Pursuing quality gastronomical endeavors for the general good
Images from berry picking at the parental homestead over the past weekend, plus a couple from the last time we got blueberries and blackberries from home and made pies. Mostly taken by tallasiandude, so the caliber of the art will be much higher than is usual on this blog.
We went to visit the parents this weekend and also picked up from the farmshare today, and since the parents impressed upon us the ridiculous overflow from the family plot, we have more than a few vegetables and fruits:
This jumbled pile includes 3 trays of the most gorgeous blueberries imaginable, 1 tray of blackberries, 4 pears from my dad’s coworker’s tree, red peppers, hot peppers, yellow crookneck and zucchini squash to feed a small village, vast numbers of ripe tomatoes (we could have taken about 7 more lbs today from the farm, but we couldn’t justify it when we already have doubts about our ability to distribute this stuff to enough people fast enough), celery, chard, 13 heads of garlic, a fistful of beets, 2 types of eggplant, a big bunch of basil, cucumbers, sweet vidalia onions, and a watermelon.
Yeah. Summer is OK.
i swear to god, they must have slipped a little cocaine back into the recipe when they made Coke Zero. It’s like happy in a bottle. Sweet, cinnamony, and LOTS of caffeine: it can fix any crappy unmotivated afternoon, or jumpstart a morning that is unresponsive to applications of hot milky tea.
okay, so my normal life with no massive task to accomplish seems to be still a little hairy, as i am finding myself without any time to blog. Part of that is that we are throwing our big summer shindig this weekend, and we came back from honeymoon to a house we’d still barely moved into, littered with boxes and wedding crap and half-unpacked suitcases, so we have a lot of setting up and tidying up to do, so that our friends won’t trip over boxes of records on their way to the beer tub. And of course work got nice and busy just as I got back in the saddle, so you really can’t win.
Anyway, while you wait for me to start posting all the great pictures and stories I have in the backlog (really, i swear), try this one on for size. It’s kind of timely, seeing as how I bet many of you have 18 zucchini in your fridge right now, giving you the nasty eye when you open the door to get a lemonade.
Our friends C & P gave us a great cookbook for a wedding present, Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and I have been poking around in there for fun things to do with the excess of produce currently on my hands. No one surpasses the mid-eastern cultures for great vegetable preparations. Yummy.
There are a few recipes in there for mashed or pureed zucchini, and i was just dumbstruck by this — how could i have failed to think of doing that!?! The damn things get all nice and mushy and soft when you cook them properly, so DUH.
Anyway. There are a few variations, but the basic idea is the same, and quite easy. Fry or boil zucchini until soft (I microwaved it), then mash with a fork in a colander to drain off some of the liquid. Make a paste of garlic and salt, and mash this into the zucchini with olive oil and lemon juice. One recipe then adds raisins and pine nuts and a bit of dried mint; another one adds a dab of harissa and some ground coriander and a few caraway seeds; and so on — i think this would work with just about any Turkish/Persian/Moroccan/etc. spice combo you like.
These are intended to be served cold, as a dip or spread or side dish/salad. It seems to me it would make a lovely addition to a meze plate with bread and feta, or a tasty sidekick for grilled chicken. And I now have a nice compact tupperware of zucchini mash with raisins and pine nuts, instead of the 7 zucchini that used to be taking up space in my fridge. Hurray!
On the way to a friend’s house some months ago, we drove down Rt 117 through Weston, and passed a fabulously retro-looking drive-in called Dairy Joy, with a sign out front saying “fried clams & hamburgers.”
Say no more.
We never got a chance to try it, though, until tonight. It was a perfect evening for it, warm and sunny with a bit of a breeze. We ordered a full fried clam plate with onion rings, a half-plate of fried clams with french fries, a crab cake sandwich, lemonade, diet coke, and a raspberry lime rickey.
This turned out to be a mixed bag. The drinks were horrible — the fountain coke was nasty, and the rickey was so overpoweringly sweet i couldn’t touch it. The crab cake sandwich was a naked cake on a naked bun, without sauce or lettuce or anything, which for $8.95 seems a little stingy.
But the fried clams were *top shelf*, the equal of any I’ve had — fresh and sweet and briny, no sand, with a lastingly crisp coating.
The onion rings were coated in the same light batter, which isn’t my preferred style for o-rings, but they were fine enough, as were the fries. Sitting on the plate with those gorgeous clams, dipped into tartar sauce or cocktail sauce (both very tasty renditions), they do just fine. The full plate is the better deal, so if you aren’t overly-hungry, just get a full plate and share it instead of buying two halves.
Of course, at a place called Dairy Joy, you more or less have to get ice cream for dessert. It’s soft-serve only, which is all kinds of old-skool for me, having grown up on the stuff. They have some interesting flavors, and are apparently known for their creamsicle twist and their “javaberry,” another twist of raspberry sherbert and coffee ice cream. We tried the javaberry, since my mom & I both love raspberry and coffee flavored stuff. This is actually pretty good, even though the raspberry is a touch too sweet for my taste, because you get flashes of both flavors as you lick your way through that cone, sometimes sweet raspberry, sometimes creamy coffee, sometimes a li’l of both. Next time, though, i think i am going for straight up coffee soft-serve. That stuff’s killer.
So before you pack the car and drag your ass to the North Shore or Narragansett Bay to get decent fried clams, consider the Dairy Joy, just down the street on Rt. 117… just bring your own beverages.
hi – sorry for the massive backlog and no posting… there is a TON of good eating that’s been going on, but we are only just back from the “honeymoon” travel-thon and then i was sick for a week. That sucked, but i am feeling normal now for the first time in months, so i should be able to start in on the posts shortly.
however.
in the meantime, we were walking down Moody Street this weekend, and stopped into Patel Brothers, and checked out their ice cream selection, and holy moly. Saffron-pistachio. At least 3 distinct varieties of kulfi. Cashew-raisin. And lots more, including some Latin-tropical fruit flavors that appear to be locally produced, if not entirely handmade in someone’s kitchen. We couldn’t buy any right then, but we are totally going back sometime this week. YUM.
UPDATE: Sadly, ALL of the ice creams we tried were no good. Boo hoo hoo! The saffron pistachio was the best of the lot, and it had so much saffron in it that it tasted like gasoline. Drat. All of them were afflicted with textural problems, as if they’d been melting and refreezing every day for a month, and some of them augmented their ice crystals with a sketchy chalky sort of feeling in the mouth. We tried an Alphonso Mango flavor in the gorgeous fancy packaging, same as the Saffron Pistachio, and even that was strangely flat, which may be the creamier variety of mango (versus the tart kind Americans are used to), but even so it wasn’t worth eating again because of the texture issue. The rose flavor in the less-fancy brand was just plain bad and we threw it out on the spot (the others got a reprieve of a few days in the freezer during which we felt no desire to eat them again, whereupon they got the boot as well).
Sadness. Despair. Oh well — i suppose one can always go to Toscanini’s and get perfectly lovely kulfi ice cream, and i bet they would do a saffron-pistachio special order if you were to ask them nicely….
so… the wedding was completely awesome. Everything, even the things that we screwed up, did half-assed, or just didn’t think of, worked out completely perfect. We’ll post for real about a lot of the wedding stuff, especially the eats, but for now we are on honeymoon in NYC.
Which means that we are slacking off as majestically as possible.
We have barely left the (absurdly swank) hotel room, since it has air conditioning, expensive linens, free champagne, and Utz cheez balls that our friend K gave us before we left. And wireless internet.
We did leave once, this morning, to wander out into Soho — which is disgustingly hot and humid this week — looking for food. We found a rather good Dominican dive on Lafayette & Spring, La Nueva Conquista, but that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that we have discovered in the course of our excessive slackery that expensive champagne mixed with Vitamin Water makes a surprisingly good drink. We’re holed up in the room, looking out at the bright midday sun, lolling on the cool white sheets in the airconditioning, drinking lemon-lime electrolyte Vitamin Water because we’ve just come in from the heat. And then tallasiandude joked that we should put in some of the leftover free champagne and make wine coolers, ha ha ha. So of course we did, and they’re not completely disgusting, but the key is that they make you feel GREAT. Well hydrated AND a little bit buzzy, just the thing for a lazy hot afternoon with not a single thing to do.
And let me tell you, having not one single thing to do is the greatest luxury i can imagine right now. We’re having a great time. More later.
So the caterer had a list of cheeses they were going to serve, which was fine, but some of them were kind of boring. So i suggested Nevat & Etorki, which are two of our favoritest cheeses in the whole wide world. Fine and dandy.
Except that Formaggio didn’t have them. And then Whole Foods (multiple locations) didn’t have them, and couldn’t order them in less than a week.
At which point, I did what any of you foodwhorish people would do: I googled.
And this brought me the miracle of igourmet.com. How did i remain in ignorance of this genius website for so long? These nice people (and they were nice when i spoke to them on the phone) are sending me an entire wheel of Nevat and a half wheel of Etorki (they had at least a dozen of each in stock) along with 2 pounds of an exciting-sounding thing called Marygold, an aged dutch goat cheese flavored with marigold petals. And they are sending this direct to the caterer via Fedex, with a promise to overnight replacement cheeses if anything should be wrong with our order.
THAT is awesome.
Yesterday i picked up the first installment of vegetables from our local CSA in Waltham, which was all manner of green leafies (more on that later), plus pick your own snap peas. Which i am now eating while working on the computer, and words do not express how delightful i find that fresh-pea flavor. I will not buy peas fresh in any market, because they are always stale and starchy by the time you get them, and so I rarely get to enjoy the treasured treat of my childhood, fresh raw spring peas. But these little guys are just lovely! Yay.
The other night, tallasiandude was in his office eating some candy when I wandered in to ask him something. I saw the M&Ms in his hand and leaned down to snarf a couple up. Whereupon i realized, far, far too late, that they were actually Skittles.
Blargh!
I had to spit them out in the bathroom trashcan. Them is some nasty candy, made all the nastier when you are expecting delicious dark-chocolate M&Ms. Eesh.