What My Dad Didn't Teach Me

Last night, I designed what was probably my most creative dinner menu ever - and it was tasty, too! The centerpiece would be a cod dish (cod being on sale at Shaw's). I decided to bake it in a marinade composed of butter and white wine, in which I sauteed onions and, at the last minute, added red horseradish. That last ingredient was as much for the color as for the taste.

To accompany the cod, I invented one salad and borrowed another. The invented salad consisted of (farmer's market fresh) lettuce, avocado, sauteed red pepper, and boiled Yukon Gold potatoes. For dressing, I made my own ranch from Mark Bittman's recipe in Tuesday's New York Times, adapted from his How to Cook Everything. (The ranch was probably the least successful part of the meal, perhaps because I didn't include chives, parsley, dill, or any of the other herbs that are sometimes used in ranch dressing.)

The borrowed salad came from a list of 101 simple salads compiled by (again) Mark Bittman in Tuesday's New York Times. The #7 is: Grate carrots, toast some sunflower seeds, and toss with blueberries, olive oil, lemon juice and plenty of black pepper. Sweet, sour, crunchy, soft. We substituted almonds for sunflower seeds, but otherwise stuck to the recipe. The tartness of the blueberries (fresh from our backyard - we didn't plant them, but whoever did doesn't seem to be harvesting their crop...) contrasted nicely with the more staid qualities of the carrots. And the almonds added a welcome crunchy texture to the mix.

The part of the meal I'm most proud of is its color palette - green, red, orange, blue, pink, white, brown, almost everything! I've come a long way from Chef Boyardee Dinosaurs and Kraft macaroni and cheese . . .

Clockwise, from the top: baked cod with sauteed onions and butter/white wine/horseradish dressing; carrot-blueberry salad; and improvised green salad. (Maggie's next career should be in food photography.)

Maggie and her cousin Rebecca enjoying our extremely classy meal. (Wine and dinner rolls (only 25 cents each at When Pigs Fly!) rounded out the menu.)

Produce

You're probably getting bored with garden updates, but hopefully this one will be more exciting: we have produce! Please enjoy these pictures of the veritable vegetable bounty in our front yard. (10 points and public recognition to anyone who can name everything in order!)

The only bad news is that our zucchini squash have contracted some kind of mildewy fungus, as you can see from the very last picture. But scientific studies have shown that you can treat the leaves and stems with a milk solution to kill the fungus. So we're doing that, and hopefully it'll work!

Skype!

Sometimes, I skype with my cousin Jacob. Tonight, I got to skype with lots of other people too - my mom, Aunt Brenda and Uncle Bill, and cousins Sandi and Ethan. But as usual, Jacob was the center of attention. Here's what it looked like:

That's Jacob on the left, Aunt Brenda in the middle, and my mom on the right. Hi everyone!

Picnic!

Last Sunday (July 12) Maggie, Panda, and I headed down to the Charles River for a special treat: a picnic and the Sunday New York Times (highlight: crossword). For the first time, we picnicked in high style, using a special picnic backpack that I originally gave my parents for their 20th wedding anniversary. It has everything you could need on a picnic, as you can see.

We had cheese and bread, chickpea salad, ice-cold lemonade (thanks to the special insulated wine "bucket" on the side), and other goodies. Hooray for summer picnics! (And thanks, mom, for the picnic backpack!)

Garden Update

Our garden has exploded with color and produce! Here I offer two sets of photos - the first group of four was taken June 19th, and the rest are from July 5th.

In case you're wondering, the updated list of herbs/veggies includes:

Lettuce (green and red leaf)

Red Beans

Peas

Peppers (red and yellow)

Tomatoes (beefsteak, cherry, and other)

Broccoli

Zucchini squash

Burpless Cucumbers

Melon

Raspberries

Strawberries (very small, but surviving!)

Basil (Thai and other)

Purple Sage

Dill

Mint (two kinds)

Rosemary

Lemon Balm

Curly Parsely

Sunflowers

Creeping Thyme

And a bunch of flowers, as you can see. We've already enjoyed a few salads of home-grown lettuce, and Joey made a delicious basil-lime granita for dinner last night with some of the basil from out front. So exciting!

Good Eats in New Haven

I've been in New Haven since Monday, kicking off my dissertation research with painstaking archival work in Yale's Gilmore Music Library. I won't bore you with details, but it's equal parts fascinating, mind-numbing, incredibly useful and completely pointless. Apparently this is what I have to look forward to throughout my career - tenure, here I come!

On to the reason for this post: like my dad, I have acquired the habit of enjoying food a great deal more when I'm away from home. (No offense meant to Maggie's or my own cooking ability, since clearly we are awesome in this regard. It has more to do with a willingness to try new places, see old friends, and meet new ones. And it helps that this research trip is Harvard-funded, so I'm more inclined to actually spend money on food.) My jaunt to New Haven has proved no exception.

Soon after my arrival, James and I hit up an excellent Chinese establishment right across from his apartment (Royal Palace Restaurant - yelp reviews here). For $6.95 we had soup, General Tso's chicken (James very spicy, me not at all), and fried rice. Awesome deal. In the evening, we patronized a well-known New Haven establishment, The Educated Burgher. (This is Yale's version of Bartley's in Harvard Square.)

There, I enjoyed a 1/3 lb. bacon cheeseburger with curly fries and a chocolate banana milkshake. Sure, I'll regret it in 20-40 years, but until then, it's all good.

Yesterday I had a small breakfast of Frosted Flakes (I never get sweet cereals at home!) and a lunch of a ham-and-gruyere croissant and a sandwich composed of Boar's Head (TM) roast beef, horseradish, and cheddar on a kaiser roll with a Snapple lemon iced-tea. But the main event was dinner.

Apparently the place to get pizza in New Haven is Pepe's, located in the city's own miniature Little Italy. James and I met there Will, Judy, Lindsay, and Kristen Oakes, family friends from way back who live 30 minutes from New Haven. Sure, we had to wait almost an hour and a half to be seated, and sure, then we had to contend with the world's slowest/most negligent waiter, but then! The pizza was excellent. We got an original with mozzarella (the original original comes without cheese!) and a pepper, sausage, and mushroom with mozzarella. Amazingly, Pepe's only serves pizza. That's right - no pasta, no subs, nothing. Don't believe me? Check out the menu:

My junk-food culinary overload continues tonight with all-you-can-eat sushi at an event James and his colleagues have been planning for at least a week. I'll let you know how it goes!