Apparently the Dutch are trying to create a frenzied international market for the first herrings of the year. Or, as the somewhat bemused NYT article put it, they’re trying to do for raw fish what the French did for, “what is, by most measures, a pedestrian wine” (it’s also a slightly snide article), otherwise known as the sale of the Beaujolais nouveau every year. Read the rest of this entry »
We moved an average of every two years when I was growing up. The top ten list of things I learned from this runs something like this:
– Picking up marbles from bowls of soapy water with chopsticks is not as universal a party game as I thought it was when I was 8 (we lived in Hong Kong, you start with m&ms and work your way up to marbles).
– Europe is awesome, not the least of which because if you drive about 4 hours in any direction you’re going to be in another country with an entirely different language, currency, and food (yes, I’m still bitter about the Euro). Also, it gives you a totally unfair advantage when memorizing slides of medieval buildings for an art history class. Read the rest of this entry »
All due respect to Dorothy L. Sayers who writes a cracking good mystery, but I don’t think that dusting Turkish Delight with arsenic laced powdered sugar would kill many people these days. Putting arsenic in something chocolate on the other hand . . . we’ve long theorized that if you wanted to off your coworkers the best way to do it would be to poison something chocolate and then leave it in a public place. The trick is doing it so that not only do you not die, but also so that no suspicion falls on you for being the one person left standing. This wasn’t actually proved in practice this past Monday since everyone in my office is still alive and well, but the theory was definitely proved sound. Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday was such a good food day I feel like it deserves excitable little exclamation points. It was the first farmer’s market of the season – I bought pints of early summer strawberries to eat for lunch (I was even nice and took one home for my roommate instead of scarfing them all at my desk), and fresh bread from When Pigs Fly for Dinner. Then I went home and discovered that there would be garden fresh strawberries for desserrt – not from my garden mind you, but a garden not 10 minutes from my house picked by people actually at Dinner. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a certain high pitched noise known generally as a fan girl squee It tends to accompany sightings of Robert Pattinson, NSYNC (if you’re feeling a little old school), or the Beatles (if you’re feeling really old school). To be scrupulously honest fan boys also squee it just tends to be at a lower register and is often accompanied by a recitation of the complete technical specs for the USS Enterprise. In my defense (although I think I managed to offend everyone equally just now) it’s not like I don’t have a favorite Star Trek series, have never been to ComiCon, or looked at Robert Downey Jr. and gone, ‘yeah he’s dreamy’. Read the rest of this entry »
I ran across a recipe for leek bread pudding last week and was on fire to make it for Dinner. I spent a while trolling for braised chicken recipes on the theory that I didn’t want anything else that would need to bake in the oven at the same time as the bread pudding, and didn’t feel like pan frying chicken again since I did that last week. I wound up with a recipe that didn’t go with bread pudding at all so I nixed the leek bread pudding for Dinner, and made it for us on Tuesday night (verdict – disappointing, don’t need to make it again). What sold me on the Braised Chicken in Aromatic Tomato Sauce was one of the reviews which described the ingredient list as ‘reading like the contents of a medieval lord’s pantry’. Even as I nodded in agreement at the cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin and allspice, I thought well except for those pesky new world tomatoes*. Read the rest of this entry »
My roommate and I were up in Toronto this past weekend – she was there to sort of work, I was there to play tourist. We had a good time in Toronto, miserable weather notwithstanding. All the Canadians we met kept apologizing for the weather, and swearing it was highly unusual. I haven’t decided if I believe them or not – we came to the general conclusion that we’d all move to Canada if it was just a bit warmer. Boston is as far north as I go. If I move, I’m moving south not further into the frozen wastelands of the north. On the other hand, bikers who stop and apologize when they cut you off at zebra crossings are a compelling inducement. At the risk of perpetuating a cliché, the Canadians really are awfully friendly and polite. Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just that when you come from New England where nobody makes eye contact with strangers on the street if they don’t have to, it’s a little disconcerting.
Saturday morning started with a water main in one of the western suburbs rupturing. This doesn’t sound like a big deal until someone tells you that it was a 10’ wide water main that connects the Western Mass water supply to the water supply for the greater Boston area. The practical upshot of this was that from Saturday morning through Tuesday morning all of the Boston area – 30 communities, 700,000 homes and 2 million people were under a boil water order. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m having a moment of schadenfreude at the recent backlash I’ve seen at the organic foods/eco movement. Or well, not precisely schadenfreude, but the warm glow that comes with seeing someone get a little of the comeuppance you’ve thought they’ve deserved for several years. Read the rest of this entry »
I like old cookbooks for the same reason that other people like horror movies. It’s that frisson of terror you get at the thought of what might be waiting at the bottom of the stair, or what fresh culinary horror could be lurking at the turn of the page. I find Norman Bates’ smiling slyly and saying, “Mother isn’t quite herself today,” and recipes that call for cans of condensed cheddar soup to be equally terrifying. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday Night Dinner 