Tables for Snooker and Bhutanese Food at Weekender Billiard

It's Saturday night and every snooker table is taken at the Bhutanese pool hall in Woodside, Queens. The players are all men, most with roots in the Land of the Thunder Dragon, the young ones lanky in faded rock tees and track pants, their elders slouching in bomber jackets and bright white kicks. They rack the red balls, watch and wait.

Pema Gyeltshen, from Mongar in eastern Bhutan, opened Weekender Billiard in the fall of 2014 with his cousin Lhendup Zangmo and her husband, Jamyang Tsultrim, a native of Tibet. The name on the awning is printed in English and Tibetan — not Dzongkha, Bhutan's national language, although they share the same script. (This may be because Tibetan immigrants in Queens outnumber Bhutanese, or because, as Mr. Gyeltshen explained, there is no word for "weekender" in Dzongkha.)

The chef, Norbu Gyeltshen (no relation), was born in Tibet and grew up in Bhutan. Pema Gyeltshen, too, can trace his ancestry to Tibet, centuries back. "We're all mixed up," he said. In a corner, portraits of the Dalai Lama and the astonishingly beautiful king and queen of Bhutan, flanked by their countries' flags, tilt over a huddle of glossy black tables.

Under their gaze, the waiter brings plates of ema datse, the Bhutanese daily meal. This is often described as soup, stew or curry, none of which seem to fit its texture here: fresh green chiles, split and still armed with seeds, under a sheen of mollifyingly mild cheese.

The ingredients might suggest some cross-cultural kinship with Tex-Mex chile con queso. But in ema datse the chiles are dominant, meaty strips meant to be appreciated as both vegetable and firestarter. At Weekender, they are Italian long hots, always a gamble, erratic in heat; some are merely sweet and fleshy, others a silent shriek.

They're simmered with butter and slices of white American cheese, a surprisingly successful stand-in for traditional Bhutanese farmer cheese made from curds, minus the tang. Other versions of the dish temper the heat with mushrooms, potatoes or hard, nearly fossilized beef, dried in-house for days — delicious, once you revive your animal within and break it with your teeth.

Momos (dumplings) are smaller than some of their Tibetan counterparts in the neighborhood, dainty pleated buns disclosing beef or cabbage and mozzarella. The latter are best eaten at once, before the cheese sets. All come with eze, a hot sauce powered by ema kam, dried red chiles that in Bhutan are laid on rooftops and hung from windows to drink up the sun. One night a woman at the next table pulled a giant Ziploc bag of them out of her purse.

Ema kam is the background thrum in jasha maroo, a soup red-orange like a late stage of sunset, with a lacy veil of fat on the surface and diced chicken and crushed garlic and ginger in its depths. And in kakgur, a soup with hunks of butternut squash broken down but still tasting bright, and cheese half vanished in the broth.

Bathup is the heartiest, a great bowl of soup heavy with hand-torn dough and defiance of winter. The first spoonful is plain-spoken, but stir in the pinch of spice at the center — thingay, Sichuan pepper — and the mouth goes numb.

It would not be a meal without Bhutanese red rice, grown at high elevations in the Paro Valley, earthy and fluffy, with a slight blush. You will want, too, chewy buckwheat noodles doused with hot oil to sear in the flavors of red chile and garlic chives. And Bhutanese black tea, which in its dry state is almost more twigs and bark than leaves. This is boiled for hours, then churned repeatedly with salt and a pat of butter. It tastes deep, like being privy to someone else's memory.

Vegan Ganache with Dark Chocolate Recipe

Make your own truffles, top a vegan cake or pour over vegan ice cream for a dairy-free dessert that is to die for. This vegan ganache recipe is only as good as the dark chocolate you choose, but once you've found a high-quality dairy-free chocolate, whip up this rich and flavorful batch of the best vegan ganache you've tasted since leaving dairy-laden desserts behind. This recipe uses coconut milk instead of the heavy cream used in traditional recipes. For best results, use a high-quality dairy-free chocolate.

What You'll Need
16 ounces good quality dark dairy-free chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 15-ounce can coconut milk (not lite varieties)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

How to Make It
Place the coarsely chopped dark chocolate in a medium-sized bowl. Set aside.
In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, heat the coconut milk until bubbles just begin to appear around the edges and steam rises from the surface.
Pour the hot coconut milk over the chopped chocolate and let stand without stirring for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, stir the chocolate-coconut milk mixture until glossy and smooth (this will take about 2 minutes of gentle stirring).
Add the vanilla extract and stir until incorporated. Use warm or slightly cooled.

Cooking Tips and Serving Ideas
This recipe is all you'll need to satisfy your chocolate cravings. Ganache is a flexible vegan chocolate sauce that can be used to make a variety of desserts with a few extra ingredients or to top an already amazing vegan dessert. In addition to being used to as a topping for cakes, donuts, and pies, here are two more simple ways to serve your vegan ganache:

Vegan Ice Cream Sundae: Don't leave your vegan ice cream lonely. Add some pizazz by topping it with this chocolate ganache. Add nuts, a few vegan brownie pieces, fresh fruit and you've got a hefty, yet healthy version of what will taste like a decadent sundae. Add a few more scoops and two sliced bananas and voila, a vegan banana split is born.

Chocolate Truffles Made with Vegan Ganache: To make your own vegan chocolate truffles, double the chocolate in this recipe. After preparing as directed above, let the ganache cool in the refrigerator until it's slightly soft, but firm enough to roll into balls. After you've formed your truffles, roll them on wax paper with coconut flakes, chopped nuts or sprinkle with cacao powder. Get creative and top them with vegan ginger chews or dried fruit such as cherries or raisins.

Getting Kids to Eat Their Veggies

This is the second in a series about eating healthy as a family and the challenges that can come along with it. Click here to read the first blog entry in this series.

Getting kids to eat vegetables can be tricky, especially if it's not always been part of the mealtime routine. My 2-year old has always been served with veggies at lunch and dinner, and usually eats at least some, even if she doesn't finish them. Lucky for me she has yet to realize that everyone's grilled cheese doesn't always come with broccoli on the side. My mom raises her eyebrows at some of the veggies my daughter eats that she never served when I was growing up- like butternut squash and edamame, for example. But it's great that even at this young age, my daughter is learning about a wide variety of foods that can be tasty and healthy at the same time.

Having trouble getting your kids to eat their veggies? One strategy might be to give them cool names. In a new study, 4-year olds were given regular carrots for lunch. Then on other days they were given the same carrots, but they were called "X-Ray Vision Carrots". They ate twice as many carrots on the days when the food had a cool name. Researchers say it makes food more fun for kids and then they continue eating more, even after parents stop using the names.

I know some parents who "sneak" veggies into their children's food by adding purees to spaghetti sauce, meatloaf, or other main dishes where they might not be expected. I have Jessica Seinfeld's cookbook "Deceptively Delicious" and have made a number of good recipes from it. I don't necessarily use it to sneak veggies into my family's meals, but rather just to cook things that are a little healthier.

How do you feel about sneaking veggies into your kids' diet? Do you think it's better to be upfront with what they are eating in the hopes they will learn to enjoy it? Or is that sometimes the only way you can get them to eat vegetables, so it's better than nothing?

Do you have any good strategies for getting your kids to eat vegetables? Any good recipes you'd like to share?

Eating healthy fake versions of your favourite food could be making you eat more

Throw out your carefully spiralised courgetti. Stop replacing your bread with thinly sliced bits of sweet potato. Get rid of the avocado and give your burger a proper bun.

All your healthy versions of your favourite foods might not be doing you any good.
It turns out that taking healthy foods like vegetables and dressing them up so they can masquerade as junk food could be a massive mistake when it comes to getting fit.
Why? Because the mental gymnastics required to eat courgette ‘pasta, avocado ‘ice cream', and the avocado ‘bun' could end up backfiring on us.

You see, every time we eat courgetti or similar healthy fake foods, we have to trick ourselves into pretending that a big bowl of vegetables is actually a big bowl of pasta.
But when we do this, we're always aware that what we're eating – as good as it may taste – is still the ‘healthy' option. And this can cause problems.
Kathleen Keller, a professor of nutritional sciences and food science at Penn State University, explained to The Atlantic that eating these healthy substitutes could lead to the Snackwell effect – when we know we're eating something healthy, so let ourselves eat a larger portion than we usually would.

And because vegetable pasta isn't actually the same as regular pasta in terms of taste and texture, our pasta cravings and expectations when we eat them aren't fulfilled, leading us to compensate by eating more or adding unhealthy topping to satisfy our foodie needs.
It's simple. When we tell ourselves we're eating pasta when really we're eating courgette, we're going to feel like we're missing out. And so we'll eat more to make up for it.

The solution? Stop pretending that courgettes taste like pasta. They don't.
Just enjoy a nice bowl of courgettes for the sake of courgettes. If you're having serious spaghetti cravings, eat the damn spaghetti. ‘Kay?

The RIGHT way to defrost food revealed

Thaw food by placing in cold water, says Susanne Ekstedt, from Sweden
Don't leave meat and fish to defrost in the fridge, the researcher advises
And thawing meat in microwave will make it go hard, says another expert

If you think the safest way to defrost food is by leaving it in the fridge to slowly thaw, then think again.
In fact, we should be thawing frozen meat and fish by placing them in cold water, according to a Swedish researcher.
It's the quickest - and safest - way to defrost food, according to Susanne Ekstedt, who works for the food and biscience unit of the SP Technial Research Institute of Sweden.

The quickest and safest way to defrost food, such as a whole chicken, is by placing it in cold water, says Swedish researcher Susanne Ekstedt

'This is something food scientists have known to be true for a long time now,' Ekstedt told Science Nordic.
'But this knowledge is mostly confined to the food industry. Most people don't seem to be aware of this.'
To thaw frozen meat or fish properly, put it in a freezer bag to keep water out, and then place into a bowl of cold water.

The food will then thaw quickly, as water conducts heat more effectively than air, which hastens the process.
Putting in cold water will prevent bacteria to grow.
The method follows the same principle for freezing food: that it should be done as quickly as possible.
Ekstedt made the discovery after experiments with freezing and then defrosting different foods.

Bjørg Egelandsdal, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Norway, supported Ekstedt's recommendation and said there has 'never been any good scientific evidence' behind the advice to thaw food in the fridge.
But what about defrosting in a microwave, a method we've all been guilty of using at some stage?
For microbiologist Per Einar Granum, of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, it's a no-no.
He only advises thawing in the microwave if you plan to use the meat in a stew - otherwise the meat will become too hard.
'It's a little too brutal for the meat,' he said.