Archive for August, 2011

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TND – Farm-to-Table Dinner

August 24, 2011

My office and I exist at different ends of the entertainment spectrum.  I go to museums for fun, they only go if dragged by an out of town elderly aunt.  I go out to dinner in Cambridge (fusion cuisine, small, innovative + cocktails), they go out to dinner in Boston (classic high end and/or neighborhood dive bars).  I plan excursions to Newport to tour Gilded Age mansions and have high tea, they go to football games and tailgate.  Overlap only ever tends to occur at the nexus points of Harry Potter movies and HBO shows.

When people in my office asked me what I’d done this weekend the response to “I went to the annual Corn and Tomato Festival at Verrill Farm” was met with a long pause and an expression of ‘well, of course you did’.  I, however, refuse to apologize for an afternoon spent sitting in the sunshine watching small adorable children being given rides on equally small adorable ponies while sampling 20 kinds of tomatoes, 10 kinds of corn and a tent’s worth of dishes made from seasonal farm produce (the chilled corn-poblano soup was particularly spectacular this year) and listening to a live blue grass band.   Read the rest of this entry ?

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TND – “The Dutch” (now with added rebuttals)

August 17, 2011

My roommate and I were up in Stowe, Vermont this past weekend for the annual antique car show – her father has a 1942 fully restored Cadillac (which won best in its class for the second year running this year – full web album of the car parade here. We go up every year for this and while her parents are showing off the car to other antique car enthusiasts we tool around Stowe poking into the various arts & crafts stores, buying chocolates to take home with us, and sampling copious varieties of jam at the awesome Stowe Farmer’s Market. We managed to spend entirely too much money on clothing, jewelry and a seriously awesome tray (we got the square elephant one – it was on sale!). What we did not get to do, sadly, was go to the Dutch Pancake House for brunch on Sunday morning. Read the rest of this entry ?

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TND – Daddy always said, “An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure.”

August 10, 2011

For reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I’ve been staring at a lot of upscale restaurant and catering menus recently. This is an activity which is mostly completely pointless because the event that I’m perusing them for isn’t happening for another three years at which point some of these restaurants may no longer be around/as good as they are now, and other new exciting restaurants will have opened. These facts have not stopped me in the slightest.

Having now looked at more menus than I can count I’ve realized several things. One, I actually have a better reason than I’m pretentious for liking farm-to-table restaurants. Read the rest of this entry ?

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TND – How Dinner is like a computer game

August 3, 2011

There are some weeks when my menu planning falls into place like the perfect game of tetris.  Then there are weeks when I leave my menu plan open in the background on my computer all day long, all week and keep clicking back to it in spare moments to swap things in and out and leave blanks and email everyone I know (okay, my mother and Jes) asking them for help figuring out what’s missing.  This week was a lot more like the latter than the former.  At this point, I’ve made and eaten Dinner and I’m still not entirely happy with the juxtaposition of all the dishes.  90% of it was there, but the green beans felt off somehow, like they didn’t quite fit into the rest of the meal.   Read the rest of this entry ?

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