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TND – “The Dutch” (now with added rebuttals)

August 17, 2011

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 »

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TND – Daddy always said, “An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure.”

August 10, 2011

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 »

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TND – How Dinner is like a computer game

August 3, 2011

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 »

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TND – Oh Woe is Me (and other non-dilemma dilemmas)

July 29, 2011

It’s not a secret that I love summer.  It’s not just the fact that for a brief period of time I’m actually warm all the time (except at work where I wear wool scarves and hard warmers).  It’s also that there’s pretty much nothing that shows up at the farmer’s market that I don’t want to (and do) buy in egregious quantities.

I am so known/notorious for this that at least one of the vendors that I go to all the time (seriously – they know me so well they’ll give me things on credit when I’ve bought more than I have cash for in my wallet that day) teases me that she could find my house by following the trail of tomatoes.  As if I’d ever waste a summer tomato on the ground like that.  Also, I’m not sure she realizes that what I buy on Monday will only last me through Tuesday evening, and that I go buy more on Thursdays. Read the rest of this entry »

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TND – I Carried A Watermelon

July 20, 2011

Summer is my favorite time of year, and now that it’s finally summer in Boston (it took a while) I’m fully enjoying it while it lasts.  Upsides include:

It’s finally hot – I get that not everyone sees this as a serious upside, but I’m cold blooded and this is the only 8 weeks of the year that I don’t have cold hands and feet. Well, so long as I’m not at work, where the first thing I do every morning is turn on my space heater and put on a sweater.

A corollary to the above – I finally have a tan, which means I can wear white and not look jaundiced. Vanity thy name is woman. Read the rest of this entry »

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TND – Eating (& drinking) our way through NOLA

June 29, 2011

When I was in high school my parents and I went on a vacation to Vienna during which it was so cold that every activity was punctuated by a stop in a café for coffee (mit schlag, aber natürlich) and torte and to defrost. The five days I just spent in New Orleans was highly reminiscent of that – substitute heat for cold, air conditioning for radiators and beignets and café au lait for coffee and torte. If we didn’t succeed in eating our way through the city, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying; and if there were iconic dishes we didn’t sample it was only because there simply were not enough meals in the day. Read the rest of this entry »

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TND – The Perfect Food?

June 15, 2011

I firmly believe that sandwiches are the world’s perfect food. You can eat them for any meal of the day. They can be sweet or savory. They can be hand held or served on a plate and require a knife and fork to eat. They can embody the spirit of any culture and cuisine. Plus, by definition they contain a tasty starch. There is no bad in this equation.

The British understand the appeal of sandwiches (and bacon) on such a deep emotional level that students at Leeds University got funding to research and derive a scientific formula for making the perfect bacon buttie. How much do you wish you could have been a part of that research team? Read the rest of this entry »

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TND – Seasonal Inspite of Myself

June 8, 2011

That high pitched noise of glee you heard around 1pm on Monday?  That was me.  Specifically that was me stopping by my first farmer’s market of the season and discovering barquettes of ruby red strawberries just waiting to be bought, taken home and sliced up for salad. Read the rest of this entry »

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TND – I Can be Taught (really)

June 1, 2011

You know what I loathe?  Recipes that call for a ¼ cup of something that only comes in a 16 oz can, or recipes that call for 1 ¼ lb of something that is usually sold in 1 lb increments.  Sometimes I just omit the ingredient, or substitute it, or make just under what the recipe calls for to make up for the ¼ lb of whatever it is that I’m missing.  A lot of the time I’ll just skip over the recipe and find something else to make.  However, sometimes, like tonight, the ¼ cup of coconut milk is important and the recipe is actually worth opening the can and dealing with the remaining coconut milk.  This is when you discover that your freezer is your friend. Read the rest of this entry »

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TND – Irrational Fears

May 25, 2011

Some people are afraid of clowns. Some people have nightmares that one day their friends will suggest them as a contestant for “What Not to Wear”. I double check that the front door is locked before I go to bed even if I’ve just watched someone else lock it. I also sometimes wake up at 2am thinking that I’ve heard the doorbell ring. I then lie there for 10 minutes wondering whether (a) I hallucinated it; (b) it’s a really polite serial killer; (c) one of our friends having a crise de foie; or (d) someone who has been attacked, made it as far as our front door and managed to ring the doorbell but can’t go any further and when I leave in the morning to catch the bus I’ll discover a dead body on the doorstep and feel really guilty about how I didn’t get up to check. Then I usually roll over and go back to sleep. Read the rest of this entry »

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