Monday Night Dinner

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 »

In hindsight – actually even in foresight, but let’s ignore that – soup + plated food for a dinner when there were too many people to seat everyone around the table was maybe not the wisest decision. In my defense, I did try to think of something else to make when I learned that there were going to be 10 people at Dinner this week. I futzed through epicurious looking for summer recipes, and I trolled a variety of my favorite blogs looking for inspiration, but when it came down to it all I really wanted to eat was corn soup and this decadent sounding tomato tart that I’ve been eying since David Lebovitz posted about it way back in May. All the other recipes I came across just left me bored, and nothing is worse than making food you find boring, because nothing will convince you that other people will like it if you yourself are bored by it. Read the rest of this entry »

At work I have a space heater under my desk, a wool scarf hung over the back of my chair, and a pair of arm warmers in my desk drawer that make me feel like Cyndi Lauper circa 1985, but also stop my hands from aching in the frigid air of my office so I’ll accept the hit for the dubious fashion statement (other comments from my office – ‘I thought you’d broken both your arms,’ and ‘hello, Debbie Gison’). At lunch I go outside and lie in the sun, and it takes 20 minutes for my feet to defrost after a morning at work. Some of this is a reflection on exactly how cold my office is, but a lot of it is a reflection on the fact that I’m just always cold. Read the rest of this entry »

In my grandmother’s house there was a fire alarm mounted on the wall of the kitchen.  Anytime you turned on the stove to cook something more complicated than water the fire alarm would inevitably go off, and someone would have to grab a towel and use it to frantically fan the air in front of the fire alarm until it stopped shrilling.  I always wondered what had possessed my grandparents to mount a fire alarm in their kitchen, or what had possessed them to leave it there for decades given that it went off every time you tried cook anything.  I mean, for me it was just part of the tradition of summer – standing in the corner of the kitchen with a towel at the ready while dinner was being prepared – but if I had to live with it year round I would have found somewhere else to put it. Read the rest of this entry »