My thoughts about this week’s Dinner can be summarized as follows: Read the rest of this entry »
TND – Don’t Make That Face At Me
October 20, 2011
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 »
TND – Epic Dithering
October 12, 2011
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 »
TND – In Which I Abuse the Oxford Comma
October 5, 2011
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 »
TND – No parade for me
September 30, 2011
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 »
TND – What’s Making Me Happy This Week
September 21, 2011
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 »
TND – Pet Peeves
September 15, 2011
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 »
TND – Exactly as Complicated as Necessary
September 7, 2011
I’ll cop to the fact that I frequently make my life more complicated than is strictly necessary. Case in point, I’m making a quilt from old t-shirts. The easy way to do this is to cut out 14”x14” squares from each t-shirt, iron it onto fusible interfacing, sew them together and attach a backing fabric and hey presto, you’re done. Is this what I’m doing? Not even close. Read the rest of this entry »
TND – This is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end . . .
September 1, 2011
Where did August go? I have a fairly clear idea about what happened to June (wedding in late May + NOLA trip), I’m reasonably sure I remember July . . . but, it’s the first of September today? How did that even happen? Where did August go? Was it kidnapped? Can we ransom it back?
Rather than focusing on the fact that the weather has embraced Fall, and it’s getting duskier and duskier as I walk home at night, and that come Monday I won’t be able to wear white shoes anymore, I’m going to look at the bright side of the start of the close of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Monday Night Dinner 