Tuesday, July 17

My carpool ran slow today, so dinner was rushed.

I made a pasta, and my wife made a salad. I sauteed some garlic, added some julienned zucchini and goat cheese, and mixed it with pasta and some parsley, basil, and sage. I also cooked some scallops in a small pan on the side for my wife. I think that next time I should use less butter to sautee scallops.

Wednesday July 11, 2007

A slightly unusual meal this evening. Sometimes, particularly in summer, we make a collection of not necessarily related platters of finger foods. Usually we have some sort of bread and cheese, some vegetable dishes, meat if she's lucky, and some fruit.

I made something in between a caprese and a salsa: tomatoes, onions, parsley, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and some lemon juice. We put it on top of some toasted slices of french baguette.









My wife sliced up a nectarine and some gouda cheese:

We also had some corn. It was tasty, but didn't photograph well. The flash seems to reflect too much off of the kernels.

The corn, tomatoes, and nectarine were all from a roadside farm on the Eastern Shore. We picked them up Sunday afternoon on our way home. I'd give them a nice plug, but I don't remember their name. The corn was especially tasty, as Maryland Eastern Shore sweet corn tends to be. I doubt other states have corn this good.

Also, for future reference, July 11 is "Free Slurpee Day" at 7-Eleven. You can get a 7.11 ounce slurpee, for free. For unknown reasons, 7-Eleven employees HATE "Free Slurpee Day". Also, I don't drive past enough 7-Elevens on my commute.

So now I'm a restaurant critic

I never intended to do restaurant reviews, but that's right out the window.

Disclaimer: there are many words following that will be misspelled, incorrect, inconsistent, and possibly flat out wrong.

My wife and I went to Lebanese Taverna in Baltimore tonight. This may have changed my life. I knew I liked hummus and babaganush, but tonight I discovered that Lebanese food kicks ass. We had something called "mezza", which amounts to a platter with several small portions of different things. We had babaganush (eggplant pureed with olive oil and tahini), hummus (same thing, but chick peas instead of egplant), falafel (fried patties of chickpea and something green), mousakka (eggplant stewed in tomatoes), swiss chard in tahini sauce, tabouleh (parsley/tomatoes/wheat with olive oil), and grape leaves wrapped around something the waiter assured me was vegetarian. There were also some sausages fried with onions, a pastry containing beef, lamb, and pine nuts, and something that looked like a meaty falafel. We enjoyed an unassuming bottle of wine, which turned out to be perfect since it stayed out of the way of the riot of flavors going on with the meal. We finished off with Arabic/Turkish coffees and some baklava.

The food was amazing. Neither one of us knows much about Lebanese food (other than that it's similar to Egyptian), so there's the chance that we mixed up the condiments and did the Lebanese equivalent of spreading strawberry jam on a pepperoni pizza. I don't care even if we did. The babaganuch was very good, but the hummos was the best I've ever had. It had just a hint of sweetness to it, like someone was walking past carrying vanilla beans. The taboole was so fresh it brought tears to my eyes (partly because while we were at the beach, my parsley dried out and died, but mostly because it was so good). My wife enjoyed the sausage, but it didn't seem to be anything special. She was more fond of the pastry/meat (I think they may have been called "kibba"). Also, "Turkish" coffee, as far as I can tell, means "you aren't sleeping tonight. Tomorrow doesn't look good either. By the way, you can fly."

The wait staff was attentive, and seemed genuinely pleased to answer questions about the food. At one point, there was a translation error (strained yoghurt != sour cream), and our waiter seemed a little bit offended that we might mistake a staple of his native land's cuisine with a spoiled milk product. He went so far as to explain how to prepare several of the things we ate tonight.

We would have been hard pressed to break a hundred dollars, but we hit fifty without even trying. Well, throw in a generous tip, and we were close to a hundred, but we also had a bottle of wine, dessert and coffee. I someone's looking for a nice anniversary dinner I can't say enough good things about this place. You cannot find a place more tailor-made for mixed marriages (or marriage-like domestic arrangements) where one partner is vegetarian and the other not. In fact, it was that facet that caught my wife's eye when she read about this restaurant in the Sun.

Father in Law

My father in law is an intimidating presence in the kitchen. He's an excellent cook, and everything he tries seems to come out well. Keeping his daughter happily fed isn't impossible, but he has set the bar for success pretty high. So far as I know, he doesn't have any formal training, just a hunger and a willingness to try things. He's one of those people who can walk into a strange kitchen, one containing only a can of green beans, a cookie sheet, and some dried basil, and he'll somehow walk out having made lobster thermidore and a cheesecake.

He's everything I hope to become in the kitchen.

Guest Post

This is my father in law's description of his dinner tonight: As the former producer of the Ocean City Cooking Show, featuring clamming technics, clam chowder presentations, and Beef at the Beach, comments about this evenings presentations are in order. Please keep in mind that good food starts with good quality materials. Visit Bahama Mama's for fresh seafood. Miller Lite to start, followed by gin and tonics, with flounder fillets and blue crab backfin crabmeat, with lots of butter to create a cream sauce (use half and half), fresh Eastern Shore corn on the cob. A small amount of cream sauce in the crab to give it structure; whole flounder fillets covered with the crab; half a fillet on top; covered with the remainder of the sauce; baked at 375 for 25 minutes. Add a beautiful sliced tomato (knife action by Paul himself). Some rice. Fine meal indeed. Paul enjoyed a veggie burger heated in olive oil, topped with chedder cheese, on a fine bun. Add that sliced tomato. Enjoy.

Beach Food

We're in Ocean City for the weekend, staying with my in-laws. My father in law cooked tonight, so this is his handywork:

That's a flounder, stuffed with backfin crab meat, and some sort of cream sauce.


Naturally, I forgot to get a shot of the veggie burger. Here are the tomatoes and corn. There was also some less than photogenic rice. Which was unexpected, since it was a blend of white and wild rices with lentils and other bits of things.