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.