TEA & CELEBRATION
TND – Delayed Gratification
May 18, 2012
I am normally the queen of delayed gratification. I can have a birthday present arrive in the mail weeks before my actual birthday and feel no overwhelming impulse to tear into the wrapping early. I wasn’t a child who went around shaking presents under the Christmas tree (at least, I don’t think I was). For me anticipation is genuinely half the pleasure. I love making restaurant reservations in advance and then perusing the menu online (at length and frequently multiple times) to build a sense of expectation for the enjoyment to come. Read the rest of this entry »
TND – Hypocrisy Hits Home
May 16, 2012
All right y’all, I need to have a conversation (okay, monologue) about a distressing recent trend in food television. By which I mean I want to talk about the television which is more about gluttony and conspicuous over consumption than it is about food. There are lots of food shows I find boring (Sandwich King), or pointless (Chef vs. City), or repetitive (Diners, Drive-ins & Dives), but lately there have started to be shows that I find actively offensive. Read the rest of this entry »
TND – In Which Aphorisms Come True
May 14, 2012
Very occasionally aphorisms come true. In the first instance, virtue was both its own reward and the early bird caught the worm. Or, put another way, a couple of weekends ago I got myself up and dressed on Saturday morning long before I actually wanted to be awake and took myself off to the grocery store to get it out of the way so that I could have time for the more interesting parts of my weekend. The reward for my virtue? I scored two of the few bundles of early local asparagus at Wilson Farms. In fact, I had a bag of green beans in my hand when I spied the slender green stalks of local asparagus out of the corner of my eye, turned around, dumped out the green beans and grabbed for the asparagus. It’s possible the Produce Manager at Wilson Farms laughed at me a little when I squeaked in excitement. Ask me if I cared; I had asparagus. Read the rest of this entry »
TND – Shallow Within Reason
May 14, 2012
I have a confession. I need my cookbooks to have pictures. This makes me feel like a little kid, but when I’m faced with a cookbook that’s just text I get lost and overwhelmed. I need pretty pictures of the food to go with the recipes. Partially this is for the simple reason that I believe in white space on the page like some people believe in the power of a good martini at 5pm on a Friday*. Partially it is because, like many people, I eat with my eyes first and I need/like to be enticed by what something looks like as well as by the description of the ingredients. And partially, it’s because I’m shallow and I just like the glossy food porn quality of the current cookbook market. Read the rest of this entry »
TND – Oh Just Die Already
April 19, 2012
In the late ‘90s there was a show on HBO called Oz which was all about life inside a maximum security prison (it was a lot better than I just made it sound – the writing was fantastic). Anyway, it was the quintessential ‘don’t get too attached to this character’ show. On the one hand, this was terrible because sometimes your favorite characters ended up getting shived out of nowhere. And, on the other hand, when there was a really irritating character you could shout ‘just die already’ at your TV with a fair chance that it might actually happen. The downside is that after watching eight seasons of Oz some of that attitude spilled over into other areas of our life – some of it TV related, and some of it really not. Case in point, there are some food trends I would like to just die already . . . . Read the rest of this entry »
TND – Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Green (with apologies to Crystal Gayle))
April 13, 2012
Dear Everyone in the Food Industry:
Please stop tormenting me with exciting recipes for Spring produce. Yes, we’re having an early Spring (the fact that we’re having Spring at all is kind of remarkable) here in the Northeast, but it’s not that early. It’s not that I begrudge you your access to fresh produce after a long winter (except for how I totally do). It’s not that I don’t want you to post recipes for Spring sandwiches filled with hard boiled eggs, pickled onions and seared asparagus, and gorgeous appetizers of crostini with strawberries and peashoots, and noodles with kale & spicy rhubarb sauce (just so you know, y’all, this is getting made the instant I see rhubarb at the store); I can (and do) bookmark them for later experimentation and consumption. It’s just that, well, I’m positively green-eyed with jealousy of your Spring bounty. Read the rest of this entry »
TND – On a Mission
April 4, 2012
Last week (about Dinner three weeks ago) I expounded on my difficulty in finding rabbit or wild boar to make any of the tasty recipes featured in Food & Wine’s March 2012 issue. This past weekend I ended up doing a little more rabbit hunting because I’d talked and thought about it so much that (a) I was really craving rabbit, and (b) it had become a quest. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday Night Dinner 