Dine Out Boston 2014 March

Busy times have come and blogs have been deserted. No more postponing, photo bomb time is overdue.

I'm always down for excuses to check out new restaurants. Boston Restaurant Week (renamed Dine Out Boston this year, yet everyone still calls it restaurant week) coincided with spring break, and I got overly excited (as I always do with food), rounded out some friends (the more people, the more menus I can try we can share), and made a bunch of reservations (even two reservations on the same day to choose according to what I want my friends' preferences), and of course ended up spending way more money than I intended to (which goes against the spirit of restaurant week, but I am hopeless at saving money when it comes to food).

First on the bat, the Butcher Shop by star restauranteur Barbara Lynch (who also owns No.9, Menton, Drink, and many other well-known Boston establishments; she was also featured in the NYTimes as one of the top women chefs; recently was nominated for the distinguished James Beard Award for outstanding restauranteur), a trendy 'butcher shop' and restaurant focusing on--surprise!--meat.
As I firmly believe that good food should be accompanied with good wine/beer/whiskey, we popped a bottle of fruity spanish wine. Cheers to A, who's always down to enjoy drinks with thirsty moi.

Appetizers consisted of charcuterie, baked goat cheese topped with tomatoes with olive tapenade crostinis, and pork meatballs. Entrees were: poulet grandmere (chicken thighs braised with mushrooms, potatoes), flat iron steak, and braised pork shoulder. The chicken thighs were juicy, but I couldn't taste the sauce when eating the inside part; the pork shoulders were tender, steak a perfect medium rare. Enough said. You feed us meat, and we are three little happy carnivores.
Dessert was lemon and raspberry cake, and chocolate mousse. Never can get picky with dessert.

Round 2: Top of the Hub. As can be told from the name, it is located on top of the prudential tower, overlooking the city. Floor to ceiling windows leave you in awe when you walk in. At this place, we mixed up the prix fixe menu with item on the everyday menu. 

Started off with sriracha deviled egg with sweet potato paper, entree was short-rib ragu papparedelle, chili-glazed salmon with brussel sprouts and black eyed peas. Standard flavors, nothing was oh-my-god amazing or complex. I say, people pay for the atmosphere. We picked an Italian Chianti Classico to accompany our meal and spice up the conversation. A caramel creme brulee graced the end of our meal, always a safe choice. 

 

 I'm on a roll now. The Elephant Walk, a slightly upscale Thai restaurant (compared to the other take-out concentrated thai restaurants in the area) with my Amherst buddies. Now I am getting lazy, and am turning this into a guessing game.

 

A few other Amherst friends stayed over for the Spring Break weekend, and T.W. Food was discovered. A tiny restaurant around ten tables with white table cloths. 

Start off with rustic house-made bread with creamed butter. Live flowers give the table a fresh touch.

Amuse bouche to refresh the palate before the meal, cold spring onion mousse with slivers of mint. Comte tart with figs. A malbec from France which was earthy and slightly smoky.

 



















 
Star of the meal-foie gras creme brulee (you heard correctly, this menu was a revelation), toasted brioche and pear preserves. You crack the surface of the creme brulee, spread the foie gras on the brioche, and you die. Crunch from crackly top, smooth and fatty, and bread oh-so buttery. This was our favorite dish of the meal.



Raviolo stuffed with ricotta, spring onions, and roasted artichoke and broccoli.

Smoked Salmon fettucini, topped with pan-seared scallop, this scallop just melted in our mouths.

Roasted lamb shank. Super juicy, super tender, and a huge chunk of meat. And man, that was a lot of meat.

Dessert-chocolate budino(similar to mousse) topped with roasted hazelnuts, grapefruit and coconut sorbet with sesame broth, and a TW sundae.

 

The grand prize goes to T.W. Food. Results may not be contested. 'Twas a happy week with happy food, happy people. 

The Evil Hand

I confess, law school life has made me weird. Okay, more weird. I have never been normal, to be honest - my high school dorm friends have openly accepted my craziness which reached its peak before the SATs, included but not limited to the following: randomly bursting into silly high kick dance moves to my theme song (yes, I had my own theme song, and no, I am never going to sing it again), asking the same annoying question about what would be my next practice score (I was sixteen years old, give me a break here), and also had a habit of taking naps in other people's beds (I had a few favorites). In times of extreme stress and pressure, people take extreme measures to cope. We are all coping mechanisms struggling to survive in this intense world after all. 

An unhealthy companion I have met on since last year is the evil hand, the hand that forces me to munch nonstop when I get nervous and stressed. Like the evil hand would sometimes make me finish a tub of sunflower seeds, a box of chocolate almonds, and sometimes even both in one sitting. The evil hand would coerce me with sweet and delusional words: it is trying to keep me awake while I'm doing my reading, fulfill my study breaks, and you might have figured out by now, the evil hand never rests. The hand which reaches again and again until my fingers scrape bottom and realize its all gone. The hand that is not mine and not under my control. No, stop! Stop!

After a semester of trying to fight the evil hand and failing on multiple occasions, I have tried to occupy the evil hand to take on a new habit. Feeding others! Study breaks (or even sometimes just study times) would be occupied by surfing the internet for recipes to feed my friends, scribbling down my new grocery list filled with ingredients for my next feeding project. 

Brown and sad bananas gave me ideas. Brown and decadent cocoa banana bread!

The bread was cut into slices, wrapped in foil, and was handed out to all the fellows I bumped into the next day. Feeding project completed.

And once in a while, the evil hand would do something even more evil, like baking browned butter carrot cake in the middle of the night. This would be justified under the words - You will never give into sleep when something is baking in the oven! So all for that, pecans would be toasted, butter would be browned, carrots grated. The hand would mix it all together and pop it into the oven. 

      

           

     

Half was fed to my brief partner D the first day. The next day, I topped it with lemon cream cheese icing topped with lemon zest, and most of also went to D - we were practically going crazy and hungry spending almost all day writing that brief, the hand never offered help.

I think I kind of made peace with the evil hand for now. Wait, where did this Ben&Jerry ice cream come from....

Living and Cooking Alone

 

Living alone needs adjustment. While I did live in a single during my senior year, every room on my floor was occupied by my closest friends, so I could knock on anyone's door for a quick chat, and would always be bumping into everyone in the common room or the bathroom. No, I was living with a big happy group, not alone.

I have been living alone since last September. Like, really alone.

The ironic thing is, one of the main reasons I wanted to live alone was that I wanted my own kitchen (and my own bathroom too- but alas, great rooms come with great responsibility. Like, scrubbing my own bathroom floor. Angrily Cheerfully cleaning out the drain clogged with my own hair.  Crankily Gleefully wiping the bathroom sink clean of my own toothpaste stains. Even happily wiping my own toil.... okay I won't go that far. You get my point.) I begged my parents to let me have my own place: Mom, do you want your daughter living off take-outs and leftovers? No, there is no MEAL PLAN! However, the past few months I have come to realize that I do not enjoy cooking for myself as much as I expected. After checking off all the items on my grocery list to try out an exciting recipe and recreating the dish in my tiny kitchen, I would look at my masterpiece, then suddenly lose appetite. I never expected such a thing could happen to me!

My sister would have been fine, the weird no-fuss girl who would have her "food fazes" that would last for at least a week. She would eat pork cutlets for dinner for two weeks, she would eat seaweed soup with rice for another week, she would go on this kind of routine where she would eat her new "favorite food" for who knows how long. This made a very happy mom and a very grumpy sister. Happy because someone did not have to think twice when prepping for dinner. Grumpy seeing mung-bean stew on the dinner table for the *gasp*  fifth time, let alone the second time.

I have battled with this 'living alone' and 'cooking and eating alone' phase for the past few months through creative methods. Surfing the internet for 'cooking alone' recipes. Buying books on amazon on 'eating alone' (yes, they do exist! Alone in the Kitchen with with an Eggplant, Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table, What We Eat When We Eat Alone: Stories and 100 Recipes ... I have the whole stash right beside my dinner table.), scribbling recipes in my little diary, savoring a glass of wine (or two, or three, oh, I should stop here, or NOT) with some nuts ... I should write a book myself on the topic. Pretty often, it would be a handful of crackers with cheese or hummus, yogurt, or maybe once in a while a salad if I had the energy to wash and chop up some vegetables. Or scrambled eggs with whatever I had in the fridge would do.

Once in a while, I do get the energy to do some fancy-pants dishes. Like the braised fennel in tomato paste, cumin, cilantro, tumeric, featured above. Recipe credit to Green Kitchen Stories blog! Spices give the dish a exotic touch, the fennel slightly crunchy in your mouth. Of course, all of this is still eaten out of the pot. :P

Then once in another while, a friend would come over and we would cook dinner! The glorious dish of the day was coq au vin, chicken braised with vegetables in a tomato plus wine based sauce. Carrots, onions, mushroom, bacon with thyme and parsley completed the dish.

D and I picked our own choice of drink. Whose drink was who's? The puzzle of the day. Please excuse my messy table. When living in a studio, a dinner table serves multiple purposes. 

The stew is bubbling on the stove. Mmmmmm.

And we sit down and feast. 

The traditional coq au vin is France is apparently made with roosters (I know, what?), as coq means rooster in French, and even though what exact animal is used might differ depending on the region, it is usually a dish made with time and care, marinating the chicken in the sauce overnight, using Burgundy pinot noirs. As we are simple students short on time and money, we used the leftover cabernet I had, and just simmered the chicken for about thirty minutes. As my friend D's contribution consisted of mostly, but not only, capturing the moments through artistic pictures and constantly making sure no one's glass was empty, she was amazed when the finished dish was actually presented ("I thought something would get burnt and we would have to order take-out! But yay!"). So it worked out just fine. 

No matter how much I will get used to eating alone, nothing will beat cooking and eating (and drinking) with a friend over yummier conversation. Cheers!