Author: foodnerd

a tavola, creepy lovenest with good food

At the spur of the moment last night I had dinner with JG at A Tavola, the italian restaurant in her neighborhood that has been touted as the best gnocchi in the city. The gnocchi are pretty good — a little marshmallowy in texture for my taste, but in a fabulous sauce of brown butter and lots of big crispy-fried sage leaves. We also had tagliatelle in a lamb ragu (yummy), a braised pork shank over white beans (yummy and huge), and braised beef short ribs over risotto (super-extra yummy).
However, this delicious straightforward-italian meal was eaten in a quiet little restaurant infested with at least 3 couples obviously having affairs. All the men were 50ish, all the women were skinny and 20ish, and ALL OF THEM were canoodling outrageously. Fingers were being sucked, two of them were actually making out at a corner table, and there was general fondling all around. JG saw one of the guys looking bored and yawning as his girl talked enthusiastically about something, then perked right back up again when the finger-licking resumed. EEEEW.
We just eyeballed them and laughed, in between admiring discussion of our short ribs. It was like fine dining in a deeply creepy junior high dance. It’s really the perfect restaurant for the setup: quiet and romantic, but in a young hipster neighborhood where those aging dudes can be utterly assured that they won’t see anyone they know on a Tuesday night.

how you know you are feeling better

you make something not only full of vegetables but also containing spicy chile sauce. And eat it, AND don’t feel nasty afterwards. Praise the lord.
I had a bag of unsweetened coconut that needed using. Here is what I did with it:
made thai coconut rice (jasmine rice cooked in coconut milk + water + small slice ginger, then sprinkled with toasted coconut)
made indonesian spicy stirfry (chicken, broccoli, carrot, onion, snow pea, mango & spicy sambal – no coconut in this one)

made curried greens from a Saveur recipe that I’ve been ogling for years now. The green beans in the supermarket looked nasty, so i got mustard and turnip greens instead. This worked out awesome, since I shorted the water in the recipe a bit and instead relied on the not-fully-moistened coconut to absorb the residual water from the greens, making the final product nice and dry. I am totally making greens this way again, and I might even truck up to Devon St and see if I can find curry leaves, though the recipe is delish without them.

made a german chocolate cake – since TNR can’t eat sugar or dairy, i took it on as a challenge to find a way to make German Chocolate Cake she could eat. We used unsweetened coconut, made a maple+butter+florida crystals frosting (thickened up by cornstarch and the dried coconut), and did the chocolate cake recipe from the current issue of Cook’s Illustrated, swapping applesauce 1 for 1 with the sour cream and cocoa+oil for the solid chocolate. (Who knew unsweetened chocolate had milk solids in it?) The cake came out awesome, very moist and fluffy and chocolaty — the recipe is a bit fiddly, but worth the trouble.

when bad food happens to good people

I went to an offsite company meeting last week in California with my whole company. This was for the most part a very satisfactory experience (except for the whole food poisoning situation, which has been proven to be completely unrelated to the trip), but on our first night there, we all had dinner at a vegetarian restaurant that had been billed to us as just completely fabulous, really great, fantastic food, eat there all the time. (We have a California office, and this place was down the street from it.)
I was trying to keep an open mind, even though I’d checked the internet and figured out it was a chinese-style place specializing in fake meat, which to me is a VERY BAD SIGN since there is a place like that in Boston that is just horrid. Bear in mind though that there is also a chinese-style vegan place in Boston (Allston actually) that is unexpectedly terrific, if a bit low in protein — we have dined there happily with vegetarian friends, on dishes that treat vegetables well and make them the stars. So I am not anti-vegetarian, I am anti-bad-food. And that’s what we got for dinner out in San Mateo: Really Bad Food.
vegetarian spring roll vegetarian restaurant in san mateo theoretically, a potsticker
The spring roll was the one exception — it was full of nice fresh cabbage and was quite tasty and well fried. Everything else ranged from mediocre to truly nasty. The actual vegetables themselves were pretty good, cooked crisp-tender, but the sauces were pretty lame, and the faux meat was generally icky. The mushroom-based not-beef was the best of the lot, tasting fairly okay if you were expecting mushroom taste rather than meat taste. And the potstickers were just a travesty: thick bready dough filled with nasty things claiming to be vegetables. Just wrong.
Compounding an already bad situation was the fact that there were four of us at the table, all women, all carnivorous, all ravenous from a long flight from Chicago, and all by this time very very cranky. By the time the entrees had arrived we’d already resolved to take matters into our own hands and go out later to the In-N-Out Burger we’d seen next to the freeway on our way from the airport. And so we did, and at last all was right with the world.
at long last, in-n-out

health update – bummer

Turns out it wasn’t salmonella that I’ve been suffering from — it’s campylobacter.
C read my post and immediately called to ask how I knew it was salmonella, at which point of course I told him I didn’t, I actually had no idea, and that was when the last part of the puzzle fell into place. Turns out he’s been just as sick for just as long, and his doctor did the tests and figured out he had a campylobacter infection. We both got sick Thursday night/Friday morning, and have had identical symptoms — his big victory today was eating some toast and marmalade.
Which, unfortunately, means that we got food poisoning when we were eating together — which was the absolutely delightful meal we had at HB last week. God damn. We really liked our food and the atmosphere there, and had every intention of going back, but at this point i’d have to say there’s no fucking way. Individual cases of campylobacter infection are caused primarily by uncooked poultry, and since well-fried chicken livers are as close as we got to poultry in that meal, that means the culprit is bad kitchen habits: cross-contamination. Bummer.
We are sad. For so many reasons.
wine & menu, hb
picture of the wines C brought
the pinot noir was delightful

green poo

This is fairly grody, but it’s so hilarious it had to be shared. I never wondered, but now I know: drinking large amounts of purple gatorade makes your poo BRIGHT GREEN. Like leaves on plants green. I laughed so hard I cried when I saw the green there in the bowl.
Apparently it’s the vast amount of Blue #1 dye they use to make it purple — passes right through your system and combines with the yellow tones in poo to make green.

pear tart tatin, an end to suffering

it’s been a while since I posted. Sorry about that — came down with a lovely case of salmonella whilst in California for a company meeting. This is day 6 of the horror, and the first day I’ve had any appetite at all. Honestly, the gorier aspects of salmonella are bad enough, but being in San Francisco with no appetite is truly wretchedness. Now that I’m home, I’ve got a fridge full of cheese and a bowl of lovely fruit I’ve been utterly uninterested in eating for days. Awful. Truly awful.
Last night, when I started to think about what could be done about the new roommate’s overripe pears, I knew I was on the road to recovery. Tonight, when I made — and eventually even ATE, yay me! — this pear tart tatin, I knew things were well on their way back to sanity.
pear tart tatin, unmolded
The new roommate (TNR?) can’t eat white sugar, so this was a maple syrup based tart, and I have to say, I recommend it to everyone. A bit of cornstarch thickens it up the last little bit, and the maple adds a terrific depth of flavor to the caramel. Yumminess.

it’s the sauce

My coworker JG got some lunch today at Hecky’s and its delightful aroma wafted into my cube and I was forced to investigate. She had a half chicken there nestled in the foil and styrofoam, covered and glistening in a red coat of bbq sauce. She ate all the dark meat and licked off her fingers, and told me she usually got too full to eat the white meat, which she didn’t like anyway, so she threw it out. I gave her The Look, whereupon she said she’d put it in the fridge for me. 🙂 She’s awesome that way.
hecky's bbq chicken
And just now, after a really irritating bout of data cleanup for a client that should have done it themselves, weeks ago, I went and got that chicken breast and ate it and was happy. “it’s the sauce” is what it says on the menu from Hecky’s. The chicken’s fine, moist enough and so on, but the sauce really does make the difference.
I’ve never had a sauce like this, fragrant and frankly quite sweet — which usually I don’t like, but this is tempered by a strong vinegar tang and spicy heat that seems like a combination of a solid dose of Louisiana style hot sauce and cayenne powder. It’s fantastic stuff, worth licking off all your digits and eating with a spoon if you get the chance. Yum.