i think i am going to like it here

Around the corner from my new office is a Mexican restaurant called Perez, where for $6 I had a plate of 4 big meatballs in a mild savory orange sauce, with creamy refried beans and rice, along with a basket of nice crunchy not-at-all-greasy tortilla chips, a bowl of pico de gallo, another bowl of fairly mild smoky thin salsa, and a half-dozen fresh hot soft corn tortillas. And the standard-issue table hot sauce is really good, spicy tangy and smoky, and new to me: Tamazula. Holy crap, it was good.
These albondigas were the Thursday special, along with posole, so stay tuned next Thursday for a report on the soup. Or possibly sooner, for some other day’s special. *grin*

au revoir

tallasiandude took me to the Tuscan Grill the night before I left for Chicago. This was a bittersweet evening — many tears have been shed as I have made my way to the midwest, but our dinner at the grill was as wonderful as always, if not perhaps more so. This is our restaurant, much the way other couples have “our song.” We don’t generally go there with anyone but ourselves, and it is so close to the house that we could almost (almost but not quite) walk there. And we always sit at the bar, for a host of reasons: it’s faster to get a seat, the bar itself is lovely to look at, all dark wood and glass, and the bartender (& owner?) is one of the best ever. He’s genial but not aggressively friendly, he’s attentive in a most unobtrusive way, and he’s as genuinely enthusiastic about the food as we are.
We used to overorder (us? overorder? *gasp*) and roll out of there stuffed to the point of pain, but we’ve mastered the art of ordering by now. The trick is to go easy on two of the three courses, and simply share one dish instead of two. This time we had a single antipasto, a single half-order of pasta, and two entrees.
The starter was a no-brainer to order — anything called “duck three ways” and claiming to involve both confit and pate is something i must eat. The third way was a duck proscuitto, and the works came with crostini & a lemony fig conserve. Gorgeous. The pasta was a wild-mushroom cannelloni in a mushroom broth, which was creamy and light and full of mushroom flavor, a wonderfully simple dish after the rich savory duck treats.
The two perennial highlights of the secondi are always the hanger steak and the scallops — this time the fish special trumped the scallops but the hanger steak was spectacular as always, tender and intensely meaty and almost crispy on the outside. It came with sauteed escarole and a gratin of penne and grated parsnips. I love the veg-pasta gratins they do at the Tuscan Grill, and this one was particularly delightful, the sweetness of the parsnips bringing out both the wheatiness of the pasta and the flavor of the meat. It is a very clever idea, marrying vegetable and pasta under a thin blanket of cream and a toasted crust of parmesan — i have seen them do this with cauliflower and other veg as well — and I am going to have to borrow it one of these days for a dinner party.
The fish was a piece of halibut with a perfect crunchy golden crust, a simple butter sauce, and a huge pile of black trumpet mushrooms, flanked by a pile of baby spinach lightly dressed and decorated with a handful of lovely rock shrimp. This time even tallasiandude was wrestling with the impulse to lick the plate, and there were many surreptitious swipes of the finger through the sauce left on the plate, a luscious blend of butter, fish juices, mushroom juices and just a wisp of acid from the salad. It is a damned shame that we can’t get fish like this without going to the top-shelf restaurants. We live on the ocean, within an hour’s drive of a major fishing city, and yet the average person will get utter dreck when ordering fish in the average restaurant or buying in a normal supermarket. Scandalous.
Dessert was a half-bottle of moscato d’asti, a particularly fruity, peachy version called Nivole, along with a single unctuous creme brulee that we shared. And then we went home to snuggle and watch the special features on the Incredibles dvd, because we are just that geeky. It was a lovely night, making quite clear the wonderful man unfortunately still in Boston while I forge on with this project of living in Chicago.

armenian easter bread

En route to dim sum at Shangri-La in Belmont, which by the way is a fantastic Chinese restaurant in the least likely of settings (the name! the weird black & white mosaic tile entry! the T-shirt printery next door!) where we had some spicy beef noodle soup that contained some absolutely top-shelf beef that was soft, moist and still marbled with tender connective tissue despite its long stewing time (better than our own beef by a long shot), and also some fried string bread and spicy steamed spare ribs and soft boiled dumplings in spicy soy sauce that I know as suan la chow show from having had them at Mary Chung’s. Where was I? Oh yes — en route to this deliciousness, I saw a woman walking past us carrying a large cake or bread ring studded with red orbs. It looked rather festive and very intriguing, and I suspected it may have emanated from the Eastern Lamejun Bakery next door to Shangri-La.
Of course I was not able to resist. I scoped out the goods while waiting for our table, and scooped up the goods as soon as we were done with lunch. We ate the treasure with friends who came over that evening with fancy cheeses & wines. It turned out to be a firm, sweet, light, eggy bread like challah but a bit dryer and sweeter, with a very nice flavor and a touch of sesame seeds on top. The orbs, as surmised, were hardboiled eggs dyed red, presumably for some kind of Easter symbolism (I am not so up on my specific Christian-pagan imagery). It’s too bad that organized religion is responsible for so much evil in the world, because the rituals and celebratory foods are really quite delightful.

casablanca kicks ass again

For years I have been eating at Casablanca in Harvard Square, and it has never yet disappointed me. The menu is hard to describe, sort of a pan-mediterranean quasi-north African flavor, with simple food in creative combinations, prepared perfectly.
For instance, tonight I had a dish I have had once before and was unable to resist ordering a second time: grilled bluefish over black chickpea puree and green beans, with yogurt sauce. This time the fish had a pomegranate-citrus glaze and a lemony sauce along with the yogurt. The tangy, sweet, earthy, nutty, creamy flavors all blend perfectly with the rich fish, and the green beans are bright green yet soft, and add a fresh clean flavor to the complex richness of everything else on the plate. Tallasiandude used to think he disliked bluefish until he tasted my dinner tonight.

Fish here is always utterly fresh and delicious, and cooked perfectly. Normally I won’t ever order fish in the first place, because it generally is not fresh or not cooked well or both, and it’s just a depressing waste of time, but at Casablanca I eat fish more often than not. Tallasiandude and D both had the poached sole, mild and clean, glowing white against a pool of black rice, black trumpet mushrooms and yellow foot mushrooms in a dark-colored but light-flavored broth, with brussels sprouts & cipollini onions. Very different from the richness of my fish, but nearly as lovely. And B had a stunner of a dish: venison with braised pears, toasted hazelnuts, sauteed spinach, blue cheese, and a sweet orange vegetable in phyllo that we think was honeyed butternut squash. The sauce was very thin and slightly sweet, not syrupy but just enough to set off the lean meatiness of the venison. The dish would not have worked as well with beef, but with venison it was tone perfect.
Even simple salads and starters are great here. Tallasiandude had romaine hearts with parmesan cream and a soft poached egg & crostini; he gave me the olives because he hates them, but loved the rest of the dish. My salad was frisee and endive with pink grapefruit, walnuts and aged goat cheese. I loved it, and the flavor combo was terrific, but I am a cheese whore and would have gone easier on the walnuts and upped the cheese, which got a little lost. D had a grilled portobello which he adored, and B had a gorgeous velvet-brown soup of caramelized fennel and potato.
I can’t gush enough about this restaurant. The food is so good, and so *reliably* good. It’s interesting AND satisfying. It’s healthy: lots of vegetables and legumes and grains, and the portions are sane. And it’s a fancy festive place with a relaxed atmosphere, so you can dress as you like — even better, you can get the same food in the bar, which is louder and even more casual. If only every spendy restaurant was this good…

chilli garden

Based on the contents of a long article in the Boston Globe food section, I have been wanting to check out Chilli Garden in Medford for a while now. And this weekend I got my chance, as I was planning to get together with S + D, old friends who live in Medford, for brunch. And hoo boy, it delivered.
Do not be dismayed by the first page of the menu, which is alarmingly standard Chinese-in-America offerings; turn the page and relax into 4 pages’ worth of Sichuan dishes, many of them with an adorable little sputtering-cherry-bomb icon next to them indicating spicy heat. We had some pickled wild vegetable, dan dan noodles (SO good), and dumplings in spicy vinegar sauce. These dumplings were the best thing on a table full of great things. They were so fucking good I ate the sauce with a spoon, and my tablemates were gracious enough to let me have most of it. I love my friends.
We also had some shrimps in spicy sauce with broccoli & chunks of dried chile pepper, ma po tofu, and twice-cooked pork belly in black bean sauce with green peppers (not gross bell peppers, happily, but some sort of more delicately flavored slightly-spicy pepper). This last wasn’t spicy, but the thin-sliced pork was terrific, very meaty and flavorful, and the fat was nice and soft and yielding, not at all stringy or icky in any way. (Again a waitress tried to steer me away from a fatty pork dish, and again I have been amply rewarded for my insistence. Let’s hear it for fat pigs and their wondrous transformations by the cuisines of the world!)
Dessert’s good too. We had black sesame rice balls, which are little mochi-like balls stuffed with sweet black sesame paste (identical to the sesame tea-cake tallasiandude brought back from China), and floated in hot syrup or water. They are DEE-licious. As it happens, I had this same dessert for the first time just last week, at Anna’s Dessert House in Chinatown. The ones at Anna’s were more syrupy sweet, while the ones at Chilli Garden were much finer & lighter. Yum yum yum.
I recommend you try this place out, and bring friends so you can have a wide selection of dishes. It’s easy enough to get to by car, and it appears to be very close to the commuter rail stop as well, so no excuses. Keep them in business; I want to go back next time I am back in Boston for a visit.

vegetarian times – feh!

My friend gave me some old magazines because she knows I’ll read anything about food — there were some Food & Wines (including the one I read on a plane and copied out a dozen recipes by hand because I was extra bored and they sounded good), and some Vegetarian Times. Now, I am no vegetarian but I have friends who are, and I can see how it might be appealing for a variety of reasons, so I try not to be a bigot about it. But this magazine SUCKS.
First of all, the nutrition is horrible: a meal of pasta with tomato-eggplant sauce is not “balanced perfectly” by a green salad and breadsticks. A recipe for pad thai has no protein whatsoever, neither eggs nor tofu. A committed vegetarian or vegan is going to need better than this to stay healthy.
Some of the recipes sound okay — a curried red lentil & coconut milk soup for instance — but most of them are pathetically boring. A reader-featured recipe is a dish of sauteed onion & red pepper braised with a can of white beans. As if a vegetarian with a week’s worth of experience in the kitchen couldn’t come up with that one. Please. The best recipes seem to be the ones cribbed from the cookbooks being pimped in “feature” articles.
And finally, the editorial is pretty poor. One article used the phrase “rein in” at least twice, and misspelled it “reign in” both times. That is just bone ignorance, and there are droves of competent copyeditors who would love the chance to work at a magazine; hire one, for heaven’s sake. And I do wonder what articles on yoga and living simply have to do with anything about vegetarianism. It’s more like this is a pamphlet for earnest crunchy wanna-bes who aren’t quite sure how to get started.
When I compare this with the things that I find on vegetarians’ blogs, like www.tinyfork.com (which I would link to if the site was up), there’s no contest. I didn’t even notice Fae was vegetarian until she mentioned it, because all her recipes sounded so yummy. No matter what you eat or don’t eat, there is no excuse for crappy food and poor nutrition, and magazines like this one are a scandal.

boiled dinner, yum yum

Every March, the markets get in the gray corned beef, and therefore I make boiled dinner. There is not much from the WASPy side of my family that’s worthy of a foodslut’s repertoire, but this one is top-notch.
The thing to bear in mind is that you need to get gray corned beef, not red. My mother maintains that the red doesn’t taste as good, and I tend to agree. Interestingly, my friend who joined us this year for boiled dinner said she normally doesn’t like the salty meat when her family makes this dish, but that the meat we had was much better, not as salty and strong. I suspect that this is because we use the gray: the gray has no saltpeter in it. The saltpeter is what keeps the red style from turning gray during its brining time. Sadly, you can almost never get gray corned beef outside of St. Patrick’s Day season, and it is even harder to find outside of New England, I am told.
Take large piece of gray corned beef and put in a large pot full of water, lots and lots of water. Add a handful of black peppercorns and a bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook at least 2 hours. Skim off the crud as it rises. Top off liquid with more water as needed. Once the meat has floated, that seems to be the indicator that it’s done, and it’s time to add vegetables. Pull out the meat and turn the heat back up to bring the liquid to a boil. I like to use potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, and parsnips, all cut into biggish chunks. Once the veggies are soft and nearly done, after 40 min or so, add wedges of green cabbage. If these are holding together well on their own, just chuck them in, but if they are coming apart you can fix this with a couple of toothpicks stuck in each to hold them together. The cabbage takes 10 or 15 minutes to get nice and soft. Once it’s all done, add the meat back in to warm it up.
To serve, fish the meat out and slice against the grain. (Remove any slabs of fat you don’t want to eat.) Fish the veggies out of the broth and plate along with the sliced beef. Everything is nicely salted and seasoned by its long bath with the salted meat. Spicy mustard goes well with this dish, as does beer. The leftover broth makes fantastic quick-n-easy soups, so be sure to save it.

spicy greens

Tonight’s kale came out really good, probably my favorite greens version so far, so I have to write it down so I don’t forget what I did.
Slice 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, and large-dice half a large (or 1 small) onion, and small-dice half a red pepper. Slice a bunch of kale into half-inch shreds. Heat a bit of olive oil in a deep frypan, and saute the onion, sprinkling with a pinch of salt, then add the garlic and pepper and saute until soft. Sprinkle with red pepper flakes to taste. Put in the kale and wilt it so you can fit the whole bunch in the pan. Sprinkle with a generous amount of salt — this appears to be key, since I used more than I often might. Once it’s wilted, add a can of chicken broth (low sodium). Cook until kale is tender and dark green, but not yet olive green. Cover it if you like, to keep it from drying out. When it’s done, add some hot sauce — I used a bit of insane-o habanero jamaican stuff and a few dashes of Frank’s Louisiana hot sauce. Grind a little black pepper over it. It’s spicy and tangy, and savory from the chicken broth & salt. Nummy with pasta mixed in, or over rice.