Committing Christmas – Dinner, December 4th
Mustard Baked Chicken with Pretzel Crusted Chicken (w/ a variety of mustards & mustard based sauces)
Sage Scented Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Grilled Apples
(umm, some kind of vegetable, although I’m blanking on what exactly – green beans?) Read the rest of this entry ?
Continuing on my recent theme of childhood nostalgia, or possibly by eager anticipation of being in London this year for Christmas, this is a meal brought to you by a trip my parents and I took around England when I was about nine. I can’t remember why we were there, or where else we must have gone in Europe on that vacation (on our way back from Hong Kong? I have no idea – Dad?). I do remember an endless stream of pub lunches eaten out on the patio because I was too young to be allowed in the pub room, and pint glasses of cold spicy ginger beer (non-alcoholic). I remember the chalk horse at Uffington, the Iron Age earth works at Maiden Castle, the standing stones at Stone Henge (building a henge are we?), and wandering across the moors collecting tufts of wool left by wandering sheep (because I was the kind of kid who collected tufts of wool in the hopes of being able to card them and learn to spin them into wool – yes, I read entirely too much historical fiction as a child). Read the rest of this entry ?
This is the annual Farm-to-Table Dinner. Someone at Dinner foolishly asked if I could name all the farms that the produce came from, and not only can I tell you that, I can tell you when the corn was picked (5:30am the day I bought it – which, granted, I only know because that’s what the sign on the enormous pile of corn said, not because I actually asked).
If you’re curious, yes there was entirely too much food. Read the rest of this entry ?
Remember when I said, “Hush, now – spoilers!”? This is the grand reveal.
Firstly, I have the world’s most awesome friends.
Secondly, in wildly non-revelatory news, when presented with too many choices I dither in an epic manner.
Thirdly, I inadvertently managed to carry on a family tradition by celebrating my half-birthday. Read the rest of this entry ?
As noted previously there was no Dinner last week because my roommate and I took ourselves up to Montreal for a vacation. I believe on Tuesday night we were tucking into plates of poutine (verdict: eh, I’d rather just have the cheese curds and gravy, I don’t really need the fries).
I really liked Montreal – I kept comparing it to other places I’d been (the outside, throw open the windows, sidewalk culture of San Diego – the French heritage of New Orleans – the quirky fierce independence of San Francisco – the sheer Canadian-ness of Toronto), but in the end I think that comparisons are a little unfair. It feels like itself, and itself is a quirky city with charming neighborhoods that embraces its French heritage and its Canadian identity. I’d cheerfully go back and spend more time exploring the Mont Royal neighborhood, going over to the Botanical Gardens which we didn’t have a chance to visit, peering in the windows of art galleries in the old port area, and gorging myself on excellent food and wine.
If you live in a major urban center in the US, or if you’ve watched the Food Network recently, you’ll have witnessed the explosion of the food truck movement. Boston is not exempt from this, and if you work in the downtown area you can have your pick of Southern-style barbeque, Silk Road-style barbeque, bahn-mi, noodle bowls, grilled cheese, popsicles, cupcakes, and (most excitingly) pickles. The grand daddy of all the Boston food trucks, however, is the Clover Food Lab truck. It didn’t quite start the movement in Boston, but it’s probably one of the best known, and with six trucks scattered around the city (Park Street, South Station, Longwood Medical Area, Kendall Square, BU and the South End) and two store front locations (Harvard Square, Inman Square, and theoretically coming soon to Hynes Convention Center) it’s also one of the most easily available. Read the rest of this entry ?
Since Jess has been busy with the U.S. Open and the new puppy, the rest of us have missed our weekly excuse to catch up and eat delicious food. (Also, our time to play with the puppies. We need our dog time.) My excuse for hijacking this particular week is that I just moved into my very own condo, making hijacking MND sound like an easy substitute for a housewarming party.
Invariably, when you move into a new place, you spend the next few months learning things.
For instance, it turns out that my kitchen window lets in ants. Given that the fan from the stove does not vent outside, this is unfortunate. It’s even more unfortunate to discover this when one has arrived home only half an hour before guests are to arrive. Oh well, lonza (which I was told would be even better with melon than prosciutto) and melon will keep people entertained for awhile, right? Fortunately, the ants are gone in time for me to begin cooking before anyone arrives.
Digression: I bake. Well, I used to bake a lot before I lived in an apartment with an oven that couldn’t hold a temperature. If it couldn’t be made in a toaster oven or a friend’s oven, I stopped making it. So, I’ve been super excited about the gas stove and functioning oven in my new place. Everyone else has been super excited that I’m starting to bake again.
Back to the main storyline: It turns out that the new oven has a safety feature which automatically shuts down the oven when it gets too hot, say when the broiler has been on for twenty minutes straight while one broils repeated batches of eggplant and summer squash for a casserole.
I discovered this when, with two guests already there and four more on the way plus a casserole and a crisp to be baked, the oven shut down completely, even the digital clock. According to my panicked scan, the oven manual does not mention this feature. I had a vague memory that the circuit breaker for the unit was in the garage, but really didn’t want to go down three flights of stairs unless absolutely necessary. So, we searched the closets just to reinforce that, yes, the circuit breaker really is in the garage. (Picture the movie Clue here). When the circuit breaker wasn’t flipped, we decided it had to be a safety feature. (Running back upstairs in a group.)
Luckily, after two more guests arrived, the oven turned back on. Time to pull out the appetizers and wine to keep people entertained while dinner finally cooks!
Read the rest of this entry ?
I got to the farmer’s market last Thursday at the very end of the day which is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand you sometimes get fantastic deals because the farmers don’t want to have to repack and take home the bits and pieces they have left, so they’ll sell them to you for a fraction of what they were during the day. On the other hand, they’re frequently sold out of whatever it was you actually needed. This is how I ended up with 12 crazy early mostly unripe peaches and then had to figure out what I was going to do with them. Read the rest of this entry ?
When I finished 10th grade everyone involved agreed that for their sanity and mine it was better that Chemistry and I part ways. I don’t know exactly what my mental block on Chemistry was, but I was terrible at it. The only parts of it that I even marginally understood were the parts where you set peanuts on fire and boiled water in a test tube from the resulting flame (to calculate the number of calories in a peanut), and balancing equations. The balancing equations part of chemistry I still wasn’t exceptionally good at, but at least derived a sense of satisfaction from making everything achieve a state of equilibrium on either side of the = symbol. This is also, I suspect, why I enjoyed doing math proofs (plus, at the bottom of math proofs you get to write Q.E.D. which always made me feel terrible erudite and like I was one step closer to inhabiting a British school boy novel). Read the rest of this entry ?
