Author: John Fladd

Meatballs and music

Elm Street eatery offers Swedish, red sauce, ‘Thanksgiving’ and other variations

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Even after 28 years in the business Kevin Cornish finds himself relearning a basic lesson of restaurant ownership: it doesn’t matter how delicious a dish is if none of your customers order it.

“We had a vegetarian meatball,” he said. “After cooking them seven days in a row without one person ordering them, we had to get rid of it.”

Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs, on Manchester’s Elm Street, is Cornish’s new restaurant, themed around — perhaps not surprisingly — 1980s rock music and meatballs. After three decades of running his successful barbecue restaurant, KC’s Rib Shack, Cornish has decided to open a second place to indulge one of his other great passions, live music.

“I love live music,” Cornish said. ”It’s probably my biggest hobby. This place [the restaurant’s location] has been opened twice with different people running it and pretty much closed twice. Manchester hasn’t always supported live music all that much. Especially in something this size, you need a scene to create a scene. There’s got to be little, ragged rock clubs for big rock clubs to succeed. My band used to play at Mad Bob’s and if we brought 25 people it was great. It was a little hole in the wall and a little bar, but in New Hampshire you can’t have a bar — you have to have a restaurant.”

Cornish had seen a few meatball-specific restaurants on the West Coast and liked the idea. He and three partners decided to adopt that formula for their menu. Despite his number of years as a restaurant owner, though, Cornish found that developing recipes for the new place required a long process of trial and error.

“When it came to the meatballs,” he said, “for one day or several days, we’d just work on beef meatballs, or beef and pork meatballs, or chicken meatballs. For months leading up to this, my wife was so sick of eating chicken meatballs — she was like, ‘What do we have for dinner tonight?’ Meatballs, you know?”

Ultimately, developing the recipe turned out to be a group project.

“We would come in and we lined this whole bar up with all the ingredients we would need. Each of us would take a table, and a bowl, and work up a recipe. It was nice to get in here and cook seven different types of meatballs in an afternoon, and being able to try them right next to each other. By coming in here and having everybody make a different one … we were able to zero in on, ‘Wow, we really like the flavor of this, but maybe, but we like the mouth-feel of this one, maybe that’s because this one was made with bread as opposed to this one made with panko breadcrumbs,’ and things like that. So we were able to kind of tweak and zero in on it and that’s what we did.”

Even after the kinks in a recipe have been ironed out, there’s still no guarantee that it will work on the restaurant’s menu. Which brings us back to the vegetarian meatball.

Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs’ menu is centered around five core meatballs: a standard red-sauce one, a Swedish meatball in a creamy sauce, a brisket-macaroni and cheese one, a “Thanksgiving” meatball made with ground turkey and stuffing, and a chicken Parmesan one.

One of the biggest surprises, though, was an appetizer that sold well from opening day onward. “The escargot is great,” Cornish said, a bit perplexed. *It’s a very simple dish, and it’s selling great.”

Rock n Roll Meatballs
179 Elm St., Manchester, 931-3654, rocknrollmeatballs.com
Open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday 4:30 to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 10 p.m., and Sunday noon to 9 p.m. There will be live music twice monthly. Visit facebook.com/RnRMeatballs for notice of upcoming events.

Featured photo: Swedish Meatballs. Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 25/02/13

News from the local food scene

• Chocolate and raspberries: The martini-and-cupcake pairing at Copper Door (15 Leavy Drive, Bedford, 488-2677, or 41 S. Broadway, Salem, 458-2033, copperdoor.com) for February is a Chocolate Raspberry Martini, made with double chocolate vodka, dark creme de cacao, raspberry liqueur, cream, raspberry puree, and chocolate syrup, garnished with a glittered raspberry, for $14.75, and a Red Velvet Cupcake, with red velvet cake, a raspberry preserve filling, and cream cheese frosting, garnished with a white chocolate cup and glittered berries for $11.

• Investing in kettle corn: Ken and Meredith Thomas, the owners of Ken’s Corn (68 Chester Road, Derry, 208-661-0282, kenscorn.com), have announced an unusual investment strategy to expand their kettle corn business. Using Honeycomb Credit (honeycombcredit.com) the Thomases are asking individuals to lend them expansion money, to be paid back with interest, rather than working through a traditional bank. Contact Ken’s Corn at [email protected].

• Extremely good ports in the storm: WineNot Boutique (25 Main St., Nashua, 204-5569, winenotboutique.com) will host a Grand Port Tasting Thursday, Feb. 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. Explore seven distinct styles of Portuguese ports, from youthful ruby to aged tawny, in an evening of rich flavors. Tickets are $50, through eventbrite.com.

• Bottle your own wine: Join the winemakers at Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) Sunday, Feb.16, for a special Valentine’s Sunday Bottle Your Own experience, which includes a two-hour tasting, tour and bottle-your-own event. One bottle of wine is included, and additional bottles may be filled and purchased. Note: The wine being bottled is pre-selected by the vintner based on the weekly bottling schedule. Included will be a charcuterie board with chocolate, cheese, nuts and meats. Tickets are $69 per person, through exploretock.com.

Nashville Hot ‘Chicken’

By John Fladd

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2-3 packages frozen plant-based “chick’n”patties (8 to 12 patties)

Vegetable oil for frying

Dredging flour:

4 cups (560 g) all-purpose flour

1 Tablespoon cayenne pepper

1 Tablespoon paprika – I like smoked paprika

1 Tablespoon kosher or coarse sea salt

1 Tablespoon fresh-ground black pepper

Coating liquid:

2 cups (475 g) buttermilk

¼ cup (65 g) hot sauce – I like to use a green jalapeño sauce; it’s not scorchingly hot, but it is delicious

2 eggs

1 Tablespoon kosher or coarse sea salt

Sauce:

½ cup (99 g) hot frying oil

¼ cup (half a stick) butter

2 Tablespoon cayenne pepper

3 Tablespoon brown sugar

1 teaspoon each of garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, black pepper, and taco seasoning

1½ teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt

Defrost the frozen “chicken” patties in the microwave, about three minutes at high power. Set them aside.

Set up a dredging station, with the dredging flower in a large bowl, and the coating liquid in a cake tin or a pie pan. In two separate bowls, put the half-stick of butter, and the dry ingredients for the sauce.

Pour approximately 2 inches of vegetable oil in a saucepan or an electric fry pan, and heat it to 350°F.

Preparing all the elements for a dish before actually cooking it is called “mise en place.” Restaurant cooks call it “mise.” Setting up all your frying elements ahead of time will make this process relatively simple. Not setting it up will lead to chaos and frustration and running around screaming in a hot oil environment.

When your oil has come almost up to temperature, use a pair of kitchen tongs to drop one of the “chicken” patties in the seasoned flour. Completely coat it, then shake most of the loose flour from it, then give it a quick bath in the hot sauce-buttermilk mixture, then return it to the flour. Use the tongs to completely cover it, and let it sit there, buried in flour, until the oil hits 350°F.

Shake most of the loose flour off the patty with your tongs, then gently drop it into the hot oil. Fry it until both sides are gently browned, three and a half to four minutes. Use a second pair of kitchen tongs to transfer it to brown paper from a grocery bag to drain. While it cooks, prepare the next “chicken” patty, and leave it buried in flour until it is ready to go into the oil in its turn.

Fry all the patties in this way, then remove the frying vessel from heat.

Ladle ½ cup of the used frying oil on top of the half stick of butter, and stir it until it melts. (Please don’t do this in a plastic bowl. Remember the screaming and chaos mentioned above? You will definitely experience that if your hot oil melts a hole in your bowl.) Whisk in the rest of the sauce ingredients. This sauce will want to separate, so make certain you stir it every time you spoon it onto a fried “chicken” patty.

If you’re a garnish kind of person, garnish with some cilantro.

So, is this authentic Nashville Hot Chicken? Not really, but it’s a good approximation of it. You’ll get a spicy and crispy coating on a chewy, not-un-chickenlike armature, covered with a sweet, spicy sauce. If not authentic, it is delicious, and as spicy as you choose to take it. If you were to bring a platter of these to, say, a viewing party for a major sporting event, you could probably expect a certain amount of ribbing at the start, but by the second set of commercials, someone else is guaranteed to try the sauce, then a patty with the sauce. Make sure you’ve set a couple aside for yourself, because the rest will be gone by half time.

Also — not for nothing — these go extremely well with beer.

FNashville Hot ‘Chicken’. Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Ashley Place

Culinary & Creative Works Manager, Lavender Fields at Pumpkin Blossom Farm (393 Pumpkin Hill Road, Warner, 456-2443, pumpkinblossomfarm.com)

Ashley Place spends a lot of time thinking about lavender. “I started working for Pumpkin Blossom Farm when it was first coming into fruition,” she said. “We were trying to figure out where [our farm and kitchen] would sit best. Previously I had actually been a bread baker for the Foothills, a restaurant that used to be on Main Street in Warner, so I had a little bit of culinary practice before then. We decided to try a bunch of different approaches, then figure out what stuck and go from there. Which led to the Culinary Camper, a mobile food truck, and out of it we sell lavender-infused lemonade, ice cream, and lavender shortbread cookies, which are one of our most popular items. We do a pineapple lavender Dole whip. We’ve done lavender white chocolate fudge in the past. We do mocktails with different botanical elements and our lavender simple syrup, so we have a lavender jasmine boba bubble tea.”

What is your must-have kitchen item?

I would say cheesecloth. For a lot of our infusions, it works the same way like an herbal tea would, where the lavender itself would have to be strained out after the infusion process. I use quite a bit of cheesecloth or mesh bags.

What would you have for your last meal?

I have a really specific one, actually: pasta with vodka sauce and Sweetie Drop peppers. They’re like these very small red peppers in the shape of a teardrop and they come in these little jars like olives with like a brine liquid in them and they have this sweet and tangy flavor. I’d want some Parmesan and then an arugula, walnut, blue cheese and pear salad.

What’s your favorite local place to eat out at?

The Refinery in Andover [4 Mill Road, Andover, 977-0194, refinerynh.com]. They do a lot of barbecue, burgers, steaks, salads, sandwiches. And then they’ll do, you know, specials like seafood dinners and stuff.

Who is a celebrity that you would like to see eating your food?

That’s such an interesting question. My friend and I think we’d really like to serve something to Noah Kahan. He is a Vermont native. And he does like some indie feel-good type music. It’s music that we like to play in the barn throughout the summer on our playlist, so I feel like it would be really awesome.

What’s your favorite thing on your menu?

My favorite is probably our lavender-infused ice cream. It is special because it’s not just flavoring. The lavender buds are actually steeped in the milk. It’s all natural. The flavor is subtle, but it’s still there. It’s a really good thing for people who are still experimenting and getting into culinary lavender to try.

What is a food trend you’ve seen in the area recently?

We’re seeing more and more different people trying our food, who probably wouldn’t have, in the past. We are coming up on our fifth year, we’ve been seeing some repeat customers. Our customers are very diverse.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

I would have to say homemade pasta. I do a ravioli with mushrooms, shallots, ricotta, garlic.

Lavender Lemonade
From the Kitchen of Ashley Place

6 parts water
2 parts lavender simple syrup
1 part fresh lemon juice

Featured photo: Ashley Place. Courtesy photo.

Ice, ice, cookie

Pork bao, crab pakora and smashburgers at Local Street Eats

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Kelli Wright is one of the best cookie decorators in the business, but it didn’t come easily.

“I’m self-taught,” she said. “It took me so long just to even figure out how to mix royal icing correctly, to get the consistencies that I like, and decorate a cookie, and to make a straight line. It took me hours upon hours of reading, and watching videos and baking shows, and trying to figure it out.”

After having spent years establishing herself as a bespoke baker and decorator — her decorating business is called Just Wright by Kelli — she has taken on teaching decorating classes and workshops, where she tries to help home bakers skip over the most tedious stages of learning to decorate.

“Seeing people start out six to eight months ahead of where I was in the process,” Wright said, “just to see them be able to do it and do it right away is extremely gratifying. When they’re like, ‘Aha! I got it! I understand some of this,’ is so rewarding to see the outcome.”

Wright teaches decorating classes in several different places. The most recent one is The Culinary Playground in Derry. She teaches groups of 10 to 15 people to decorate cookies with royal icing. The classes run either two hours or two and a half. Each student is provided with the icing, tools they will need, and four to six sugar cookies. Wright concentrates on teaching participants how to decorate the cookies, using particular patterns that they can work from.

“What I like to tell people is ‘I give you a starting point’,” Wright said, “‘and then it’s all about learning how to just kind of let go and let your creativity take over. Learn what you like, what you don’t like — try to develop a style that’s yours.’ And some people are … not comfortable with going off-script based upon whatever their prior knowledge of decorating is and some people get very creative and want to improvise and do things that make them happy. I think that’s the whole [attraction] of baking is to have joy and share love through an edible treat. So I let them go rogue and have fun.”

In her classes, Wright works exclusively with egg white-based royal icing.

“I want to make sure it sets nicely for people to travel with when they take their cookies home,” she said. “If you put the right balance of ingredients together it’s not hard when you bite but it does still have a nice soft bite after it has a chance to dry.”

Although Wright teaches groups as large as 75 people, her classes at The Culinary Playground are smaller to fit the space available to her there.

“The classes take up a bit of space,” said Kristen Chiosi, owner of The Culinary Playground. “You have your cookies, you have a flexible mat to work on, and you have all your tools. So 16 is what’s comfortable in our space. We project up onto a screen so students can see what she’s doing. So we have a camera that’s pointed down toward her mat that has her cookie and you can see her hand and as she’s doing it. She’s talking through the steps and that’s being projected on the board so that people can follow along.”

Wright said cookie-decorating is fulfilling to teach, because students can learn a concrete skill very quickly and extrapolate from there. “I love seeing people try something new and then get that realization like, ‘Now I understand why custom is custom and what goes into making that one piece of edible art.’”

Cookie-decorating
Kelli Wright’s next sessions at The Culinary Playground (16 Manning St, Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com) will be a Valentine Cookie class Saturday, Feb. 15, from 1 to 3 p.m. and Wednesday, Feb. 19, from 4 to 6 p.m., and a Saint Patrick’s Day Cookie class Sunday, March 9, from 10 a.m. to noon and from 12:45 to 2:45 p.m. Register online through the Culinary Playground website.

Featured photo: Cookie decorating classes at Culinary Playground. Courtesy photo.

Bringing a street-food vibe to Nash

Pork bao, crab pakora and smashburgers at Local Street Eats

By John Fladd

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What is street food? For Alyssa Drift, the owner of Local Street Eats in Nashua, it’s not about the exact food you might get on a street corner halfway around the world. Although it could be.

“I haven’t traveled internationally a whole lot,” Drift said, “but I like to eat. So it’s more like going out into different cities and different places, whether it’s Boston, Portland, Portsmouth, any of those kinds of places. Even in Florida, like Miami and places like that are just a little bit more rich in culture than New Hampshire is a lot of the time. I feel like places like that have more of a diverse dining scene, and I wanted to bring something like that to Nashua.”

With a mission statement like that, it would be understandable if the menu at Local Street East went in a bunch of different directions, featuring dishes from a large number of places around the world. Drift and her staff have done the opposite. She said it was important to them to keep the menu clean and simple.

“It’s really streamlined, very simple, some handheld [items], some bites, some snacks. It’s really approachable, again, on the food standpoint, but very manageable for us to keep fresh ingredients in-house and have everything go out consistently at the high quality that we expect our team to deliver.” Plus, Drift said, she and her staff have a loophole. “The other thing is, we offer specials every single week,” she said. “So in addition to our regular menu, each week that runs Wednesday through Tuesday we offer at least two to three specials coming out of the kitchen. We usually offer a larger item and then a smaller item just to give variety to those people. We have a really big regular clientele. So we like to give people the choice to switch it up every now and again and not get sick of the regular menu. And then the plan for the regular menu is to switch that every 12 weeks. So we’ll do four seasonal menu changes.”

This winter’s menu items have been inspired by cultures as different from each other as China’s, Thailand’s, Mexico’s, and from the southern U.S. Some of the appetizers include Pork Bao (chewy Chinese dumplings), Crispy Crab Pakora (deep-fried Indian snacks) and a charcuterie plate called Girl Dinner. Main courses include American-style smash burgers, pad thai, and blackened fish with pineapple salsa.

About half the items on the menu either are plant-based or can be modified to be.

“We have a lot of vegan options on the menu,” Drift said. “Not just vegetarian, but full vegan. I feel like that’s a demand. Today, people try to be a little bit more more sound in their decisions and how they eat and source food. It’s definitely on the upswing. There are a lot of non-alcoholic people and a lot of vegan people. We have a permanent section on our cocktail menu that has zero-proof cocktails at all times and we have specials that we rotate every now and again. But I mean, to have 10 to 15 non-alcoholic options that aren’t Coke, Diet Coke and Sprite is a point of pride for us. We take just as much care making those as we do with any of our cocktails.”

Bar manager Krista Fisher said that whether she is designing mocktails or full-octane drinks the goal is to find ingredients that go well together, especially if they are a little surprising, so she can keep customers on their toes. “The special this week is called a Clown Car,” she said. “It has scotch, apricot, raspberry, and orange bitters — a little bit of everything. It’s served in a Collins glass on the rocks.”

“With a little umbrella,” she added. “Everything here is made a little cute.”

“Inspiration comes from everywhere,” Fisher said. “There’s a lot of trial and error. We’ve definitely experimented with flavors where you’re like, ‘Nope, that was weird.’ But pineapple and espresso go together, so that was cool to find out.” The biggest realization she has come to recently is the importance of picking a great name for each drink. “The name attracts them,” she said. “The flavor makes them stay.”

Local Street Eats
Where: 112 W. Pearl St., Nashua, 402-4435, local-streeteats.com
Hours: Tuesday through Thursday from 4 to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 4 to 11 p.m. Make reservations through the restaurant’s website.

Local Street Eats. Photo by John Fladd.

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