Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

Happy 5th birthday to us!  Another year, another brilliant trip to Pig Island.  As always, we're very grateful to Jimmy Carbone and his team at Food Karma for organizing this event and being gracious hosts.  I would have loved for it to be about twenty degrees cooler and a bit more overcast; it was sweltering and I came home with a pretty gnarly tan!  But no matter, the plentiful food and drink were still enjoyable. In past years , I've tried to pinpoint a recurring theme or motif that inspired the chefs: last year we saw a lot of chicharrones and pork rinds, whereas past years there were lots of tacos or sliders.  I think this year's theme was a little broader and more international: fusion pork dishes. One of the standouts was a sandwich from Hudson & Charles of pickled pork shoulder in a banana calamansi BBQ sauce.  We spoke to the chefs, who told us calamansi is a citrus fruit like a cross between lime and orange, commonly...

Happy 4th birthday to Veritasty!  We are eternally grateful to Jimmy Carbone and the folks at Food Karma not only for inviting us to our first food event four years ago, but also for throwing this wonderful celebration of pig every year!  The weather held up, the lines were not too long, and there was delicious food to be had at Pig Island. I have found some years that there are trendy pork preparations (one year, I recall there being a lot of pork tacos, another had a lot of pulled pork sliders) and this year was all about crunch - and by that, I mean chicharrones! Many chefs chose to accompany their pig dishes with either a small sprinkling of crunchy pig skin on top; some fried up whole huge chunks for us to break up and eat at our leisure!  Alex is immune to the pleasures of chicharrones, but I'm kind of obsessed for some reason....  I think growing up in an Asian household eating these things: (prawn crackers, in case you didn't grow up in an...

Last month, Veritasty went to one of our favorite food fêtes (which is also the benchmark for our birthday; HAPPY 2ND BIRTHDAY VERITASTY!), Pig Island.  This year's Pig Island was a little more like Pig Pier since the venue changed from Governor's Island to Red Hook, Brooklyn.  Red Hook is a northern neighborhood of my beloved borough, which is now most famous for IKEA and Steve's Key Lime Pie and Brooklyn Crab .  The waterfront where Pig Island was spread out was gorgeous: you could simultaneously see little patches of greenery and park benches right next to the very industrial oil rigs rising out of the Hudson River.  Pig Pier made us very happy campers. One of the first stalls we came across hawked Southern Belle barbecue sauce.  While these fruity sauces (for example, blueberry and mango flavors) would be a good accompaniment to any barbecued meat, these brilliant southern belles served up the sauces in delicate floral teacups, with slices of sausage ...

I am very grateful for the opportunity to have eaten at Brooklyn Crab with Alex's family a little while back.  I still think back at that dinner fondly and wish I had someone who could drive me to Red Hook at the drop of a hat. Brooklyn Crab is a really dive-y restaurant out in Red Hook. It literally looks like a shack on a beach, with mismatched furniture and surf boards, fishing bait and tackle, and a big plastic shark hanging off the walls.  The tables are nothing more than picnic benches with paper plates and a roll of paper towels.  There are bottles of hot sauce lining the tables and booths so you can grab any of dozens of varieties to season your seafood to taste.  The wide-open windows afford a beautiful view of Manhattan, especially breathtaking at sunset! We did a bit of family-style dining with appetizers, and I had a fish sandwich for my meal.  We shared peel-and-eat shrimp, fried oysters, fried calamari, and fried clam strips.  My cu...