a knish to build a dream on

Meeting my parents in NYC for my birthday, I demanded that we eat our way across the Lower East Side; upscale food I can get any day at home.



At Yonah Schimmel's Knishery, the kasha knish was delicious, but the surprise star was the sweet potato knish. This was only about 1/4 sweet potato and 3/4 white potato inside, plus a lot of onion, so that the sweetness (and the bit if cinammon on top) was just an accent on a basically savory thing. I'm going to have to try this at home. Russ and Daughters' was mouthwatering to walk through (and I hadn't remembered all the non-fish gourmet goodies from last time -- were they there a few years ago?) but aside from getting a bunch of candy and dried fruit to go, the only fish we had was a few bites of the gefilte fish that had so captivated me on my last visit. It's the sweet kind.

We were saving room for an early pre-show dinner at Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse, a place in which each table gets an old-fashioned glass charger full of seltzer (several by the end of the meal) and a diner-syrup-pitcher full of shmaltz. The star here was the chopped liver appetizer. The liver came on a little plate, and on another little plate came grated black radish and browned (or rather blacked) fried onions. These were dumped together in a metal bowl, and quickly, to fend off comments, the host poured on a small river of schmaltz and mixed it all together. I'll have to try adding the onions, at least, to chopped liver next time.