Summer Rolls

FAMILY AFFAIR Tama Wong and her daughter, Georgia, 16, make Vietnamese summer rolls at their home in Flemington, N.J.
By ELAINE LOUIE
Published: October 9, 2012

LINDA EVANGELISTA once said that she and other superstar models “don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”

Mia Wong, 14, said, “I don’t get out of bed unless there’s food on the table.”

At her home in Flemington, N.J., there is always food on the table because the Wong family is food crazed, and that is perhaps an understatement. Moar

Recipe: Vietnamese Summer Rolls with Black Bean Garlic Dipping Sauce

Aaron Houston for The New York Times
Vietnamese summer rolls with a black bean garlic dipping sauce.

Too Much Wine? Not Enough Room?

BOTTLEROCKET Leslie Alexander, owner of Société du Vin, a private wine tasting space/cellar in Bridgehampton, N.Y. It will be open almost around the clock, he said, when the space reopens in the spring.
By FLORENCE FABRICANT
Published: October 9, 2012
BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y.

LESLIE ALEXANDER, who owns the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association and spends half the year in Southampton, N.Y., hired a Hollywood set designer and spent $5 million to turn an old potato barn in nearby Bridgehampton into state-of-the-art wine storage with a lavish tasting room last summer. Moar

No Apologies Necessary When a Dish Goes Awry

Save the Day Rösti.
By MELISSA CLARK
Published: October 5, 2012

MANY years ago, I saw a photo of braised Provençal duck in a food magazine. It was stunning, with bronzed pieces of duck nestled in sauce studded with olives and potatoes.

I made it for a dinner party. Instead of a culinary masterpiece, I was left with a soupy pot of pale duck bobbing under a slick of its own liquefied fat.

Had the same thing happened to me today, I would have simply changed the name of the dish to “duck confit with potatoes and olives.” If people were expecting that layer of fat, it wouldn’t have bothered them. Or if I wanted to get fancy, I could translate the whole thing into French. Moar

A Taste of Fall in a Bottle of Hard Cider

By DAVID TANIS
Published: October 5, 2012

A FEW years ago, I spent a month in a tiny village in Normandy. Up the road, past an ancient apple orchard, was a dairy farm run by Monsieur Bernard, a wiry, weathered, hard-working fellow who looked to be in his mid to late 60s.

It was a really small dairy farm, just 14 cows. “I used to have a big herd,” he told me, “but there’s not much business anymore. Everyone around here has moved to town.”

Still, he did have a handful of loyal customers, and if you wandered by in the afternoon just after milking time and brought your own jug, he would sell you a liter of still-warm milk for a few centimes. I’m not much of a milk drinker, except for a little in my morning coffee, but I still walked over every day to buy some, and to have a chat.

Each day Monsieur Bernard got a bit friendlier, and by the end of the second week, I found my status had changed from nosy tourist to trusted regular. I received a gift with purchase: a bottle of his homemade hard cider or, as he called it, cidre bouché. The cider was delicious, if a bit rough around the edges. Unfiltered, yeasty, lightly alcoholic and full of apple flavor, it was a far cry from the cloying commercial cider I grew up with. Moar

Recipe: Pork Chops With Apples and Cider

Vintner With Nothing to Hide Finds That Few Are Looking

PITY the revolutionary who, in a leap of faith, takes a brave and principled stand, possibly at great financial risk — and yet nobody seems to notice.

Such is the woeful tale of Randall Grahm, proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, Calif. Five years ago, Mr. Grahm took the possibly imprudent step of deciding to list on every bottle all the ingredients used in producing his wine. Moar

Sbarro Plan for Growth Is Starting in Kitchen

By STEPHANIE STROM
Published: October 8, 2012

The pizza wars may be just beginning.

Executives at Sbarro, the chain ubiquitous at shopping malls and airports, are hoping to elevate their restaurants in consumers’ minds with a better quality of pizza.

Aided by some technological changes, the company will return to making tomato sauce fresh and shredding cheese in each restaurant, instead of using prepackaged ingredients. The reformulated pizza is intended to help transform Sbarro into a “fast casual” restaurant chain like Panera Bread and Qdoba, said James J. Greco, who became chief executive at the beginning of the year. Moar

Limoncello?

At the close of a recent meal at Cathy Whims’s standout Italian restaurant Nostrana in Portland, Ore., my table-mates and I found ourselves seeking a bibulous dessert of some type. Usually that would mean vin santo for me, but as I was dining with a distiller, I thought the house-made limoncello I spied on the menu might be of greater interest. It’s one of those things you never think about, limoncello, until it pops up as a suddenly great idea: that dazzling bright yellow, half-frozen, lemony tang, like an adult slushie. Though it is also sweet, its penetrating citrine pop cuts like the Jaws of Life at the close of a hearty meal. Moar

Recipe:
Limoncello Once Removed

(Douglas Derrick, Nostrana, Portland, Ore.; adapted from Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Italy)

1.75 liters of Everclear, or other strong or overproof spirit

18 lemons, whole, well washed, preferably organic

superfine or white sugar

food-grade cheesecloth, rinsed and wrung out

strong butcher’s twine

large sealable glass vessel or urn, with lid.

It helps to have another pair of hands while setting this up, but once you’ve gotten the initial setup in place, it takes care of itself. Pour the spirit into the well-cleaned urn. Drape the cheesecloth in crossing swaths, making sure to gauge the length so that once the weight of the lemons is pending, they cannot reach the spirit. Bind the cheesecloth tightly in place on the outside edge of the urn with the butcher’s twine, wrapping it under a lip to make certain it is well held. Place the lemons into their hammock and cap the whole with the lid. If the lid has a plastic or rubber gasket, you may wish to remove it, lest it leach any off-flavors into the mix. Store in a stable environment out of sunlight for nine weeks. Given variables like temperature and humidity, your limoncello may be ready before then. Warmer climates will speed up the process. Avoid opening the jar, as it will set the curing process back, but do pay attention to the color of the mix; you want it rich with a kind of varnished yellow, but it can actually go too far, overextracting into a brown color with an intensity that can be too much for some people’s taste.

At the end of the aging period you should have roughly 1.4 liters of unsweetened lemon spirit at roughly 60 percent alcohol by volume, or 120 proof. Make a simple syrup of ½ liter water and the same of sugar. When dissolved fully, add to the lemon spirit and mix well. Taste for strength, balance and sweetness and adjust water for dilution and/or sugar if necessary. Be cautious not to drown the lemon’s bite and aromatics with too much sugar, but also bear in mind that if you’re serving your limoncello from the freezer, you will perceive slightly less sweetness in the frozen mixture.

Note: for more precisely diluting down to taste, you can purchase a spirit hydrometer, a device like a small floating thermometer or fishing bobber, which tells you the proof or percentage of alcohol in a solution, for as little as $7 to $10 at most brewing or winemaking supply stores. You would be looking to keep the final limoncello at about 40 percent, or 80 proof.