Thanksgiving at Rialto

I know you're all wondering about our Thanksgiving lunch at Rialto. Arentcha? Sure y'are!

We decided to go at real proper lunchtime, largely because if we waited until, say, three or four, we'd already have demolished a box of crackers and an entire wedge of Stilton with dates and oranges, and then we wouldn't be hungry.

As it turned out, that was the right time to turn up: there were only a handful of occupied tables and we were shown to a lovely window spot in a secluded corner.



(One of the nicest things about Rialto's recent redesign is that the room is sectioned off with linen drapes, creating smaller, more intimate seating areas. Sure, you can still hear the obnoxious diners at the next table, but at least you don't have to look at them.)

Rialto's Thanksgiving menu was a three-course prix-fixe.



Even though there weren't that many choices, we still had a tough time deciding.



Actually, there were four courses: everyone got the roasted pumpkin soup, a creamy, velvety little serving with pumpkin seeds, a dollop of ginger cream and a fried sage leaf.



For the first course, I chose the salad with poached pear. The greens came tucked inside what was essentially a taco shell made entirely out of parmesan cheese. (Process that for a moment.) The pear was allegedly poached in red wine, but there was something else (Amaretto, perhaps?) that gave it a sweet, almondy note.



And then, the star of the show: the turkey dinner.



The mouthful of crisp skin and the scattered pecans were a tasty and unexpected bonus.



Note the diced morsels to the left of the sprouts in the next photo. Notice how the sprouts do glisten so? Bacon, my friends. Bacon.



With the turkey, I had a German Spätburgunder; it's unusual to find German reds, and this was lighter than its French Pinot Noir cousins and a good match for the meal. This shows the color pretty well:



And then dessert: a pumpkin custard topped with chocolate and cream, each flavor carrying hints of fall spice and blending together in a happy harmony.





And finally, a nice cup of mint tea in a teapot that looked like the kind of teapot that would appear in a 1950s sci-fi movie about drinking tea in the year 2000.



So that was all very — wait, what's that you say? What did The Boy eat?

Well, let's ask him, shall we?



(And yes, they played salsa all afternoon, which I loved, especially hearing Celia Cruz and a Beny Moré cover, but which The Boy compared to how I would feel if they played incessant Beatles while we ate. I saw his point.)

The service is always graceful at Rialto, and was especially so that day. Perhaps it was because the atmosphere felt like more of a celebration, or perhaps the staff was thankful that people were still willing to eat out, even in the middle of an economic apocalypse.

Either way, a number of lovely people stopped by our table to chat, including Rialto's chef and owner Jody Adams.

Darn. I should have asked her the secret of the poached pears.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Freeeee cheeeese!

We were driving to Middlesex on Thursday night when I got a text from Alan, who was already there.

"Free cheese!"

"We're on our way," I wrote back, assuming our favorite waitress had comped him a couple of pieces that would be history by the time we arrived.

Thirty seconds later, a second txt: "Freeeeeeee cheeeeeeeeese!!!"

Turns out his excitement was warranted: Middlesex was launching a new seasonal cheese plate, and had brought in fromager Robert, formerly of Formaggio Kitchen, and now of Farmstead in Providence, to give the dairy delights a formal introduction to Middlesex society.



We stopped by to pay our respects, and were presented with a good Montrachet; a bold Brebis Pardou; and a rich, buttery Gratte Paille that, at room temperature, practically required a spoon.



The accompaniment was an imported German apple mustard, which was a good foil for the cheese; we also got a glass of prosecco that paired perfectly with the Gratte Paille.

As I chatted with Robert, I noticed he had a clipboard with a sign-up sheet titled Bueno Queso Social Club.

"It's a monthly get-together," he explained. "We try different cheeses, and pair them with wine or beer."

Sounds good, I thought, reaching for a pen to add my name to the list.

"Oh yeah, and in January we're going out to a farm! We'll bale hay and help with the cows. It'll be great!"

Regular readers know we're not cold-weather people at the best of times. We don't "do" the outdoors: our idea of roughing it is when you have to leave the hotel to find a martini. And while I love animals, and would happily get down with the cows, I've also read enough James Herriot to know farms in winter are grim places.

So therein lies a dilemma.

Still ... cheeeeese ...

The Battery: an assault on fish and chips

When I learned about the recent opening of The Battery, an "authentic Irish chipper" in Brighton, I was delighted. Finally, I thought, there was a place I could find something approaching real fish and chips without having to go all the way to New York.

The Boy, it turned out, was equally enthusiastic (but then again, he's a sucker for anything that involves a Fryolator). So last Wednesday he picked me up after work and we headed out for fried deliciousness.

I was a little anxious, as my friend Lisa had investigated the place when it first opened (literally; they'd been in business for about an hour when she arrived) and she'd said they didn't seem to have their act together. But we decided that was probably opening night jitters.

The Battery's exterior promised good things.



The interior looked authentic enough.



And it smelled authentic, in that it was impossible to breathe without inhaling lungfuls of grease molecules.

The Battery's menu is basic but varied, offering chips with gravy, curry, cheese, peas (mushy, one assumes) or garlic mayo; pollock or haddock; battered sausage or burger (yeah, not too sure about that one); and chip butties.

Figuring we shouldn't pig out too much, we decided to get a fish each and share a side of fries. So I ordered fish and chips, plus a fish.

And that's when everything went horribly wrong.

First of all, the woman behind the counter couldn't understand what I was asking for. And she was so soft-spoken, and the combined chorus of hot oil, venting system, and CNN on the TV was so loud, that I couldn't hear what she was saying.

We probably should have realize that the total cost of $30 for one-and-a-half meals was a little high, but we were tired and hungry and we just wanted some damn chips.

And then I asked if we could get a couple of slices of bread to go with it.

"No," she said, "we don't have bread."

But you have chip butties, right?

"Yes, you could order a chip butty. But I can't give you bread."

Okay, no bread. We sat down to wait.

Eventually, the woman came toward us, bearing a tray piled with food. It can't be all for us, can it?

It was.

She unloaded a fish and chips for The Boy. And then a fish and chips for me. And then a super-sized extra mountain of chips.

Now I understood why our food cost so much. Now I got why she sounded incredulous when we said our order was "for here" instead of "to go."

But didn't it strike her as slightly odd that we'd want an entire sack of potatoes?

She was apologetic (though grudgingly so), took the extra fries away, and said we should stop at the cash register on the way out for a refund. Back behind the counter, she explained the situation to the manager, who explained that she should figure out the difference and bring the cash to us.

So, after all this, what about the food?

Okay, I admit I have a gold standard for fish 'n' chips: The Station Chippy on Station Road in Billingham. The chips are pale, soft and pliant. The fish is delicate, and the batter clings to it the way one holds on to a dream in the moments before wakefulness. I'm serious. There's a sweetness to the frying oil that infuses everything. And also, they do pineapple rings. And you can get scraps.

At The Battery ... well, the haddock was lovely. Generous, flaky, flavorful and generally good quality.

However.

The batter was thick and chewy, dry on the outside, gluey inside, unnecessarily crunchy in places.



And the chips were just. Sad.



Little-known piece of kitchen science trivia: thinly cut potatoes cook more quickly than thickly cut potatoes. Oh, you knew that? Apparently the spud-basher at The Battery is unaware of this arcane fact, which is why half the fries were okay and the other half were cooked to an inedible crisp.

Look, I don't claim to be a frying expert. I know it takes practice to be able to turn out perfect fish and chips every time. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of practitioners in the UK who have figured it out. And until The Battery gets it right, it's upholding the myth that British cooking is bad.

In the meantime, I'll content myself with dreams of fish suppers to come.



The champagne is optional. The buttered bread is not.

Thanksgiving? Way ahead of ya

After weighing the relative success of last year's Thanksgiving at Sandrine's, we decided once again to go out for Turkey Day instead of cooking at home.

It's not that we don't love to cook, you understand; it's just that the prospect of spending all morning in front of the stove and all afternoon in front of the sink (because I don't trust the dishwasher) takes the edge off having a random relaxing Thursday off work, gravy or no gravy.

So we're giving thanks at Rialto in Harvard Square, which promises roasted pumpkin soup with ginger cream; red wine risotto with figs and almond pesto; and of course a full-on plate of bird and carrots and sprouts and stuffing.

The one downside to this otherwise brilliant plan is that we get no leftovers. In previous years, we've stretched the T-Day meal to last a week, between hashes and pasta dishes and soups, finding increasingly creative ways to use up mashed sweet potatoes and garlic green beans and picadillo stuffing.

But the meal we missed most last year, almost to the point of mourning, was the next-day sandwich: turkey, cheese and Julia Child's cranberry chutney stuffed into a ciabatta roll and warmed in the oven. A beautiful thing.

So this weekend we decided to have a scaled-down Thanksgiving a little early. I knocked together the chutney in about an hour, we picked up a free-range chicken and some veggies, and The Boy found a nice Bordeaux. Result:





The green pesto-esque thing in the foreground above is garlic ground up with fresh rosemary, oregano and sage, blended with butter and massaged under the skin of the chicken. Was it good? What do you think?

Best of all: we got to have the next-day sandwich for supper the same day. And there was enough chicken left for lunch sandwiches for half the week and some fabulous enchiladas, for which The Boy made fresh tomatillo sauce.

Hey, there's no rule that says you can only celebrate Thanksgiving once a year.

Foodie hell in Orlando

Okay, maybe "hell" is overstating the case slightly. And perhaps "Orlando" is too broad an area to disparage, as I stayed within the confines of a golf resort 25 miles from downtown. And I suppose it's even a stretch to call myself a "foodie," given that my predilection for eating, and talking about eating, is a trait shared with, oh, just about the entire population.

But if I'd titled this post "A few not-very-good meals in a golf resort somewhere in Florida," where's the fun in that?

In fairness, I wasn't there for fun; I was at the Healthcare Internet Conference, a fabulous few days of full-on marketing nerdery with 450 other people looking to figure out how to make their hospital websites more inviting, valuable and user-friendly. From that perspective, it was great, and I came away with a notebook of scribble and a list of ideas to put into practice.

But outside of conference hours, I was pretty much on my own for foraging purposes. Had this been New York or Miami, I could have strolled out of the hotel and into any number of dining options. Instead, I was surrrounded by 36 holes of Greg Norman-designed lawn atop what was once swamp.



So I ate:

• A straight-from-the-fridge sports-bar chopped salad, arranged on the plate as though intended for a child going through the "none of my foods can touch each other" phase
• A chocolate croissant topped with icing
• A blackened grouper sandwich with the consistency of a sock
• This:

Disturbing as the above looks, it was a godsend; being a high-end resort, prices were elevated, and my travel budget didn't include meals. So the hors d'oeuvres served during the early evening networking session became dinner, supplemented by

• Trail mix and bananas.

Perhaps, then, you can understand my gratitude when I arrived back in Boston, and The Boy met me at the airport and said, "Let's go to Hungry Mother."

An hour later, I was sipping a gin martini sweetened with honey syrup and sharing a bowl of boiled peanuts. And then this arrived.



A choucroute of collard greens topped with a pork rib, a thick slice of bacon, and the most amazing garlic sausage I've had in ages.

There's no place like home.