Why I love The Boy #736

Yesterday the cold-bug that had been hanging over my head like a dark cloud descended onto my shoulders, despite my best efforts to ignore it. I stayed home from work (which goes against all my natural urges to be in Total Control) and hunkered, snuffling, under a blanket with an IV of hot tea.

Today I feel much less inert, but The Boy decreed I was still sick and in need of rest. He made thick, fluffy banana pancakes for breakfast, and then went out to the dry-cleaners--an errand, I should point out, that only benefited me.

And then--and then--he came back with goodies from the Blue Shirt Cafe in Davis Square, specifically my favorite Indonesian squash soup:



It's a curried soup, sweetened with coconut milk and topped with baby spinach leaves that wilt in the heat. When I worked in the Square, I'd have it for lunch two or three times a week. It was an addiction.

To follow, we shared a curried veggie wrap: zucchini and grilled peppers and carrots and onion and lentils and raisins and jasmine rice in a wholewheat tortilla.



Maybe I should get sick more often ...

Shameless fundraising plug

Working at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute gives you a whole new perspective on what it means to be dedicated to your job. There are some amazing people here, busting their respective and collective humps to figure out how cancer works and how to make it go the heck away. And then there are the wonderful frontliners who care for patients, sharing the good and the bad, helping people get through a confusing and frightening experience.

Wanna help them? Sure ya do!

Check out my Rally Against Cancer page. If you can spare a couple of bucks, you'd be giving a heapin' helpin' to a massively worthy cause.

(Here ends the shameless fundraising plug.)

Easter lunch

Easter is a good excuse to do lunch right, I always say. This year, we went fresh and springy and simple: roast lamb leg studded with garlic and rosemary (the latter harvested from our herb garden last year and stored in the freezer); roast golden beets; steamed redskin potatoes tossed in olive oil; and English peas, which The Boy shelled and basically poached in butter and fresh mint.



Emboldened by my recent success with saffron cake, I felt inspired to bake dessert: Swiss Easter rice tart, courtesy of Nick Malgieri.

This is a rich, dense, eggy-buttery tart with ground almonds, puréed rice and a hint of lemon zest; it's somewhere between rice pudding and flan. And frankly, it was damn near perfect.



You know, I'm kinda getting the hang of this baking lark.

Hungry Mother

New to Cambridge: Hungry Mother, a restaurant that sounds like a '70s prog rock band but serves up lovely southern comfort food, courtesy of a Virginia-raised, French-trained chef.

It's on the site of the former Kendall Cafe, but any signs of that live-music venue are long gone, and the look is urban-rustic-moderne: dark wooden floors, white wood, muted colors.

Sounds like a million other bistros, it's true. At Hungry Mother, the differences are in the details, specifically:

• Water is served in Mason jars, giving a laid-back, down-home touch to an otherwise sophisticated setting.

• The restrooms are papered with cookbook pages: Julia Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one, The Virginia Housewife in the other. Not only does this suggest someone at Hungry Mother has a fundamental passion for homestyle cooking (and a sense of humor), it also turns a trip to the loo into a chance to learn how to pickle walnuts.

(That could be a new euphemism: "'Scuse me a minute--I have to go learn how to pickle walnuts.")

• The whole place smells. Like. Ham. Not something you'd necessarily want in a Glade candle in your living room--you'd be gnawing on the sofa in no time--but when you're in a hammy zone, perusing a hammy menu, and the whole place is perfumed with sweet, smoky hamminess, it's heavenly.

The menu at Hungry Mother is small, which makes things easier (especially for those of us unable to make decisions). From the section of the menu titled "To tide you over ..." we chose beef tongue canapés, thinly sliced marinated meat with Gruyère and a dab of Dijon mustard, the tongue tender and intensely flavored.

Then The Boy went for the green salad, which featured both red and golden beets, roasted, as well as slices of blood orange. It looked like a plate of jewels, and the mild sweetness of the beets matched well with the sharp citrus and the vinaigrette dressing.

No salad for me, though: I took the pork sausage, which came in its own individual skillet (awww! Bless!) on a bed of black-eyed beans, and was topped with sweet chow-chow, a bright, tangy-fresh complement to the grilled sausage and smoky beans.

My entree was catfish; cornmeal-breaded and served with collards, it's a dish we often make ourselves. Except, of course, that Hungry Mother takes it up a notch, matching it with cauliflower and capers, and dressing the greens with a mustard vinaigrette. Fabulous.



The Boy went all-ham-out, opting for pork shoulder braised in bourbon, sweet and tender, on a bed of creamy grits. Amazingly--I could hardly believe it--he thought the pork rib that came with it was "almost too much meat" (what???); the dish would have been just fine with half the portion. (I'm not sure who he is or what he has done with my husband ...) Of course, he ate it anyway (okay, maybe it really is him).

No room for dessert, which was a shame, because I was intrigued by both the cardamom chocolate pot de crème and the sorghum ice-cream that accompanied the pecan sticky bun.

Next time, Hungry Mother. Next time.

What is ethnic food?

The first time we ate at A Salt and Battery, Manhattan's nostalgia-inducing (if unrealistically expensive) approximation of a good old Northern chippy, a woman at the next table looked at her companion over a basket of battered fish and exclaimed delightedly, "I just love ethnic food!"

I was shocked. Ethnic food? This wasn't ethnic; it was chips and pork pies and sausages and Irn-Bru. It was the food of my childhood, as familiar and simple as a bowl of cornflakes. But to this woman, it was downright exotic.

Lately I've been thinking about this wake-up moment, especially in light of a couple of discussions currently taking place. One concerns The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8. Lee's (yes, her middle name is a number) exploration of Chinese food in America, and the way it's so far removed from authentic Chinese cuisine that it's almost unrecognizable to visitors from China.

The other revolves around changes to Britain's immigration policies, which have reduced the number of new arrivals from the Indian subcontinent while increasing the population of Eastern Europeans. As a result, Indian restaurants, struggling to find cooks with first-hand experience of the cuisine, are instead hiring kitchen staff from places like Croatia. The concern is that knowledge of traditional techniques and recipes will disappear, or will eventually only be understood by a handful of old-timers.

And these discussions have me wondering: what is "ethnic"? What is "authentic"?

If, for instance, I asked you to name some ethnic cuisines, what would you say? Thai, Jamaican, Cambodian, Cuban? Mongolian and Nepalese? Yeah, they probably fall under the heading.

So does "ethnic" food mean "foreign" food?
What about Italian? That's foreign, right? Well, it depends what we mean by "Italian." Pizza is Italian, but does that mean the excreta of Domino's can rightly stand shoulder to shoulder with the creations of Da Michele in Napoli?

Maybe Italian food isn't a good example; in the US, at least, it has largely been reduced to what Henry Hill in Goodfellas refers to as "egg noodles with ketchup"—a fast, cheap, indigestion-inducing way to carbo-load. Non-nativeness alone is not a strong enough distinction.

So does ethnic mean "alien, different, strange"?
What about French cuisine? It's decidedly alien, almost treacherously so (remember the hysteria over "Freedom Fries"? Could you imagine similar censorship over lasagne?). It's often hard to pronounce (Ris de veau renversé sur une tarte aux champignons et son jus de truffe, anyone?). It involves strange ingedients: frogs' legs and pigs' feet and tête de veau.

But it conjures up images of starched tablecloths and obsequious waiters and excellent wines—things we like to associate with sophisticated civility; things we're comfortable with (or imagine we should be). Different and strange don't necessarily work as sole identifiers of ethnic food.

So does "ethnic" mean "authentic"?
In the sense that ethnicity is a marker of belonging to a group, that could be more appropriate: it's the recipes handed down from mother to daughter, a transfer of internal, culturally relevant knowledge going back generations. (I'm thinking of the comforting, complex cochinita pibil at Tu y Yo, from a family recipe dating back to 1908.)

And that brings in the idea that "real" ethnic food can only be created by the people who grew up with it. Which explains the concern over Bosnians standing in for Bangladeshis in the curry houses of Britain.

But on the other hand, authenticity is no guarantee of quality, in Indian cuisine or any other, as anyone who has valiantly masticated a gristly General Gau's will tell you. (Of course, as the above-mentioned Jennifer 8. explains, this dish is an American creation, unknown in the general's hometown. Still, provenance notwithstanding, a restaurant that screws up deep-fried battered chicken is unlikely to excel at other dishes.)

And does authenticity rest in the creation or the creator? If I make Puerto Rican habichuelas using Goya sofrito from a jar, is that less authentic than my mother-in-law in San Juan following the same recipe, using the same brand? Does my Englishness negate the authenticity of the dish?

The conversation spilling from the kitchen at Davis Square's Irish pub, The Burren, suggests the guys working the grill are more familiar with Quisqueya than Cork. Does that mean they can't knock together a fine English breakfast (not unlike this one)?

For that matter, do people think of Irish food as "ethnic"? Apparently so, if this selection of Google search results is any indication. Oh, I'm so confused.

And then there's this report from Deloitte, which defines ethnic food as representing "dishes (and their ingredients) that can be attributed to a specific ethnic group." Not a bad umbrella definition.

Wait—does that make me ethnic?

Culture (and food) Saturday!

Lunch: Henrietta's Table in the Charles Hotel. The shabby-chic farmhouse furniture makes it feel a little like dining at Pottery Barn, but that can be forgiven. Especially when they do lovely cocktails (mine: champagne and raspberry purée; The Boy's: a feisty Bloody Mary):



The Boy ordered a quiche of roasted cauliflower, sweet onion and two blue cheeses. It didn't look particularly exciting on the plate, but it was insanely rich and creamy and delicious.

My pulled lamb-shank with sweet fingerling potatoes and feta cheese, quite apart from being fantastically tasty, won the prize for most photogenic.



Next stop: the A.R.T., to see Julius Caesar. Is there a better day to see this play than March 15?

We had good seats.



This production moved the action to the 1960s, and everything had a Kennedy-esque feel (the men in tuxedos, the ultra-hip furniture, the jazz trio, the Oldsmobile that, um, descended from the rafters). To give the story an extra twist, it had been re-imagined as the possible dream of Lucius, Brutus's deaf slave--a Shakespearean take on Tommy Westphall, wearing Superman jammies. And at the end, the cast danced to a Nelly Furtado song.

It was powerful, and visually stunning (and three hours long), and we came out feeling a little dazed. We started walking up Mass Ave, and then remembered that the Alloy Orchestra was doing live accompaniment to Josef von Sternberg's silent-era Oscar-winner Underworld at the Somerville Theater that night.

When was that likely to happen again?

So we picked up tickets, and then went to Diva for dinner, figuring a nice vegetarian Indian dinner would make up for our extravagantly rich lunch. More cauliflower, this time in a fresh aloo ghobi with potatoes and cilantro, plus dal makhni, plus a desserty naan with apricots and coconut.

And then off for more cultchah.

We'd seen the Alloy Orchestra accompany Buster Keaton's The General at the ICA. But that's a film we know well; neither of us had seen Underworld, so we were interested to see how well the music would work against an unfamiliar setting.

This time, our seats were not as good.



Still, we had a mostly unobstructed view, and the only downside to the evening was that the two women behind me were intent on carrying on a conversation throughout, reading the title cards to each other and discussing the action. You know how much I love that.

I wanted to turn round and hiss, "It's a silent film! That means you two have to be silent!" But I didn't.

Aaaanyway, the film was great--an early example of the gangster movie, and obviously a template for many of the films that followed in the genre. It was gritty, and violent, and occasionally funny (at the end of a long, decadent party, exhausted guests wade through cartoonishly excessive piles of paper streamers that cover the floor, ankle-deep).

Neither of us paid as much attention to the music as we did for The General, partly because we were more focused on the film and partly because we were much further away from the musicians (the photo above shows how they were smooshed together in one corner), so not as easily distracted by business with mallets and accordions. But the score certainly flowed well, moving gracefully from gunfire-action to moments of tenderness to more shootouts, keeping pace with the drama.

And then we staggered home, wearily proclaiming that we really need to get more culture, and should try an opera or some modern classical music.

And then we got tickets to see Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Live.

I wonder how they'll manage the squiggles?

KnowFat! (Or flavor!)

During the work week, lunch is my lamest meal of the day. Give me a cheese and pickle sarnie and a fistful of carrot sticks and some ginger tea and I'm quite happy, especially when the alternative is braving the freezing winter wind to buy essentially the same thing elsewhere.

And as my office is a) near Fenway Park and b) surrounded by colleges, the closest non-sandwichy options tend to involve hunks of beef, molten cheese and Fried Things. Not that any of this is bad in itself; it's just that lunchtime consumption of such delights ends with me facedown on my keyboard for the afternoon, snoring my way out of a food coma.

Today I had no sandwich, so yomped down the street to KnowFat! Lifestyle Grille, which prides itself on "good nutrition" and "healthful ingredients" and having World Heavyweight Champ/baldy grill-monger George Foreman as a spokesmodel.

Not that I was particularly looking forward to the experience. I'd been twice before, and was disappointed both times: first by the three-bean chili, which suggested a can of mixed beans stirred into a jar of tomato salsa; then by the arrangement of gelatinous tofu chunks and steamed-to-death broccoli on a bed of exhausted quinoa. If George thought this was tasty, he was probably really looking forward to the packing peanuts that one of his eponymous offspring was fixing for his dinner.

And yet here I was, back for more. Why? Because I'm not a quitter, that's why.

The KnowFat! Lifestyle Grille's menu has wraps and sandwiches and salads and burgers. But if that's really what I'd wanted, I could have gone to UBurger and romped in beef drippings.

Figuring that the side dishes would say a lot about how much attention the restaurant paid to detail, I ordered the Triple Side Plate ($5.25 with tax), choosing fries (sorry, that's KnowFat! AirFries™), seasoned black beans and Mediterranean roasted veggies.



The beans (seen here attempting to crawl off the plate) were the least exciting; the seasoning was Southern, but too subtle, and the consistency suggested much time sitting around. The veggies were at least once fresh, and the yellow squash bore grillmarks (did George do 'em?). But the oregano-heavy sauce coated everything in goopy uniformity, leaving texture as the only way to tell the carrots from the zucchini: the salad-dressing phenomenon.

The fries (sorry, the KnowFat! AirFries™) were pretty good--at least on a par with some of the more upmarket burger places in the area--lightly seasoned, with a gently crunchy exterior, fluffy (but not hollow) inside. And if they're low-fat, so much the better.

Though again, if I was going to satisfy a fry craving, I'd rather do it at UBurger. Or Sel de la Terre, home of the trance-inducing rosemary pommes frites. Or Duckfat in Portland, Maine, where they cook the fries in ... well ... it's right there in the name.

Hmm, I'm getting sidetracked. Maybe the real reason I was whelmed by KnowFat! Lifestyle Grille is that, given the choice between healthy and bland or fat-filled and tasty, I'd choose the latter. Or at least look for a place that wasn't afraid to use fresh herbs, grated ginger, maybe a squeeze of lime or a dash of wine. It was telling that KnowFat!'s condiment station featured several bottles of Tabasco sauce.

And I shouldn't be too harsh; the place is clean, the service is friendlier than you'd expect for a fast-food joint, and dine-in customers get real dishes and silverware instead of disposable plastic. And given that it seems to be a favorite lunch-spot for local cops, it's probably the safest dining location around.

Still, I guess it's back to cheese sandwiches for me ...

Weekend food roundup: Morocco, Mexico, France

Saturday night
The Boy whipped out his tagine (ooer missus!) and threw together Tagin Djaj Bi Zaytoun Wal Hamid, aka chicken stew with preserved lemons and green olives, from Claudia Roden's cookbook Arabesque.

The recipe calls for some of my favorite aromatic ingredients--saffron, lemon juice, garlic, ginger, cilantro--and even though I was supposed to be doing other stuff, I kept wandering into the kitchen to inhale. And take photographs.



In goes the cilantro:



The Boy discovered preserved lemons at WholeFoods, so every now and then he brings some home. They're marinated simply in salt and lemon juice, and have a bright flavor that combines the best aspects of lemon and salt while minimizing the brash sharpness and intensity of both. Unsuprisingly, they keep pretty well, so over the next few weeks we'll find excuses to chop up a chunk of rind and throw it into anything that needs a lift.

Sunday morning
We'd dined at Tu y Yo on Friday night, and came home with leftover rice, black beans and cochinita pibil--the result of a deliberate act of sacrifice on my part. Even as I ordered the dish, I was already dreaming of the reheated remains on a warm tortilla with grated cheddar and a fried egg.



Sometimes, dreams come true.

Sunday afternoon
You know how you develop certain expectations of a dish, based on repeated encounters? Take apple pie, for instance. You start to define it as a kid, and refine your benchmark at diners and holiday meals. Right now, you can probably conjure up your definition of apple pie: the depth of the dish; the level of cinnamon in the sauce; whether the crust is glazed or sparkling with sugar granules.

And then, one day, you meet a pie that blows all your preconceived notions out of the water.

My awakening came over lunch at Petit Robert Bistro in Kenmore Square. The source of my enlightenment: coq au vin.

I thought I'd had coq au vin before. But apparently that was merely chicken that had shared a pan with red wine.

This was something else entirely: deep and rich, the red wine sauce almost carmelized onto the meat, with a generous fistful of bacon to add a smoky undercurrent.



It was amazing, and it is now my gold standard for the dish, but it was also not my lunch of choice: I had andouille and boudin noir, which was lovely, especially as it came with thinly sliced carrots bathed in garlic butter. (They're vegetables, so it's healthy.) The Boy was lucky, though, that I didn't steal his entire plate of chicken.

It was our first foray into this restaurant; it won't be our last, especially as they also have such interesting options as calf's liver and tripe and sweetbreads. The Boy points out that it's close enough to my office to be a lunch destination, which is a frighteningly tempting fact.

Sunday evening
On the menu tonight: baked haddock with steamed bok choy. It's probably for the best.

Posh poutine

Avid readers (both of you) may recall that our inaugural experience with parmo, much-loved post-booze nosh of North East England, led us to create our own upscale version, aka posh parmo.

It should hardly come as a surprise, then, to learn that we unleashed a new taste sensation on the land last night: posh poutine.

(The only real surprise is that it took us so long to get around to it.)

Poutine is to Montreal as parmo is to Middlesbrough, and I suspect My People would recognize its beauty. The basic ingredients are french fries, cheese curds and gravy, though you can add anything else that seems appropriate (bacon, sausage, foie gras).

The cheese curds are a key ingredient, and they're usually hard to find in these parts, being more of a Midwestern delicacy. But The Boy, genius that he is, located a shipment in Trader Joe's. Suddenly, anything was possible.

Our posh version began with organic russet potatoes, cut into fries, tossed in olive oil and baked in the oven.

Wisconsin cheese curds: check.

Gravy: check. (Okay, we cheated a little on that, and used instant gravy. But it was a nice British lamb version with a hint of fresh mint.)

And for a little something extra: organic lamb sausage with black olives, pine nuts and feta. Not stricly authentic, it's true, but sometimes you have to go a little crazy.

The result:



What?

Okay, you think that's bad? Then know this, my friend: The Boy took the leftovers to work today. For lunch. In a sandwich.




Update: On reviewing the above with a fresh eye, I realize I failed to describe the experience of consuming this dish. Faced only with a couple of garish images, a casual reader could be forgiven for, perhaps, making gagging noises.

So allow me to elaborate.

This is, without doubt, comfort food, gastronomically unchallenging and emotionally satisfying. The fries, cooked skin-on, had a slightly crispy exterior, the insides soft and a little sweet.

I'd layered the curds among the fries, so the ones buried in the middle of the bowl melted, coating everything they touched with a gooey golden blanket, like the King Midas of cheese.

The sausage was exactly as I'd hoped, the lamb deep and satisfyingly meaty, the olives intensifying the flavor. And gravy. How can you say anything bad about gravy?

En famille à Pigalle

Last night, we went to dinner with our eight best friends. They're the people we've known pretty much the length of our marriage, and they are family to us. We see a few of them regularly, and some occasionally, but it's rare that our busy lives allow us all to sit around a table together.

Our tenth anniversary seemed a good enough reason to change that. We booked a table for ten at Pigalle, and while the waitstaff seemed a little anxious at first (possibly assuming we were a pre-theater crowd who expected to be served and out the door in 90 minutes), they realized we were in no hurry when we all ordered the five-course tasting menu.

Can I describe each dish for you? No, sorry; on this night, food took second place to conversation, and I was more interested in catching up than in taking notes. Having said that, I do remember:

• the amuse-bouche of pickled beets, yuzu honey and horseradish crème fraîche, served in a miniature martini glass, every mouthful a lovely balance of sweet and spice, cream and crunch


• the perfect breaded sphere of a panko-crusted poached egg atop asparagus and frisée salad


• the thick slice of roast salmon, skin slightly charred and crisp, fish soft and tender
  
• the short ribs, deep and meaty with a slightly carmelized sweetness


• the intense, moist richness of the molten chocolate cake

We staggered out of Pigalle some time around 11, five hours after we arrived. The night air was almost cold enough to shock us out of our satiated daze. But we'd spent an evening with our family of friends, and that was insulation enough.