A very berry delight.

It's that time of year again, and as the days get warmer, you'll see a lot more street vendors out and about here in New York City.  These purveyors of cheap cuisine have been my go-to guys for fine, frugal fare in finicky financial times.  My curb-side heroes have been the halal food carts and fruit vendors, ever since my first summer down here.  While chicken and rice is a great deal for a meal (we'll probably talk about them another time), I love the fruit vendors because they're just so much cheaper than the local supermarket.

Today, on my way back from picking out a wine for my steak, I stopped by and picked up two 16 oz. cartons of strawberries for two dollars.  Compared to what you'll find in the Food Emporium supermarket one block away (one 16 oz. carton for somewhere between four and five dollars), this was phenomenally cheap.  Unfortunately, it is a law of nature that any berries you buy at a fruit vendor will inevitably go bad the day after you buy them.  To take full advantage of these street vendor deals, then, you'll have to do something special besides just eat them.

After eating as many as I could today, I decided to make the rest of my strawberries into a syrup.  This particular one would be more of a strawberry in syrup mix, which could be used for various things like ice cream, strawberry shortcake, or blended into yogurt.  In principle, syrups are sugar dissolved in water.  To make my concoction then, I sliced up a bunch of strawberries and boiled them in a little water and a decent dose of sugar until the liquid achieved a thick enough consistency.  Tomorrow, I'll probably have some of that with the carton of Greek yogurt I've had sitting around in my fridge for a week now.

As for the steak, well... here's a picture:

As it turns out, the cut was a little thinner than I had imagined when I told the butcher (At a local butcher shop, Ottomanelli's), so I overcooked it somewhat - a shame, since the Argentinian Malbec I had was rather good - spicy, with a moderate level of tannins.

As a side note... is it just me, or does everyone automatically say a red wine has notes of blackcurrant?  I've never even SEEN one, much less tasted one.