Three Beautiful Things 08/05/18: Penne, Errors and Walks, Great Chefs and Ten/6

1. In the same way that the Deke and I hadn't eaten rice for a few months when we had curry the other night, we also haven't had pasta for quite a while. We've had a bag of penne sitting around for months and I decided to boil it up and I made a version of Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce without the onion. We didn't have any on hand and so decided the sauce would be fine without one.

2. The Red Sox and Yankees played a 10 inning game tonight. The Red Sox sent the game into extra innings by scoring three runs in the bottom of the ninth off of Aroldis Chapman. It was exciting to see the Red Sox come back and eventually win the game 5-4, but it was disappointing that the outcome of the game hinged as much as it did on errors by both teams and too many bases on balls.

3. I watched the finale of last year's Alton Brown Challenge on Chopped. I won't give away how it turned out in case anyone reading this might watch it one day, but I can say that of all the episodes I've watched of Chopped, this episode was the most tightly contested and featured the best chefs I've ever seen on the show.

I picked up Ed this morning and we traveled to CdA and went over to Darren's. Darren wanted to eat at Ten/6, a relatively new Louisiana-style restaurant in Midtown CdA. Mike Stafford was in town and met up with us. Ten/6 is very popular, so we had a wait of about twenty minutes before our table opened up and the kitchen got backed up with all the customers and so our food was slow to come out. None of us minded. We enjoyed our coffee -- I had a couple of cups of their chicory coffee. I would have loved this coffee with steamed milk, a kind of New Orleans cafe au lait, but Ten/6 doesn't steam milk for coffee. No problem -- I just had to ask! I ordered the Jazz Kitchen Hash with poached eggs and Tuscan toast. The hash was a medium spicy tasty blend of many flavors: celery, onion, green peppers, queso Oaxaca cheese, herbed potatoes, Andouille sausage, and pickled collard greens (my favorite ingredient in the hash). My food was delicious and filling and was an adventure for me in that I'd never eaten a hash anything like this one before.