Welcome to Eat This! Your insider's guide to the best food New York City has to offer. And that doesn't mean sending you to posh and trendy restaurants - you can read about those anywhere. Still, if that’s how you want to blow your dough, knock yourself out...

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Brooklyn's Red Hook
Ball Fields

We have just come from our second visit to the Red Hook Ball Fields in Brooklyn and are feeling quite satisfied, indeed. What? You haven't heard about the Ball Fields yet? Hardly seems possible really, but here's a bit about it.

Red Hook is a rapidly-changing neighborhood of Brooklyn located west of Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill and bounded by the BQE [Brooklyn-Queens Expressway] and the New York Harbor. Its growth stymied by poor mass transit (before the Metrocard, it would have been considered a "two-fare zone"), it has recently surged in popularity, particularly amongst the hipster population. It is now home to the Fairway Market and soon, to a new IKEA. Don't blink or you'll miss all the US Civil War-era warehouses coming down to accommodate the new structures.

Red Hook is also home to lots of football fields - your football, that is. And every weekend in the warm months, in addition to several simultaneous games, it features the amazing cuisines of Latin America lovingly prepared by everyday cooks under homemade tents, charging far fewer pesos than seems possible. Like what? you might well ask. Our recent trip saw us scarfing down huge queso huaraches, the tortillas themselves made right in the booth, with guacamole, lettuce, tomatoes, more cheese, and all sorts of hot sauces (or not, as you wish) for the ridiculous price of $4.00. Meats are available as well, but we don't eat 'em. Let me know how that works out for you. The booth, the first one on the right as you enter the field, past the tchotchke stand, also makes tacos.

Not in the mood for hauraches? How about a grilled corn to knock your socks off? It's $2.00 and you can have it one of two ways: either with a squeeze of fresh lime juice and dusted with chili powders or, my fave, with a thin slather of mayonnaise, salt, grated queso, and chili powder. Sweet!

But what to wash all this goodness down with? Funny you should ask. Between the aforementioned taco stand and the gilled corn goddess is a juice stand. Oh my god, what a juice stand! Fresh watermelon juice will cool you off on the very hottest days that the summer can choke up, and at $2.00 for a medium or $3.75 for a large, it is a fabulous deal. Don't fancy watermelon? They have cantaloupe, pineapple, mango, lime, and horchata, to name a few.

Not satisfied yet? Tough customer. How about ceviche from the lady at the very last stand on the left? She puts together a silence-inducing tuna soup for $7.00 for the bowl. A posh restaurant would be charging double for less. Still no? What about pupusas? There are around two stands that put those together for you. They range from about $1.50 to $2.00, depending on the filling. Pupusas, so you know, are Salvadoran in origin and are a thick corn tortilla made from a masa (maize) dough (made on site, by the way) that is stuffed with one or more of the following: cheese (queso), fried pork rind (chicharrón), chicken (pollo), refried beans (frijoles refritos), or queso con loroco (loroco is a vine flower bud from Central America and purportedly an aphrodisiac).

There are also stands selling flautas, fruit (including mangos on a stick), baleadas, tacos, tamales, quesadillas, and taquitos, for starters. The food comes from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The entrance to the fields is on the corner of Clinton Street and Bay Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The stands are open Saturday and Sunday, rain or shine, from roughly May through October.

Recently, there has been noise about bidding out the permits to sell on the fields to the chain restaurants, which will force these hard-working and talented chefs out of the area. Get down there while you still can and enjoy one of the great, authentic culinary treats this city is famous for. You will not be sorry!

These are interesting times — and places — we live in aren't they? And none more so than here in New York City it seems. The global headquarters of AIG are located here, as are the headquarters of Goldman Sachs [often referred to as Golden Sacks, in the UK].

With that in mind, and noting that all this crap raining down on us affects the quality of life in New York. These companies pay huge amounts in taxes — or would do if they came clean with all their earnings, instead of hijacking some of it into the Cayman Islands. But that's another story. This story is about the ever so slightly tarnished look the Obama administration has right now, in regard to the débâcle of the financial bailout of Wall Street.

For the Brits that don't know, Frank Rich is one of the more grounded op-ed columnists on the staff of the New York Times. I read him regularly. That's often where I get my dose of sanity when it seems the world is going to shit in a hand basket. He doesn't solve these crises, but he has a knack of shining a powerful light on the problem or culprits. And explains it — with links — to support his commentary. I like that.

So that brings me here. In the midst of a seeming Obama meltdown. Is this the most serious crisis he'll face during his presidency, is this as a reader responded to the NY Times:

"President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived."

So wrote a reader in response to a story in the New York Times and as Frank Rich writes in his excellent op-ed piece this morning, appearances on Leno or a token 90% bonus tax isn't going to fix the gaping wound in the credibility gap that is President Obama's so-called transparent government.

Reading Rich's column I take away a sense that there are two villains of this whole débâcle. At least one of these villains I've spoken about before [as have many, many other, more exalted sites]. As far back[!] as September '08, then again in October that year, and November too. Oh and shortly before Christmas!

Who are the villains? Why, Goldman Sachs [aka, Golden Sacks] of course and to a lesser extent, Larry Summers.

Now, shouting FIRE! in a crowded theatre on so many occasions means when there really is a fire, people either don't believe it, claim it's been taken care of and not to worry, or simply deny it. Sounds like a Bush regime meme, but sadly [the 'taken care of' part] is the kind of thing Summers — in the Obama adminstration — has said.

As Open Secrets notes, the biggest recipient of Goldman Sachs money in the 2008 cycle was, err... Barack Obama - $983,245. This amount dwarved his closest rival — Hillary Clinton — by over half a million dollars. Dems as a whole received almost $2.5 million largesse from the vaults of Golden Sacks [Repubs. a mere $770k].

Why? I ask this particularly as the figures above don't square with the reaction of high-ranking capos at GS who went running to their recruiters after the news of a 90% bonus tax broke, who voiced their 'sense of betrayal', and angrily shouted "fuck Obama". Literally. On the floor of the NYSE.

I find these revelations disturbing. Working in graphic design, the thought of numbers, finance and the markets leave me cold. However, like millions of us out there — not working in finance — I have a 401k, I have some minor investments in stocks, I hope to have some money to retire with at some point too. And whilst I don't pretend to know financial minutiae, the relationship of Goldman Sachs in particular to this and previous administrations is problematic for me.

But what's worse is — and who remembers now? — members of Congress grilling baseball star Roger Clemens about possible steroid use, while the entire banking system of the United States was disintegrating with corruption and fraud outside their doors.

In the meanwhile, all I can do is hope things can turn around. Ironic, eh?

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