Monday Night Dinner

Last Friday I was having a conversation with a coworker in which he explained to me that the reason he could never move to suburbia was because he hated yuppies. I was relieved of the necessity of pointing out that as a commercial real estate broker who owned his own house and was married with an infant he was pretty much the definition of a yuppie by him waving his hand and saying, “Yes, yes I know I’m a yuppie, but that doesn’t mean I want to live near them.” Which okay, I can understand that. I make fun of the people who shop at Whole Foods even as I’m going up to Wilson Farms to buy organic free range eggs, organic milk in a glass bottle and opting for the locally sourced Macoun apples versus the Granny Smiths from Wisconsin. Hypocrisy and I are good friends. Read the rest of this entry ?

Most dinners, no matter how simple they are, seem to produce a disproportionate number of dishes. Even just grilled chicken with greens and roasted sweet potatoes, which is close to the easiest dinner I can think of, requires two pans and a baking sheet to cook. That doesn’t even take into account the prep tools (grater, knife, dish to marinate the chicken, chopping board), or the serving dishes. The cooking part of dinner I quite enjoy, the cleaning up portion of the evening less so. Thus, the meal that can be made in one pot, contains all the elements of a balanced meal – protein, starch, vegetable – and, as a bonus, can be made in 45 minutes or less is the holy grail of week night cooking. Read the rest of this entry ?

When they teach you things in school they never tell you why they’re going to be useful. I think this is a failing. I mean, I was the kind of kid who generally speaking liked school, and was never particularly averse to learning things just because, but even I might have been more enthusiastic about certain subjects if they’d been prefaced with some kind of practical application.

Granted, I never needed a real world application for learning about post Enlightenment revolutions in Eastern Europe or reading Jane Austen. This is probably a good thing because I’m not sure that 10th grade me would have been convinced by the argument that I would desperately need to know 19th C European geography in order to read a newspaper one day. I might have been on board with the idea that learning how to parse an English text would stand me in good stead for critical readings of Ethan Allen commercials and the problematic racial narratives of wildly lucrative, if not very good, movies in later years. Then again in 9th grade I didn’t pepper my conversation with words like agency, heteronormative and paradigm, so maybe not. I did, however, use words like parse, because see above about being that kind of kid. Read the rest of this entry ?

The first week after Labor Day always makes me feel vaguely misanthropic. I wander around Boston thinking, ‘who are all you people, and why are you cluttering up what was my nice empty city?’ Double that sentiment for every time I have to avoid the hordes of students who have invaded. I’ll get over this in a week or so, but right now I’m still wishing it was summer and the city was empty and you could be guaranteed that nothing useful would happen after 11am on Friday. Read the rest of this entry ?

I had ambitions towards an entire meal from the farm stand – tomatoes, corn, zucchini, salad, melon, nectarines. I was doing pretty well – tomato tart, corn & zucchini salad, salad with nectarines, melon – and then I got to the soup, at which point it all fell apart. My problem was not a lack of summer soup recipes. I have stacks of summer soup recipes. My problem was that I was already using so many summer ingredients in the rest of dinner that there weren’t really any leftover to use as a base for soup without repeating myself. Read the rest of this entry ?

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 ?

For the 17 months of the year that it’s winter here I buy a bunch of bananas, a couple of apples and pears, and maybe some clementines and that will last us through the week for lunches and snacks.  Last week I went to the grocery store on Saturday and bought:

1 (large) bunch grapes
1.5 lb cherries
1 quart blueberries
3 lb watermelon
1 cantaloupe (or whatever the local orange fleshed local melon equivalent is called)

By Wednesday night there was not a piece of fruit left in the house.  Read the rest of this entry ?