lined up at the bar, but then the people at the corner left, so we moved there and ordered appetizers.

Remember when appetizers were called apps & no one had a smartphone?

So Fat Goose, of course, puts goose fat in things where it doesn’t belong, like a lovely looking lentil, pear and Stilton salad, or kale salad. But both were tasty without the goose.

Then, we got a table so we could order main courses. A progressive dinner in one small restaurant.

Vegetarian options for main courses included a sweet potato strudel with oddly bitter carrots and scallops with roasted cauliflower.

We also had wild mushroom toasts with goat cheese – the best thing on the menu.
Next time, a reservation.

Artisanal Meat, Veggie Sandwiches

When a restaurant touts the origins of its meat, form four local butchers and specialty shops, I figure the vegetarian food is going to be an after thought. But Zito's Sandwich Shoppe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, puts as much care into its veggie sandwiches as it does in its meat offering, so this is definitely a vegetarian friendly place.

Of the 13 classic sandwiches, 5 are vegetarian (3 if you don’t eat fish). Plus you can create your own. All are served on brick oven bread baked by Il Fornaretto in Bensonhurst, or gluten-free bread from Everybody Eats in Park Slope.

The meatless was my first choice, with plenty of grilled portobellos roasted peppers and broccoli rabe, with artichoke spread. My only gripe was that it was too cold, so if you can let your sandwich sit for awhile, or ask the counter guys to heat it up.

But this brings up the problem many have with this place. The food is wonderful, but waits can be interminable. If you order arancini, Sicilian rice balls (there is an addictive veggie version, with spinach and homemade mozzarella) and sip a craft beer, you might be a little less puckish when your food arrives.

Sandwiches are huge, and make a more than filling dinner; at lunch, you might only eat half and save the rest for later. You could also split a sandwich and get one of the 6 veggie side dishes: faro salad with roasted corn, garlicky broccoli rabe or lentil with caramelized onions.

The eggplant parm, with more of that homemade mozzarella and a slightly too salty tomato sauce was a perfect counterpoint to the crusty bread. If you like breakfast for dinner, try the bargain Potatoes & eggs sandwich; scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, onions and parmesan cheese, with tomato sauce on the side.

The chickpea fritters were so meaty that my husband was convinced he had been given meat. These fritters are not like falafel at all, but with the lettuce, tomato and lemon, they were yummy.

Next on my list to try, before I start customizing my sandwiches, is the Sicilian tuna, with arugula and tapenade.

We were not bothered by our long waits, since the guys working there were so friendly and they have a great sense of humor. A family friendly place that promotes its high chairs and growlers has to be. Fill those growlers with Sixpoint craft ale to go, or drink a beer with your sandwich. There is also wines from Long Island based Gotham Project.

Vegetarian Chicken Soup

As a Jewish mother, I supposedly have the panacea for colds, chicken soup. This legendary broth-y soup has been spooned in the mouths of generations of kids, with the urgent, “eat it, it’s good for you.”

I don’t make chicken soup, since my family is vegetarian, but for years I have made a rich vegetable soup, using vegetable stock to make a soup with carrots, parsnips, celery and onions.

But my youngest daughter doesn’t like broth-y soup.

Now, we take other measures to ensure winter health, getting flu shots, drinking Traditional Medicinals cold tea when we get the sniffles, and not going outside with a wet head (not sure what this one does, but my own Jewish mother instilled it in me).

Still, I wanted Nora to eat the restorative soup.

Here’s the thing – she loves soup, but only cream soup. One day, I took her bowl and buzzed it with the immersion blender. Voila – she ate the soup.

Then I thought about other soups and ways to get more vegetables into her. Nora hates cooked carrots, but if they are blended in soup, she willingly eats them. And I find ginger to be particularly soothing when I have a sore throat. Since Nora is a singer (and a screamer) she gets a lot of sore throats, cold or no.

Note: You can make this soup vegan by sautéeing the onion in olive oil.

Carrot-Ginger Soup

1 onion, roughly chopped
1 T butter
1 3 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled
2 quarts vegetable stock (homemade is much better, but you can use Imagine)
3 carrots, peeled and cut into 2 inch pieces
3 parsnips, peeled and cut into 2 inch pieces
1 sweet potato, peeled and chunked
1 potato, peeled and chunked
slat and pepper, to taste
Tabasco sauce, to taste

Cook the onion in the butter on low heat till soft, about 10 minutes. Add the ginger, stock and all the veggies and turn the heat up high. Add salt and pepper.
When small bubbles appear, turn the heat down to medium, cover, and cook for about 45 minutes, or until all the vegetables are soft.

Remove the piece of ginger.

Blend the soup with an immersion blender (you can do this when the soup is hot) or wait till it cools and blend in a food processor until smooth.

Add the ginger back. Heat and taste; add salt, pepper and Tabasco sauce, if needed.

This soup gets even more ginger-y the next day. Just don’t serve anyone the huge chunk of ginger; it can turn them off ginger forever.

Have a bowl after you get your flu shot.

Decluttering: a pack-rat’s tips

An earthquake recently jolted New York City. While damage was minimal, my oldest daughter posted a photo on Facebook of her youngest sister’s playroom, “apparently the only part of our house affected by the earthquake.”

I have raised a slob.

Now, I don’t profess to be all spic & span, but I do prefer a clutter-free zone. Yet I am at heart a pack rat. This is why I believe strongly in closets.

Our family has a lot of them.

When we built an addition to our house, we added a wall of extra deep closets, where the television, DVDs and board games live. We also have a ton of videotapes, which no one watches. I’m not even sure our VCR works. The kids watch movies on their computers.

In our battle to reclaim floor space, I have these 10 tips:

Bins. I love color-coded bins, so kids can remember that crayons go in the yellow, markers in the blue.

Baskets. I use baskets throughout the house, for hats, gloves, makeup.

Shelves. All those bins and baskets can’t be in the floor, because then there would be no place to walk, or play.

Clear boxes. These are best for high closet shelves, so you can see which has the sweaters, which the ski socks.

Rotation. Most kids simply have too many toys. If you put some out of reach – in the basement, under the bed, on the highest shelf, it limits kids’ options, plus it seems like they have new toys when you bring them back out.

Donation. When they clearly have outgrown something, I donate it. But don’t donate too soon. My youngest decided she was done with Barbie, but I knew she was too young to completely give them up. I put them in the basement playroom and, although she denies it, we know that she still plays with them.

Stoop/yard sale. In our Brooklyn neighborhood, families have frequent stoop sales, where they unload extra or unwanted toys. Be beware. Some kids use the opportunity to buy new toys with the money they make (we usually donate the money to whatever cause the kids choose).

Digital camera. Get rid of school projects, but preserve them by photographing them before you trash them (and don’t let kids see them in the garbage).

Less is more. I really like when beds are made, but blankets and covers make it more difficult for kids. We have sheets topped by comforters with print covers. All you have to do is pull the comforter up and the bed is made. And laundry is simpler. You don’t have to wash the comforter often; just wash the cover.

Build. If you run out of floor space, build a new closet.

Family at Play: Kids on Bikes

Biking has been one of my favorite activities since I was a child. When I was a teen, I went on bike trips with American Youth Hostels, and even when I had a car at college, I used a bicycle to explore St. Louis. It seemed natural that when my husband and I bought our second brownstone, we built a closet specifically for our bikes.

Like many kids, our girls played soccer, and the fields were a couple of miles from our house. We used to drive over, but the extremely limited parking meant we could circle the fields for half an hour, with one kid missing practice and the others growing bored. We told the kids, “if you want to play soccer, you have to ride to the field.”

This turned a couple of hours at soccer into a day-long adventure. In our first house, we stored 2 bikes in the cellar, 2 on the ground floor, and the third up the stoop. Just getting all the bikes out took 45 minutes. And when the kids were younger, they rode very slowly.

But as their skill level and confidence grew, so did their speed. Our youngest daughter, now 13, rides a 35 mile round trip to the beach with no complaint, and she went on a bike trip with camp, New Hampshire to Maine, biking 45 miles a day.

Our middle daughter, now in college, often rode her bicycle from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side for high school. She was a competitive soccer player, so she didn’t ride when she had soccer practice, but we rode our bikes to her games.

Family vacations have included Backroads bike trips in Denmark and Italy, and shorter bike trips as part of a family trip. We have ridden bike trails in Northampton, MA, Jim Thorpe, PA, and Cincinnati, OH. We rode bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and through Mayan ruins in Mexico.

We were trying to decide what to do to celebrate Nickelodeon's 8th Annual Worldwide Day of Play this weekend, but the 13 year old has practice for the Ultimate team. So we will go on a own bike ride without her.

Our kids all played varsity sports, from track to soccer to Ultimate, they ski, they swim, they hike and rock climb. But they go their start on tiny bicycles with training wheels. Get your family started on exercise today.

Ordering in for the Emmy's

A pile of outdated menus stuck in a kitchen drawer is so 1990. Use your drawers for their intended purpose, to store corkscrews and bottle openers, and order your food on the web.

New Yorkers have several online delivery services, which offer a network of restaurants and no additional cost to the coach potato. With the Emmy’s approaching and football season under way, this is a good time to consider options.


Grub Hub has over 15,000 restaurants in 13 cities, including Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC.

You can sort by cuisine, restaurant name or menu item and read Yelp reviews to help try an unfamiliar restaurant.


Allmenus.com also includes Yelp reviews. They live up to their name by trying to include all the menus of local restaurants in every market – but this means that some restaurants don’t participate in their online ordering program. So you might see a menu for a place you want to order from – and not be able to order.

Of course, you could actually leave your house, but you can also spend hours searching the 250,000 menus from cities across the United States. It’s also in over 400 college campuses.

Seamless offers apps for apps for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry users, or you can old-school it with a computer. The site covers 7,000 restaurants in 27 cities across the US and UK, and you can bookmark restaurants you like for easy re-ordering.

Delivery.com, the newest service in New York, has restaurants, but also grocery stores, liquor stores and florists who deliver – about 3,000 places in all. It has about 10,000 places in 10 cities outside New York.

Delivery.com offers reward points; follow the other sites on Twitter for promotions and special deals.

To go with your food, try The Sparkling White. Created by the folks at Sauza in honor of seven-time Emmy winner Betty White, a nominee for Hot In Cleveland.

7.5 oz. Tequila
2.5 oz. Triple Sec
3 oz. fresh lime juice
3 oz. Agave Nectar
12 oz. Prosecco or sparkling white wine
Lime Wedge for garnish
Combine first 4 ingredients in a shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously. Strain the mixture into a chilled champagne glasses and top it off with the sparkling wine. Serves 9.

Vegetarian Banh Mi: Cheap Brooklyn Lunch

Israeli relatives who came to our house passed one of the ubiquitous Vietnamese sandwich places in Park Slope. “What means this vegetarian pork?” they asked.

I have never been sure at Hanco’s Bubble Tea & Vietnamese Sandwich because they always seem to be out of it, but the vegetarian pork at Henry’s Vietnamese Sandwiches is seitan in a spicy barbeque sauce, with the usual coriander, cucumber, shredded carrots and diakon radish.

Henry’s sandwiches are cheaper, too; the vegetarian ones are only $5.50 here, instead of $6.50.

If you like very spicy food, you can handle the hot version; the medium needs an extra squirt of Sriracha.

The only disappointment is that there is no whole wheat option.

Henry’s has a delicious vegetarian chicken sandwich, that taste just like – chicken. There is also vegetarian ham or fish, neither of which I’ve tried yet.

Hanco’s is a much nicer place to sit; Henry’s has just a couple of tables and is really better for take-out.

Henry’s also has a variety of brown rice dishes, each $5.95, with meat or the veggie meat.

Both Henry’s & Hanco’s are on Seventh Avenue; Fifth Avenue in Park Slope also has Lotus (all sandwiches are $5.95) and Home (all sandwiches are $6).