though none of us are irish, 24 and 44 joined forces on friday night for a st patrick’s day dinner party, i guess you could call it. mirms made colcannon, corned beef, and soda bread, and carrien and i brought beef stew and cupcakes. cupcakes, […]
carrien and i love food, but we’re also poor students. accordingly, we wanted to partake in the newly christened winter restaurant week (i guess business is slow), without breaking the bank. we settled upon lunch ($20.06 as opposed to $30.06) – which, when you consider […]
it always begins like this – i had bought something at star because it was on sale (raspberries at 2 pints/$5), with no actual plans to make anything in particular. as i had bought them a significant number of days ago, carrien and i went ahead and made something with them. probably not a good idea considering that i’d left the office to get a respite from model-making for my hands, which are feeling kind of arthritic, but i couldn’t resist. cooking seems to be the only thing i really want to do nowadays.
based on the ingredients we had on hand, we combined a bunch of different recipes to create the above tart. the crust is made out of chocolate graham crackers and cocoa. we needed butter to hold it all together but only had 3ish tablespoons, so in desperation and an unwillingness to go to the supermarket, we added a few tablespoons of sour cream and an egg yolk. hey, it worked – it’s a tad crumbly when you cut the tart, but it holds together surprisingly well. (more…)
yesterday carrien and i (mostly carrien, really) made “samosas” – basically a samosa crossed with spanikopita. the filling is red onions, yellow onions, cumin, spinach, garlic, roasted fennel, and red potatoes; the wrapper is phyllo dough. we were attempting to use our spinach and lettuce […]
marco / 253 hanover street / boston ma / 617-742-1276 / tue-thu 5-10:30pm, fri-sat 5pm-11pm, sun 4pm-9:30pm / reservations accepted / entrees moderately expensive ($15-25) i heard about marco from being on pigalle’s mailing list. after it got a bunch of good reviews, i thought […]
i guess i could never be a dishwasher, because a day after the dinner party, my hands are all itchy and irritated by constant dishwashing. i just put two kinds of gunk on my hands in hopes that they will be happy soon. it’s strange, though, because throughout my clay travails, i never had an angry hand problem. it’s probably the soap, then, which is even called “mild” but merely seems to be mild in the sense that it doesn’t clean as efficiently as normal dishwashing liquid.
so the party- let’s return to the subject of actual party. celina and i had wanted to have a chocolate-themed party since last fall, but studio got in the way of having any time for anything else, so it got pushed to iap. we wanted to have a party party, but instead we did a dinner party because, sadly, chocolate (and the wine that goes with it) is expensive. after intermittent perusal of the internet, here is the menu we came up with. it’s a balance between budget, chocolate, not too much chocolate, and time constraints (we started on friday and cooked pretty much through til the beginning of the party, minus sleep). (more…)
carrie: and when we go to star, we could get – me: pork loin! carrie: yeah, that too…but i was thinking of ice cream. (24 hours later) carrie: last night i had a dream about rare meat…i think it was the pork loin. * * […]
right now i’m sitting at the kitchen counter, my impending chicken broth on obsessive surveillance for the purpose of skimming off any foam that dares break the surface of the broth. i have vague memories of michael ruhlman’s book about food school and a raft, […]
did you know that trader joe’s (at least the one on boylston) now carries a brand of herbs called “infinite herbs”? if only the “infinite” were true. at any rate, the herbs are perfectly good and a whole 60 cents cheaper than herbs at star or whole foods, so i might have to make weekly treks out to trader joe’s. sadly, when i moved in june, i moved closer to star and harvest, but farther away from trader joe’s and the river street whole foods (“the mother ship”). when i went to get my hair cut i stopped by and made the herb discovery, and pounced on some thyme and dill. thyme is my reigning favorite herb, with tarragon a distant second.
i bought the dill because i like the way it smells. i have had it infrequently in the past few years; notably in a warm green bean salad carrie made for a menu once, and when my mother makes little toasts for special events – she spreads the toasts with cream cheese that has been blended with onions, ham, and dill, and puts a slice of tomato on top of that. carrie and i, needing to use it, decided on a tunisian fish soup, the green bean salad, and some dill-cheddar biscuits. all right, carrie decided to make the soup, and i made some things to go along with it. (more…)
when i was younger, my mother used to buy my grandmother’s birthday cake at konditor meister. their cakes were these enormous, wonderful confections – a dark, dark chocolate cake filled with whipped cream and cherries, with a bit of rum. on top, they were decorated […]