When you go to visit someone for the first time you invariably end up drifting towards their bookshelves to check out what they read, or at least I do. When I go a new country I like to meander around a grocery store for pretty much the same reason. Admittedly this is possibly my bias talking, but I think that food and language are the two best ways to learn about another culture. Read the rest of this entry ?
My roommate and I have a deal. She doesn’t ask me to buy boxed macaroni & cheese, and I pretend not to notice that she’s snuck PAM cooking spray into the pantry while I’m out of town. She watches Disney movies when I go away, and I watch ridiculously cheesy romantic comedies when she’s away. It works well for us.
This was the last Dinner before I go to my parents for Christmas. It was therefore the last chance I had to use up the various things in my fridge that I know my roommate won’t eat while I’m gone, and that will have gone bad by the time I get back. There’s some unfathomable number of mushrooms in the fridge. I clearly bought them to make something, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Possibly it was the same dinner for which I bought an enormous quantity of green beans. Then there’s the 4+ lb of butternut squash that I bought a month or so ago with the intention of making soup. I never got around to roasting the squash, and while it’s not going to go bad in the 10 days I’ll be gone I’m of a mind to clean up the kitchen before I leave. Read the rest of this entry ?
A combination of not having Dinner last week and having a birthday Dinner this week for someone whose birthday is actually on Thanksgiving, has completely thrown off my sense of time. I keep having to remind myself that it is not the week after Thanksgiving, and that I do not have most of December to go before Christmas. It is, in fact, two weeks to Christmas. It is 10 days until I leave for Christmas to visit my parents, which in turn means that it’s seven days until my mother remembers all the things that she wants me to bring her from the US that she swore she wasn’t going to need this year.
I succumbed to the evil cold/flu that’s been going around lately, and since the thought of eating, much less cooking, was exhausting I cancelled Dinner.
Going to someone else’s house for Thanksgiving is like voyaging into the unknown. You never know what strange customs may prevail in this foreign land. They may serve olives and pickles with dinner (my roommate’s family). They may serve salad (why?). They may not make gravy (my cousin’s husband’s family – my entire family stared at him in horror when he admitted this).
I’m actually not all that picky about my Thanksgiving Dinner. This is mostly because I know that Christmas dinner will be exactly the same as what I would have served for Thanksgiving if I was making it. So, if I miss my chance at Bacon & Chestnut Stuffing in November, I know that I’ll be eating it in December. However, Thanksgiving is at our house this year, and I keep feeling like I’ve forgotten some vital Thanksgiving dish, I just can’t remember what it is.
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My roommate and I were down in Miami this past weekend, and I love Boston, I really do, but there’s something to be said for standing on the beach at midnight drinking mojitos in mid-November. Frankly there’s something to be said for drinking mojitos at midnight no matter what the setting, but the beach was a nice touch. While I was there it occurred to me, as it does periodically, that high school Spanish might have been more useful to my life than German (although German does have the dubious merit of making Latin seem easier by comparison).
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Dear Stop-n-Shop:
It is November 2nd. That’s two days after Halloween, twenty-four days before Thanksgiving and fifty-one days to Christmas. In other words, it’s way too early for me to be seeing Christmas ornaments and snowmen peeps on the shelves (anyone else remember when peeps were a seasonal treat?) The leftover Halloween candy has barely made it to the sale racks, and you’re pushing Christmas knick-knacks already? Have you forgotten that there’s an entire other holiday in between Halloween and Christmas for which you could be selling tacky and unnecessary kitsch?
Also, wherefore your sudden and mysterious aversion to beans? What used to be a plentiful variety and stock of beans – red beans, black beans, kidney beans, great northern beans, garbanzo beans – has shrunk to a paltry and elusive collection. I think I bought the last two cans of black beans in the store.
To say nothing of the butter shortage. I kind of (but not really) understand having a run on butter around Thanksgiving or Christmas what with all of the baking, but Halloween? Who runs out of unsalted butter on November 2nd?
Je vous prie, Monsieur/Madame, d’accepter l’expression de mes sentiments les plus exaspérées.*
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There are certain places that are quintessentially emblematic of a particular region or aesthetic. It’s like they’ve been designed to fit a stereotype and they’re a little Stepford in how well they succeed in conforming to our expectations.
Gruyere in Switzerland is like that – although in fairness, a lot of Switzerland is a little Stepford. Gruyere is what happens when Hansel and Gretel escape from the wicked witch and decide to go into urban planning. There are cobblestone streets lined with neatly whitewashed houses with geraniums in every window box. There’s a fountain in the middle of the town square, and there are flower arrangements in old wells (geraniums, of course – we knew my mother had lived in Switzerland too long when she started to buy geraniums for outside planters with a complete lack of irony). In the winter, snow rims the eaves and icicles hang in neatly ordered rows. Because this is Switzerland I’m sure that the inhabitants are trimming the icicles if they get longer than the regulation limit.
I had a mildly horrifying realization the other day. I’m becoming my mother.
No offense to my mother, who is a charming and lovely lady of whom I’m quite fond, but I feel emphatically that I’m too young to turn into her. Not the least of which because it means I’m that much closer to an unhealthy obsession with the temperature of my freezer.
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This is the story of the lamb stew that wasn’t.
It starts with losing two members of Dinner for the foreseeable future – one to an internship at L’Espalier, and the other to rehearsals for a play. On the one hand, those are obviously good things and we’re pleased for them. On the other hand, we won’t get to see them as much and that’s sad. And, on a third hand, they are coincidentally the two people at Dinner who don’t like lamb which means that while they’re off not coming to Dinner I can serve lamb to my heart’s content.
Monday Night Dinner 
