Monday Night Dinner

60 degrees in March is a cause for celebration.  It’s throw open the windows, and daringly go out without a coat weather.  It’s refuse to feel envious when my parents gleefully tell me that they’ve had to close the windows because it’s only 60 degrees where they are (actually they usually tell me this in February when 60 degrees seems like an almost mythical temperature in Boston).  It’s the promise of Spring weather and I look forward to it every year.

60 degrees in the last two weeks of August, however, is miserable. Read the rest of this entry ?

I’m seeing more and more restaurants that cite their locavore cred on their menus.  I, personally, would be perfectly satisfied if restaurants gave a list of the local farms that source their food at the back of the menu, but the preferred method seems to be citing the source of each ingredient in a dish which can make for some long item descriptions.  You no longer get watermelon salad, you get Drumlin Farm Arugula and Watermelon Salad with Red Onion, Toasted Pinenuts, Feta Cheese and Buttermilk Dressing.  And rather than zucchini pizza you get Verrill Farm Zucchini, Carlos’ Roasted Tomato Sauce, Mozzarella, Parmesan, Sweet Onions, Chopped Garlic, EVOO and Basil.  Frankly I’m only surprised that they don’t also tell you who pulled the mozzarella and grew the onions and basil (I say this with love – both of these menu items came from a restaurant I’m quite fond of). Read the rest of this entry ?

We live in a heathen consumerist society, and when it gets me a fridge delivered on a Sunday morning I’m just fine with that. As I told my mother, blue laws only apply to things you might want to buy on a Sunday, like alcohol*. I know my mother once dramatically stalked out of a Sears and swore she would never set foot in one again, but I have nothing but nice things to say about our local Sears. For one thing that side of the mall is the easiest place to park, but mostly because I walked in to Sears on Saturday morning and by 12:30 on Sunday afternoon I had a fridge up and running in my kitchen. Nearly a week later and that still feels a little miraculous to me. Read the rest of this entry ?

I think I watch too much Masterpiece Theater because the other night I dreamt that I was being given etiquette lessons on how to dine with the ghosts of your departed ancestors (most important, don’t dip your spoon in your soup until your oldest female ancestor has dipped her spoon – you may be hosting the living guests, but at 425 she’s the matriarch and it was her house first). Or possibly I’m anticipating the next Harry Potter movie too eagerly, because the Great Hall where I was co-presiding over the multi-course dinner looked suspiciously like Hogwarts. It’s enough to make me think that I should be making Dinner a lot more formal than it is. Read the rest of this entry ?