For some reason, our garden cantaloupes have been starting to mold before they are fully ripe, so in order to deal with the mangled chunks of yummy but none-too-sweet ripe melon, I made them into sorbet. Taking a tip from the strawberry sorbet I had at Jiraffe in LA, I put some sauternes in with the melon and sugar. Holy cow! Just like the strawberry, the melon is pushed right over the edge into glory by that wine’s sweetness and floral overtones. The alcohol also helps keep the texture soft and velvety, rather than icy. I ate some every day for a week, and there’s still some left, which I think I might go eat right now. Oh, how I love the sweet fruity desserts!
(though still, as good as this melon sorbet is, the All-Time Best Fruity Dessert Ever prize still belongs to the lime sherbet made this spring. Hot damn.)
Author: foodnerd
middle-brow food bucket
Original (low-brow) food bucket: Kraft Mac & Cheese, Hormel canned chili, hot dogs. Ideally cooked over a campfire. Intensely satisfying hike food.
High-brow food bucket: Homemade mac with real melty cheeses, homemade chili with ground meat and beans and tomatoes and spiciness, hot dogs. Usually made at home. Tastes great, of course, because of all yummy ingredients especially including cheese. But somehow wrong, contrary to the spirit of food bucket.
Enter last night’s last-minute dinner: Annie’s white mac & cheese, Stagg fancy-pants meaty canned chili from Costco, a handful of aged cheddar, chopped fresh tomato. No dogs, b/c the chili has lots of meat. It has the proper spirit, of cans and powdered cheese mix, but it tastes great because of the tiny bit of real cheese and higher-quality foundations. Mmmm…
mojito milkshake
Visit #2 to the Friendly Toast in Portsmouth NH found the frosty-drink machine in good working order, happily, and we had a selection. The blueberry-raspberry smoothie was lovely, pure fruit, not too sweet. The vanilla milkshake was perfection, as expected. But the mojito milkshake is where the real action is. Milk, sugar, lime juice and finely minced mint — it’s like minted, melty lime sherbet. Tangy and delicious. Worth not being able to finish the monster sandwich that accompanied it.
nevat
A creamy white, soft goat cheese from Catalunya. Utterly luscious. Texture like a firmish brie, with smooth, fatty, milky, goaty flavor. First had at LaBrea Bakery, but also found locally at Whole Foods Fresh Pond. *swoon*
Upstairs on the Square
Restaurant Week in Boston, and the only place we wanted to go was Upstairs. Mostly because we hadn’t been since it changed names & locations, and curiosity was getting the better of us.
This is a weird restaurant. The upstairs “formal” dining room is entirely pink, and decorated to a finely-pitched blend of Legally Blonde, Gustav Klimt, Alice in Wonderland, and the Magic Kingdom. It scared us, until we’d gotten outside a nice stiff cocktail, at which point it became cuddly and amusing, a bizarrely appropriate counterpoint to the extremely Cantabridgian ladies populating the room. And don’t even get started on the precisely matched set of 6-foot, vaguely exotic metrosexuals comprising the waitstaff. Where do they find them? Is there a casting call?
All this frippery aside, the food itself is wonderful. The portions are small, so you can indulge while still fitting into your size 2 togs from Jasmine/Sola — which is good for food sluts like us who will take your 3-course prix fixe and raise you a couple of desserts and maybe a cheese plate.
The roasted black cod, with crabmeat stuffed into a tiny, tangy heirloom tomato, was dreamy as that sablefish always is. The steak frites was very nice, but those weren’t no frites; they were dainty little homefries. Thank god the waiter (under interrogation) provided full detail on the dish, so I could change my order to the cod — when I order frites, I expect double-fried crunch action on those potatoes. Desserts were uniformly terrific, particularly the pistachio tea cake and sicilian lemon sherbet and buttermilk ice cream. But the best in show was the heirloom tomato soup, soft and warm and chunky, with bits of bacon and some kind of elusive flowery note that we couldn’t pin down — we suspect it’s allspice in the bacon cure — so very, very tasty!
It’s spendy, so I’ll probably be limiting my visits, but I’d go back for that food. Next time, though, I’ll be sitting in the much-manlier downstairs room; a girl can only take so much pink in a lifetime. *shudder*
stupid cheese tricks
Been tickled by this ever since I put some goat cheese into a bowl of pasta, only to have it completely melt and coat the pasta with creamy tangy goodness.
Newest entry, and something you can only really do in summer with the good produce: Cut kernels from one cob leftover corn. Dice up a big fat tomato. Mix together, add pepper & salt, and a couple of slices of chevre, ideally with some herb on it, like chive. The cheese melts in with the tomato juices and makes a creamy dressing.
(Note from 8/31: this works just as well with very sharp cheddar, though it doesn’t melt so much. Added steamed green beans and some hot pepper flakes too. Yum.)
the joy of seltzer
I have been obsessed with seltzer water lately. I crave those tangy, tingly little bubbles. I drink it plain, I drink it mixed with a little cherry juice or lemonade or orange juice (orangina, without all the sugar!). Can’t get enough. And so I am starting to get annoyed with schlepping those heavy bottles home from the store, and even more annoyed with the fact that in so doing, they inevitably get jostled, so that when you open each and every bottle, you get a face or a shirtsleeve full of seltzer. I have got to get a working soda siphon pronto. The fabulous red metallic spherical one i got in a secondhand shop still has some funky odor about it which I haven’t been able to chase away yet, so I may have to break down and buy a new one. In the meantime, can i interest you in a spritzer? There’s a vanilla flavored bottle I’m about to try…
(and ps: why is it that whenever I ask for a seltzer water in a restaurant or bar, the server has NO IDEA what I am talking about? I have to ask for fizzy water, soda water, or in the most dire of cases, club soda before I make myself understood. Is it so regional an expression that only new yorkers and jews know from seltzer?)
pea tendrils & dill?
At the Newton farmers market today, I bought some pea tendrils and dill from the Hmong Farms stand. The nice lady there got very excited and told me that she often sautees both those things *together*, with a little garlic, which I thought a little weird but kind of intriguing. So I did it. I kinda like it, though it doesn’t taste very asian; more like english peas with dill. Tallasiandude is a purist, though, and it’s not his cup of tea.
tasty cracker nuggets
These wee tuscan crostini that they have at the Whole Paycheck and other foofy food stores are freaking yum-o-rama! Plain or rosemary flavor, so tasty… and they make cheese taste even better than usual. Especially the delightful truffley number that hedge got this past weekend. And there’s nothing in them — flour, olive oil, yeast, & salt, that’s it. Buying these for every cocktail party I ever throw ever again. Yum.
more good eatin’
Further adventures of cookery with hedge:
Spanish dinner of seared local wild scallops on wilted frisee, followed by pan-seared local wild hake with parsley/garlic/lemon sauce (hake=yum, even tallasiandude likes it), minted basmati rice, more green bean/walnut salad, and sliced tomatoes.
Deep South breakfast of tall buttermilk biscuits (from Cook’s Illustrated, yummy and easy), mustard greens in ham hock broth, scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, homemade marmalade, and homemade dill pickles.
Breakfast #2 of more biscuits, New Zealand rata & manuka honey, fried eggs and bacon, tea, and sliced tomatoes with scalloped tomato & fried crumbs.
What a vacation she had: sleep, read, go to food markets, cook, eat, repeat. Yeah!