bananas roasted in coconut milk with pecans & ice cream


This actually looks better than it tasted, for once. I need to cook the bananas longer but not let them burn to a blackened heap which is what happened to the REST of the dish and why I didn't take another picture. I'll try this again someday. It was still mighty tasty, though... but next time I'll leave the liquidy part out of the coconut milk so that it doesn't become soupy!

West End? Psh... it's all about Havana Central now.

When I was in undergrad the West End was the go to bar for most of the frats and sororites on campus... which means I rarely set foot in there. I can see the appeal of shot girls and jello shots with whipped cream on top and slipping around in someone spilled something, but I'd rather do that in one of the bars down in the Village.

A while back this place turned into a cuban restaurant called Havana Central. In its earliest incarnation I visited and was mighty underwhelmed.

Now that I'm back in the neighb and always up for giving a place another chance I've changed my tune.

This is a media noche. It's a cuban sandwich (ham, roast pork, pickle, mayo, mustard, infused with deliciousness) on a sweet roll instead of the standard bread!

It was delish!

I also had some maduros (the sweet plantains) and for breakfast the next day at work I saved this little plate of chorizo with roast potatoes, onions and surprise cheese!*

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THE WEST END | 2911 Broadway
(between 113th & 114th Streets)
Phone: 212 662-8830 | Fax: 212 662-9107




*Surprise cheese is cheese you don't know is going to be in your dish, but you're happy to find anyway.

don't skimp on the shrimp

blogger-emoticon.blogspot.comI adore shrimp. It's delicious and as long as I don't have to devein them I'm happy to cook feasts of the curly crustaceans every week.

Here are two dishes I made a few weeks ago:

One is shrimp in a curried tomato sauce over linguine


and the other is sundried tomato pesto with shrimp over the leftover linguine from the first!

Artichoke Basile... a mini DiFara closer and quicker


So I went to this tiny place (14th b/t 1st and 2nd) a couple days ago and had to get the Artichoke pie..

It was good, very good, but it's not what made me swoon with delight.

This...this... smallish slice of Sicilian pizza heaven is what will keep me going back for more:

The crust is infused with generous amounts of olive oil. The sauce is perfectly chunky and the cheese just coats the whole thing in a blanket of deliciousness. There's fresh basil on this and the regular slice and when I go back I'm going to skip the artichoke slice so I have more room for these.

When I went they didn't have the cauliflower fritti because apparently with the volume of people coming through it's hard to make it in a sensible amount of time.

I look forward to the day when I can try that too. =)