Dinner June 10th – Last of the Asparagus
Spring on a Plate Salad
Jammy Cornbread
Posts Tagged ‘Salad’
TND – First of the Local Asparagus
June 11, 2014
Dinner May 20th – First of the Local Asparagus
Buttermilk Roasted Chicken
Chimichurri Sauce
Asparagus Tart
Strawberry-Rhurbarb Salad
Orange Wedges
MND – They’re Eating People!
August 6, 2013
Apparently we’ve just grown the first hamburger in a lab. And by this I mean, it’s the first hamburger that is technically meat, but has nothing to do with an actual animal. PETA must be plotzing.
It was shaped and fried up (with the addition of lots of butter – which, to me, somewhat defeats the purpose of a lab grown hamburger patty – because surely part of the reason to do this is to get away from the ethical concerns of animal husbandry and while dairy cows aren’t slaughtered for hamburgers, I don’t think their living conditions are any better than the average meat cow, so unless the butter was also lab grown I don’t think you’ve achieved independence from the commercial meat industry) earlier this week in London. Read the rest of this entry ?
MND – Cravings
August 6, 2013
Do you ever get intense cravings for foods you don’t normally like, or is this just me?
I got through periods where all I can think about is eating a rich eggy potato salad, or a traditional creamy cole slaw. These are dishes that I normally pass over in a buffet because I prefer my potato salads dressed with lots of mustard and vinegar, or with a pesto sauce, and my cole slaws bright and tangy with vinegar and citrus.
Similarly I will take a no-thank you helping of pasta salad when presented with it in a situation where I have to take some to be polite, and skip it entirely if etiquette permits. I don’t like mayonnaise, and I’m not particularly fond of cold pasta, and I find that even the smallest serving sits leadenly in my stomach. I have, nonetheless, been day dreaming about pasta salad for the past three weeks straight. I don’t want a bowl of spaghetti dressed with rich tomato sauce, or a plate of fettuccini tossed with decadent alfredo sauce. I don’t want buttered and salted noodles to soak up the sauce from a braised stew. I want cold pasta. Go figure. Read the rest of this entry ?
TND Extra – Oscars 2012
February 29, 2012
My office runs a Super Bowl pool every year, and every year I get asked multiple times if I want to participate. I get tired of finding clever non-offensive ways to say no (in my office an unexplained ‘no’ is not an acceptable answer). Most years I don’t even know who’s playing – although this year I did because it’s impossible to live in Boston and not know that the Patriots have made it to the Superbowl. This year my standard response was that I didn’t care about the Super Bowl, but if someone wanted to handicap the Oscars I’d be in like Flynn. Nobody too me up on my suggestion. Read the rest of this entry ?
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 ?
TND – The Third Thing
January 5, 2011
The third thing was totally snow. Not, I’ll point out, snow in Boston (because when Boston got 20” of snow, Logan airport was open again the next day). No, it was snow in London which was much much worse. Through an unfortunate confluence of bad luck (lots of snow in a short period of time), poor planning (not enough de-icer fluid) and incompetence (‘we were prepared for the snow on the runways, but were surprised at how it piled up around the planes’ – which, what? Did you think that snow was selective about where it fell?) Heathrow shut down for something like 5 days just before Christmas. This resulted in an unsurprising, if tedious, amount of chaos. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – The Day After St. Patrick’s Day Dinner
March 19, 2009
Oscar Wilde said, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” As with many things Oscar Wilde, this is both witty and true. In my next life I aspire to being a professional aphorist.
Nothing will teach you to do, or not do, something quite as effectively as doing it and realizing half way through exactly how bad an idea it was. That being said, there are a lot of stupid things I’ve done in the kitchen that I’d have been willing to take on faith as bad ideas rather than having to experience them for myself. Out of idle curiosity I polled Dinner to find out what things they wish someone had told them not to do before they found out the hard way. For a group of people with (collectively) an alarming amount of education, we did all seem to be a little short on common sense. Mind you, this does add further proof to my theory that there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of higher education you have achieved and the amount of common sense you demonstrate.
WND – The “they’re breaking down the hegemonic structure of the heteronormative language system*” edition
July 19, 2008
You’d have to ask Jes what it’s like to meet us en masse for the first time. I can only imagine that it’s mildly terrifying. Strictly speaking on an individual basis we’re not particularly scary. But, we’ve all known each other for at least 10 years and we’ve been having dinner together once a week for most of that time. We don’t always communicate in full sentences anymore. A lot of the time we short hand ideas via various British comics – Eddie Izzard, the folks at Beyond the Fringe, the occasional influx of Yes, Prime Minister, although that’s mostly just me. We have multiple in jokes about homunculi (because well, once you have one they seem to multiply – the jokes, not the homunculi). We’ve had perfectly serious conversations about the composition and history of blood mead that sounded for all the world like we were contemplating serving it at our next party. Rest assured, to the best of my knowledge none of us has ever served anyone blood mead for any occasion. And, while having an opinion about which captain was the best captain isn’t a requirement, having the answer not be Janeway probably is*.
Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – The Curse of the Devilled Eggs is Lifted!
June 26, 2008
The single most useful part about this blog, for me at least, is keeping track of what I’ve made when. My mother keeps a small journal of the meals she makes for guests so that she doesn’t repeat them. While acknowledging the usefulness of this, I remain faintly horrified at the thought of being that organized. It’s a little too Martha Stewart for me to wrap my head around.
I sat on my couch on Sunday morning in search of inspiration, which is a more polite, if less accurate, way of describing looking blankly at a wall and complaining to my roommate. What I really wanted was devilled eggs – because clearly I’m a masochist and wanted to try again despite three fairly spectacular failures – but I felt like we’d had a dinner of summer salads just the other week. But! The blog revealed that the last time we had summer salads was in the beginning of May, it’s just biscuits that I’ve made more recently, and really, I ask you, can you have too many biscuits?*
Monday Night Dinner 