This is it. My last visit to the original Frost Street, where it all began. This was the place I called home for my third year of law school. There's something sinister about the 3L year. It's utterly superfluous from an educational perspective, so you have lots of free time to discover what you really like to do, just before you strap in to your first life-sucking job in the legal profession. I realized I love to cook, and was just starting to get good at it when the demands of a legal career left me with few opportunities to practice my newfound avocation. Such is the way of the world, I suppose. But for a couple of days in early June, I went back to the place that gave this blog its name.

This is #1 Frost Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- the house where I began to learn to cook:

And this is the kitchen where it all started:

And this is why am I posting about the house on its namesake website now:

That's my kid brother folks, a Harvard Law School graduate. When I moved out of #1 Frost Street, he and his friends moved in. And when they graduated a couple of weeks ago, they all got together and held a barbecue in the backyard for their families.

For me, it was a poetic way to say goodbye to the house where I first started playing around with food and flame. For my brother, it was a moment of simple happiness between three years of challenging study and what promises to be an even more challenging career.

I've always believed he's better suited to the law than I, but it's nice to see that in his third year of law school, my brother has come to understand the importance of good food shared with those close to you. We're all proud of him. Congratulations, little brother. Good luck on the bar exam.

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I've posted about my old standbys in Chinatown, but I did manage to try something completely new while I was there. On the corner of Mott and Bayard, there's a little fruit stand displaying, among other more pedestrian items, a row of spiky brown globes hanging off hooks in yellow nets. I've come here to buy my first durian.

Is this some strange weapon left over from the rough-and-tumble days of the Five Points? One can certainly imagine a drunken thug tearing through a gangland brawl, braining his enemies with a durian attached to a chain. But no, durian is actually a fruit, native to Southeast Asia, that ranks with the mangosteen as among the most celebrated plants in the culinary pantheon. Just as the mangosteen is considered the queen of fruits, durian is hailed as their king.

The most often mentioned characteristic of the durian is its smell. Even people who love it above all other foods admit that it usually has an "off" odor. Hotels and public buildings across Southeast Asia post conspicuous signs banning the fruit from their premises. Less charitable gastronomes make no bones about it: durian just plain stinks. But if something can smell so foul, and yet still evoke paroxysms of pleasure in its broad and devoted following, it must taste pretty friggin good. So I ponied up the royal fee of five dollars American for one of these skull crushers, and gingerly toted it back to the Upper West Side.

When I got my first durian home, the first thing I did was open up all the windows. I couldn't detect any odor from the unopened fruit, but I had heard that once you break the skin of a durian its smell floods the air. Durians are usually opened with a machete, but those are hard to come by in the genteel West 70s, so I sharpened up my slightly less menacing cleaver. Bracing myself, I hacked away, fully expecting to be overpowered by a stench somewhere between that of an open sewer and a week-old dead body.

My durian smelled of neither. Perhaps this is a result of dislocation from its native land: I understand that durians harvested for sale abroad are of a special variety that can be picked before they are ripe, that they are frozen for transport, and that both of these treatments diminish its odor (and, many claim, its flavor). That is not to say that the smell was pleasant: it was faintly reminiscent of a gas leak. But it was certainly manageable. More off-putting is the tactile experience of opening a durian. Its hard, almost bony exterior yields to a forceful blow from a sharp instrument, revealing the durian's soft, cream-colored flesh. I was reminded of a line from the Simpsons:

[Kent Brockman]: Professor ... would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?

[Professor]: Yes I would, Kent.

Anthropomorphisms aside, I was able to scoop out the durian's flesh and separate it from the leathery, coral-colored seeds that lie at the center of each segment.

So how does durian taste? For me, the most striking part of the experience of eating durian is its texture. It really is like eating custard. The similarity is almost creepy. I imagine that in a region where dairy products are scarce to nonexistent, the sensation of creaminess must go a long way in raising the popularity of a foodstuff, even one that smells bad and is separated from the consumer by rows of sharp spikes. In this respect the durian is remarkably similar to another Eastern delicacy: the sea urchin. Personally, I would just as soon whip up some egg yolks and milk.

The flavor itself was understated: faintly reminiscent of bananas, mildly sweet, but with the lingering undertones of that gas-leak smell and an oily rubbing-alcohol note that I believe many Western durian-tasters equate with the sharpness of raw garlic. I know that my Bayard Street durian is probably a poor representative of the species that is traditionally eaten as soon as possible after it spontaneously drops off the tree in a Siamese jungle, but it just didn't do much for me. I couldn't eat more than one segment's worth of flesh, and tossed the rest.

As a post-script, I later learned that durian is considered in Eastern medicinal traditions to be an extremely "hot" food, i.e., it falls into the "yang" side of the "yin-yang" balance. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that durian eaters avoid other "yang-y" foods, especially alcohol. I wish I had known this before I washed the king of fruits down with the king of beers. I suffered from some wicked indigestion the whole night.

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Alas, the demands of my day job (which for the past couple of months has really been more of a day, night, and weekend job) prevented me from preparing anything really spectacular for the fish edition of IMBB. So I'm cheating this time around. I've dragged a metaphorical net through the Frost Street Archives and pulled together a retrospective of tasty sea-treats.

There was the softshell crab sandwich I made for memorial day, which is still eminently in season.

There was the jigsaw puzzle of a shad fillet, the steeliness of its roe and the quirkiness of its history.

There was the heart made of gravlax, along with a history of buried salmon, that was inspired by a trip to the Culinary Institute of America.

There were oysters upon oysters, with all their sultry suggestiveness.

There were anchovies from the House of Roque, in Collioure, several of which are still sitting packed in salt in my pantry. (I wonder if they're still good?)

And of course, there was the smoked fish from Citarella, that kept me warm on a cold winter night, and saved me from the ignominy of back-to-back grilled cheese dinners.

Who would have thought fish could do all that?

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Welcome to my favorite Cantonese lunch joint: Big Wong's. This unfortunately named hole-in-the-wall on Mott Street (between Bayard and Canal) serves up the best Cantonese roast meats (spare ribs, duck, pork, you name it) on Manhattan. At lunchtime you can wait by the entrance for a rickety formica-sheathed table in the crowded dining room, or hover by the cash register as the boys behind the counter chop up your order. Either way, you'll have a great view of various delicious dead things hanging off of stainless steel hooks.

Big Wong's has a full menu, but there's really only a few things worth ordering. Aside from the roast meats, there are some tasty rice crepes filled with shrimp, pork, duck, or (carb-haters beware) fried Chinese crullers. Noodles and other entrees are passable at best; there are plenty of superior options for such fare elsewhere in the neighborhood. But for a quick, greasy, salty meal on the cheap, you can't do much better than this little dive on Mott Street.

(Commenters: let the double entendres begin.)

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After my first year of law school, I took what I thought was going to be a wicked cool sumer job. I was going to work at the Office of the District Attorney, New York County -- that's right, my own personal episode of Law and Order.

Turns out what I did most of the summer was look over transcripts of wiretaps on suspected narcotics traffickers. Very boring. And I became a little suspicious when the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor informed me that I would be receiving my weekly stipend in cash. Chain of custody, anyone?

But in any event, the summer gave me ample opportunity to scour Chinatown for the best example of one of my favorite dim sum specialties: the roast pork bun.

The roast pork bun is a ball of dough encasing chopped cantonese roast pork, which is often heavily slathered in that delectable smoky-salty-sweet sauce you find on all types of animal flesh in Cantonese shops. The dough can be steamed or baked, but for a handy satisfying lunch I generally opt for the baked variety (steamed buns are nice for a weekend dim sum brunch). I've eaten roast pork buns from every restaurant and bakery from Baxter to the Bowery, and my favorite - by far - is the golden treat served up at the May May bakery on Pell Street, just East of Mott.

May May stuffs its slightly sweet dough with generous portions of heavily seasoned and sauced pork that has actually been roasted in the Cantonese style -- many pork buns use pork that has been pan-fried or steamed and seasoned with scallions or other such nonsense. They are glazed with just enough egg wash to make them hypnotizingly shiny. And, like most pork buns in Chinatown, they are amazingly affordable: just over 50 cents apiece. The only problem is that May May knows it has the goods, and won't let you get out their door that easily. You can only buy their baked roast pork buns in boxes of 9 for $4.75. And it is easier than you might think to tear through the entire box in an afternoon.

Those opting for a healthier option can try May May's sticky rice packets: hunks of roast pork, vegetables, or both surrounded in delicious sticky rice, wrapped in leaves, and steamed. Prices range from $1.00 to $2.00, and just one will make for a filling lunch on the go.

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Yes, I've been gone for a while, but for good reason. Last week I was downtown for jury duty during the day, and in the office at night. If working at my firm is like having two jobs, going to jury duty on top of it is like working three. But now I've got lots of stories from Chinatown to share with you.

Trial lawyers and jurors are lucky in that the Manhattan courthouses border Chinatown on its western edge. Manhattan's Chinese quarter teems with cheap, satisfying eats, particularly Cantonese food. Radiating out from the intersection of Mott and Pell streets is a maze of gastronomic delights, which I'll be sharing with you over the next few days. It's good to be back.

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