b(eing) todd

junior miss and I spent labor day weekend down east, which is confusing localese for up north in maine. we were meeting my parents, who were themselves coming from yet down and easter in nova scotia. we snored our way through the gentle shower that was an embarassed former hurricane earl scurrying north and enjoyed some fun times on the beach and in the pool (junior miss) and in the local walk-in urgent care (me, after a banged up knee chose to get seriously infected my only beach weekend of the freaking summer). but I digress.

the point of this quickie post is to celebrate a breakfast I enjoyed this morning. now, I'm the kind of guy who will happily order the same thing every time I go to a restaurant. the mexican joint across the street doesn't even bother with a menu anymore - the waitress just calls back "it's the enchiladas poblanas guy again" to the kitchen when she sees me walk in. at least I think that's what she says, because that's what emerges shortly thereafter. back to my breakfast.

as I said, I tend toward the conservative in my ordering habits. in a diner, if I see sausage gravy on the menu, that's what I order. this despite decades of disappointment in greasy spoons across the nation. it is as if some miscreant food service professional started a trend: "hey, lets make some white gravy, but instead of putting actual sausage in, we just use a sausage to stir the gravy and then pepper the crap out of it so people think the lumps of flour and lard are sausage." and so the word spread across the land - the chains went first, but one by one, the old time diners followed. oh, I still eat it, because I don't mind the occasional repast of spicy lard bits, but I kept hoping for more.

I am delighted to report the maine diner does not adhere to this bastardized definition of sausage gravy. the plate arrived more grey than white, with only the height of the steaming mounds indicating the presence of the gravy's biscuit foundation. and its lumpiness was not evidence of an impatient chef with no time to do the job right. no, these were lumps of sausage. I regret that I failed to take a picture of it before devouring it. although, truth be told, it probably would not look very appetizing to someone who was NOT a sausage gravy lover.

on our way home, junior miss inquired whether the maine diner was named for the state "or the other main, the one that's important." I explained the difference in spelling, but acknowledged to her that a diner as good as the maine diner could probably justify a claim to being the main diner. it was that good.

Evan Sung for The New York Times

Dana Casey, a member of a Brooklyn cooking co-op, packs up her share of the monthly haul at Kristen Prinzo’s home.

By LAURIE WOOLEVER

Published: June 22, 2010

DINNERTIME in our home, once a source of great pride and pleasure, became a rather lackluster affair after the birth of our son in 2008. Mostly it involved repurposing takeout leftovers or, on a more ambitious night, mixing chunks of frozen vegetable purées, meant for the baby, with macaroni and cheese. It was family dinner in the sense that it was marginally edible food, consumed together in the home, but prepared with the same care and passion I brought to refilling the cat’s water bowl.

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Evan Sung for The New York Times

In Brooklyn, co-op members, from left, Christine Algozo, Amy Scallon and Dana Casey serve themselves brunch provided by the swap host, Kristen Prinzo. French toast, vegetable frittata and cheese were on the menu.

But in February, everything changed. My husband and I became part of a cooking cooperative, and suddenly we were eating tagliatelle Bolognese, eggplant Parmesan or chicken adobo, all of it homemade, and only a fraction of it cooked by me.

A cooking co-op, or dinner swap, is simply an agreement by two or more individuals or households to provide prepared meals for each other, according to a schedule. The goal is to reduce the time spent in the kitchen while increasing the quality and variety of the food eaten.

It’s not a new idea — dinner co-ops have been around for years — but it was new to me. Mine is based in my apartment building in Jackson Heights, Queens, which adds to the convenience. Members of our co-op, made up of four households, including two editors at the James Beard Foundation and Tony Liu, the executive chef of the Manhattan restaurant Morandi, exchange meals weekly....

He also had a pile of watermelons, jugs of mango and pineapple juice, and two SnoWizards, stainless-steel contraptions that produce the silky, fluffy ice shavings required for a true Louisiana “snoball.”

A snoball is to a snow cone as Warren Beatty is to Shirley MacLaine: closely related, but prettier, smoother and infinitely cooler. “In New Orleans, you can get killed if you call it a snow cone,” Mr. Williams said.

And no wonder — a snow cone is usually a mound of crunchy hailstones sitting in a pool of synthetic sugar syrup. The ice is crushed into pellets that send shivers up into the brain, and the flavoring has no chance of being absorbed into the ice.

But there is another way. A way of scraping ice so that it falls softly into cups like a January snowfall, and soaks up flavor the way dry ground soaks up rain in July. This is shaved ice, and it is a game-changer.

American food lovers, who seem to be re-examining every humble snack — beef jerky, pretzels, soft-serve — for artisanal potential, are now turning their attention to shaved ice. They are abandoning the Day-Glo aesthetic and fake flavors that they grew up with in favor of the true colors of summer fruit.

The new snow moguls draw inspiration from a whirling blizzard of these treats around the world: Hawaiian shave ice, Mexican raspados, Korean bingsu, Baltimore sky-blue “snowballs” topped with marshmallow, and Taiwanese bao bing flavored with palm sugar syrup. Indian golas and chuskis, sold by street vendors or gola wallahs, are flavored with rose, cardamom, orange and saffron. (A popular source is Saffron Spot, an Indian ice cream parlor in Artesia, Calif., south of Los Angeles.)

Most of them hail from places where summers are hot, and fruit plentiful: Latin America is packed with shaved ice treats, like Nicaraguan piraguas — named for their pyramid shape — Cuban granizados, and frío-frío (cold-cold) from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

“I’ve seen them in Cuba, I’ve seen them in Uzbekistan, I’ve seen them in Korea,” said Nathalie Jordi, an owner of People’s Pops in New York City, who makes shaved ice topped with organic and local fruit syrups. “It’s the simplest possible summer dessert.”

Fresher than Fresh is a snow cone start-up in Kansas City, Mo., owned by Lindsay Laricks, a graphic designer who grows many of the herbs for her blackberry-lavender and watermelon-basil syrups. Ms. Laricks sells her snow cones out of a 1957 Shasta trailer at local markets and art openings. “The trailer looks like a canned ham, but the snow cones are all natural,” she said. “I hope to completely reinvent the snow cone.”

At Pulino’s, an ambitious new pizza restaurant on the Lower East Side of New York, the pastry chef Jane Tseng freezes a purée of almonds, sugar and water, then sends it through the fine grating blade of her Robot Coupe R2N so that a light almond-flavored snow gathers in heaps. It tastes like essence of tortoni, sweetly fleeting.

Instead of having the creamy texture of a sherbet (which is churned like ice cream), or the crunch of crushed ice, or the large ice crystals of a granita, properly shaved ice is soft and snowy on the tongue, and disappears instantly when pressed against the palate. The technology for shaving ice runs from Ms. Jordi’s simple approach (a large block of ice and a shaver) to the complex (the Japanese-made Hatsuyuki HF500, priced about $1,500).

Shaved ice is a wonderful carrier for fruit flavor, skimming lightly across the taste buds, beautifully demonstrated by Ms. Jordi’s lemon-plum combination, or the dry apple-grape concocted by the chef Daniel Holzman of the Meatball Shop on the Lower East Side

Mr. Holzman is the proud owner of a Hatsuyuki, which devotees say earns its price by making perfect shaved ice from regular ice cubes. Most machines require specially shaped blocks that can take days to freeze. (A comparison of home ice shavers is below.)

The notion of “perfect” shaved ice — dry, light, with the slightest possible crunch — becomes clear from one’s first mouthful (“bite” would be too strong a word) of the bingsu at Koryodang, a Korean cafe in the trend-loving heart of Koreatown in Midtown Manhattan. The ice here is powder-soft; the house-made green tea “sauce” that’s poured over it is milky and lush, but with no heaviness.

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