Fair warning, I am about to horrify everyone of Italian descent and anyone born south of the Mason Dixon line (except my mother who doesn’t like grits and therefore doesn’t care).
Polenta and grits are the same thing.
I know, I know, I’ve just committed some kind of heresy, but that doesn’t make me wrong. Don’t believe me? Let’s analyze this. Read the rest of this entry ?
Apparently my new default for Dinner is ‘dither’. I spent a day and several IM conversations dithering about whether one time the lasagna recipe would be enough to feed 8 people. This is partly because while the recipe itself divides into halves or thirds or quarters fairly neatly, you end up with strange amounts of raw ingredients leftover (like 3 oz of ricotta), and a strange assortment of pans on the table (one large pan, one really small pan). I eventually decided that one time the recipe was enough to feed 8 people if I stretched the meal with both the requested salad and green beans (originally it had been an either or) and added a plate of tomatoes. Then on Tuesday afternoon at the farmer’s market I dithered about whether I really needed/wanted the tomatoes since Dinner had been reduced to six people and the lasagna would be a gracious plenty all on its own. Eventually I voted against the tomatoes but not before standing there with my hand hovering indecisively over the tomatoes for several minutes. Read the rest of this entry ?
Some books should come with warning labels. I don’t mean the kind of warnings that land books on the Banned Books list. I mean warnings like ‘Do not read this book unless you have time to make cinnamon rolls this weekend’. Or, ‘Map the route to your nearest Moroccan restaurant before starting this book.’
I’m not talking about the obvious books either. Anyone who didn’t know that “Like Water for Chocolate” was going to leave them hungry was clearly not paying attention to the cover copy. I’m talking about books like the one I just finished. Read the rest of this entry ?
There are any number of food related bandwagons which I have not just jumped on to, but have walked in the parade, cheered on the sidelines and made large posters with sparkly puffy paint to promote (well, figuratively anyway).
I’m on board with the local food movement. I was a proponent of the slow food movement before it had a name. I’m kind of an adherent of the organic food movement – by which I mean, I’ll do it when it’s easy, convenient and not wildly more expensive than the alternative. I spend quite enough of my budget on food as it is, I don’t need to look for ways to spend more. Read the rest of this entry ?
Last week I was critical and complaining about trends in food TV. Friday afternoon devolved in a series of small annoyances which cumulatively were enough to make me wish I kept a bottle of scotch in my desk drawer the way that everyone in the 1950’s seems to have (or so television would suggest). I spent the first half of this week playing phone tag with a restaurant manager so that I could complain about mediocre service we’d had on Sunday afternoon. In the light of all that negativity, I feel the need to redress the balance with a burst of positive thoughts. One of the podcasts I listen to ends every show with a segment called “What’s Making You Happy This Week”, so in that spirit here’s a list of what’s making me happy this week. Read the rest of this entry ?
I sometimes feel like I have more than my fair share of pet peeves. I have at least four that are just related to the printer/photocopier at work, and I have two completely separate and lengthy lists of pet peeves for traffic depending on whether I’m the pedestrian or the driver – I do try not to do the things as a driver that make me nuts as a pedestrian, although I’m not entirely sure I can say that the opposite is true.
I also have a whole series of pet peeves about cooking shows. I’ve talked before about how they exist in this vacuum where nobody has food dislikes or food allergies, more than once in fact. These are two not new exactly, but recently reinforced pet peeves courtesy of a series of Saturdays that have filled my DVR with cooking shows. Read the rest of this entry ?
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 ?
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 ?
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 ?
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 ?
Monday Night Dinner 