the beet ravioli again

the day before i had my last paper due, i decided i needed a break, and sent myself off to miriam's and josh's pre-hannukah party with the bottle of champagne that lauren dropped off. said bottle of champagne, incidentally, went to toast the impending end of finals, and miriam's new job at nelson/nygaard (much thanks to lauren).

if these smallish informal dinner parties are what real life consists of, i'm more than ready for it. in honor of hannukah, we had latkes and doughnuts (sufgiyanot, i believe the proper spelling is...) at the kitchen table, which, on occasions like this, is pulled away from the wall, the leaf put in, and chairs of all kinds pulled around it - it's kind of like eating in the galley of the ship. close quarters - fridge, stove, and sink all within an arm's reach - and thoroughly enjoyable. we also had roasted broccoli and pot roast, the latter having been bought at star on a whim (supermarkets are so good for those).

as part of the guest party, carrien made beet ravioli with the golden beets from our boston organics shipment, and i, having nothing to show for the past week but copious drawings, a model, and a poorly written paper, brought along the bottle of champage, which i had stuck in the fridge the day before in anticipation of thursday. i had had my first favorable encounter with beets the year before, when somebody at lmf (i think it was mika since carrien has no recollection of it) made beet risotto. beets are actually good. not that i'd ever thought they were bad, per se, but i had had quite enough pickled beets in lisbon. fresh beets are another matter entirely. i encourage you to try beets the next time you are at the supermarket. the beet ravioli were particularly good, and i of course ate too many of them.

however, this is all a buildup to the point of this post, which is to say that i am making the beet ravioli for new year's eve tomorrow at nora's. this is partly a desire to make the beet ravioli myself, and partly a desire to make tiny, labor-intensive things for a manageable number of people (5). i'm going to do them in wonton wrappers like carrien did, and make them a bit smaller, because then they will go in soup. i really think they would go best in a plain chicken broth with some peas or scallions or something, but in that case, the only kind of acceptable chicken broth would be the from-scratch variety, which isn't going to happen. as an alternative, i'm planning to make a plain tomato soup with the vegetables sauteed in rendered bacon fat, in hopes that the acidity of the tomatoes will go with the beets, and the smokiness of the bacon will with both tomatoes and beets. the garnish will probably be sour cream, and of course, the poppy seeds still figure into the equation (the original ravioli were sauteed in butter and poppy seeds). perhaps also some peas for color and flavor? i don't know. anyway, more to come on this later - i have no idea how this will all turn out because i can't really imagine the flavors well enough to put them all together in a foolproof manner.

beet ravioli with poppy seed butter
2 large red or golden beets (about 14 ounces)
1/2 cup fresh whole-milk ricotta cheese
2 tablespoons dried breadcrumbs

1 pkg wonton wrappers

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1. preheat oven to 400F. wrap beets individually in foil; place on baking sheet. roast until tender when pierced with knife, about 1 hour. open foil carefully (steam will escape). cool. peel beets; finely grate into medium bowl. add ricotta cheese and season to taste with salt and pepper. stir in breadcrumbs.

2. place small bowl of water next to work surface. spoon 1 tablespoon beet filling onto a wonton wrapper, dampen the edge of the wonton around the filling with water, and seal, pushing out as much air as possible. press the edges firmly to seal; the ravioili can be sealed in any shape you like. transfer to a nonstick surface, dusted with flour.

3. melt butter in large skillet over medium heat and stir in poppy seeds; keep warm. working in batches, cook ravioli in large pot of boiling salted water until cooked through, stirring often, about 2 minutes (alternatively, you could nuke these in a microwave, probably, if you put them on a plate with a bit of water). using slotted spoon, transfer to skillet with melted butter; toss to coat. divide ravioli among 8 plates; sprinkle with Parmesan.

[makes 8 first-course servings]

cold, creamy + luscious

few things are as satisfying as a bowl of vanilla ice cream with cherries in it.

triscuits and the end of a hiatus

man, who invented triscuits? why are they so addictively good? they're like healthy potato chips - fiber replaces the potatoes but the salt is still there, so eating one means eating about twenty. ok, maybe not twenty - there's a limit on how much fiber one can eat in one sitting - but still...i wouldn't be surprised if there are huge triscuit boxes in my dreams, urging me to eat more triscuits.

as i sit here thinking of all of the wonderful food-related things i am going to do - like go hunt down a good butcher in the north end, finally find that russian food store from my childhood, make another pilgrimage to formaggio kitchen - i can't help but realize that i only have four weeks in which to cram about a semester's worth of food exploits. hmph. i have grand plans for weekend brunches at 24 - but there's only 4 weekends! perhaps some of those weekend brunches will have to come on weekdays. and the most amazing thing about this statement is that some of those weekend brunches actually could come on weekdays, since i will technically be on vacation.

regardless of how much of my list of food things to do that i get through - and based on how much of it i got through during the summer when i lived at 44, it won't be much - i am determined to make up for last semester's dearth of things food. well, ok, not really a dearth, but every morning that i wake up, i'm amazed that i'm still alive. the semester was really just a very lovely, intense blur that passed in the blink of an eye, and the contrast between that and the wonderful nothing that i'm doing right now is as stark as it gets. i enjoy being at home, but (brace yourself for another outpouring of love for knives) i can't wait to get back to my knives, poor neglected things. i feel like i've only been flirting with them, and january is for actually getting to know them. i will finally stop being slightly afraid of the mac, with its ability to cut off my digits without a second thought, and learn both knives so that i know exactly when to use each one. mmm....

i've also come to the conclusion that i will never be a professional chef. i might have a bakery at some point, but when it comes to professional ambition, i know i'm really just not good enough to be more than a better-than-average home cook. ah, reality. i also don't really care to be good enough to be one of those famous, cutting-edge cooks - i'd rather generate large amounts of comfort food with a little experimentation on the side. i would like to have that neighborhood bakery where everyone lines up for bread in the morning...

on the list of food exploits:
- restaurants to go to : family restaurant in brookline, taberna de haro near nora's,
- food places to go to : russian food stores in brookline/allston/brighton, formaggio kitchen, butcher's shops in the north end, trader joe's, whole foods
- food things to make : bread....lots of bread, brunchy things on sunny-but-cold sunday mornings, banana cream pie with a graham cracker crust that has been brushed with chocolate, cheesecake, carrot cake, i freely admit that i have a sweet tooth the size of california, a wedding cake (yes, i just said "a wedding cake"), butternut squash anything, salt-roasted chicken, clay-pot-chicken...

the calm before the storm

alright, i've been staring at my computer since 6:30am, trying to make my portfolio reach that mythical land of completeness; i need a break. oddly enough, not one from the computer, but at least one from the portfolio because i'm falling asleep.

i shouldn't have done it, but yesterday careen and i made dinner for 44 and assorted friends. hm. i really did know it was going to be bad for me, and it will mean that i will sleep much less this week, but i did it anyway. i guess i don't really know about moderation. it was quite wonderful...quite an orgy of cooking. i'm still learning which one to use when; for example, the wusthof for chopping chocolate; the mac is really just for vegetables. i've started to be able to feel the differences in the knives when i use them - i can actually feel the brittleness in the mac, whereas the i feel that i could use the wusthof forever and it would always be the same.

i also got to make pie crusts; i could make pie crusts all day. i used a slightly different recipe (less butter, essentially) because i was blind-baking them for pumpkin pie. brushing them after they came out of the oven with a beaten egg white did the trick again for keeping the crust from getting soggy. i do like soggy crust in a way, but not leaden crust. it's not a surprise that the egg white works, but it's something that i never would have thought of. good ol' saveur...

anyway, this is what we made, for about twelve people (recipes included for the stuff we didn't make up) :

roast turkey with prosciutto, rosemary, and thyme
apple, sage, sausage, and parsnip stuffing
broccoli with a fontina cheese sauce
butternut squash risotto with peas

chocolate pudding (with my trusty callebaut chocolate and valrhona cocoa)
pumpkin pie x 2
spiced poached pears

i had no idea really what kind of spices to put in the pears, which got poached in a dessert wine, water, and sugar, so i went to harvest. i ended up getting white peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon sticks, and cloves. pretty standard except for the white peppercorns, which i quite liked - it added a bit of a kick. i got lazy (this whole production took maybe 7 hours straight of cooking) so i didn't make a chocolate sauce. of course, there was chocolate pudding so that went with the pears fine. the chocolate pudding tasted better today, after a day. i'm not surprised, since that's what chocolate things are wont to do; but it definitely tasted like it was of the campfire variety yesterday when i made it. faintly so, and not enough so that i wouldn't serve it (and eat lots of it), but i was annoyed all the same. "campfire," by the way, if lmf lingo for "slightly scorched." anyway, today the taste was completely gone. go figure. it was also almost black - it was, hands down, the darkest chocolate pudding i have ever seen, due to the dark color of the cocoa. valrhona cocoa - go get it from whole foods. it'll change your life.

the pumpkin pie was excellent, probably because it's really hard to mess it up. have you ever had a bad pumpkin pie? ok, let me rephrase: have you ever had a bad pumpkin pie, made from scratch? yeah, that's what i thought. they don't exist.

the turkey was pretty damn good. it was my first time roasting a turkey, though at this point i'm convinced it's not as hard as the food magazines make it out to be every year. we stuffed prosciutto-herb butter underneath the skin, put an onion and some garlic inside, and roasted it for maybe three hours. i think it must have been just the turkey that was good, because it tasted more turkey-like (gamier, i guess) than the turkey i had at home for thanksgiving. the gravy was excellent, too, with the addition of a lot of pan juices. mmm, pan juices...it's amazing, the amount of gravy one can eat, and the range of things one can eat it with.

i hadn't cooked for a bunch of people for a while, so it was probably the best thing i could have done saturday night. the cooking time was well-paced and not rushed for a rather impromptu affair (i planned and went shopping on saturday morning). if i measure my level of stress by the strength of my tendency to abandon work to cook as therapy, i would say that my stress level is off the charts this semester. formerly, i was able to go a few weeks without cooking anything; now i seem to be able to go about a week and then i give in. but i already knew that.

well, i am sure this will be my last post until xmas break. if i am still alive after that, and i haven't totally ruined my health with forced poor sleeping habits, i'll live to cook another day. but right now i am going to go eat a poached pear. poached pears are undoubtedly one of the most gorgeous foods known to man. all translucent, golden brown on the outside and cream-colored on the inside, and so wonderfully spicy...how could you not love them? they instantly redeem any mediocre pear.

review: nora is a quarter-century old (sel de la terre)

we went to sel de la terre for nora's 25th, since craigie street bistrot was booked (note to self: book craigie street for own birthday). the food wasn't really amazing, but it was quite solid, occasionally approaching epiphany. i had barbecued salmon with brussels sprouts, turnips, and "spiced butternut squash nage," with crispy parsnips on top. i hate it when restaurants try to be clever or cute with their terminology - one ends up wondering what it means in english. "crispy parsnips"? that could be any of a million different things. it turned out that they were basically really thin chips made out of parsnips instead of potatoes. very enjoyable, but i'm not sure that they really went with the rest of the dish - in fact, they were pretty much a separate experience from eating the rest of it, so i have no idea why it was included. however, the rest of the meal was fantastic - the salmon was nothing short of the best salmon i've ever had. i'm not sure that i think that barbecued salmon is the best way to treat it, but it did go well with the squash puree. the turnips were fantastic - all crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and brussels sprouts are only unredeemable if they've been steamed or microwaved after having been frozen. probably the best thing about the dish was the salmon, which was simply perfectly cooked and really...well, i don't really claim to be the expert on the flavor level of different kinds of salmon, but this one was pretty darn good. it was also a rather obscenely large piece of salmon - almost twice what you might get at another restaurant.

however, the restaurant in general is priced pretty well for all this, and of course there's the bread at the beginning. sel de la terre is famed for the bread, and is rightly so. i'm a big fan of the black olive bread. the butter had to be european - it was rather yellow and you could just taste the butterfat, not in a bad way. i do wish the bread had been warm, though - i'm generally not a fan of cold bread. it's not a problem when the bread is light, but when it's dense, you feel like you're eating a brick.

what made up for a fairly up-and-down evening was really great service - just enough so as not to be inattentive, and not too much so as to be overbearing. i felt like our server would have talked to us about herself a little bit, had we been the type of people to inquire. i suppose that's my ideal of servers in general. and it's an ideal that requires servers to perhaps share a little too much about themselves, but there's something that distinguishes run-of-the-mill service and really good service, and for me, that involves some sort of action on the server's part that is different from the norm.

we had a couple of appetizers as well (i apologize for the woeful organization of this entry) - the charcuterie and a smoked chicken-feta cheese flatbread pizza. both were quite good, if not groundbreaking. the charcuterie at craigie street is better, but this one was the traditional combination of forcemeats and condiments. the flatbread pizza was maybe a bit...unexciting? i guess maybe i feel that flatbread pizzas are all the rage now. however, the smoked chicken-feta cheese combination was really great. i would have liked something to add a little more zing to it - citrus of some kind? something that was a little sharp in flavor.

i had been thinking about my favorite restaurants recently, and these are my first thoughts regarding a top ten (in the boston/cambridge area):
1. craigie street bistrot
2. pigalle
3. caffe umbra
4. sel de la terre
5. upstairs on the square
6. central kitchen
7. aujourd'hui
8. picco
9. rangzen
10. addis red sea

and these are the places i would still like to go to:
rachel's kitchen
oishii (the one in newton)
taberna de haro (the tapas restaurant near my sister's house in brookline)
hamersley's bistro
neptune oyster
martsa's on elm
family restaurant in brookline
plus places in inman square, and davis square in general, and the japanese restaurants in the porter exchange building

thanksgiving a day early

wow! i got a turkey...off reuse! now i can engage in all sorts of plotting during the car ride to new york...because what should i do with said turkey (on sunday, probably)? perhaps a better question might be what am i going to make to go with the turkey, although in all reality, i've never actually roasted a turkey myself. i've always wanted to see what a traditional turkey is like, with the stuffing inside the cavity and everything. ooh, and cranberries...this could go in a million ways. hmmm, and of course there will need to be pie. i wonder if there is anyone who doesn't like pie. it'll be nice to make some, because i haven't had a chance to make pie crusts in a while, and my finger is finally completely healed (if still a little sensitive). so pumpkin pie, and maybe miriam's chocolate walnut pie...and perhaps chocolate cream pie? the most satisfying thing about thanksgiving pies is eating them for breakfast the next day. as for vegetables, maybe i'll try the cauliflower gratin that i made from the bouchon cookbook, which, now that i think about it, must have a million wonderful things in it that i could make. obviously it's time for a good sit-down with my cookbooks.

am i the only one who daydreams about food like this?

winter is here!

it's finally getting cold, and i can't say how thrilled i am. i was going to go to studio all day today, but since carrien is home, we're going to make chicken pot pie - we're roasting the chicken right now. today's chicken has rosemary-thyme butter stuffed underneath the skin, is stuffed with apples and onions, and was rubbed with a salt-sugar-paprika-pepper mixture before being popped in the oven. same roasting method as before - 20 minutes at 400, then the rest (probably an hour to an hour and a half since stuffed that cavity pretty well) at 350. we'll let that cool, then pull it apart and make pot pie with it. god that smells good in the oven.

an update on the chicken: that was one beautiful chicken. of course, we let it sit for maybe ten minutes before ripping it apart for the pot pie, but it was a pretty wonderful thing. i realized that i really do like to stuff my chickens with lemon wedges (we didn't have any around), but it was good anyway - the herbs made up for it. it had beautiful color from the sugar rubbed into the skin - basically it looked like cookbook or food magazine photos of roasted chickens (though mine looked a bit ghetto with its makeshift coil-of-aluminum-foil trussing). perfectly cooked, too, so chalk that up as my first really good roast chicken. the pot pie was really good as well - i thought we wouldn't use up all of the thyme, but instead i just put it in everything (biscuit topping, roux, and vegetable mixture), hoping it wouldn't be too overpowering, and it was fine.

pasta and pastina

does anyone else out there like eating pastina in bulk - as in not just in soup? i'm sitting in my kitchen, eating a bowl of pastina with pasta sauce, and i find that it's an incredibly satisfying experience. pastina is one of those things i never had as a kid unless i was sick, which automatically put it on a pedestal; consequently, as an adult, eating a bowl of pastina is a guilty pleasure, as if it's your birthday and thus you can do what you like. it reminds me of how calvin "drinks" hot cocoa - a mug stuffed with marshmallows, with the hot chocolate very syrupy and poured into the cracks. eating pastina with pasta sauce is the same thing: pastina with a little bit of sauce. the absence of the soup takes away pastina's aura of wholesomeness; you know you shouldn't be eating the pastina with such density, but you can't help it because pastina's just so good.

i seem to be making up for cooking time lost to studio in the past few days: on friday, celina and i roasted a chicken; yesterday i went to carly's apartment, albeit circuitously, and helped her make dinner with lauren and dana; and today carrien and i are going to make dinner.

i very much enjoyed the chicken on friday, and i think i've settled upon a preferred method for roasting them - 15-20 minutes at 400, and about an hour or so at 350. i forgot to salt and sugar the skin, but it had a lovely golden-brown skin anyway. i had stuck a lot of tarragon-thyme-butter mixture underneath the skin, which i like to think kept it tender (which is was, happily). we stuffed the cavity with extra tarragon, lemon wedges, and onions. given a little more thought, i probably would have stuck an apple in there, too. we also made gravy to go with the chicken, although we didn't coordinate the timing quite right, so we made the gravy from the innards, rather than pan drippings, which i added at the very end. innards are a distinctly un-american thing to consume, but they're great for flavoring the gravy. i have always considered the neck of a chicken or turkey to be a special thing, just because my mother always cooked it and gave my sister and i pieces of it. it pretty much grosses other people out; i had the neck all to myself... anyway, the gravy was pretty standard : brown the innards, add onions and celery, then chicken stock, and let it simmer away for a long time. we added the pan drippings at the very end and that added a nice kick to it.

we also flouted the white-wine-with-chicken rule and had red wine with dinner because we both like it better. we just bought a bottle at harvest, without really knowing whether or not it was good - it was a shiraz, and the label, like almost every other red wine label, touted aromas of blackberries, plums, chocolate, etc. the wine, however, turned out to be quite good, especially with dinner (it was buckeley's shiraz, 2003, from south australia) - not too heavy, not too light, and actually very fruity. it was better than the cabernet sauvignon that we had several weeks ago (the markko reserve 2001), which likely needed a few more years of aging, because it was a little harsh. anyway, the wine would probably be good for celina's and my theoretical (embryonic?) chocolate party. i've been thinking of what would go well with chocolate, so that we don't overdo the chocolate aspect of the party, and red wine would be excellent. i think we might do the hot chocolate with spices and chile peppers that celina made - in the idea's inception the party was a vehicle for making really good hot chocolate. we're still not sure how the party will be structured; it will be something like our housewarming party, but it will be a chocolate party instead. we'd like to make truffles, but again, the whole thing is still in planning stages - it will depend on studio as to whether or not the party will actually happen. some other thoughts are a chocolate fondue, some sort of savory thing involving chocolate, some really complicated chocolate cake confection (i would like, at some point, to make a marjolaine....). perhaps we'll buy lots of random chocolate stuff and have people make chocolate sculptures too. hmm...

an old memory

every now and then i remember the russian food store my parents went to a few times when i was a kid. it was so long ago, and i wasn't yet interested in remembering places, that the memory consists of a few shadowy images. the store is in a brookline-like area; we would go there at night because both of my parents were working at the time. the store was tiny, and wonderful for children. i remember the place as being kind of dim, but perhaps that just because it's memory? there were wire racks and aisles that were piled with multitudes of things i had never seen before. we went there specifically to buy the candy - chocolates. plain chocolate, chocolate with some sort of praline filling, chocolate with nougat...essentially it was a plastic sack - the kind you put vegetables in at the supermarket, filmy and translucent - filled with colorful, foil-wrapped pieces of candy in all sorts of random shapes like rectangular prisms and cones. you could stick your hand in the bag, pull something out, and you wouldn't know what it was because it didn't say on the foil, and the text that was on it was always a place - odessa - or in an alphabet i couldn't read. but you knew that whatever it was, it was going to be new and exciting.

food, beautiful food, how i miss you

it's amazing how fast quiche disappears (at least, around me and carrien). i long to be using my beautiful knives and i think i will do so tomorrow night. today carrien and i get another box from boston organics....mmm... if i were actually home when we got our boxes, it would be like christmas every time! since i'm not, it's more as if food just magically appears in our fridge (which is also good).

eggs are an amazing thing. they stretch like no other ingredient i know of - you can make a bread pudding with one egg and lots of milk and somehow it still stays together. you can also make a quiche with only vaguely correct proportions of eggs and milk, and it somehow turns into a quiche. or maybe i just have a magical oven.

i made an apple crisp on monday after i came home from studio, and discovered that i'm still in search of the ultimate apple crisp recipe. i've found that i like the brown sugar in the fruit and the white sugar in the oats and butter for the crisp part - butter and sugar is a combination that you really shouldn't tamper with, since it turns into so many wonderful things.

alright, that completes today's compendium of random food thoughts. i wish i could cook more often - i actually miss working with my knives, and that's vaguely disturbing. i think i need to do something more physical than making models. models are fun, and i enjoy making them, but ultimately they're just models, whereas when you cook, you make food, and when i am working with clay, i'm making a complete, finished object. a model is...well, a model. they can be beautiful objects, but essentially they represent something else that's the actual object.

staying awake

i think i may have figured out why i fall asleep in class : i fall asleep when i'm hungry. weird, huh? i guess my body decides to shut down or something.

i don't have too many food recountings to recount this week, sadly. sometimes i lose track of time because every day i just do work for 15-20 hours and the rest of the hours i sleep. makes for a very uniform type of existence. oddly enough, i never really get stressed out, because it all works out in the end (just repeat it over and over to yourself). anyway, the food : carrie and i made what was probably tex-mex on monday, i think it was. or maybe it was another day. it was sometime last week. i found the avocadoes we'd gotten from boston organics in the back of the fridge and we decided we needed to eat them, but not cold, because it was cold outside. we ended up with chicken braised in broth and tomatoes, with sauteed onions, corn, and the avocadoes diced and mixed in for good measure. oh, and there was some cumin in there too, which went well. to go with it, we made some rice, which is probably the first time i've successfully made rice in a pot. weird, huh? at lmf we had the rice cooker, and at home my mom always made it, so i've always been able to avoid the mess that is overdone/burned rice. at any rate, tex-mex or not, it was quite good, and there was enough of it (my tendency to overestimate amounts kicked in) to feed us for a couple more days.

probably the only other notable food experience of the week was grendel's, yesterday. grendel's is probably the closest thing to the bun shop at cambridge university, which is the ultimate college pub. or, pub in general, really. besides, you can't really get better than "the bun shop" for names. grendel's doesn't have food that's as good, but it is cheap. what makes it good, of course, is going with your next-door neighbors and other random people, and having some fun after spending the entire day alone in studio. i like to work in studio when it's quiet, but not really alone because it's such a big room. and i feel like i'm doing something wrong by coming in when nobody else is there.

but this is a food blog! food, food, food. i'd like to cook again sometime soon. i do love my knives. this is something that i think i say far too often, but they really are so wonderful... i could do anything (to food!) with them... hmm, if i could cook right now, i would make...chicken pot pie. well, it's not really cold enough outside for chicken pot pie. but what i'd really like to make is some sort of really involved dealio that's really horrible for you. something chocolate, that involves real mousse made with egg whites, and also fruit. god. do you ever just get the yen to make a ten-course meal? here's what i'd make:

ode to food, 31 october 2005

(i) some sort of fruit salad-y type thing. poached pears with cheese?
(1) potato-leek soup with bacon
(2) salad greens with pears and toasted pecans
(3) risotto with red bell peppers
(4) chicken pot pie with caramelized onions, peas, corn, and carrots
(5) tomato-smoked eggplant salad with balsamic vinegar and mozzarella
(6) spinach-onion-yogurt persian thing with toasted pita (borani es fanaaj? that's not right...)
(7) cheese course (things like taleggio, brie, and blue cheese, with honey and apples)
(8) oatmeal tuiles with strawberries and whipped cream
(9) caramel fondue
(10) complicated chocolate-mousse-fruit confection...

review: central kitchen

central kitchen / 567 massachusetts avenue / cambridge ma / 617-491-5599 / sun-wed 5:30-1am, thu-sat 5:30-2am / reservations accepted for parties of 6+ (recommended) / entrees moderately expensive ($18-25)

i have no wish to tackle my thesis at the moment, so instead i'll write about food. i had dinner with rob at central kitchen, which i had been to once before with celina back in june when i had just moved into 24. while it's not mind-blowing, it's good, solid, above-average stuff. it's a bit expensive for students, but has a great atmosphere - hip but not pretentiously so. it's a small place, balanced lighting, cool dented chrome tables.

neither of us was particularly hungry, so we split an appetizer and an entree - mini portuguese style stew (clams, mussels, and sausage in a tomato broth with bread) and mushroom ragout with ricotta dumplings and creamy polenta. the portuguese stew was good but pretty standard; the ragout was really quite good. the ricotta dumplings were an interesting idea, and really good with the mushrooms (shiitake, hen of the woods, lobster, i think...). and creamy polenta is always a good idea. it had peas in it too, which added some color and a bit of sweetness to the heft of the mushrooms.

for dessert we had an orange chiffon cake with mascarpone cream and a bit of diced tropical fruit. it was pretty good, but i wouldn't have described the cake as a chiffon cake - it was more like a lighter pound cake. the mascarpone was a great addition, and probably what made it for me. in general, it was very enjoyable, if the service was a bit neglectful at the beginning. the high point was definitely the mushroom ragout, and the portions are pretty big, so we were rather full even having split what one person would have ordered normally. i hadn't been out for a while because of studio, so it was really nice to have dinner out somewhere - it's as enjoyable as cooking dinner with friends, just different. makes me feel like i'm a normal person again, really. funny how that is.

autumn trifle

one could not possibly call this trifle a "fall trifle;" it requires the british-accent, hunting-dogs-and-trumpets air that "autumn" lends to the phrase. specifically, this is an autumn trifle with roasted apples and pears, and a pumpkin-caramel sauce. carrien sent me the recipe a while back when we had just gotten apples and pears in our organic foodbox, and as we still had them, and i finally wasn't closeted in studio, it got made. it was a relief to cook again, and wonderful to use my santoku. i'm afraid i've been neglecting my wusthof chef's knife in favor of the wonderful balance of my santoku. the wusthof is great for heavy-duty work, but i haven't had to do any lately. and the santoku just cuts through things as if they're butter. it's simply amazing. have i mentioned that i love my santoku? i really believe that i own the most beautiful knives in the world. or, at least, in the world of people i know. i bow down in awe of my knives. and hope that i won't cut myself with them, as i am wont to do from forgetting that i own sharp knives. no testing the edge on my finger for these babies.

we started off the evening coercing miriam and v to abandon their plans to go to grendel's, and come over to cook with us as we had food to cook - an unnaturally large "jewel yam" (more plump than anything else) and cauliflower. i had seen a disgustingly beautiful (if that makes any sense) photograph of a cauliflower gratin in my bouchon cookbook, and jumped at the opportunity to make something from it for the first time.

for dinner we ended up making the cauliflower gratin, the jewel yam with wilted greens, and pasta with fennel sausage in a tomato cream sauce that was essentially a vodka sauce. both the yam and the cauliflower had curry powder in them and i added some to the pasta sauce too, along with some cumin, billington's dark brown sugar, and balsamic vinegar to take away the awful canned blandness of the crushed tomatoes we had in the pantry. that's the last time i use that brand of tomatoes (the green can)... all of it turned out quite well, though, and got put together in a reasonable amount of time. the gratin was suspiciously easy to make, although probably more involved than the typical gratin - the cream segment of the recipe was onions sauteed with finely chopped cauliflower stems, cooked with the herbs (supposed to be bay leaves and thyme, but all star had was tarragon), curry powder and cream. not hard to do, though, just longer. you mix that with blanched cauliflower, top it with cheese and bread crumbs, and pop it in the oven until it looks done. it was quite good (thank you thomas keller), if very rich from all the cream. i think i liked the tarragon more than i would have liked thyme. and of course we ate the whole thing. we had some red wine with dinner (markko cabernet sauvignon, 1999, which is best with food) as well.

i made the trifle while we watched a few good men. the first part is a cinnamon pastry cream - typical preparation, with a bit more flour than i would have liked. it thickened up remarkably quickly, unlike the last time i made pastry cream, probably because of increased egg yolks. next was a pumpkin caramel sauce, which starts with butter and sugar, eventually lots of cream when the mixture caramelizes, and then canned pumpkin at the end of all that. i ended up doubling the recipe because one reviewer recommended it as an ice cream topping - the one constant in our fridge is invariably ice cream. you might wonder how my body handles the cholesterol bombardment, and i can't give you an answer. you would think that my arteries are about to be completely clogged, but my cholesterol was normal when it last got measured. strange. the trifle gets finished off with roasted apples and pears. i hadn't realized that they would release so much liquid, so i was a bit disappointed with that - i would prefer firmer fruit still with the roasted flavor (guess that's a bit of the oxymoron). but all together (all of the above plus ladyfinger soaked in the tokay i opened yesterday - royal tokaji, 1996, 5 puttonyos) it was quite good. and very autumnal. and now we have breakfast for tomorrow!

autumn trifle with roasted apples, pears, and pumpkin-caramel sauce
cinnamon pastry cream
6 large egg yolks
2 cups whole milk
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup cake flour
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

pumpkin-caramel sauce
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup canned pure pumpkin

roasted fruit
3 large Fuji apples, peeled, cored, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (about 4 cups)
3 Bosc pears, peeled, cored, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (about 3 cups)
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

assembly
3 1/2 dozen (about) soft ladyfingers
1/3 cup dry Sherry
2 cups chilled whipping cream
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
8 1/8-inch-thick slices Bosc pear
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1. for cinnamon pastry cream: whisk yolks and 1/2 cup milk in large bowl. add sugar, flour, vanilla, and cinnamon. whisk until sugar dissolves. bring 1 1/2 cups milk to simmer in heavy medium saucepan over medium heat. gradually whisk milk into yolk mixture. return mixture to same saucepan. cook until custard thickens and boils, stirring constantly, about 2 minutes. transfer to medium bowl. add butter and stir until melted. press plastic wrap directly onto surface. chill until cold, about 2 hours.

2. for pumpkin-caramel sauce: melt butter in heavy small saucepan over medium heat. add sugar and cook until mixture is deep amber, stirring constantly, about 8 minutes (mixture will be grainy). reduce heat to medium-low. add cream (mixture will bubble). stir until caramel bits dissolve, about 2 minutes. add pumpkin; stir until heated. refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours.

3. for roasted fruit: preheat oven to 400F. mix apples, pears, and lemon juice in large bowl. place butter on rimmed baking sheet. heat in oven until butter melts and begins to brown, about 5 minutes. add fruit to baking sheet and toss with butter. roast until fruit is soft and golden, turning with metal spatula every 15 minutes, about 1 hour. cool fruit on sheet.

4. for assembly: place ladyfingers, flat side up, on baking sheet. brush with sherry. line bottom of 2- or 3-quart glass trifle dish with single layer of ladyfingers, sherry side up. line bottom edge with 1 row of ladyfingers, sherry side in, pressing gently against dish. spoon half of pastry cream into lined dish; smooth top. cover with half of fruit. drizzle with 1/2 cup caramel sauce. line edge of dish with second row of ladyfingers, sherry side in. cover fruit with single layer of ladyfingers. spoon remaining pastry cream on top. cover with remaining fruit. drizzle fruit with 1/2 cup caramel sauce. line edge of dish with third row of ladyfingers, sherry side in. chill at least 6 hours.

5. whip cream, sugar, and vanilla in bowl until mixture holds peaks. fill pastry bag fitted with large rosette tip with whipped cream and pipe over trifle (or spoon whipped cream on top of trfile). drizzle whipped cream with 2 tablespoons caramel sauce. brush pear slices with lemon juice; arrange decoratively atop whipped cream.

[makes 12 servings]

review: great bay - confusion and disappointment

i guess that the hostess not being able to choose between taking our coats and checking the next group's reservation was already a bad sign. half of our party (my parents, my sister, her fiance and his parents, and me) left for the table as the rest of us stood around awkwardly holding the coats we'd taken off. though we were standing right in front of her she couldn't seem to decide if she should take our coats first, then ask the next group for their name, or to talk to them first, then take our coats. eventually - eventually - she decided to take our coats.

the restaurant itself is a little too self-consciously hip, though the layered window curtains are pretty cool and the lighting is at the perfect level. the menu was so-so, in terms of being adventurous, and the food was pretty good, but all of this was marred by the unexcusably bad service. when our waitress poured the wine, she dribbled some of it down the side of multiple glasses. when the busboy came with his crumb-scraper, he seemed to view the crumbs as some sort of large, looming monster because he scraped them off so forcibly, not into his hand, that most of the crumbs got flung into my lap. we waited an interminably long time for the check after we had asked for it, and had to flag down some random busboy to get them to take our check to someone who could take care of it.

i would like to say that otherwise, our experience was good, but how can one have a good experience at a restaurant without good service? if i had expected bad service, it would be a different situation entirely, but at a restaurant like this i had expected good service. getting bad service at a nice restaurant just ruins the entire experience. the food we had was good, but not sparkling, as it is wont to be at many other restaurants of the same level. it was merely average - no technical perfection, nor anything that was particularly exciting. the fromage blanc ice cream that came with the blackberry cobbler was good, but the gelato version i had of it in san francisco two months ago was far superior to it. my sister commented that the cider doughnuts she's had at apple orchards were better than the one we had at dessert.

now, the spaetzle i had with my roasted monkfish was excellent - slightly truffled with some faint lemon - and the monkfish was wonderfully crusty on the outside. i didn't really understand why it came with a prawn and would have preferred it without. my father's short ribs were fantastic - the best i've had in quite a while. the rolls were excellent, and the wine we had (a sauvignon blanc, andrew rich from willamette valley) was great, too, but the service just cast a shadow over the whole affair. i can now only fixate on what bad service i had - the last time i had such bad service was at stella, and theirs was a fault of having been open for only a few days when we went (great bay has been open for an entire year). it's true that the "poached" egg that was really a softboiled egg, that came with my entree at stella, was a travesty, but i'm sure they've fixed that problem by now. i sure hope that great bay is going through some sort of flux, but i guess i won't be finding out, because i won't bother to go back.

delicata squash

this is a photo of our delicata squash, a type of squash that has a hard rind that makes it feel like a gourd, but that's also edible. we cut it up (with my gorgeous, wonderful santoku that i keep nicking myself with by accident) and tossed with with carrien's ligurian-pesto-infused olive oil, then shot it in the oven until it was done. we had gotten the delicata squash in our organic food shipment (must remember to leave the boxes out for them this week); neither of us had ever had it before. it has the texture of a slightly firmer sweet potato, with a more subtle, less dramatic flavor to it. it's also much more attractive than your typical squash. we added some microplaned parmesan cheese, too, and had it for dinner along with some persian hybrid rice. the best thing about our box o' organic food is that it forces us to cook with what we have, instead of running over to star, which always looms in the oh-so-short distance. tonight we had spinach and half a bell pepper to use up, so we sauteed some diced onions, added the bell peppers and the spinach, and then yogurt. minus the bell pepper, this resembles a persian dish celina once made for a menu. we then added rice (if you were persian you would eat this not with rice, if i remember correctly) that we had cooked with chicken broth and cumin. it was quite good, and something i'd do again. amount-wise, we had about two cups of spinach, one medium-sized diced onion, and half a green bell pepper, and added maybe a third cup of lowfat plain yogurt (plus salt and pepper, of course). to this we added the rice, which was about a cup dry.

a tidbit for you to enjoy is this article about cornell's award-winning variety of delicata squash. this is the first link that comes up when one googles "delicata squash." it's kind of funny (as well as noteworthy for you plant breeders out there) in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.

central square + gentrification

from stuff@night (my comments at the end):
From fast to fine
Hot restaurants, tasty events, and the buzz on Boston's dining scene

BY LOUISA KASDON

Only a chef-owner as gutsy and farsighted as Steve Johnson — formerly of the Blue Room — would look at Central Square’s old Burger King space and see a potential site for a fine-tuned urban bistro. Until last spring, the site had all the hallmarks of mid-Cambridge grunge: a seedy Mass Ave storefront and even seedier patrons. No more. Johnson is well under way with a new project, the Rendezvous at Central Square, a near-100-seat bar and restaurant that will showcase his elegant, earthy European palate. If construction continues apace, the new restaurant will open sometime in early October and serve dinner seven nights a week. It will have a full liquor license, a big bar for eating and drinking, a communal table, and a menu rooted in Johnson’s French culinary background. We’re talking real restaurant, with an atrium, bright skylights, banquettes, trained waitstaff, and prices from the low $20s on up. With this one new restaurant, Central Square could be on the cusp of a neighborhood reinvention.

For decades, Central Square has been the multi-ethnic ridge of Cambridge, slightly tawdry and joyously funky, but lost in a zone just beyond Harvard’s reach and not quite in the crook of MIT’s arm. It’s home to a fair number of pubs and bars, lots of Indian and Asian budget eateries, and the Middle East and Phoenix Landing. Other than to visit Central Kitchen, however, no suburban gourmet has ever looked up from his or her newspaper and said, "Hey, honey, let’s go see what’s new in Central Square."

That could change very soon, and Rendezvous could be the catalyst. Although it’s still a construction site, the new space’s bones are emerging — and the bones are good. It’s a big space, airy and crisp, like Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square. One side will feature banquettes for fours and sixes; the central area will have traditional dining tables. The front window will house a big communal table for all those cozy Cantabrigians who like to dine en masse. The bar will serve liquor, of course, but Johnson emphasizes that it’s to be a dining space where people can drink, rather than a drinking space where people can eat. "This is a restaurant with a bar, not a late-night place," he says. "We’ll be done with dinner by 11 and mopping up the floors by midnight. Central Square has enough bars."

Although he wasn’t in a hurry — after all, there was a lot of good sport fishing from his boat in Bristol, Rhode Island — Johnson had been seeking a new location since he left the Blue Room more than two years ago. He’d casually considered every space and potential concept from Boston to coastal Rhode Island. But Johnson always had a hankering to work close to his home near Central Square. One day last April, after looking at restaurants for two years, he was walking down Mass Ave and saw a for-lease sign in the window of the former Burger King. "I’d looked at every space in the city by then, worked with all the usual suspects, the realtors and landlords," Johnson recalls. "And here I was just ambling by and saw a phone number to call." The process has been fast by anybody’s standards, less than six months from beginning to end — including getting the blessing of the neighborhood association, often the most difficult part of opening a new restaurant in Cambridge.

The Central Square Business Association is overjoyed by Rendezvous’s impending arrival. It’s been hoping for a wave of gentrification in Central Square, but one that would re-invigorate the area without erasing its ethnic complexity. It invested in new parking lots (three public lots are within a block of the new restaurant), installed sidewalk benches, and improved the streetlights. Central Square merchants had been unhappy for years that the old BK was owned and operated by an absentee landlord, out of touch with the kind of clientele his franchise was attracting. Recently, a new owner bought the building; he hopes to turn the property into a source of neighborhood pride, and has been diligently working with Johnson to make sure his new tenant has everything he needs to succeed — most importantly, a full liquor license. At the Licensing Commission hearing, Johnson got the green light from the city with no muss or fuss.

Of course, it’s a gutsy move. The site is definitely not an "A" location. Only a chef of Johnson’s reach and reputation could turn an old Burger King into a destination that will woo the kind of diners who go to the South End, but only because all the bistros there have valet parking. On the other hand, Mass Ave has an appealing, almost Parisian grittiness, what with the Middle East next door and the scads of interesting characters who make the scenery more interesting than in Newton.

Johnson has hired as his chef Deepak Kaul, who cooked with him for three years at the Blue Room before moving to San Francisco to cook at Jardinière, a restaurant very much in the tradition of Alice Waters & Co. The GM at Rendezvous is Nicole Bernier, another Blue Room alum. "It’s great to work with people I know well," Johnson says. "It feels like a Blue Room reunion." The menu at Rendezvous will be more French than fusion, and will have fewer Asian influences than the Blue Room during Johnson’s tenure.

Urban storefronts are like dominoes: when one store changes hands, it sets a chain in motion. A new chichi bistro like Rendezvous may be the key domino to regenerate Central Square. If it could happen in Kenmore Square, it can happen anywhere.

* * *
i wonder what the person who wrote this is like. i wonder if they know what happens when a neighborhood goes through gentrification. i wonder if they know that central square is good as it is - that something that might be good for one neighborhood is most definitely not good for a different one, because they are inherently different. i would really like to know if she thinks anyone who lives in central square and loves it would ever use the phrase "chichi bistro" in a positive manner.

a narrow escape

i am currently watching the game on nesn. though i am faithfully watching my team, i also feel the need to write about caffe umbra before the nine bowls of soup i've had in the past few days chase away my food memories.

as carrie and keith had had a rather subpar experience at mantra for restaurant week, we made a reservation for cutcat (carrie, keith, eric, erica and me) at caffe umbra to erase that memory. [a note on mantra: please do not go to this restaurant; not only is the food reportedly uninspired, the restaurant illegally charged keith more on his credit card than he had written on the receipt.]

dinner itself was really great! i was favorably impressed, although i did detect slight inconsistencies in service and food quality that are typical of restaurant week (even though they shouldn't be). the service was actually pretty uneven: i asked for sugar for my tea and the server totally forgot, and water didn't make it into our empty glasses for some time.

however, excellent food made up for it. i had a "salad" of smoked eggplant, fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, and really good, thick balsamic vinegar. i've never had smoked eggplant before, and it was really amazing - concentrated flavor, kind of chewy. it paired really well with the mozzarella, and the balsamic vinegar was probably the best i've ever had - it was real balsamic vinegar, thick from being aged for a long time. it reminded me a lot of the salad i had at chez panisse, even though technically they were completely different.

my main course was chicken under a brick, which caffe umbra is known for. it was good, but not fantastic; it was, to say it snobbily, merely standard. the greens with it were a little bitter for my tastes.

the dessert was second best after my first course - i got the sticky toffee pudding, which is also a house specialty (it always sounds weird to say that about any restaurant that isn't family-run or a diner, rather than some hip, upscale joint). i have never had sticky toffee pudding, and i'm inspired to make some soon - it has this lovely round flavor that is extremely satisfying. i think it would be even better when it's cold outside. and with whipped cream...it was basically a slab of caramel in steamed-pudding form. mmm.

something i hadn't noticed in previous visits with my family is that caffe umbra is loud. one would think that restaurants would have solved this problem, as it's not particularly challenging. there are a million ways to fix bad sound - use softer materials, pay attention to how the sound bounces around, etc, etc. i don't know why it gets ignored, since it's one of the most important things. if i go to dinner with someone, chances are, i wanted to talk to them. some restaurants seem to think that's a strange idea. at any rate, in pretty much all other respects i was quite happy with the place. it wasn't as good as pigalle, but i'm happy to see that the food hasn't lost any of its luster.

dinner with mr. eggplant

last week i was at star and saw an eggplant with a nose! perhaps this is old hat to you, dear readers, but for me it was a totally new experience. i thought briefly about buying it, but refrained. a couple days later i was back at star (i seem to go there a lot), and i saw another one! this time i decided i needed to purchase it, and let me tell you, it was three dollars well spent. and it was so noteworthy that i decided it was photo-worthy as well, hence the photo to the left.

mr. eggplant languished in my fridge for a few days as i ate my way through restaurant week and a lot of bread and cheese, including my first encounter with taleggio. (p.s. currently the cheapest butter in the city is at whole foods, for $3.49/lb.) oddly enough, the taleggio reminded me a lot of the caviar i had at both alinea and french laundry - where by "reminded me a lot" i mean it tasted exactly like the caviar. specifically, the caviar with the cauliflower panna cotta. isn't that weird? i feel like i was violating some sacred cheese trust, where i was supposed to taste x flavor in the cheese but didn't.

back to mr. eggplant. i wrapped him in a paper towel and stuck him in his plastic bag so he wouldn't get moldy before i wanted to use him ("eat him" sounds rather...violent). out of options today for dinner (cheese but no bread), i plucked mr. eggplant from the fridge with every intention of cooking him. and so it went: the demise of mr. eggplant.

having peeled mr. eggplant, i cut him up into thin strips. i also diced a bunch of plum tomatoes and a large clove of garlic. cooking was basic stuff: saute the garlic in olive oil, add the tomatoes, then the eggplant, then let it stew for a long time. i added chicken broth as a liquid to help the eggplant break down, which it did over the next hour. it took so long to cook down that i ended up eating hunks of brie drizzled with honey in the interim. when it was finally done, i just added it to castellane pasta and enjoyed a nice, leisurely dinner while watching the game.

new crush

i went to get a haircut today and on my way to the salon, i just happened to notice that kitchen arts was right across the street from the salon. ok, actually i was looking out for it, hoping it would be nearby. and it was! of course i couldn't resist not going inside after my haircut. my excuse was that i needed a pair of tongs. really, though, i wanted to look at the knives. i recently bought a wusthof chef's knife (8", i have small hands), but have been eyeing santoku knives of late. so i asked the guy about the santokus, and really it's a specialty knife. translation : i don't need it. (from love actually: "i don't want something i need, i want something i want.") i checked out the different ones and i wasn't really expecting to love any of them, but i absolutely loved the MAC santoku! i don't know how my brain always picks the most expensive things to like. but the main point is that this knife feels like it's an extension of my hand. i can't remember ever having held a knife that felt so perfectly balanced in my hand - it was as if it belonged there. the end result is that i now covet a MAC santoku knife - the one with the divots and the wonderfully balanced weight in the handle, not the cheaper one (stupid brain) that cook's illustrated likes. i think it's the MSK-65. here's the link so you can go and drool on your own.

update : so perhaps this was foolish but i went ahead and got it online - i found it for a pretty good price that was much lower than the original price. yay! now, if only the people upstairs would be a little quieter in their moving preparations...

review: pigalle two ways

pigalle / 75 charles street south (in the theater district, not in beacon hill) / 617-423-4944 /tue-thu 5:30-10pm, fri-sat 5:30-10:30pm, sun 5-9:30pm /reservations accepted (and recommended) / entrees expensive ($22-30)

for some reason, i had never noticed before that pigalle is a small restaurant. luis, nina, v and i got to the restaurant late, but they didn't blink an eye and seated us fairly quickly, given that the place was packed (on a wednesday!). the room is designed carefully with an eye to space - the columns divide the room into three spaces and somehow make it seem bigger, rather than cluttered; there's a mirror on one side of the room that makes the room seem bigger, but is set above eye level so that you don't have to stare at yourself all night if you're facing it.

we were seated on the side of the restaurant on the night i went with luis, nina, and v - it was an 8:30pm reservation on a wednesday, we got there twenty minutes late, and were seated about fifteen to twenty minutes after that. while ordering, i asked for a glass of wine, and was really kind of offended that i got carded. i mean, i guess i can understand the concern, but it's not like you can do anything stupid after you've had just one glass of wine. and, if you're ordering wine in the first place, you must know something about it. anyway, i actually didn't have my drivers license, but i did have my passport. i felt kind of stupid using my passport to prove my age - it seems like it's overdoing it.

anyway, the real reason we were there was the food, and i should talk more about that. the first thing i was struck by was the menu - they've expanded the menu! most restaurant week restaurants use the event as publicity, and recently the boston globe ran an article about how many of them use subpar ingredients because people don't know the difference (which is just a very, very cruel trick, in my opinion). but pigalle seems to have the best interests of the diner in mind - instead of doing a set menu with one or two options for each course (first, second, dessert) they have essentially designed a bistro menu, with four to six choices for each course. it seems like the chef viewed this as a way to experiment with things one wouldn't normally do. it's a good way to test out new dishes on the unwitting public, really.

my dinner was duck-heavy, and i realized that it probably wasn't the most optimal choice of courses, but i really wanted both the duck liver and the crispy duck so i decided to go for it. the duck liver was slightly better last year, i think - i remember the duck livers being smaller last year and i liked that much better. however, it's still an excellent first course. the duck itself was wonderful - very crispy skin, even better than the chinese restaurants do it. the portion was quite generous and the mushroom fricassee was excellent. it was the first time i've ever liked shiitake mushrooms - i guess i like them fresh but not dried? there weren't too many lychees but perhaps they melted into the fricassee, which was sweeter than i had expected (in a good way). the duck was excellent in combination with the lychees and mushrooms, and i'd never had maitake (hen of the woods) mushrooms before. i like them a lot - they have a nice, firm-but-not-chewy texture and a nice delicate flavor. the duck also came with mashed potatoes which wasn't really necessary (and i would have preferred a green vegetable) but which was nice. they gave so much mashed potatoes that i shared it with v and still couldn't finish it.

dessert, as usual, was excellent. i don't know who the pastry chef is, but he or she is very consistently good. i had the vanilla tapioca pudding with granola (oats, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds, by my count) and maple ice cream. perhaps i've just been starved of ice cream all summer while i was in chicago, but the maple ice cream was quite heavenly. the tapioca pudding was excellent - very creamy - and the granola added another texture, tasting nutty but not too healthy. i had a taste of v's chocolate souffle tart, and the almond sorbet on it was...reminiscent of the way the chai ice cream i had at aujourd'hui with the honey cake - it was all cool and wonderful.

i found myself at pigalle again, three days later, with my parents, nora, and charles - i had made my reservation before nora made hers, but at any rate i certainly wouldn't complain about another evening at pigalle (hence the "two ways"). we had a bottle of red wine - i forget what it was, beyond it being a blend of red wine grapes from southern france - to go with the rest of dinner. i, of course, was determined to have completely different things than either of my previous visits, settling on the crispy tuna roll with pickled vegetables, the roasted salmon with beets three ways and a port reduction, and the chocolate souffle tart (i was a little disappointed with the third dessert available - summer fruit with rhubarb consomme - as the rhubarb consomme had already been done by no 9 park in may). all three were excellent.

the tuna roll was basically tuna tartare encased in crispy phyllo. the pickled vegetables were pretty good, if a little strong - in fact, though japanese in inspiration, it was more chinese in flavors, and it was a little overdone. i guess it seemed like it was a very american take on japanese food - it just wasn't quite delicate enough. but it was a wonderful idea, and the tuna and the crispy phyllo is really great. (the pickled vegetables were chinese turnip, julienned carrots and cucumbers, and ginger.)

the roasted salmon was really great - i was very happy that i ended up getting it over the steak. the skin was really crispy, the meat perfectly done, and the combination of flavors really fantastic. i've discovered that i do like beets. the skin of the salmon was salty, which was a nice contrast with the sweetness of the beets and port reduction.

and finally, i think the tapioca pudding was probably the best dessert. the chocolate souffle tart was good, but merely a good chocolate dessert, made better by the existence of the almond sorbet.

i'd like to go back to pigalle, not on restaurant week - though pigalle is undeniably a great deal for restaurant week, as normally some of the second courses cost as much as my entire meal did. i would also like to go to upstairs on the square for dinner - i opted not to go for restaurant week because it was so uninspired, menu-wise.

first food lust

from the april 2005 issue of food and wine, sandwich-pressed sugar doughnuts...mmm...

it may not look like it, but this is actually the inaugural food lust. i just transferred my previous food blog, mimblewim, to this blog. seeing as "foodlust" is an actual food-related blog name, i thought it was a fitting switch.

food daze

these days, i have been in a bit of a food daze. on my trip to california, i am still at a loss to explain how i was able to visit two legendary restaurants in the course of less than 24 hours. make sense to you? nope, doesn't make sense to me either. it was so much good food in such a short period of time that i sometimes think it was all a dream, except that i know it wasn't. but i do feel like i've been spoiled more than anyone should ever expect. i also know that i (and my sister, thanks nora) paid dearly for it, but of course that all melts away when you're actually eating. however, now i think i am ready for a period of normal eating. i think that the level of good food that i maintained during the school year was constant this summer, but came in the form of really low-level dinners sprinkled with a few really high-level dinners. given a choice, i prefer the former by a lot, though i'm happy to have had the wonderful experiences i had this summer.

blackbird : take two

i think nora's intention with the blackbird gift certificate she sent to me was that i use it on my scheduled trip there the first time i went, but it arrived just a day later than that. at any rate, i was very happy to have tried the restaurant again. upon returning, i found it much better than the first time, for a variety of reasons.

i was by myself again; i had made a reservation for 7pm on a tuesday night. blackbird is always full, it seems, and tuesday was no exception - i arrived in time to see the first seating leave and the second seating start eating. i was seated in a better place this time, just in terms of my preference - in the back half of the room, facing a bunch of other tables, and with a view of the kitchen. it was probably the ideal location, actually. dining solo gives one unprecedented license to stare - because it's "observing," in this case, not staring. i was slightly neglected while i looked at the menu, but the service besides that was great. the waitstaff was much less silent this time. i think that i have also settled into being a solo diner, in terms of being comfortable by myself, and my boldness in staring (because, after all, it really is staring).

this time, i went when i was hungry, and i think i chose a better selection of dishes than i did last time. i had:

i : tomato gazpacho with smoked crab - an amuse-bouche that was really great. the mug it was served in was too big, but it was really wonderfully tomato-y with scallions. unfortunately the tomatoes and scallions utterly consumed the smoked crab flavor, so it became a different texture more than anything else.

1 : salad of endives, crispy potatoes, basil, dijon, pancetta and poached egg - this would be great if it got mixed better. the crispy potatoes are formed into a cylinder that holds the rest of the salad, and when it's served the waiter cuts it up for you. i appreciate the creative gesture but i think it's a bit weird to have someone cutting your food for you. i'd rather do it myself. the potatoes were great, and everything together was good - basically it was a caesar salad, deconstructed - but it didn't mix together well enough to be consistently good.

2 : grilled california sturgeon and braised oxtail with sweet corn pancakes, chicories, and chanterelles - this was probably the high point of the meal. it was done really well, and sturgeon is a great firm white fish in general. it was perfect with the corn pancakes and the chicories. the chanterelles i could have done without. the fish was, in my opinion, perfectly done.

3 : selection of five cheeses (swan creek farm fresh goat cheese with sungold tomatoes, munster gerome cow's milk with roasted beets and hazelnuts, fiumorbu brebis sheep's milk with toasted onion bread and caperberries, comte raw cow's milk with dates, and berkshire blue cow's milk with dried cherries) - i wanted to have a cheese course so i did that instead of wine. i think it was good in terms of pacing of the meal, but i was disappointed with most of the pairings. the beets, tomatoes, and cherries were really good pairings, but i wasn't a fan of the dates, and especially of the caperberries. the caperberries were just too strong - think capers, with the flavor multiplied by a lot.

4 : avocado panna cotta with blackberry coulis, blackberries, peaches, and doughnut holes - this was pretty good. i liked that it was an interesting pairing - it's a modification of what this used to be, which is a dessert of three doughnuts. the doughnut holes were really excellent - they used a yeasted dough - but the panna cotta was more like key lime pie than anything else. the blackberries went with the dessert really well, but not so much the peaches, which tasted a little unripe.

so you might think that i didn't enjoy my meal. well, it was good, but not great - i much prefer craigie street bistrot. however, the atmosphere here is great for solo dining - there's a lot to watch. across the room there was a couple that, at the end of their meal/date, were holding hands. to my left there was a european couple (eastern european?); the girl was wearing purple zebra-print tight pants, with a sparkly waistband - they could only have been european. in a show of bad taste the guy started talking on his cellphone while his date was sitting there in front of him; she gave up after a while and went to the bathroom. the couple at the table to my right was on a date, and he was one of those crochety, stodgy old fellows who must say everything loudly and thinks he knows everything, and wants to be seen as worldly and sophisticated. his progression of comments about the bread pudding they shared: "this is so big for two people!", then "well, actually, i think this is just right for two people", then "this is really good." i believe that the man would have said anything was good, just to appear to be well-bred. people in this restaurant are always so...self-conscious, i guess - the self-consciousness that comes with going to a hip restaurant, where one is always wondering "am i hip enough? i'll just pretend i am as i walk by everyone else."

in short, i think i like solo dining a lot. i've yet to find a place where the waitstaff will pause to talk to me, but it's a lot of fun to people-watch - and restaurants are really a great place to people-watch. i think my next quest, once i can afford it, is to become a regular somewhere.

wine notes

while in napa, we also hit a couple of vineyards for tastings - robert sinskey and cardinale. incidentally, while at the bookstore a couple days ago, i came upon a cookbook by robert sinskey's wife - the vineyard cookbook. i think i've finally developed some opinions about wine i do and don't like. i think my favorite really is cabernet sauvignon, and i'm not really a fan of merlot, though sometimes it can be okay. i really don't like pinot noir, however, and i'm not a fan of chardonnay. for whites, i do like white bordeaux and gewurtztraminer, but not much else. i can't remember what we had at alinea, but i liked the malbec a lot. i liked the gewurtztraminer that jessica's parents had at french laundry better than the one nora and i had at alinea.

"satisfies like meat"

i just came upon this article in today's nyt which, among other things, sports this phrase: "Alda Fuortes de Nitto...cooks eggplant that satisfies like meat." as i thought about that, i wonder what it is that meat means to us (us meat-a-tarians, that is), and how we view it. should eggplant satisfy like meat? why would you want to liken eggplant to meat, anyway? it's an entirely different thing - should it then be treated completely differently?

since i'm not vegetarian i can't say, but i wonder if they think of certain things as replacing meat - like the vaunted portobello mushroom cap, for example. i would hope that they don't - that it's just a different way to eat. the way that phrase is worded implies that meat is a necessary component of one's diet, or possibly the most important one, while it really isn't. or maybe it's trying to say that there are things in general that satisfy like meat, using the word "meat" to signify the important part of a meal. but is any one part of a meal "better" or more "significant" than the "meat"?

for me, meat has become an increasingly optional part of a meal. i certainly do like it - a lot - but it's no longer the mainstay of dinner. i suppose i think of meat more as a flavor now, rather than a necessity. sometimes i want it, sometimes i don't, and a lot of the time i'm too lazy to cook it or too cheap to buy it.

review: napa + the french laundry

the french laundry / 6640 washington street / yountville ca / 707-944-2380 / dinner 5:30-9pm daily, lunch f-sun 11-1pm / reservations accepted up to 2 months in advance (recommended, and be prepared to call continuously exactly at the moment when you can call for a reservation) / tasting menu extremely expensive ($240)

i wonder if yountville became what it is after the french laundry opened (i think it was 1993 or 1994 according to what i overheard from the waiter as he told the table next to us), or if the french laundry opened when yountville was already what it is. i think it was the former. at any rate, the french laundry is located safely away from the so-touristy-it's-surreal area of the town. across from the restaurant there's a vegetable and herb patch for the restaurant, where there are beets, zucchini, watermelon, various herbs, etc. it's a strange place for an herb garden - right next to all of the cars! - but it's cool to see it there. there was even a little patch of corn growing there.

the restaurant - like alinea (grant achatz used to work at the french laundry) - is located in a house, rather than a space on the first floor of a larger building. it's more home-like than alinea, partly because it's in california, i think. we were seated on the second floor, up a staircase that the waitstaff ascended and descended with such smoothness that i wondered how long it took them to master the movement. basically, sitting in the restaurant is like sitting in someone's nice sitting room or parlor - the decor was vaguely french, with the bathrooms contained behind a mirror and wood paneled wall. the chairs were really comfortable, which is good for those who spend four hours eating lunch (i've never understood plastic chairs in restaurants). upon sitting down, i immediately recognized the way the napkin was folded and pinned with a clothespin from the french laundry cookbook (this clothespin wasn't blank, but was basically a business card in the form of a clothespin). incidentally, i still haven't mastered the art of having my chair pushed in for me - i always sit down too soon! if you have pointers on the etiquette of gracefully doing this, please tell me.

i'll say this now (and post the vegetarian menu later) - the vegetable tasting at french laundry is the only vegetarian menu i've ever seen in my life that was actually competitive with other menu offerings. i very much almost got that instead of the chef's tasting. i had tastes every now and then from jessica, and let me tell you, it was really fantastic. when i first started hearing about french laundry, i pretty much just brushed it off as overpriced good ingredients. admittedly, i never really bothered to find out exactly what was going on here, but i'll happily recant my former opinion. i think i've also become much more attuned to the quality of produce, so i probably couldn't have eaten at french laundry before now and appreciated it.

there was a table next to us with a largish group that included a woman with 80s-era style and melodrama who had just graduated from business school. she was very...american, we might say. ok, she was kind of loud and a food novice. i wouldn't normally harp on food novices because you have to start somewhere, but honestly, people who go to a restaurant just because they hear it's famous really annoy me. wouldn't you look up reviews and web stuff about a famous restaurant you're going to, instead of sweeping in, ordering champagne, and grandly telling the waiter that you just want whatever the chef's best dishes are? (fyi: thomas keller was not in the restaurant when we were there, but he was slated to arrive in the afternoon.) sigh. the rest of us prefer to concentrate on the food. i mean, i know she was celebrating...but must one celebrate so vocally?

ok, so this is a breakdown of what we had, plus my comments (a la alinea). to drink: water and various grape juices (a gewurtztraminer and a pinot noir) - basically the liquid before they ferment it into wine. french laundry only gets a few cases of these a year, from the navarro vineyard. the pinot noir was a bit too sweet and one-dimensional (fittingly, it needed to be fermented) but the gewurtztraminer was wonderfully fruity and floral at the same time. mmm.... one can always hope that the future will hold navarro gewurtztraminer juice.

i : gougeres - best gougeres i've ever had in my life, hands down

ii : salmon "puree" in a sesame cone with chives and creme fraiche: there's something strange about eating salmon in a cone as if it were ice cream, but it was extremely good anyway. it reminded me of the microplaned salmon at alinea, but there was, of course, more salmon and it had this wonderful texture to it.

1 : cauliflower "panna cotta" with beau soleil oyster glaze and russian sevruga caviar - the caviar was very, very, very good

2 : "peach melba" - poached moulard duck "foie gras au torchon", masomoto family farm peach jelly, pickled peaches, marinated red onion, "melba toast" and crisped carolina rice - this was an the choice i took over a pluot and heart-of-peach-palm salad. it was pretty good. i think this was a bit too delicate for my tastes, though it was excellent - i prefer the pork rillettes at craigie street bistrot. it was a very satisfyingly whimsical presentation, though.

3 : extra virgin olive oil poached fillet of gulf coast red snapper, oven roasted roma tomatoes, jacobsen's farm summer squash, nicoise olives and garden basil "pistou" - we all got annoyed with the skin of the snapper, which was kind of tough to cut through with the fish utensils one uses in good company, but the snapper itself was really, really wonderful. it was really flavorful, perfectly cooked, perfect firmness...mmm... this tops the black bass i had at no 9 park in terms of ingredients, easily. the combination of all of the flavors in this - especially the pesto ("pistou" is the provencal word for pesto) - was really great, but it was really the fish that stood out.

4 : "fricassee" of maine lobster mitts "cuit sous vide", golden corn pudding, summer truffle "coulis" and summer truffle "filaments" - i was slightly disappointed with the lobster, which seemed a tad overdone, or stringy or something, to me. however, the combination of flavors in this dish was transcendent. the truffles at french laundry are many times better than the truffles i had at alinea - full-flavored and earthy. jessica had truffles grated onto something she had, and they came over with a laquered black box on a silver tray, extracted the truffle from the box, microplaned truffle onto her dish, and replaced the truffle in the box (which then brings into question - how many people end up touching that thing???). ok, back to the lobster. "cuit sous vide" means that they cooked the stuff slowly while it was vacuum-packed (see this past sunday's nyt for an article on it, featuring thomas keller and a bit of the dude at el bulli). but man, the combination of the lobster, corn, and truffle...i can't get over it. by the way, there was a point to having both the truffle coulis and filaments - the difference in textures was actually significant. the lobster i had at alinea, however, was more perfectly cooked, i think.

5 : "aiguillette" of liberty valley duck breast, wilted mizuna, slow baked black mission figs, port wine and young ginger "vinaigrette" - well, "aiguille" means needle in french if i'm not mistaken, but i don't know how that applies to the duck breast. i was surprised that they didn't give us sharper knives for the duck breast, which had some stringy element one one side between the skin and the meat that was difficult to cut in general. this was good, but necessarily fantastic.

6 : snake river farm "calotte de boeuf grillee" (cap of the rib eye), grey morel mushrooms, roasted jacobsen's farm young leeks, yukon gold potato "parisienne" and "sauce bordelaise" - jessica's dad thought that this was the best of all of the dishes. i think i was more impressed with the lobster, but it's true that this beef is the best i've ever had in my life (i have to admit that i wasn't really impressed with the flavor of the bison at alinea). the morels - well, i love morels. these were great - a little salty, but they went so well with the beef, i couldn't really complain. i do think that the morels that i had at craigie street bistrot and no 9 park were better, though. the man at the farmers market in hyde park told me that the season for morels was over about a month ago, so i don't know where they're getting them from at french laundry. then again, it is california, land of ever-growing produce... ok, the beef. the leeks were great, though as jessica's dad commented, i wouldn't have minded a few more... the potatoes were similarly excellent. but the centerpiece of the thing was the beef - everything was really there to glorify the beef.

7 : "meadow creek grayson" with caramel apples, toasted walnuts, baby arugula and pomegranate reduction - all i can say about the caramel apple is "wow." i don't think i've ever had an apple that tasted like that! it was unbelievably sweet, crisp, flavorful...maybe i'll have to go and try apples again when i'm back home - i don't really believe that good apples are hard to find in boston. i was, however, more allergic to this apple (it was raw) than i usually am. hm. anyway, the whole thing was good, though i prefer sharper cheeses.

8 : lychee sorbet, "yuzu scented genoise", goma "nougatine" and black sesame "coulis" - this was amazing. the lychee sorbet was like a good chinese watercolor, if you can imagine the juxtaposition of those two images. it was wonderfully cool and...well, i can't really describe it. it was just amazing. and especially with the black sesame stuff everywhere - it was just the right thing to go with it. it reminded me a lot of the black sesame candy my sister and i used to eat when we were kids.

9 : "tentation au chocolat noisette et lait", milk chocolate "cremeux", hazelnut "streusel" with madagascar vanilla ice cream and sweetened salty hazelnuts - perhaps not as transcendent as the lychee sorbet, but that's probably because i'm more used to chocolate desserts. this one, though it wasn't as transcendent as the sorbet, was not lacking by any means. what i liked best was the layer of stuff underneath the milk chocolate "cremeux" - basically a cross between mousse and panna cotta. it was amazing, the chocolate with the stuff underneath. the sweetened salty hazelnuts were also really good - the salt was perfect with them.

and post-menu: "mignardises" - these have to be the best post-menu, tiered-silver-tray tidbits i've ever had. first, they brought us tiny creme brulees and pots de creme (each of us had one or the other). i had the creme brulee and it was great. and, they certainly recognized that people always love eating tiny things. whenever i have creme brulee, i always think of amelie, and unwittingly start to tap at the sugar the way she does. after the tiny cream-based stuff, they brought us the tiered silver tray, which has a number of tempting things on it: a shortbread cookie, a financier with raspberry jam on it, two little cakes with sultanas in them, a tiny chocolate tart with a flake of gold leaf on it, two chocolate-pistachio candies wrapped in plastic, and a plate of coconut french macaroons. the macaroons were fantastic. i ate the financier. i don't think i've ever had a better financier. i do love almonds... ooh, so much. ok, and finally, they came around with a silver tray with rows of truffles on it. i had an earl grey truffle. very good, but still nothing on burdick's, which is still tops in my book for chocolates. (p.s. the bill came on a laundry ticket.)

the service was great - our server was very attentive and as they do with tasting menus, they tell you what's in each dish. they were attentive without being pretentious. i wonder if they're happy working there. it seems like it. they also gave us a copy of the menu upon request. a word about the menu: what's up with all of the quotation marks? let's take, for example, the "cauliflower 'panna cotta'" - obviously the chef thinks of it as a panna cotta, so the menu should just call the thing a panna cotta. maybe it's not how other people might think of panna cotta, but the menu is the announcement of the chef's intentions, not a list of things that the diner is used to hearing.

so i think this whole rambling account probably deserves some sort of summary. well, i have to admit that i'm still kind of in a daze, having gone to so many good - ok, not just good, legendary - restaurants in such a short period of time. as it is, i wanted to go to a few other places in chicago (everest, avenues, spring, and green zebra come to mind) but my funds ran out, sadly. or rather, they didn't run out, but i decided that i'd rather have food for days than one evening. ok, back to french laundry. i can't really judge whether it's the best i've ever had. i think that it ties with alinea on my list - alinea because it's so wonderfully experimental, and french laundry because it finds such wonderful ways to showcase fabulous ingredients. i wouldn't have thought that there was such an art in creating culinary vehicles for really good ingredients, but there is, and when it's done well, you get french laundry. i liked the service a little better here than at alinea - perhaps slightly less unctuously smooth, but still great and much more personable. somehow at alinea they're a little...well, i felt like i was being patronized a little bit when i asked questions. it was really lovely to have a nice, leisurely lunch - i can't remember when i last had lunch like i did at french laundry. ok, not in the four-hours-of-leisure way, but a leisurely lunch in general. usually i go grab a teriyaki bowl from tokyo lunch box and eat at my desk. who wants to eat outside when it's gross and humid?

anyway, that's enough rambling. hopefully i'll post more coherent summary thoughts when they finally cohese.

review: chez panisse

chez panisse / 1517 shattuck avenue / berkeley ca / 510-548-5525 / reservations recommended (see reservation policy for hours) / 3-course prix fixe menu varies from $50-100

jessica wrote me in a letter that we were going to go out to chez panisse on youngsun's last day in the city. chez panisse is jessica's restaurant mecca, as alinea was my ultimate dining experience. anyway, since i received the letter after i left for california, our 8:30 reservation at chez panisse was a total surprise for me. a pleasant one, of course!

we headed over to berkeley after walking around golden gate park for a while. it gets quite cold in san francisco in the evening, which was a welcome change to me after the sweltering humidity of chicago (note to self - never return to any disgustingly humid place unless it's called boston). chez panisse is located on the outskirts of berkeley's central area near the university. there is one menu that is changed daily, and it's a three-course meal in the regular downstairs dining room unless you opt to add a cheese course. there's a vegetarian option, though the night we went, it was either lamb or a stuffed tomato - you can probably guess what we all chose (jessica is only vegetarian in boston).

points off for the snobby maitre d', who, upon looking at us, asked if we were dining in the cafe. sigh. i hate it when people assume such things. the way one is dressed is not a fail-safe indicator of how much one will tip. european (he was half-french and half-italian - the people behind us asked him if he was french, in french - i expect that he didn't think we understood him, either) doesn't mean class.

however, we were duly seated, and the dining room is all warm light and slightly frank lloyd wright-ish lighting fixtures. the tables are great - just the right size. our amuse-bouche type thing was prosecco with blackberry syrup, and a little dish of olives (the night's menu was mediterranean-inspired). the olives were great - concentrated, soft olive flavor without an edge to it - mellow would be a good word.

the first course was field greens with ricotta cheese and roasted figs (and toasted almonds, but i didn't eat them). i can safely say that this is the first time i've ever had field greens that i've liked - they were obviously chosen and combined with care. they were probably just really good field greens, too. the figs were good, but really, the best thing was the ricotta. it was, by far, and i mean by far, the best ricotta i've ever had. i could eat just that for days! i guess that's what fresh ricotta is supposed to taste like.

the second course was roasted lamb with eggplant puree, green beans, cucumber-yogurt stuff, and...um...crap, i forget the last thing that was on the plate. oh! purslane! purslane is pretty good. anyway, the lamb was great, if not totally remarkable. it was really good in combination with the eggplant and the green beans. i think there were maybe too many things on the plate. but it was good.

we declined the cheese course because it didn't sound that interesting to us (the next night jessica and i had a blue cheese and a sheep's milk camembert that tasted like cheese-y butter - good, but so rich).

the dessert was by far the most stunning thing on the menu. it was a perfect ten : a terrine consisting of a pistachio cake, wildflower honey ice cream, and peach ice cream. i thought that the first bite - of peach ice cream - was good, but the wildflower honey ice cream was even better. even better than a bite of the whole thing, which was not at all shabby. that ice cream was the best ice cream i'd had since the white chocolate ice cream i had at craigie street bistrot. it tasted so wonderfully fresh, too... and on the plus side, i didn't get an allergic reaction to the peaches on the side of the dessert (unnecessary but good).

we stopped by the kitchen afterwards and talked briefly to the sous-chef and the pastry chef. the sous-chef told us that one shouldn't buy anything but japanese knives, and that they should all be $60 or less, but conceded that, after all, it's what feels comfortable. i covet a santoku knife, but they're rather expensive. i wonder where he got his. the pastry chef told us that the peaches had just been "marinated" in a sugar syrup. the one thing i would have liked was to have seen alice waters in the kitchen. i mean, i know that she's a busy woman, but if somebody is the chef of their restaurant, i like to see them in the kitchen.

bottom line : this is an excellent restaurant, if not the best ever. it's wonderful in its simplicity. there were several things that were really fantastic, but some of it was merely very good. there were three people we were walking behind on the way to the restaurant - we passed them, then they passed us and stopped at the menu of the restaurant (full for the evening, i think). i'm sure they gave us either surprised or baleful glances as we passed them on our way into the restaurant.