John Fladd – Page 48

The Weekly Dish 25/09/11

News from the local food scene

• New diner on North Elm: Brothers North End Diner is now open at 1361 Elm St. in Manchester, in the location that was formerly home to North End Bistro. The diner is open seven days a week from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, and according to the owners will eventually have a full liquor license.

• Godspeed Dancing Lion: High-end chocolate shop Dancing Lion Chocolate (917 Elm St., Manchester, 625-4043, dancinglion.us) will have its final day of cafe service on Thursday, Oct. 2, with limited retail hours selling bars and other items “until we run out” Oct. 7 through Oct. 18, according to the shop website. In a statement on the website, owner Richard Tango-Lowy wrote, “Dancing Lion Chocolate is more than I ever expected it could be. But I always knew that it was in itself a piece of art and would one day be complete.”

• Food Network approved: As reported by Patch.com in an Aug. 27 online article, the Food Network put Alley Cat Pizza (486 Chestnut St., Manchester, 669-4533, alleycatpizzerianh.com) on its list of the best pizza in each state. The article “50 States of Pizza Slices“ at foodnetwork.com/restaurants praised “the impeccable thin-crust.”

• Four courses of coffee: LaBelle Winery Derry (14 Route 111, Derry, 672-9898, labellewinery.com/labelle-winery-derry) will host a four-course coffee-themed dinner Friday, Sept. 12, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Each course will be crafted to include coffee and will be paired with a different LaBelle wine. Tickets are $109 through eventbrite.com.

• Street cookies: Local Street Eats (112 W. Pearl St., Nashua, 402-4435, local-streeteats.com) will host a Posy Cottage Cookie Pop-Up on Tuesday, Sept. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. Learn the art of cookie decorating with Posy Cottage Cookies — no experience needed. Everything will be provided: freshly baked autumn-inspired cookies, rich icings and step-by-step guidance. Tickets are $35 per person through the Local Street Eats website.

Double Ka Meetha

Many years ago, we planted a peach tree. Jump forward two decades and we have more peaches than we know what to do with. Two words spring to mind: peach daiquiris.

Peach-Infused Rum

Peaches are full of delicate flavors, colors, and, er, peachiness that are alcohol-soluble. If you cut up a bunch of peaches and soak them in liquor for anywhere from a few hours to a week you will end up with something special. Don’t bother to peel them; peach skins have flavor compounds and colors that will serve you well.

Rinse your peaches, just to make sure you’re not including any dust or bugs then slice them into chunks into a large container, and cover them with rum. For an application like this, your best bet is probably to use a medium-shelf white rum. (Vodka will work perfectly well, as will whiskey. Maybe even tequila.)

I usually let it sit for four or five days, stirring or shaking it once or twice a day. When I think it’s ready, I taste a spoonful or so, then strain it through a fine-mesh strainer. If I’m feeling fancy I’ll strain it again through a coffee filter.

Peach Syrup

Wash a bunch of peaches, then dice them up. Again, I wouldn’t worry about the skins. Freeze the diced peaches for a few hours or overnight. By freezing them you’ll poke holes through all the cell walls with ice crystals.

Later, when you’ve got a little time on your hands, cook the frozen peach chunks with an equal amount (by weight) of sugar. Stir the mixture from time to time, until the juice comes to a boil, then strain that, too. If the syrup needs a little zing, squeeze a little fresh lemon juice into it, not worrying too much about measuring anything.

This syrup will last for two or three weeks in your refrigerator.

Peach Daiquiri

2 ounces peach-infused rum (see above)

1 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice

2/3 ounce peach syrup (see above)

Combine all three ingredients, with ice, in a cocktail shaker. Shake until a frost line appears in the condensation on the shaker, then strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass.

Is this rummy? A little.

Is it limey? Just limey enough. Lime is everybody’s best friend, and it gets along beautifully in this situation.

Is it peachy? Sweet Leaping Moses on a Popsicle Stick, yes. This is the perfect drink for when a child is whining. After two or three sips, you can assure them that living is easy, that their daddy is rich, and their momma’s good-lookin’. The child’s confused silence will be a little bonus.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Roast beef and Italian-style pizza

Zo’s 2 opens downtown

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

For Harpreet Singh, opening a restaurant was a leap of faith.

Singh, who opened his second restaurant, Zo’s Place 2, in Manchester in August, said he opened his first restaurant with no experience.

“It was very overwhelming,” he said. “And financially I was drained too. For 10 years I saved all my money and then I just put it in one restaurant. I didn’t get a loan for it, because I didn’t have any background. I went through a phase where I was literally crying every day.”

Singh bought a roast beef place in Nashua and threw himself into learning everything he could about running it.

“That’s where we started,” Singh said. “That’s where I learned everything.” His son was about to be born. “I told myself that before his first birthday I’d do something that he would remember his whole life, so that’s when we opened the first place.” The Singhs named it Zo’s Place, after their son. “Before his first birthday, we opened in Nashua. And then, around his second birthday, we decided to open a second place.”

Not surprisingly, when Singh was building the menu for Zo’s Place 2 he started with roast beef. “Obviously,” he said, “everybody who knows me, who knows my background, knows that roast beef is one of the things I bring wherever I go. It’s one of our signature items. It’s not just sandwiches. We do it in a calzone. It’s called roast beef three-way calzone. Basically mayo at the bottom, and then a little bit of cheese and roast beef, and we’ll put James River barbecue sauce, and then cheese at the top, and then it will be a calzone. We make a roast beef three-way pizza … we put 10 slices of roast beef on it. We want to keep our beef rare and tender. So we drizzle some barbecue sauce and mayonnaise on top of the pizza. And then we have roast beef sandwiches and also club sandwiches that we do [with roast beef]. We do a roast beef salad too.”

Singh decided to go in a different way for Zo’s pizza.

“We do hand-tossed Italian pizza,” he said. “We know that in Manchester the majority of the pizza is Greek style. And that’s what we do at our Nashua location too. But here, I wanted to hand-toss Italian pizza. It has a thinner crust, and different sauces and cheeses, too. The dough is fresh-made here in the house. Our Italian [sauce] is a little sweeter and we go lighter on cheese.”

Singh said that aside from the pizza “a lot of the menu is Greek-style. The salads that we do [are] really good, like the fresh chicken kebab salads. That’s all Greek-style. We use Greek feta with onions. And then we have gyros. We do chicken gyros, and we do lamb and beef gyros. We have rice bowls, steak tip rice bowl, chicken kebabs, grilled chicken rice bowls, chicken parm rice bowl, eggplant parm rice bowl, and then veggie rice bowl. And then we have club sandwiches, which you can get with anything you want on it — tuna club, ham and cheese club, roast beef club, cheeseburger club.”

“We have a pretty solid menu.”

Singh said it was important to him to use the same ingredients in multiple dishes.

”Let’s say we bring in a new item,” he said. “If [its ingredients are] not used in all the different menu items, they’re going to sit around for one item.” On the other hand, he used eggplant parmesan as an example. “It can go in an eggplant parm rice bowl, it could be an eggplant parm sub, it could be eggplant parm ziti, it could be the eggplant on a pizza.”

Zo’s Place 2

Where: 102 Elm St., Manchester, 836-3905
Hours: Monday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 1:30 a.m., and Sundays noon to 1:30 a.m.
More: zosplace.com

Featured photo: Harpreet Singh holding a Junior Roast Beef. Photo by John Fladd.

It’s all in the spices

Egyptian food fest feeds Nashua

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

What you have to understand about Egyptian food, according to Kyrillos Gobran, is that while it has many similarities to the foods of other Mediterranean cultures, small details make it distinct.

“When you go from one place to another,” he said, “[the foods] might look similar but the spices that are being used add very different flavors to them, and each one that you will eat will taste different even though it might be the same piece of meat.”

Gobran is a priest at St. Mary and Archangel Michael Coptic Orthodox Church in Nashua, which will hold its annual Egyptian Food Festival this weekend.

“We use cumin a lot,” he said. “We use nutmeg. We use mixtures of different kinds of spices mixed together, which is good for grilling and it just adds an Egyptian type of flavor to it.”

Gobran said the foods on offer at the festival provide a window into Egyptian culture.

“In Egypt, they love their food and they love to eat in the morning, evening, at night, and even late at night — restaurants are open for all [types of food] until the late, late hours of the night.” These are the types of foods that his church will serve at the festival, he said.

“A lot of what we offer are meats,” he said, “like the beef kabob, chicken kabob, lamb kabob, stuff like that. That’s really very authentic to Egypt. It’s very tasty, very juicy. One of the great comments that I get from people that come every year is that, we come here, we enjoy the food and we are so happy that the quality and the taste of it doesn’t change from year to another. Keep it up, keep this coming.’”

“We have shawarma,” he continued, “beef shawarma and lamb shawarma as well, and Egyptian sausage. Of course, many of the foods we offer will be vegan and non-vegan. There will be falafel, and stuffed grape leaves, and something that is one of the most famous vegetarian food in Egypt. It’s called koshary, which is like a rice mixed with brown lentils, elbow macaroni, chickpeas, and it’s flavored in a way — it has like tomato sauce on top … The flavor in it is very tasty when you mix all of these together. Of course, it’s topped with fried onions as well.”

Not everyone comes to the festival for savory foods, Gobran said.

“In terms of desserts, we have lots of them — things like baklava,” he said. Egyptian baklava is subtly different from the Greek version, he explained. “It’s different in the syrup — we don’t use as heavy a syrup. We use a little hint of vanilla, for example, just to give it a smell and a good taste to it. One of my favorite desserts that we’ll be having this year is om ali.” This is a bread-based dish made from flaky bread or pastry, soaked in sweetened milk and baked with nuts and cream. “We’re going to be having fresh mango juice as well, and so many other desserts and drinks that are related to Egypt.”

It’s probably not possible to try everything in one visit.

“Some people come for the three days,” he said, “and they try different things because they cannot try everything on the first day, so they come back and try different things every day.”

Egyptian Food Festival

When: Friday, Sept. 5, from 4 to 9 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 6, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 7, from noon to 6 p.m.
Where: St. Mary and Archangel Michael Coptic Orthodox Church, 39 Chandler St., Nashua, stmarycoptsnh.org
More: Rain or shine. Admission is free. Search for Nashua Food Festival on Facebook.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 25/09/04

News from the local food scene

• More Zizza Pizza: Zizza Authentic Pizza, a Milford pizzeria, has opened a second location at 1100 Bicentennial Drive in Manchester, specializing in up-scale pizzas and sandwiches. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Visit zizzapizza.com.

• Breakfast Bourbon Brunch: Flag Hill Winery and Distillery (297 N. River Road, Lee, 659-2949, flaghill.com) will celebrate the release of its newest spirit, Breakfast Bourbon, with a special brunch, Sunday, Sept. 7, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sip handcrafted welcome cocktails and build your own bloody bourbon bar. Tickets cost $60.43.

• Wine-Tasting mystery party: Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host Murder at Downton: A Wine Tasting Mystery Inspired by Downton Abbey on Wednesday, Sept. 10, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. There will be curated wine tastings, interactive clue rooms, and a live murder mystery set in the glamorous world of Downton Abbey. Create your own character name, team up to solve the crime; prizes await the best sleuth and most fabulous costume. Tickets are $48.80.

• Wine with history: General admission tickets are still available to the Vintage & Vine fine wine and food festival at the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth on Thursday, Sept. 4, from 5 to 7:30 p.m., according to strawberybanke.org/vintage-vine, where you can purchase tickets.

• Local wines and bites: The Fall Food & Wine Festival will take place on Saturday, Sept. 27, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St. in Nashua, featuring wine, cheese, chocolate and more, according to a press release. This 21+ event benefits End 68 Hours of Hunger — Nashua, a non profit that provides food for the 68-hour weekend between school meals, the release said. Tickets cost $25 for general admission, $35 for an extra hour of admission from 6 to 7 p.m., the release said. See tinyurl.com/3sfxvwp9 for tickets.

Life in the pits