where is jenner's mind

ice cream in south portland

2011-06-13T00:00:00.002-04:00

i don't eat all that much ice cream. its not that i don't like it, i'm an american for fuck's sake. but after many years of suffering, i finally admitted to myself that i am lactose intolerant. ice cream is not only made with milk but they add lactose to it to make it have that creamy mouth feel so its a double whammy on the belly of us lactose intolerant folks. but how can i be a whole person without a little ice cream in the summer?

so for this month's blog-o-rama project i elected to try willard scoop in south portland's willard square (there was some mild drama involved with this choice, it ends up i don't know how to use the 'send all' email function). this was an exciting choice on multiple fronts. number 1: we just bought and moved into our first house in south portland, and while we didn't manage to score a home in the coveted willard beach neighborhood, we are a short walk from said neighborhood. number 2 relates back directly to number 1, willard square is so f-ing cute!

this past friday afternoon, we took a walk to willard square to try out willard scoop. it has a totally adorable store front and the interior is equally adorable. as we walked in, and were the only patrons in the little shop, the 2 women behind the counter didn't say hello. i think this peeve is a marker of truly being a grown up. but come on, you are just standing behind the counter, we walk DIRECTLY in to your line of view, and you don't greet us with a hello? and its maine and people are suppose to be friendly in maine! the young girl who served us was friendly enough taking our orders and did dish out a nice cone of ice cream.

all the ice cream is made on premise, and while they don't have a huge selection, they have a nice selection. all your typical flavors and then some more interesting ones thrown in like blue berry and salted caramel. a small scoop is $3.50 and if you want a waffle cone it's 50 cents extra on any size.

one of my other weird things with ice cream is that i don't like i lot of shit in it. call me a purist but i really just want to taste the ice cream and not nuts or brownie or ribbons of fudge or potato chips. i think this stems from my dad. he eats ice cream EVERY night! sadly he is not the happiest guy and i think his ice cream is likely one of the few things he finds pleasure in. if he could, i think he would have vanilla hagen dazs every night. don't buy him a pint of ben and jerry's or he might throw it at your head.

my favorite flavor of ice cream is coffee. at willard scoop their rendition is 'dark roasted coffee' and it was delicious! i got it on a sugar cone, which was the freshest cone i have ever eaten (i didn't ask if they make them there but they do make their waffle cones) and it didn't have any paper wrapped around it so you don't have to worry you are eating glue with your ice cream. the ice cream was dense and creamy and very coffee-y! pretty much a perfect cone of ice cream in my book.

seth got thin mint in a waffle cone -- think chocolate ice cream with girl scout thin mints mixed in. and, as always, he elected to top it with jimmys. willard scoop only has chocolate jimmys and seth wanted me to mention this as a bone of contention, he likes rainbow. but really i don't care because i hate jimmys! they are little waxy bits that don't taste like anything but sugar and they get stuck in my teeth and yuck. incidentally, jimmys are typically called sprinkles on the west coast. i grew up calling them jimmys but that is probably due to the influence of my east coast born parents. since initially writing this my frined katie who is also from california, said she called them jimmys as a kid. maybe there is no east coast-west coast jimmy-sprinkle rivalry.

once seth had licked off all the jimmys i did try his thin mint ice cream. the texture was just as good as mine, creamy and dense, but the flavor wasn't as good. it was actually a little difficult to tell what the flavor of the ice cream was: was it chocolate? well then it didn't have a very strong chocolate flavor. was it suppose to be minty? then it failed completely there. seth wanted something minty, and when he got chuncks of the cookie there was that taste of mint. but otherwise it was not the perfect cone of ice cream.

willard scoop is a great spot to go for a cone this summer. there are picnic tables in the empty lot next door as well as couple seats right out front. the square itself is great for people and dog watching. a very enjoyable place to have a sweet summer treat.

doesn't jenner just love a bargain

2011-04-17T21:11:00.000-04:00

its true i do love a bargain. i have bored seth on many occasion going over the detail of my recent shopping trip and how much i saved. but up until this point i have not jumped on the coupon band wagon. that's not to say that i don't use the occasional coupon, because i do. but generally it just seems like a lot of work for not that much savings. and i don't really come across all that many coupons for things i really use.
up until trader joe's came to town, i hardly ever purchase or eat frozen meals; seth and i strive to eat as little processed foods as possible; and i really love me some natural home and beauty products. so i thought that sort of ruled out any value for coupons for me.
before i go on, don't worry, this is not going to become a couponing blog. i think that people who coupon within the realm of healthy are pretty cool and i will go to their blogs for tips and tricks of getting great deals. i have also recently realized that there is a large proportion of people who are not couponing within the realm of healthy, i.e. the crazies on extreme couponing. and some of these folks even commit coupon fraud! up until a week ago i didn't even know there was such a thing.
what i want to briefly share with you are some good sites i have found to get some info on couponing. there are, in fact, a lot of coupons for organic and natural products out there. but there are still some big draw backs to these. one is that often the best place to find these coupons is on the company's website and they make you give them your name and email before you can actually download the coupon. two, is that a lot of the products are still processed foods. they may be organic but they are still processed.
so check out these websites/blogs and coupon to your hearts content. i'm gonna try to save a little here and there but you won't find me buying 100 butterfingers or 200 rolls of paper towel anytime soon (actually occurrences on extreme couponing).

whole foods has great coupons and you don't need to give them your email address.
i think the woman who writes healthy life deals is a kindred spirit. i mean she loves whole foods, trader joe's, and target. she has a great section on how to "stack coupons" at whole foods.
speaking of target, they have online coupons and mobile coupons.
organic deals is also a good blog, especially their section on coupon databases.
if you can figure out how to down load mambo sprouts coupon printer thing (i haven't) you can find some good deals here.
i also like your green helper, for more than just coupons.

all the kids are doing it

2011-04-17T20:33:00.001-04:00

guest blog post by seth eli goldstein:
if you are a culinary nerd you have heard about the food truck craze. food trucks have become hugely popular in cities like LA, new york, and even boston (this week's tv diner was devoted to boston food trucks). sadly, there are no food trucks in portland, yet... however, with the recent opening of gogi you can feel like a trendy LA hipster while munching on korean/mexican fusion.
gogi (653 congress street) is in a space right next to local sprouts on congress. i admired the black painted tin ceiling on walking into the restaurant. i was hungry on this particular friday afternoon so i went for the proverbial "it." one pulled pork taco, one beef short rib taco, and an order of fried dumplings, whose filling i cannot remember. my food was ready in two shakes of a lambs tail and at $3/taco and $6/order of dumplings, a great value.
the tacos were wrapped in a single corn tortilla and topped w/ lettuce, cilantro, bean sprouts, and thin slices of radish and cucumber, with a wedge of lime on the side. both variations were super tasty. of the two, i enjoyed the pork more.
the dumplings were wonderfully fried and crispy and came with a vinegary soy dipping sauce that i could have consumed as a beverage.
my only complaint about the whole meal is that i had a taco "blow out." you know what i mean, right? all the taco stuffs busted through the tortilla, forcing me to rely on my fork to finish. if gogi doubled up on the tortilla, like a traditional mexican street taco, they could reduce the risk of such blow outs.
given the affordability and uniqueness of gogi in portland, i think this establishment is a great addition to the portland food scene. what is really cool is that gogi is open late night so if you need some korean/mexican fusion at 1 am, and who of us hasn't, you have a great option.
here is an article from the portland daily sun on gogi for a little more back ground.

pub style

2011-04-11T00:00:00.003-04:00

burgers are one of those foods we have ALL eaten a lot of. when you think america fare, you think burgers. we have all had thousands of good burgers and hopefully quite a few great burgers. but when you really think about it, probably not that many horrible burgers. that's because burgers are such a simple thing that you really have to go out of your way to fuck up a burger.
on our 3rd round of burger-o-rama, these are the things i am thinking about. its strange too, because unlike the year of mediocre thai food i recently endured, average burgers don't bother me so much. there is something soul satisfying about even the most mediocre burger.
so with that i start the review of my burger experience at the down town lounge. i am an overall fan of this place. at this point in my life you will not find me here late night, but seth and i are known visit on a random weekday evening enjoying their lengthy happy hour. everyday from 5-7pm dtl has drink and food specials, all food on the board is 1/2 price. its also generally a good place for burgers as that is what makes up their entire regular menu -- from a classic single patty burger to a greek gyro burger with fish, chicken, and veggie in between. seth is a fan of their big mac, whose description brings you back to the 1980s commercials when "2 beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame bun" sung to your belly.
on this weeknight i was on call for work so the only beverage i indulged in was a cola. we started w/ boneless buffalo wings which were pretty delicious though also a little disgusting. and like so many buffalo incarnations, no hot enough. they were very crunchy and the blue cheese was very chunky so overall they get a thumbs up for greasy fatty bar food. they were also half off so even if they were a little disgusting, how much can i really complain. and they were only gross in that 'i can't believe how much i am enjoying this nastely little fried snack' sort of way.
i contemplated getting the most basic of burgers so i could really judge the burger and not the toppings. but then i realized that dtl is not the place you go for your 100% angus beef burger cooked to a perfect pink medium rare. these burgers are all cooked to a gray well done and its not one of those burgers where you really want to taste the meat (of note, this was one of my problems with my burger at david's. as good as the bacon was, i think they should let the beef shine on its own). so i went for the burger special: a bacon, swiss, mushroom burger w/ lettuce, tomato, and chipolte mayo and fries. as it was on the board, it was about $4.
this was a good, satisfying burger. everything really tasted great together. i was a little concerned the mushrooms would be canned but they were fresh and very tasty but i do wish there was more. they were all sort of crowded in the center (another side note: until i moved to the east coast i didn't know that canned mushrooms existed. then i worked at this dive-y bar in boston and that was all they served. i even discussed this with a friend of mine, who is also from california, and her only response was: "they can mushrooms?" i think we all can agree mushrooms really should not be canned.). the chipolte mayo needs more kick.
seth got the haddock burger to start his research for another survey piece. he thought it was very good but the piece of haddock could have been larger and he had the same complaint about the chipolte mayo.
i rarely meet a fried potato i don't like but i was pleasantly surprised by dtl's fries. in a place like this i usually expect to find frozen fries. but these appeared to be hand cut! they were very good but i do think they are filling the heinz ketchup bottles with an inferior ketchup product.
so this was a good burger experience. i think the price played a roll in my review. at $4 i am more forgiving then at $12. when i go to dtl i have lower expectations and so they are usually met. if i am at a finer establishment with a higher price point i expect more. again i will say, its hard to fuck up a burger and so i think if you need a burger fix with a beer and you only got a few bucks in your pocket, dtl will do the trick.

lazy mo fo and chinese food

2011-04-04T12:41:00.001-04:00

if i was a good blogger i would have posted about the article my very significant other had published in the bollard as soon as the paper hit the news stands in march. instead the entire month passed by and i didn't post anything. so here it is, april and a new bollard will be hitting the stands soon and i am only now telling you about the amazing piece on all-you-can-eat chinese buffets my husband wrote.
my devoted following knows i am not a good blogger. what can i say? i am lazy and that is a big part of it. there are multiple things each day that occur and i think to myself: "random people want to know this pointless thing about me." but i don't write about it. also i have a job in which i spend the whole day on the computer without any real down time to fuck off and surf the web or write a blog post (a slow morning has provided me with a free lunch to post this entry).
so i can say i am vowing to write more about food and mundane occurrings in my life. but i probably won't. and you probably don't really care either way.
in any event, check out the online version of seth's article: from super great to super soggy.

burger fancy

2011-03-07T17:27:00.001-05:00

for this round of burger-o-rama it is fine dining!
seth and i have been wanting to try david's ever since tv diner gave it the platinum plate. when a said that david's had burgers i thought it would be a great chance to check it out.
the actual space that david's occupies is beautiful, with really high ceilings and lots of cool architectural details. but the decor made me feel like i had taken a step back in time to the 1990s. their were multiple out of place decorative colloum, i think i remember a few romanesque busts, and just a sense that someone with just a little decorative know-how needs to come in and pare down the decor. even the david's logo needs some updating to the 2010s. i know you don't really care about how the place looked, but i just had to say.
they started us a bread basket with these very tasty bread knots served with a parmesan cheese, oil, and herb mixture that was not so pretty to look at but was pretty good. i was so hungry when we first sat down so i ate way too much bread and was stuffed after only a few bites of my burger.

the burger's description in the menu is full of superlatives like magnificent double smoked bacon and a really good pickle. the bacon was pretty magnificent but the pickle was no more than what i would expect to come with a fucking $12 burger. it was good but if you are going to say something specifically about the pickle, then it better be a really good pickle.
large thick angus beef patty was perfectly cooked at medium rare. the double bacon is really a double wide sliced of bacon. it was unsurprisingly delicious as bacon tends to be. it was served with cheddar cheese, ice burg lettuce, thin slices of red onions, and sad looking tomatoes. the truffle fries with truffle ketchup were each very good but together, the truffle flavor was overwhelming.
overall the burger was good. the bacon was smokey (surprise) and crispy and kind of overpowered the flavor of the beef. i don't remember the cheese at all so it clearly wasn't that memorable. i forgive the tomato, it was february in maine. but maybe you should just leave it off if its no good.
while the burger was good, i would not go back to david's specifically for this buger. if you are at david's and you are craving a burger, this one will do the trick. but it was short of magnificent or even very good.

romantical meal

2011-02-07T00:00:00.001-05:00

i don't go out to dinner on valentine's day but i do love to go on romantic dinner dates with seth. one of our favorite places is benkay japanese restaurant for romantic dinner for two.

here is what you get:
a choice of one drink, per person, sake or beer or wine
first course: seaweed salad, squid salad, shrimp and vegetable tempura, and tofu and pork gyoza.
main course:
sushi: tuna, Salmon, yellowtail, shrimp, flounder, eel
sashimi: tuna, salmon, yellowtail
Roll: choice of any two rolls from the regular menu

so what this means is you each get a drink, then you eat a beautiful bento box full of delicious appetizers. this is a really exciting part of the meal to me because we don't usually order these as our main focus is maximizing our raw fish pleasure. but I love goyza and tempura.

then comes the plate of maki, sushi, and sashimi. the sushi and sashimi are selected for you but you get to choose your maki and the selection is excellent and some of the choices are fancy $10 rolls. every time we go to benkay we have to order the new york roll with grilled salmon skin, cucumber, scallion, bonito flakes, radish sprouts. this is the best salmon skin i have ever had with crispy crackly skin and amazing smoky flavor.

the fish is very fresh and the slices of sashimi sit on the plate like little jewels, waiting for me to scoop them up with my chopsticks, dredge them in a slurry of soy sauce and wasabi, and plop them in my mouth.

the thing that really makes this a romantic dinner for two is the price. all this for $70! and for those of you out there who do go out to dinner for valentine's day, you can get it all for $60! go to benkay's website and print out the coupon and get $10 off from february 8th to 14th.

normally benkay is one of those great restaurants that always has a table open, but for valentine's day you will likely need reservations.
other spots we find to be romantical are salt exchange and bar of chocolate.

cold stuff

2011-02-06T21:29:00.000-05:00

ice

frozen

meats

the first hot beef injection

2011-01-17T00:00:00.017-05:00

we own a copy of george motz’s hamburger america; a state by state guide to 100 great burger joints. we’ve had burgers at new haven’s louis’ lunch, reputably home of the original hamburger. (the proprietors don’t allow any ketchup or condiments in the restaurant and have been known to kick people out who attempt to smuggle in ketchup packets. truth be told, even after living in new haven for 3 years, jenner never at here.) we’ve had the burgers at harman’s lunch, maine’s sole entry in hamburger america. we’ve had from connecticut’s own ted's steamed cheeseburgers to the california's in-n-out. What we are trying to say is that we like hamburgers, perhaps not as much as some people, but a lot. so we are enthused about this new portland, maine food bloggers collaborative project, portland’s best burgers. first up, the diner/sandwich shop burger.

so are we wimps because we went to hot suppa? jenner doesn’t think so. she even called both of the two diner/sandwich shops named after a man and a woman (steve and renee's diner and kathy and dave's cafe) , but both were only open for lunch. it was wednesday night and we wanted some burgers. After looking over the portland food map’s diner/sandwich shop section we settled on hot suppa, as much to check out their burger as to indulge in their amazing cubano sandwich.

our last trip to hot suppa, right after they first started serving dinner, was kind of a bomb. except that jenner ordered the cubano and fell in love. before we even walked in the door on this recent cold wednesday evening jenner knew what we were ordering. the restaurant was warm and bright and we got a nice cozy booth by the window for people watching. service was fast and attentive and our server knew a lot about their tea selection. seth feels, and experts (meaning otis) agree, that hot suppa has the best bloody mary in portland, and so he started his meal with one. jenner ordered a white pear tea due to her ongoing upper respiratory infection, then proceeded to order us poutine, the double double, and the cubano.

the poutine came first, and while we ate the entire plate, jenner didn't feel like they lived up to her expectation. now jenner does not claim to be a poutine expert (though, she wants to go to montreal but seth has a strange xenophobia directed toward french canadians), so the let down may simply have been that her expectations were unrealistic. but she wanted thicker gravy and the cheese curds sounded amazing but were not melty enough.

the double double and the cubano came out together with their chosen sides of sauteed collard greens and some kind of tomato soup. normally jenner doesn't believe in double patties on burgers because it usually leads to bad burger to bun/topping ratio. but on reviewing the menu she realized that each patty is 4 ounces and one patty would be a small burger. as it worked out two 4 ounce patties was in perfect ratio to the bun/toppings. the patties are hand made and thin with the edges thinner than the center. not only does this create delicious crispy edges when the burger is cooked on a flat top, its really pretty to look at and congers up nostalgic feelings of a bygone era of burgers. when we ordered the burger, the waitress said "it comes w/ cheese, pickles, and sauteed onions, is that okay?" hell yeah that's okay! but when the burger got there we realized that cheese, pickles, and sauteed onions are all that come on the burger. a quick wave to the waitress got us a side of tomato and lettuce. iceberg lettuce. normally jenner loathes iceberg lettuce, but when you are talking about this type of old fashioned, basic burger, no other lettuce will do.

simply put, the burger tasted great. this is not a fancy or gourmet burger, in fact its made with american cheese. but if you are looking for a really tasty burger, you are not gonna go wrong with this burger. all you got to do is find someone to split the burger and the cubano with you and you got yourself a fantastic date.

so yeah, this cubano is all that. we know this piece is all about the burger but we really need to tell you about this cubano. we are big fans of cubanos. in boston we lived just down the street from la esquina de sabor, el oriental de cuba. to translate for my non-spanish speaking reader, el oriental de cuba is a restaurant that touts itself as the corner of flavor. they are in fact on a corner, and before they got moltov cocktails thrown through their windows and had to redo the whole restaurant they had a neon sign that read esquina de sabor.

el oriental's cubano is a classic cubano while hot suppa's is a slightly more modern version. it starts off with this really amazing french bread. the first time jenner had this sandwich she asked about the bread and it is actually made specifically for this cubano. then the sandwich is layer with roast pork, ham, gruyere, mustard, and cornichons. that's right, roast pork AND ham. seth remembered that last time jenner ordered it he wanted a little extra mustard so we had the waitress bring some extra on the side. this is an awesome sandwich. jenner really really loves sandwiches and she thinks this sandwich is really really awesome.

the sides were good. we both love and hate that the collard greens are sauteed and not real true stewed collard greens. they are meaty and hearty and smokey and when you eat them you feel like you are eating something good for you. jenner didn't have any of the soup but seth really liked it.

so we are definately going back. next time we will skip the poutine and get fries as a side to either the burger or the cubano and maybe we will try to fool ourselves that we are eating healthy by getting the collard greens again. oh and we will get the chocolate bread pudding again because jenner loves bread pudding and this is a great version (we will take it to go because seth likes some time between dinner and dessert).

the best of the thai-o-rama best

2010-11-23T10:46:00.001-05:00

so if you have been following my blog or this thai-o-rama project than you know there was a lot of not great thai food eaten in the last year. all a long you may have been thinking, "i don't care about hearing about bad thai food, just tell me where the good stuff is." so this is where the pay off of eating all that not great thai food happens. i can, with authority, tell you where you should spend your money on thai eats, and where you should not.
all of the bloggers are all using the same categories below to rate the restaurants:

Best pad thai: i actually don't order pad thai that frequently. i thinks its kind of a wimpy thai dish, like ordering california rolls at sushi. but sometimes i do crave it and reading back over my reviews it seems that vientiane had a great rendition.

Best curry: curry is the opposite of pad thai for me, i like to order it every time i go for thai, and i especially love to get it with duck. the green tofu curry at chiang-mai two was excellent, though one needs to be aware of their heat rating. sabieng thai also had a good panaeng tofu curry. with these two endorsements i think it may actually be tofu i like to order in my curry

Best spring rolls: i think that spring rolls across the board are pretty mediocre so i can't recommend any places rolls over another. but since seth's go-to thai appetizer is crab rangoon i will tell you that hands down the best version of this is at chiang-mai two. you can actually taste crab in this version.

Best soup: we only ordered soup at 2 or 3 spots so i am gonna decline to comment here.

Best atmosphere: boda is the only interesting restaurant space of any of the restaurants we dined at. but remember, if you like bus stations, vientiane is the place for you.

Best overall: i'm gonna do a top 3, in no special order -- pom's thai taste, chiang-mai two, and boda. i'm not totally on the boda band wagon, and i didn't like everything we ordered. but with some much of exactly the same thai food, its fun and exciting to dine on something different. honestly i would put it in the top category alone for the dessert of sticky rice, coconut milk and mango. it was a total surprise that chiang-mai two was so good. it has a very traditional menu but everything we ordered was the best version we had in 13 restaurants. pom's thai taste is a great stand by with a huge menu and is super approachable for those new to thai food. i also think that veranda thai and sabieng thai do a good job.

Best prices: i think this really should be best value for the money. again i think chiang-mai two had excellent food and reasonable prices. vientiane also had very good food at pretty much dirt cheap prices.

Best "I never expected to like it" dish: i have mixed feelings about crab rangoon and i usually just allow seth to order it. so i guess my 'never expected to like it dish' was the crab rangoon at chiang-mai two.
Place I would never go back to (my own catagory): so while there was a lot of mediorce thai, most places were not horrible, just nothing special. i think that if they are your neighborhood thai restaurant than you can get a decent americanized-thai meal there. the one restaurant that i would never recommend anyone is viet bangkok cuisine. i actually gave this place a okay review when we dined there but it was only our second restaurant and i was not yet jaded by just okay food. and, in fact, this place's food is not okay. i can still taste that weird plasticy taste that flavored our curry.

last thai supper

2010-11-16T00:00:00.001-05:00

so last night for our last thai supper (round 13 of thai-o-rama) we all met up at sengchai thai (803 forest ave). we were the only table in the restaurant (really glad i made reservations) so we got a lot of attention from our server. at first she was endearing and quirky but by the end of the dinner it was a little much for me. i was out to dine and conversate with friends and our server frankly dominated the conversation at times (i will be interested to hear how everyone else felt about her). with all this said she was quite attentive, she gave us all separate checks which i always think is above and beyond what a server really needs to do, and she gave us a free appetizer of curry puffs, which were tasty.
seth and i ordered crab rangoon (surprise) which the server said was great but was only your average crab rangoon that don't taste like crab but are somehow satisfying in their fried creaminess. we also got the tom kha gai which was quite flavorful with a strong scent of lemongrass and, of course, coconut milk, but was a little watery in texture.
for our entrees we got the spicy basil with tofu and the pineapple curry with duck, both ordered 2 out of 5 spiciness. the spicy basil was spicy w/ lots of nice fluffy pillows of fried tofu and a nice basil flavor. the pineapple curry was a red curry w/ loads of pineapple, red and green bell peppers, carrots and duck. i thought the flavor was fine, not the worst curry i have ever had but far from the best and it wasn't spicy at all. there also wasn't really that much duck in it, but i liked the duck that was there.
finally, my thai iced tea, which i sucked down in about 5 minutes flat, so it clearly wasn't that bad, was not as strong as i typically like them.
so as you can tell, this was yet another mediocre thai meal. if you are in the area and you are really craving thai, by all means stop into sangchai thai and you will get a predictable meal of thai standards. but by no means go out of your way to dine at this restaurant.
coming soon, find out which thai restaurants you should go out of your way to dine at when i do my wrap up of all things thai in portland.

no name thai restaurant

2010-11-02T00:00:00.003-04:00

guest blog post by seth eli goldstein:
Well, this is embarrassing. Jenner asked me if I would guest blog for this round of Pad Thai-o-rama. Sure I would, and so I headed down to the Thai food restaurant located in the food court at Monument Square. The embarrassing thing is I can't remember this place's name.

The food court is a nice clean space and there is excellent people watching when all the suits downtown are released for their one hour recess. The restaurant, whose name I cannot remember, is really a counter place. The cool thing is that you can watch your food cooked to order before your eyes. My Pad Thai went straight from the wok to my Styrofoam container and was piping hot. It was a large portion and I felt like I got a pretty good value for the price. I would have tried a couple of appetizers as well but I was all by my lonesome and although I am in the Guinness Book of World Records for most crab Rangoon eaten in a single meal I just went with the Pad Thai.

I thought that the spice was pretty mild, particularly as I requested a spice factor 2 out of 3. Perhaps a tad bland as well, but still passable Pad Thai with wide noodles served with scallions and mung beans. Sometimes pad Thai can be a bit on the sweet side. The Pad Thai, from the restaurant whose name shall remain a mystery, was not too sweet, and that was nice. If you need a quick and affordable Thai fix for lunch (I'm pretty sure this is a lunch only joint) that will leave you with leftovers for dinner, hit this place up. It won't knock your proverbial socks off but it does the trick.

this was a guest posting brought to you by seth for the 12th round of thai-o-rama. the unknown name of this restaurnt is siam orchid and it is located at the one city center food court.

cumberland county fair

2010-10-18T19:31:00.000-04:00

alpacas!

mini lop bunny

i grew up with guinea pigs and i heart them very much

midways are made for hipstamatic and cross process

stuff i see, portland streets 1

2010-10-18T19:10:00.000-04:00

one of the best things about my new iphone is having a camera with me at all times. honestly, while i am trying to get the cost of it covered by work because there are health care apps that i can use for my job, i really bought it for hipstamatic.

tamales for thai

2010-09-28T00:00:00.009-04:00

for this round of thai-o-rama it was off to chiang mai-two at 52 washington ave. while we were pretty sad to see loco pollo close down, it was fun to see what the new proprietors had done with the space. it really felt very different from its previous incarnation as a tamale shop. i thought it was tastefully decorated with a merciful lack of south east asian kitsch.
there was only one other table the tuesday we went in but the young man who was cooking and serving all the food seemed a bit overwhelmed. in any event he waited on us quickly, was very friendly, and all of our food came out fast.
for appetizers we ordered the crab rangoon and the thai dumplings. if you have been following these posts, you know that seth loves crab rangoon. i feel pretty ambivalent toward them -- i enjoy the creaminess of the filling contrasted with the crunchiness of the wrapper, but i never, ever feel like they taste like crab. these crab rangoon actually tasted like crab and i could even see real pieces of crab in the filling. served with a clear, sweet plum sauce and yum. the thai dumplings, filled with minced pork and shrimp and topped with fried shallots, were two bitefuls and again a fabulous version of a standard thai appetizer.
the entrees are ordered by star for how spicy you want them on a one to three star scale. i asked the waiter if one star meant not spicy at all and he answered "i can make it not spicy if you want." so really it should be a zero to three star scale. we ordered the spicy duck as 2 stars and the green tofu curry as 1 star.
the spicy duck was served in a creamy red sauces with lots of bamboo shoots, snow peas, green bell peppers, and basil. the duck was suppose to be crispy and it was, a little, but it wasn't exactly what we expected. and it was a bit of a small serving of duck. but on a whole, it was delicious and spicy! 2 stars definitely gave it a great kick that made my nose run and my lips burn.
the green tofu curry was full of tofu, yellow summer squash, zucchini, green beans, bell peppers and basil. the curry itself was creamy and flavorful and 1 star was a great level of spiciness for this dish.
somewhere in the midst of this burning goodness i had an epiphany. this is what is missing from so much thai food. thai restaurateurs have watered down their cuisine so much to make it palatable to americans that it has lost most of its flavor. thai food is suppose to be spicy. its from a country that is hot and the spice is there to make you sweat and cool you down. unfortunately, the next morning seth paid for our spicy dinner, if you know what i mean.
the waiter, it ends up, is the owner and he was really excited to talk to us about the restaurant, local thai food, and even this blogging project. he gave us some coupons for 25% of an entire meal (but which are only good for less than a month) and tried to give me like 10 take out menus, i think to hand out to friends. i'm not gonna give you a menu but i do recommend that you check out chiang mai-two. i have accepted, after 10 or 11 thai restaurant reviews, that there is really very little variation in the vast majority of menus. so instead of judging on originality, i judge on quality. i thought this place was great when it came to taste and quality. in all honesty i think its gonna be our new go-to thai restaurant.

a little thai take out

2010-08-31T00:00:00.001-04:00

we are not huge take-out people. part of it is that i love the experience of eating out and the other part is that i hate the waste involved with getting take out. of course there are exceptions, like pizza and i find it absolutely decadent to get indian take-out and eat it in front of the tv. but with the assignment to go to ventiane for this round of thai-o-rama we made another exception.
and to be frank, vientiane has absolutely no ambiance for a dine-in experience. unless you like to dine at bus stations, in which case this would be the perfect spot for you cuz you could get some tasty thai and not have to breath in diesel fumes. there is a small selection of asian condiments that is fun to browse through while you are waiting for your food, so i think that's enough ambiance.
as far as the food goes, it really quite tasty. we got fried spring rolls to start which were pretty average but the sweet, thin dipping sauce helped out. for our mains we got yellow chicken curry that had lots of fresh veggies -- peppers, eggplant, green beans, basil -- but kind of scant on the chicken. seth felt like the chicken was overcooked, but it was in a saucy curry so it wasn't really an issue. the curry was creamy with a nice subtle burn. we also got pad thai with 2 shrimp and scant chicken, but with lots of crunchy mung beans. there was a good peanut flavor, and while it wasn't served with lime wedges (sorry dawn) i really enjoyed it.
they also have a really fun selection of canned asian beverages so we each got a can of thai iced tea and the cashier talked us into trying a can of jelly grass drink, which kind of tasted like tea w/ long pieces of jellied something. not something i would try again.
we also got at jar of tom yum soup mix which reads: "remark: use fish, chicken or other meat also delicious."
i have heard rumor that there is something on the menu that is so spicy that it clears the entire shop as its being cooked.
after a summer break from thai food and blogging, vientiane was a great welcome back. while they offer the average thai fare, vientiane does a good job at it. its very convenient and we will definitely be going back for thai take-out.

the perfect morning

2010-08-29T17:11:00.000-04:00

i initially started this post to describe a perfect day i had. but i only made it to 11:30 am before i put it on hold to finish in a few days. now i am coming back to it more than a month later. so i think i will edit it a bit and post it as the perfect morning. and truthfully, this is how most of my saturdays look, though i am not quite lucky enough to have a massage every saturday morning.
let me tell you what a perfect morning looks like in jenner's mind.
7:45am: okay so this was a little early for a perfect morning but i was getting up early for good reason.
8:00am: church tag sale just down the street from my house. i have always wanted to be a regular tag sale go-er but i have only recently starting really started going. i didn't have any unbelievable finds, but i still had a great time and spent $4 on 4 items. and i got to indulge my obsession with cookbooks and add yet another one to my collection.
9:00am: massage w/ becca. okay, i have been keeping this secret to myself for long enough. the awake collective in the east end has massages for $40/hour! yes, that is right, $40/hour! and this is an AMAZING massage. worth at least double what they are charging. becca has gifted hands and she is truly a healing practitioner
10:00am: ice coffee and berry muffin from katie made bakery. they have coffee ice cubes. need i say more? but i will say more -- greatest berry muffin ever! i also really love their berry scones. i have had a love affair with scones for years, probably made all the more intense because a good scone is hard to find. my most favorite scone was from the original buckie's biscotti in dennis, massachusetts. but ever since they moved locations (and the fact that seth works every weekend so we never make it to cape cod) i never get to indulge in this favorite. finding these amazing scones at katie made is a happy discovery.
10:30am: farmer's market. this is my saturday ritual and it really does make me happy. this saturday i got to meet up w/ jen and her two kids. one of my new favorite finds at the farmer's market is swallow tail farm's dairy products. every morning i make a smoothie w/ their kefir and in season berries whenever possible.
11:30am: seth finally has a weekend day off ...
so that is what a perfect saturday morning looks like in jenner's mind. not surprisingly, food is a major factor.

please stop

2010-07-07T18:51:00.002-04:00

every time i post something here i get one, and sometimes multiple, comments in japanese or chinese trying to advertise their websites of young asian women in their under ware. i have nothing against these websites or their content, but i always block your comments and i really don't think that anyone reading my usually about food blog is looking for information about your websites (not that they aren't in to the content but they know where to more appropriately look for that content). i doubt you are actually reading the posts you comment on, but if you are can you please stop posting comments on my blog? i will never publish your comments so you are really wasting both your time and mine. please please please stop.

go over the bridge right now

2010-07-07T18:45:00.003-04:00

seth already told you how good it is. i dropped their name in a post about a totally different restaurant. but have you gone yet? i know you have some weird aversion to driving over the bridge into south portland but i'm telling you that pho hanoi will not disappoint.
if you like vietnamese you have try this place out. i am very fond of than than 2 and i enjoy the pho immensely at siagon, but i don't know that i need to go back to either because pho hanoi is SO GOOD.
so i am begging you, for the very selfish reasos that i don't want to see this little gem go out of business, go to pho hanoi!!!!
other people like it too:
yelp
chow hound
urban spoon

saneg thai house

2010-07-06T00:00:00.001-04:00

so for round 9, it was off to saneg thai house.   they have two locations, strangely close to one another. the original is on congress street, in the shadow of maine medical and the other is literally around the corner on st. john street.
seth and i had been urged some time ago to try this place out by our friends, mark and kate. they had warned us that it could be hit or miss but we decided to try it out anyway. this was way back before i was an expert on the thai restaurant scene in portland and in general we were very pleased. the food was good and the service was ... um, entertaining.
the old thai woman working the front of the house, who ends up to be the sister of the owner, seemed to not have the stamina to walk all the way over to our table so took our order from across the room. at some point she warmed up quite a bit and decided to tell us in great detail about her mammogram and pap smear. now this is something i'm pretty used to because once you tell people that you are a nurse practitioner they want to tell you all about their health. but i didn't tell her i was a nurse practitioner. it was also quite interesting to watch the numerous people coming in for take out, almost all ordering pad thai, and asking for no radishes. they were repeatedly told, there are no radishes in the pad thai, but in fact the menu does say their are radishes in the pad thai.
but that was last time. this time i also felt the food was good, though pretty standard. at this point i have surrendered myself to average thai food. the service was also not nearly as entertaining this time around.
for appetizers we got the basic pu pu platter, which was -- you guessed it -- standard, but still tastey with its fried chicken wing, and chicken satay and crispy cups of some sort of ground meat and lots of sweet dipping sauces.
for entrees we got pad thai (no radishes please) and a duck red curry. i was pretty pleased with the pad thai. it was peanuty and light and citrusy (lack of citrus can be a big complaint of my fellow bloggers). there was plenty of chicken and i think a few shrimp and it really satisfied that rare craving i get for pad thai.
the duck curry was also very good. it was a rather mild creamy red curry with lots of big chunks of crispy, fatty duck. there were so many vegetables they were practically spilling out of the bowl. i especially liked the cherry tomatoes and the grapes, which when hot sort of burst open in your mouth (yeah i know, "that's what she said"). i don't imagine that grapes are especially authentic in thai cuisine, but i really did enjoy them.
in relation to all the standard thai in this town, i think its up towards top of the list. but as my friend mark said, we may just be hitting it on the right night. its also quite a deal with the pad thai costing like $6 or $7. so at this price point and the two good meals we have had so far, i would visit saneg thai house again.

also on veranda street

2010-06-17T21:21:00.002-04:00

a few fridays ago, seth and i went to veranda thai for the 8th round of thai-o-rama. we have wanted to try this place since our mechanics, across the street at portland motor sales, told us it was good. (note: if you need a great honest mechanic, you should go to these guys). its a tiny little place and we grabbed one of the last open tables to watch a parade of to go orders come in and out of the door.
we quickly ordered a couple thai iced teas and our food. this was a few weeks ago and i'm tired and can't find the menu on veranda's website so i'm gonna have to summarize the meal a little. for appetizers i'm sure we ordered spring rolls. i can't remember them, so i guess they were just okay (unlike the fried spring rolls at the new pho hanoi in south portland that are just awesome).
for our main courses we got a fried fish in a brown basil sauce and the classic thai beef salad.
the fish was really good with a rich brown sauce, lots of fresh basil, onions, and i can't remember what else. the beef salad was quite good as well. seth and i both agreed that it really needed a little more lime but the beef was more tender then in the same salad at pom's thai taste.
as i said before, the restaurant is tiny so the kitchen is tucked around the corner, really only feet from the dining room. its kind of cool to be able to hear the cooks working in the kitchen, but with that you have to take that your meal may be a little smokey and your clothes may continue to smell like thai food long after you are done eating.
overall i found veranda thai to be pretty good and i would eat here again.

New Vietnamese Joint in So. Po. Hits the Spot!

2010-06-08T10:48:00.003-04:00

Whats up folks? Seth here, guest blogging. Why? I had to let you know about the new Vietnamese restaurant that just opened up at 171 Ocean st. in South Portland. Last week I was riding my bike through South Portland and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a new sign for a place called Pho Hanoi. (I have great peripheral vision, particularly for all you can eat buffets, large carnivorous predators, and Asian restaurants.) I'm a big fan of both Tan Tan and Saigon but I was very excited that another Vietnamese place was opening in our city. So yesterday afternoon I checked out the menu posted on their door to make sure they would be open that night. I noticed a couple of "special combination plates" of bun and rice with no further description. This intrigued me, I was intrigued and compelled and by the time Jenner got home from work I was hungry! First late me state with absolute authority that you with not find better more attentive wait service in any restaurant in the greater Portland area. This seems to be a common trait of Vietnamese places here in Portland, this winter one of the waitresses at Saigon, literally, kissed my wife on the cheek while serving her pho. The two servers at Hanoi were great and checked in with us often about our beverage and food status. The menu is considerable and I was pleased to see some offerings not available at Portland's established Vietnamese joints. For apps Jenner and I had the shredded pork skin spring roll, which was texturally a bit strange due to the pork skin but super tasty. We also tried the fried egg rolls. I'm gonna put it all on the line her and say that they were the best Vietnamese style fried spring rolls I've had in Portland. That' right, I said it! Jenner got the chicken pho as her main and it certainly rivals the pho at both Tan Tan and Saigon (although it did not have the pronounced anise flavor favored by some). The pieces of chicken swimming in the broth were particularly tender. I could not help myself, I had to have the "mystery" combination bun plate listed only as "Special Combination Vermicelli Bowl." I asked the waitress what was in it but I don't understand accents so well. I did take away from our conversation that something was wrapped around something. In spite of not being exactly sure what was in the dish I ordered it anyway. And, Ladies and gentlemen, I was not disappointed, turns out the dish is contains a shrimp paste that is hand molded onto pieces of bamboo. The special combination also had grilled pork and grilled chicken which both had a wonderful char grill flavor to them. All the accompanying veggies were super fresh and the basil, in particular, stood out. When we had finished and were leaving the chief had come out from behind the line and he asked us how our dinner had been. Accolades. I should mention that the space is basic but pleasant. I had my take out menu in hand and I plan to use it frequently.

Sabieng Thai

2010-05-18T00:00:00.002-04:00

this is round 7 of the GREAT thai-o-rama and this time we went to sabieng! located on forest ave. just off congress, it is in a nice space with a huge front window, very high ceilings, and exposed duct work. i did appreciate that the required thai kitsch was quite pared down. it seemed like someone had put a little thought into the decor versus just putting the most tacky things possible on the walls. but i know you don't really care that much about the decor. you want to know how the food was.
appetizer = chive pancakes. yummy. a little gummy in that way that rice pancake-type-things can be but it filled with fresh chives and garlic and complemented nicely with a ginger dipping sauce.
mains = panaeng tofu curry and lemon grass chicken, both served with brown rice and both ordered medium spicy. yum to both.
the tofu was like little pillows of soft goodness soaking up the richness of the perfectly spicy, not too sweet, curry. it was full of fresh crisp green beans and basil and sprinkled with kefir lime zest.
the lemon grass chicken was unfortunately not so lemon grassy but still really good. a nice rich brown sauce with lots of chicken and green beans and bamboo shoots and basil. again it was spicy enough to give you a nice burn without detracting from the overall flavor.
we were the only table in the restaurant so we got pretty great service. the cook himself came out of the kitchen and asked us how everything was. he seemed very pleased that we were so pleased. we thought we were really gonna see some action when a fire truck pulled up right outside the restaurant but the owner told us that the fire truck comes almost daily as the building across the street houses a lot of older folks.
on our way out, we saw blueberry files coming in with m. i hope there take out was as good as our dine in.

images of spring

2010-05-05T17:56:00.001-04:00

eat fiddle heads! these were prepared with shallots, olive oil, salt, and pepper and sauteed. last night we had them tossed in garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper and cooked in the grill wok. both so simple but so delicious. they are only around for a short time so eat them up!

lilacs! i love lilacs so much, but because i don't have any bushes of my own, i have to try to find bushes around town that aren't obviously in some one's yard so i can cut some to fill my whole house with their amazing aroma. these i cut from over a brick wall while no one was watching.

pansies! i went a little overboard and bought way too many pansies. but i found pots for them all and now it looks like someone threw-up pansies on my deck. not such a bad thing.

a very thai experience

2010-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

round 6 (i'm losing track) of thai-o-rama and we went to boda!
the inside of boda is really interesting with concrete walls and rough wood tables and chairs. the windows in the front are amazing for people watching. a couple delicious cocktails got us going. seth had a basil tom collins and i had a mildly fruity alcoholic arnold palmer.
started with the larp het, at northeastern-style spicy mushroom salad of grilled assorted mushroom mixed with chili, shallots, soy sauce, lime juice, mint, long-leaf coriander, and roasted rice powder. this was a little disappointing because it was overwhelmingly salty from way too much fish sauce. there were a couple of bites where the grilled mushroom and herb flavors shone through and they were really great. but the majority was difficult to enjoy. and while i like a little crunchy, i didn't like the texture of the roasted rice powder.
for appetizers we got the northern-style sausages and a grilled squid special. the sausages themselves were very gingery, which i loved, and were served with pickled ginger and relish. i can't really remember the relish but seth and i both LOVED these sausages. to be honest, i don't meet many sausages i don't like.
the squid was just okay. it, like everything else that landed on our table, was presented beautifully. the small squid bodies sliced horizontally and served with spicy chili, garlic lime dipping sauce. by itself, the squid had hint of smoke, but was otherwise flavorless. the dipping sauce was really good, but it was all you tasted with each bite of squid. i love sauces, but i think they should complement the flavors of the main dish, not overpower it.
we shared one entree of braised pork hocks, simmered in a rich dark stock made with chinese five spice, served with jasmine steamed rice, hardboiled egg, tofu, asian mustard green pickles, and spicy & sour chili sauce. the menu said it is one of the most popular street foods in thailand. it was pretty amazing. it was kind of deconstructed and both together and standing alone, each component was great. the asian mustard green pickles were ridiculously good and my only complaint was that there wasn't more of them on the plate.
we usually don't get dessert but i was feeling decadent so i got a decaf espresso and we shared an amazing dessert of sticky rice, coconut milk and mango. again it was deconstructed and we had to unwrap the sticky rice from the banana leaf and pour the coconut milk over the rice. the mango was perfectly ripe and buttery. its the thing i would be most excited to go back to boda to eat.
all in all, this was a pretty good meal. first off, i have never seen any of these things on a menu at any other thai restaurant, so they get points for showing me something different. second, even though there were a couple of items that i didn't really care for, the things i did like were really great.
i would go back just for the cocktails, dessert, and people watching.

poisoned in california

2010-04-17T13:31:00.007-04:00

seth wants it to be called the great lengua incident of 2010. i'm thinking i should market it as the new lengua diet. in any event, i got food poisoning on day two of my seven day trip to my home state of california.
i was dreaming of tacos for weeks. i had done all this research and found blogs dedicated to tacos in sacramento: yum tacos and perfecto taco de sacto. my family graciously allowed me to haul them across town to eat these authentic jewels of taconess. my mistake was the lengua. yes people, tongue! i love it as many others do, but i think i have likely eaten my last bite of tongue, for at least a while (no pun intended). i will say they were delicious going down. and seth and my whole family ate other types of tacos - carnitas, pollo, carne asada -- but i was the only one who ate the lengua. and the only one to get sick. i have many more photos of this taco truck moment but i can only bring myself to post this one glorious photo of how beautiful and innocent they looked before going down.
i planned on photographing and blogging about every meal in california, but i was sick as a dog for almost the entire trip. i had absolutely no appetite for like four days and the mere thought of food made me ill. in fact, i'm still having some residual nausea as i write about these tacos now. at the worst points of yucky tummy, i thought i would never blog again because i couldn't imagine having the stomach to write about food.
i am happy to report that i got some in-n-out into my belly before the tacos. and on my last day we hit up comforts for their signature chinese chicken salad. i worked at this up-scale deli in high school and i would definitely say it helped to create my obsession for food. the chinese chicken salad is simple but absolutely their best seller for years. romaine and iceberg lettuce, crispy fried rice noodles, scallions, grilled chicken, and this perfect tangy light dressing.

boston eats at susan's fish and chips

2010-04-17T13:06:00.003-04:00

my friend and movie maker extraordinaire, sarah, came for a visit to portland and we created another boston eats at susan's fish and chips.
she is also getting some much deserved attention for these creations and was interviewed on wbur's public radio kitchen blog about boston eats. enjoy both!

transitions

2010-04-04T17:32:00.003-04:00

friday was the last day of my first nurse practitioner job. and while i am happy to be leaving behind my two hours a day of commuting and multiple daily annoyances that left me feeling like my patients weren't getting the best possible care, i was sad to say good-bye to many amazing people i called my patients. truthfully, i'm on to bigger and better things, including a less than 20 minutes round trip commute, amazing benefits (the painful irony is that i have been an uninsured nurse practitioner for the past 16 months), lots of chances to grow, and many more amazing and also difficult patients.
in this two weeks between the end of one job and the beginning of the next, seth and i are going to california to visit some family and friends. it will be my first trip home in 2 1/2 years. my parents just moved from petaluma, a town they had been living in for the past 12 year to sacramento, the capital of my home state. as a kid, sacramento was a cow town with very little going on. my cousin went to college there so we spent a few weekends there each year, rafting on the american river and looking for something to do. but its a city that has grown up quite a bit. and naturally, i am looking forward to some eating! i plan on reporting back on what i am putting in my mouth. i can tell you right now that mexican and in-n-out burger will be on the list.
as for this beautiful easter sunday that signifies many transitions within itself, i was gonna make lamb with artichokes. unfortunately, i didn't realize that while easter is not a big deal to me, it happens to be a big deal to most other people. the super markets were very much closed so i couldn't buy my lamb. so we will instead be heading out for some indian at hi bombay!

finally some good thai taste

2010-03-30T08:51:00.001-04:00

round four and our assignment was pom's thai taste. between the congress street location and the cottage road location in south portland, seth and i have been to pom's a least half a dozen times and its my feeling that its some of the best thai food in portland.
this past wednesday, after the bizarre snow cleared to a beautiful evening, we walked downtown to sample pom's again. it was about 6:30 and the restaurant was quite full. there were a few empty tables but they were still waiting to be bussed. as we waited by the door i could see there were two servers working the floor without a busser or hostess, and they were hustling. initially i was quite put off because one of the servers walked right by us on her way to bring a table food and didn't even acknowledge us. i was a waitress for years, and i in no way expected her to drop what she was doing to seat us, but i felt like she should have at least said 'i'll be right with you.' but within another minute she was seating us and apologizing for the wait and the rest of our service was great.
ordering at pom's can be a little intimidating as you are presented with three separate menus -- one of sushi, one for noodles, and one for thai. we knew we were going for thai, so that made things easy for us. and once you get into the thai menu its super descriptive and helpful. i've been eating thai for years but i didn't really know how choo chee varied from other curries until i read the descriptions of the many thai sauces.
i managed to steer seth away from the appetizer sampler and instead we started with the thai crab cakes and the deep fried pork dumplings. this was our second time ordering the crab cakes and they were delicious again. the cakes themselves are a mixture of maine crab meat and ground chicken and don't have the delicate texture i expect from crab cakes, but are quite toothsome (remember kevin's definition of toothsome on top chef?). though the menu mentions some pineapple sauce and ginger salad dressing, both times we have gotten these, they are served with this yummy pink creamy sauce and a sweet and sour sauce. i'm curious about the other sauces, but the two we got are great accompaniments.
the pork dumplings were kind of a disappointment. you can choose between steamed or deep fried, but i really wanted them pan fried. i love the way pan frying crisps up some of the skin but leaves other parts soft. deep frying the dumpling just made them tough. and both the filling and the ginger dipping sauce were bland.
for our entrees we got the yum nuer salad and the spicy crispy duck. we had ordered the duck before and it was amazing the first time so i was really excited to try it again. but i felt like we were sort of going out of our comfort zone ordering the salad as i usually order some sort of curry. when the salad arrived at the table i realized we had ordered it the first time we ate at pom's, along with the spicy crispy duck, so we were basically repeating a previous meal. it was great the first time and it was great again!
the yum nuer is salad of thinly slice of charcoal-broiled beef mixed with lemon grass, red pepper, red onion, cucumber, tomatoes, and scallions, tossed in spicy sour lime juice dressing on a bed of lettuce. it certainly is yum (sorry i couldn't help myself)! the beef itself was a bit overdone for my taste and pretty tough, but the fresh veggies with cilantro and mint and the spicy dressing totally made up for it. i would absolutely order it a third time.
the spicy crispy duck was all that i remembered it to be: half a crispy roasted duck topped with mushrooms, onions, red and green onions, and basil leaves in a spicy chili-garlic sauce. we had a dish very similar to this at viet bangkok and oh my god how pom's version blows that one out of the water. this is the way you serve crispy duck! the crispy crackling skin coated with sticky spicy and slightly sweet sauce ... i'm drooling just writing about it.
i love that pom's features local maine crab and shrimp on their menu. but i'm totally puzzeled as to why they have new zealand mussels. is there something i don't know about these mussels? is it just a species of mussels? are they really so amazing as to forgo local mussels in favor of importing them all the way from new zealand?
one thing i feel compelled to address is price as it was one of the things i bagged on sala thai for. in reality the price points at pom's and sala are pretty much the same, but i don't mind spending the extra money at pom's because the food is better. it doesn't even really strike me as pricey because the quality of the food is so great.
so this was yet another great meal at pom's and it reinforced my belief that this is one of the best thai restaurants in portland.

north creek farm, a slice of heaven

2010-03-28T22:10:00.003-04:00

back in decemeber i was reading downeast magazine and i came across this piece about this little place called north creek farm in phippsberg right on the way to popham state beach.
when the weather was forcasted to be absolutely amazing for seth's birthday on march 6th, i suggested we hit up north creek farm for lunch on the way out to a day at the beach. this little place it a total gem. a country store/gourmet market/cafe/farm/rose garden. every little nook and cranny is so adorable you want to plotz. even if the food sucked, it would be worth it just to check out this gorgeous piece of earth. but, in fact, the food is pretty great. we shared two paninni and a cup of tomato soup. the surfer sandwich had smoked turkey, spruce mountain wild blueberry chutney and gruyere, a combo i would never think of putting together but that works so amazingly. the smoked salmon paninno also had cream cheese and roasted red onions, an obvious but delicious combo. if you look really closely at the photo below you can actually see my tongue sticking out of my mouth i was enjoying my sandwich so much.

(i'm trying to add more photos to my blog but i tend to be very unhappy with my food photography. i blame my camera and the lighting in my kitchen at night. it has nothing to do with my photographic ability. as you can see from the photo above, with the right light i can produce great food porn ... i mean photos.)

KON asian bistro

2010-03-16T00:00:00.001-04:00

round three and out to kon asian bistro with some of the other contributors to pad-thai-o-rama. i again wanted to just sample from their thai options, but seth already had his mind set on his entree and i had to have the mini beijing duck. yeah, we had already been here before and we know what we liked.
oh mini beijing duck! i dream of you often with your sweet plumy sauce and crispy fatty skin and your fresh cucumbers and scallions and your light fluffy rice flour bun. seth and i ate something very similar to this, called a peking mac, every time we went our favorite little dim sum place in new haven, connecticut (east melange too, sadly closed now). and then i had the pleasure of eating the real deal, peking duck, in hong kong at spring deer. it was pretty much indescribably amazing so i won't try to describe it. anyway, this little rendition of peking duck was almost as great and i toy with the idea of returning to kon and ordering two plates of these all for me.
i did manage to order a thai dish for my main course, thai red snapper -- fried fish in a sweet and sour sauce with fresh vegetables. it was good, but not great. the fish was fried perfectly, with a great flavorful crust that stood up to the syrupy sauce. the veggies were vibrant in color and still crisp and fresh tasting. but the sauce totally unexciting. i also somehow got it in my mind that it was going to be a whole fish, so i was a little disappointed when it arrived as a fillet. but it didn't say anywhere it was a whole fish.
to be honest, it would have been hard for any dish to stand up to seth's main course choice the szechuan crispy dried shredded beef. thin pieces of beef breaded and deep fried, the covered in a sweet, sticky sauce and tossed with sesame seeds and some green veggies. yum. if you are the kind of person who enjoy any rendition of a chinese dish with small bits of fried meat in sweet sauce, and i am that kind of person, you will enjoy this.
i can't really recommend that you go to kon asian bistro specifically for thai, but i will recommend you go there. all the food i tried there was at least good and some of it was exceptional.

the salt exchange and MRW

2010-03-13T08:09:00.003-05:00

last tuesday, for restaurant week seth and i decided to try the salt exchange. as we browsed through the menus on the maine restaurant week website, their menu appealed to us the most and i have pretty much been wanting to try it since it opened.
at 7pm on a tuesday the restaurant had a nice crowd but was not too busy. seth and i both really loved the space, with the painted brick walls and open duct work -- it is airy and elegant, while still retaining the charm of an old port warehouse. our server was attentive, well informed, friendly, and helpful.
in his classic pirate style, seth started with a winter rum punch with meyer's, bacardi, and captain morgan's rums mixed with pineapple and cranberry juice and an amaretto floater. as i have been suffering from repeated headaches from red wine (i know, i'm drinking cheap wine!) i decided to go with an alagash tripel.
the salt exchange is a small plates restaurant heavy on local seasonal foods. they elected to offer 3 savory courses for MRW, instead of the more traditional starter, main, and dessert courses most of the other restaurants offered.
for our first course we ordered the pork terrine and the cheese board. the pork terrine was, not surprisingly, very rustic and served with whole grain mustard, pickled shallots, and candied lemon peel (i think, having trouble remembering the exact details now). the terrine itself was ... porky, but not terribly flavorful in any other way. the extras on the plate were really nice accompaniments, especially the pickled shallots, whose briney tartness helped to balance the fattiness of the terrine.
the cheese board included two cheeses, honey, apples, baguette, and a few pomegranate seeds. i can't remember exactly what the cheeses were, but one was a grassy vermont cheese and the other was a earthy french cheese (descriptives from our waitress). the plate was lovely, the honey was amazing and floral, and the cheeses were fine, but we both really would have loved to have seen a couple of maine cheeses featured on the plate.
for our second course we ordered the pan seared scallops and the farm greens. the scallops were great: perfectly cooked, with chunks of bacon stuffed inside and served with baby purple potatoes and a broccoli puree.
the farm greens, on the other hand, was the weakest course of the meal. the greens themselves were beautifully tender, dressed lightly in a tasty sherry vinaigrette and served with a smear of briney olive tapanade (the only food seth will not eat are olives so i licked up all the tapande) and the most amazing duck proscuitto. i had never had duck proscuitto before so i was really excited to try it. it was cut so thin you could see through the fat marbling and it was salty and lusciously fatty in my mouth. so i know you are asking, you are raving about this salad, so what was wrong with this dish? the greens themselves were so over salted as to make them inedible. part of me thinks this may have been on purpose as there were these other salty elements on the dish, the chef wanted the salad to also have a nice saltiness. the other part of me thinks there was no communication behind the line and each of the three cooks (its an open kitchen) salted the greens personally. in any event, it was WAY too salty.
for our third course we chose the casco bay cioppino and the confit pork belly. seth was dying to try the cioppino packed with local fish and served with the requisite sourdough bread, and this dish really did deliver. growing up outside san francisco, i have had my fair share of cioppino and this was spot on with its tomato broth tasting of the sea with a great variety of shrimp, white fish, mussels, and crab. the pork belly was my favorite dish of the meal, after all it was pork belly confitted in pork AND duck fat! needless to say it was fatty and luscious and fall apart tender. served over one of the creamiest polenta i have ever had with root veggies on the side, which were just slightly aldente. a great complement to the softness of both the belly and the polenta.
we opted to spend a bit extra and share a slice of the flourless chocolate cake and a deliciously fruity (not yucky fruity like an apricot or blueberry ale) widmer bros. drifter pale ale. the cake was decadent and served with a petite cup of hot chocolate topped with a bruleed marshmallow (aka a toasted marshmallow).
overall it was a great meal and i will definitely be going back to the salt exchange. but due to its moderately high price point, it is one of the many restaurants in portland that needs to be reserved for a special treat, at least until i make that billion dollars. the restaurant week price for three courses was $30.01, which saved us about $5 per person. even if this MRW deal wasn't quite a steal, it did get us to try a new restaurant, and like i said, we will be going back.

more confessions of obsessions

2010-03-09T20:41:00.000-05:00

you probably guessed it from my post about my cat's favorite treat that i am a bit obsessed about my cat. well even i did not understand the depth of my obsessions until i looked through all of the hundreds of photos of her that seth and i have taken. what can i say, she's photogenic. i knew we had to do something with all these photos. and so cow's meow was born. just wait till i have me so human babies!

don't judge a book by its cover

2010-03-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

so for round 2 of pad thai-o-rama it was off to viet bangkok cuisine at 249 saint john street. this restaurant is very close to my home and i have gone by it many times on my way to enjoy a delicious vietnamese sandwich at kim's souvenir shop, but that's a discussion for another time. anyway, based on the exterior, i have never thought it a restaurant i wanted to try. in fact, i planned never to try it. so when we got out assignment for the second round, i was far from enthused. but i did my duty as food blogger and took on my assignment, albeit with a slightly closed mind.
i was surprisingly pleased once we walked into viet bangkok. its a small clean restaurant with all the requisite kitschy south east asian decor. there were no customers when we first walked in and we were greeted with a friendly hello by a woman i guessed is the owner. just after we sat down, another table of three came in, but that was it for customers while we were there. which led me to the realization that this food blogging challenge is not just fun, but we are helping to stimulate our local economy and hopefully getting some readers to also eat out.
viet bangkok's menu, you may guess from their name, is not strictly thai, but vietnamese and seemingly chinese too. seth got very excited when he saw the long list of fruity tropical cocktails. alas, they didn't have pineapple juice, so could not make nearly 1/3 of their cocktails. we both settled for a singha, served iced cold.
per usual, i had to convince seth that neither one of us needed to start our meal with a heaping plate of fried food by ordering the sample appetizer plate. but i did let him pick out our starter, and, per usual, he chose the crab rangoon. i'm not a huge fan of crab rangoon for multiple reasons, most importantly because i don't think they ever taste like crab. this version was really no crabbier than any other that i have eaten, but they were pretty tasty. the fried wanton was crisp around the edges but sort of soft in the center and the cream cheese filling was flavorful without being overly sweet (another complaint of mine about rangoon). the sweet and sour sauce was also especially good with the sweetness nicely balanced with salty fish sauce.
for our main courses we ordered the spicy duck from the house specials and the chu chee curry with shirmp from the thai curry section. viet bangkok offers the choice of white or brown jasmine rice. i know brown rice must not be traditional in thailand but i think its nuttiness goes so perfectly with the sweet and spicy sauces of thai cuisine.
the spicy duck description stated it was a dish of boneless roasted duck specially prepared with eggplants, mushrooms, bell peppers, onions, carrots, and scallions in a chili basil sauce. no where did it mention that the duck with be small pieces of tempura battered meat, which was a little disappointing. i love duck and i eat enough of it to know that if cooked properly, its skin will be plenty crispy and no tempura batter will be necessary. the thick coating of batter detracted from that fabulous ducky flavor. but even with the protein of this dish falling short, it was quite yum. the chili basil sauce was fragrant and flavorful and the huge portion was overflowing with tons of perfectly cooked veggies.
the chu chee curry with shrimp came out about 5 minutes after the crispy duck, so i am glad we were sharing both and one of us didn't get left waiting while the other ate. this was the biggest serving of curry i have ever seen. food writing is full of hyperbole, but this is not one, the serving was huge. in truth, there was a whole lot of curry, and sort of a normal amount of everything else. this entire dish had 6 giant prawns, which tasted as though they were cooked separately with lemon grass on a grill. they were huge and tasty. on my initial bite, i was overwhelmed by a flavor i couldn't place, but which would best be described as tasting of plastic. interestingly, after a few more bites this flavor didn't bother me so much, and i really enjoyed the dish.
even though there were some weird elements in both our main courses and seth couldn't get his drink on because of the lack of pineapple juice, i enjoyed our meal at viet bangkok. as our assignment is to try all the thai restaurants in portland, we stuck to their thai selections for this meal. but i'm intrigued and i will defiantly be heading back to try out some of their vietnamese and chinese dishes. it was also a really great value and we had enough leftover to both have large lunches the next day. so take my advice and don't judge this restaurant by exterior. you may get some surprises in your dishes, but overall i think it will be enjoyable.

bolognese

2010-02-21T09:10:00.005-05:00

ever since i had that amazing bolognese with orecchiette at caiola's back in november, i can't get it out of my head. i have to admit, before this dish i sort of thought bologease was just red sauce with ground meat. this dinner at caiola's changed everything for me. friday night, already in bed, i decided to make it this weekend. so i grabbed my copy of how to cook everything, and just like i thought, bitty had a very approachable bolognese recipe.

so yesterday i woke with plans of visiting the first winter farmers market and having a little lunch with jen, andrew and the kids. seth and i planned to incorporate a little exercise into our day and we ended up walking through the entire city, stopping here and there for little bits of food. the weather was amazing and it turned out to be one of those special portland days where i keep asking myself how i can be so lucky as to live in such a wonderful little city with such an amazing quality of life. i will narrate it through the dish i made for dinner.

meat sauce, bolognese-style by mark bittman

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, minced (from fresh approach)
1 carrot, peeled and minced (from winter farmer's market, fish bowl farms)
i celery stalk, minced (i omitted this)
1/4 cup minced bacon or pancetta (from micucci -- i just realized i used a 1/4 pound of pancetta! well more pancetta is never a bad thing)
1/2 pound ground pork (from farmer's market, sumner valley farms)
1/2 pound lean ground beef (from fresh approach -- for some reason, didn't occur to me to buy it at farmer's market)
3/4 cup dry white wine or juice form tomatoes
1 (28- or 35-ounce) can whole plum tomatoes, drained reserve juice if needed instead of wine
1 cup beef or chicken stock (used my own homemade chicken stock)
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 cup cream, half-and-half, or milk (used MOOMilk)
freshly grated parmesan cheese

put the olive oil in large, deep skillet or sauce-pan. turn the heat to medium-low and, a minute later, add the onion, carrot, celery, and pancetta. cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes.
add the ground meat and cook, stirring and breaking up any clumps, until all traces of red are gone, about 5 minutes. add the wine or tomato juice, raise the heat a bit, and cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the liquid is evaporated, about 5 minutes.
crush the tomatoes with a fork or your hands and add them to the pot; stir, then add the stock. turn the heat to low and cook at a slow simmer, stirring occasionally and breaking up the tomatoes and any clumps of meat that remain. after an hour or so, add salt and pepper. cook for at least another hour, until much of the liquid has evaporated and the sauce is very thick.
add the cream, half-and-half, or milk and cook for another 15 to 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. serve immediately with any dried or fresh pasta, passing grated parmesan, if you like, at the table.

seth has no qualms about carbo-loading so he asked me to also make garlic bread. normally if i were making pasta i would refuse,but i was feeling pretty indulgent, so i agreed. i really like to get a little demi baguette for garlic bread, because we just don't need that much bread for the two of us. we found one at standard baking co. i must say, my garlic bread is some of the best i have ever had. the trick is a lot of butter! for a demi baguette, i use about 2 tablespoons of butter and 2-3 cloves of garlic. i let it come to room temp (or gently microwave it) and spread it all over a baguette sliced length wise. then i sprinkle a little finely grated parmsean cheese on it and stick it under the broiler for 2-3 minutes.
at standard baking co. we also picked up some dessert: 1 madeline and a chocolate cork. the madeline was a perfect rendition of this cake like cookie and the chocolate cork was rich and fudgey and a total treat!

sala thai

2010-02-16T09:17:00.006-05:00

on tuesday night seth and i ventured to outer washington for a little thai food at sala thai. the restaurant is cute and kitschy with plants and decor hanging from the ceiling. as it was a tuesday night, sala thai was pretty quiet.

we started out with thai iced teas for both of us, seth wanted a cup of tom khar gai, and i ordered the pan fried pork dumplings. the thai iced tea hit the spot and the menu even suggested the iced tea as a good way to cut the heat of the food, if you didn't want a beer.
the broth of the tom khar gai was very tasty and fragrant of lemon grass and coconut. but the only ingredients in the soup had were chicken and scallions, which was a letdown because we were hoping for some vegetables. to be fair, when rechecking the menu, it clearly states "chicken soup with coconut milk, lemon juice and chopped scallions" so i guess we can only blame ourselves.

the pan fried pork dumplings were by far the highlight of the meal. they were stuffed with a mild pork filling, pan fried to a beautiful crisp, and topped with little bits of fried garlic. i tried to scoop up as many bits of garlic onto my dumpling before dipping it into a slightly sweet tamarind sauce.

for our main course we ordered seafood rad pik off the specials menu and yellow curry with chicken from the curry offerings. The seafood rad pik consisted of lightly battered shrimp, scallops, and squid, sautéed with mixed vegetables and a special sauce, all served over a bed of iceberg lettuce with cucumbers and tomatoes around the edge of the plate. the special sauce was fruity and reminded me a lot of duck sauce and i can't remember if there were any vegetables in the dish other than the cucumbers and tomatoes. at $14.99 it was one of the most expensive items on the menu and it was a very big serving. i thought the bed of lettuce was kind of strange and even though we ordered it as hot and spicy it was quite mild. with all this said it was still good. while i was getting pretty full, seth polished off every bit of seafood. he left a few cucumbers though.

the yellow curry with chicken had pineapple, green peppers, summer squash and basil leaves and was creamy, aromatic, and slightly sweet with a very nice heat. which was a surprise because it was listed as a mild curry. so the seafood rad pik was more mild than we expected and this was more spicy than we expected. i would have preferred that both dishes has the heat of the curry. i really love thai curries and this was a good curry. it had all the things i look for in a curry, like the creamy sauce playing off the acidity of the pineapple.

our service was at times slow for how empty the restaurant was, but out waitress was friendly and kept our waters full. all in all i think sala thai was good, but standard. all the food was flavorful, but other than the dumplings, nothing stood out. and while sala thai was relatively inexpensive, i thought it was pretty pricey for thai (again, to be fair we did order one of the most expensive items on the menu). it's also quite far from our apartment in the west end. if it was excellent thai, i would make the trip across town to eat here, but there are plenty of comparable thai restaurants closer to my home.

addictions

2010-02-03T20:46:00.014-05:00

i have an magazine problem. i'm totally addicted to magazines. almost all the magazines i subscribe to are cooking magazines and i keep each issue. so in addition to my cook book collection i literally have thousands of recipes in my house.
the big problem with this addiction is that its at odds with my desire to be a greener person. so with all these recipes at my fingertips i decided to cut back on the number of magazines i subscribe to and try to cook some of these dishes.
tonight i did just that. last night i picked a main dish and a dessert out of food and wine magazine from february 2008, bought all the ingredients today, and cooked them up this evening. here is what i made:
three-lentil dal
the flavor of this was great and tasted very authentically indian. i made the mistake of substituting green split peas for the toor dal, and they cooked a lot slower than the yellow split peas and red lentils. and i would have liked more tomatoes in the dish. but it is something that i will definitely make again, probably as a double batch so i could freeze some for a future meal. tonight i served it with a simple green salad and called it dinner.
the bulk food isle at whole foods came in quite handy for this dish as i was able to buy the yellow split peas, red lentils, and cumin seeds there. i love the bulk isle for spices because you can buy just what you need and not spend a fortune on spices.
milk-chocolate pots de creme
we have yet to sample the finished product of this decadent dessert but we licked the blender and the chocolaty custard was super rich and delicious. i'm gonna serve it with a little home made whipped cream. should be great!

gourmet kitty

2010-01-24T16:03:00.007-05:00

okay, really my kitty is no gourmet. she prefers to eat the fern to just about anything else and she doesn't care one bit that her cat food is organic. but she does love these treats i brought home for her from fetch a while back. the treats are dried bonito flakes from a company called cat-man-do and cow (yes that is my kitty's name) goes crazy for them. while these flakes of dried fish are as light as air, they are kind of expensive -- $6.99 for 1 oz. but for my little baby, anything.

then, last weekend, seth and i were shopping at hong kong market on congress and i came upon this tiny corner of japanese food. and there was this giant bag of bonito flakes, 3.5 oz for $6.00! this is the exact same product only for humans, not brilliantly packaged and marked up for sucker cat lovers like me.

this gets me thinking about a couple of things.
1) i wish i had the kind of mind that could think up packing a japanese food in a cute container with a cute name for cats. then maybe i would be a little closer to that billion dollars i'm hoping to make.
2) ethnic markets are often a really great place to get bulk items cheap. i buy most of my spices at ethnic markets because you can get so much for pennies compared to what you pay at the super market. We have bought curry and chinese 5 spice powder at hong kong and more recently chili powder from masala mahal, an indian market in south portland.

so now we are well stocked up on cow's favorite snack and we know where to find her bonito next time we are low. if you are looking for a treat for your special kitty, i really recommend you try out bonito flakes, but skip fetch and go straight to hong kong market!

recent food musings

2010-01-06T20:47:00.004-05:00

pot roasted rosemary lamb with fingerling potatoes
this is what i made for new year's eve dinner and it was amazing. so super easy and so succulent, tender, and flavorful. the gravy was the most luscious i have ever had.

goat cheese, pesto, and sun dried tomato terrine
i first ate this totally delicious combination in giant form at a weeding in the berkshires. realizing that i could easily replicate it, i googled it and found this recipe. its a true standby appetizer that everyone loves. i made it for both thanksgiving and christmas eve this year.

maine shrimp season
seth has a goal of cooking with maine shrimp as frequently as possible. so far he has made shrimp quesadillas, shrimp cocktail, and shrimp curry. the shrimp curry is a variation on a thai chicken curry he has been making for years. i asked him to add less water so it would be more saucy. he threw the shrimp in at the absolute last moment so they wouldn't over cook.

duck fat
i read somewhere reports of soggy fries at duck fat. i am happy to report that my last two visits have resulted in delicious crispy fries.
favorite dipping sauce: truffled ketchup

another amazing meal at caiola's

2009-12-06T20:37:00.003-05:00

the night before thanksgiving seth and i and my friends jasmine and chris from new york, dined at caiola's. i have previously raved about this place so i won't waste time telling you all the things i love about caiola's. i just need to tell you that i had the most amazing orecchiette and bolognese made with both pork and beef. the rich tomato sauce tasted like it had been simmering for hours and it clung perfectly to the little ear shaped pasta. it was one of those things you put in your mouth and think you could eat this and only this for the rest of your life. well, at least that is what i thought.

shopping local for the holidays

2009-12-06T20:25:00.002-05:00

though my father can't stand it, i love love love christmas. i love the lights and the music and the family time. i can even love the snow this time of year. and while the truth is that i do end up consuming around the holidays, i love christmas despite all the consumerism. and i do my best to keep the gift giving simple and low cost.
i decided i was gonna do my best this year to do all my christmas shopping locally. so yesterday i headed into the old port around 2pm with flurries twirling around my head and enjoyed the multitude of other christmas shoppers. it was absolutely the quintessential holiday shopping experience and it definitely got me in the spirit. by 4pm my arms were weighed down with shopping bags, i had walked across town and back, and i had put a little money into my local economy.
so see what you can do to get into the spirit and find someone you love the kind of gift you can't get at the mall or online, in your town.

boston eats, featuring wijm

2009-11-28T14:29:00.008-05:00

yeah i know, i totally blew it on my one post a day challenge. what can i say -- it was totally exhausting and once i stopped posting everyday it was hard to even start back up. and seth and i hosted two of our friends for thanksgiving so i was very preoccupied with preparation. stay tuned for blogging about that epic meal and the doings with all the leftovers.
for now enjoy this boston eats video restaurant review seth and i did with my friend sarah when we were in boston in mid-november. it was at this really fantastic chinese restaurant. but i will let the clip speak for itself. hopefully there will soon be a boston eats visits portland!
shanghai gate
oh yeah sarah also recently did this review that i failed to post:
coast cafe

processed foods and depression

2009-11-11T20:01:00.002-05:00

this blogging everyday thing is really hard. so i'm taking the easy way out tonight and pointing you to an interesting article about how processed foods and depression are linked. in reference to my last post this really makes a lot of sense to me. cuz i also treat a ton of depression and anxiety and naturally some of those folks who are eating mcdonalds every day are the ones i'm treating for depression.
going to be in boston for the next 4 days at a big primary care conference. maybe i will eat some great meals and blog about them...

its an epidemic

2009-11-09T19:36:00.004-05:00

a large part of my job as a primary care provider is managing chronic health conditions. what that usually means is managing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high sugar before and after it results in diabetes. all of these conditions can, for the most part, be avoided by living a healthy lifestyle. yet they are some of the most common things i treat.
tomorrow i have two people on my schedule, each of whom i diagnosed with diabetes with sugars in the 400s. since an initial diagnosis of diabetes is made when sugars hit a mere 126, this means they have had untreated diabetes for many years. on top of that diabetes takes years and years to develop, all along causing irreversible damage to your body. for those of you that don't know, diabetes causes strokes, heart attacks, blindness, kidney failure, erectile dysfunction, and its the leading cause of leg amputation. does any of that sound fun to you? it surely doesn't sound fun to me.
so its really hard for me to get why that guy on friday, who watched his dad lose limbs and then his life to diabetes, didn't really care when i told him he was on the verge of developing diabetes. he couldn't understand why he had a problem with his sugars, when he never ate lunch. but every morning, EVERY MORNING, he gets a sausage mcmuffin, coffee, and an orange juice from mcdonalds. he couldn't begin to wrap his mind around why orange juice was not a healthy choice for a person like him. even though i was reviewing many ways in which he could make positive changes to his diet he just kept saying, "i've never heard that orange juice was bad for you."
and here's another thing, if you weigh over 300 pounds, why would you argue with me that you get enough exercise walking around at work? you clearly don't get enough exercise. i don't solely blame these people though i do think some god dammed personal responsibility is in order here! i blame a society that makes the worst food the cheapest. that makes us feel that we are not satiated unless we are completely stuffed. that is set up for us to drive our cars everywhere instead of walking or riding bikes. that cuts physical education from schools.
if you are reading this right now you know i really like food and i eat a lot of it. i don't not exercise as much as i should but i do actually move my body on a regular basis. and i eat GOOD food! i think most of the food that my patients are eating is disgusting -- white bread! egg sandwiches from the gas station! mountain dew! without sounding like michael pollan i have to ask if these are really even food!
i don't want you to think i am a heartless care provider because i am not. but as the obesity epidemic is at the intersection of two things i am very passionate about, food and health, i can get a little worked up.

fine italian food in ghana?

2009-11-08T20:05:00.004-05:00

when i was living in ghana we would often take weekend trips to this amazing little beach about forty minutes outside of accra, called kokrobite. at this beach there was this amazing guest house run by a british woman and her ghanaian husband called big milly's backyard. it is the standard to which i have held all guest houses in foreign countries at which i have stayed. you had your choice of accommodations from free standing cottages, to rooms in a block, to spaces to lay your sleeping bag and a trunk to lock your stuff in. all bathrooms were shared, there was no running water, and unpredictable electricity. everything was situated around a open-air bar and the ocean was only yards away. everything you ate and drank was put on a tab, so you had to be careful not to have too good of a time or you may not have enough money come pay time. they cooked three meals a day there and you elected to partake in each of the meals. since there was very few other options in kokrobite at that time, most meals were eaten at big milly's, with a giant star beer to wash down the super fresh fish, and lots of young foreigners to trade travel stories with.

there was one other dinner option. an italian man named franco had decided to ride his motorcycle through west africa. when he landed at kokrobite he decided to stay and open and italian restaurant. he was just opening it the year i was living in ghana and each meal i ate there was progressively more refined. he set up a small kitchen hut and built tables under palm frond umbrellas. the first couple times i ate there he was both cook and waiter. but as both big milly's and his place became more popular he hired kids from the village to work with him.
my favorite dish was spaghetti al tonno. a simple dish of onions, garlic, tomatoes and tuna, it was just so delicious. franco used the locally canned starkist tuna in oil as a substitute for italian tuna in olive oil. the ghanaian version is heavy and fishy and gave the dish as strong and rich flavor.

i think about this pasta dish and those amazing weekends at kokrobite. through the internet i have been able to see how this small fishing village has grown and attracted more and more tourists. the good news is that there are just not that many tourists in ghana. i crave the taste of that dish and wish for it to take me back to those moments when i was 20 years old and living in such a foreign land as a foreigner.

about a month ago we went to dinner at paciarino and they had spaghetti al tonno on the menu. i ordered immediately thinking i was going to indulge in franco's pasta dish. in no was this rendition bad. the fresh homemade pasta had a great texture and bite and the sauce was tasty. but i could barley taste, see, or feel the tuna in the sauce. i just ended feeling like i had a great marinara sauce. and it left this place in my heart and stomach just aching for the real deal.

so recently, as i was perusing my father-in-law's cookbooks and i found a recipe for spaghetti al tonno in cucina ebraica, flavors of the italian jewish kitchen, i knew i had to make it. the final product this evening was exactly the soul satisfying dish i had been longing for. the hardest part of the whole thing is waiting for the water to boil. so try it out some night soon for an easy and delicious meal.

spaghetti al tonno

1 pound long pasta
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped (about 2 cups)
12 salt-packed anchovies, filleted, rinsed and very finely chopped, or 24 olive oil-packed fillets (about one 3-ounce jar), drained and very finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
6 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 can (6 ounces) olive oil-packed tuna, preferably italian, drained and broken up
2 tablespoons capers, rinsed and chopped
1 to 2 cups chopped canned plum tomatoes (according to the recipe this is optional but according to my memory totally necessary and i just used one 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes)
grated zest of 1 lemon (again optional in the recipe and i omitted it)
freshly ground black peeper to taste.

bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Drop in the pasta, stir well, and cook until al dente.
meanwhile, warm the olive oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. add the onion and saute until tender and translucent, 5 to 6 minutes. add the anchovies, garlic, and parsley and cook for 1 minute. and the tuna and capers and the tomatoes and lemon zest, and cook until warm, about 2 minutes.
drain the pasta and add to the sauce in the pan. toss well to coat, then stir for a minute or two to flavor the pasta with the sauce. sprinkle with pepper and serve immediately.

hi bombay

2009-11-06T19:05:00.005-05:00

i love love love indian food. every time i eat it i dream about the day when i will touch my feet down on the earth of the sub-continent. it is just so complex in its tastiness. much of indian food is very saucy and i love sauces. so much so that seth calls me a sauce whore. i'm really quite indiscriminate about what kind of sauce, i just want volume.
i also love to get indian food for take out and that's what we did tonight. i don't know why i love it for take out. maybe because it just seems so decadent to eat in your pajamas in front of the tv.
seth called and placed the order and i swung by on my way home from work. we have eaten at hi bombay many times before and i really enjoy the weirdness of watching bollywood on a plasma tv while eating saag paneer and drinking king fisher beer. tonight was the first night we have gotten take out from hi bombay and it was great.
we choose the malai kofta and the chicken saag, two of my stand-by dishes at indian restaurants. tonight, like all other times, i was not disappointed. i find it a little difficult to describe all of the nuances of flavors in indian food because it is so complex and layered. both dishes tonight were ordered medium spicy, which had a nice heat and left you with a lasting burn on your tongue. there was tons of chicken in the saag and it delivered that deliciously creamy spinach yum that i expect from a good saag. the malai kofta is a combination of these delicate veggie "meat balls" and a creamy slightly sweet, savory sauce.
it was a totally satisfying dinner at home, just as it always is in their restaurant.

fennel and sausage risotto

2009-11-04T20:03:00.003-05:00

try this great recipe for fennel and sausage risotto. i made it with store bought chicken broth and it really would have been better with a super flavorful homemade stock. its a very warm and comforting dish for a cool evening.

i'm anticipating a slip-up in my challenge tomorrow night cuz some friends are coming into town.

someday very soon the majority of us are going to be in favor of marriage equality.

ruski's

2009-11-03T19:51:00.003-05:00

tonight after voting, seth and i went to celebrate democracy with a pint of beer and some fried food. and what better place for such a celebration than ruski's (212 danforth street)? ruski's really is a go to place for seth and i for many reasons. number 1: its awesome. number 2: two blocks from our house. number 3: real dive bar. number 4: good food. number 5: unpretentious.
in college i had my heart broken when brady's yatch club, our favorite local dive bar, got "discovered" and was over run with hipsters. this is not to say that there are no hipsters in ruski's, cuz there frequently are. but there are also lots of salty dog regulars. everyone sort of balances each other out so it never feels like a scene for any one group of people.
there menu is very extensive and i almost always have a hard time ordering because how can you decide between a burger, a calzone, or nachos? there are just too many choices. and while it is very basic cuisine and a very large proportion of the menu is fried, its good stuff.
tonight we decided to share the chicken tenders appetizer with ranch dressing and the sauerkraut hot dog. i have been wanting to order a hot dog here for ages but just haven't. i shouldn't have waited so long cuz it was great -- it was quite meat-a-licous and tasty. i think their dogs are a pound each so i was happy to share it with seth. i am obsessed with fried chicken so i have never met a chicken tender i didn't like. one of these days i'm gonna order the fried chicken dinner with four pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy. all for $8.95.
oh yeah -- pbr pints are $2.

slow cooking

2009-11-02T19:31:00.004-05:00

last night i made my first slow cooker meal of the season: lamb shanks with white beans. this is something i usually braise on the stove top or in the oven. but we had plans to have a little happy hour over at jen and andrew's house and i knew that by the time we got home it would be too late to start a braised dinner. so the night before i went about searching for a good slow cooker recipe for this dish.
one thing i love about the slow cooker is the ease. i love the idea of throwing a bunch of stuff in a pot before work and coming home to a beautiful dinner. but this dish does not fit into that bill. because the shanks need to be browned and the onions and garlic need to be sauteed, it took me nearly 40 minutes to get everything in the pot. so it was much better suited for the sunday dinner meal category. by the time the 8 hours of cooking time was up, the meat had completely fallen off the bone and the beans were super tender. it really did turn out great andi told seth it was the definition of succulent.
but i promise you, if i make this dish again in march i will hate it. because that is the curse of the slow cooker. no matter what you cook or what you cook it with, by the end of the season, everything comes out tasting exactly the same. maybe it's just that by march i'm craving fresh, barley cooked veggies and light summer fare. my taste buds have just had enough of hardy, meaty, rich foods. but right now in november, it is exactly what i am craving and this dish really hit the proverbial spot.

my challenge

2009-11-01T20:15:00.003-05:00

november is national novel writing month. knowing myself, i'm not gonna write a novel. so i got thinking about something i could challenge myself to do, that i might also enjoy. and it hit me: i enjoy writing this blog but i wish i were better at it. so i'm challenging myself to write one post a day in the month of november.
i think it's gonna work out well because nba basketball season started this week and that leaves me a time with nothing to do. let me explain. seth and i watch a lot of tv. i've always liked tv and it really is the ultimate brainless activity for me. i have a job that demands a lot of my brain power, so when i come home after a long day at work i just want to relax in front of the tv. which is usually fine ... except for basketball season. seth loves nba basketball in general and the celtics in particular. he must watch every celtics game on broadcasted on tv. in northern new england that means 3 to 4 games a week. when i start to whine about how much basketball he watches seth reminds me of the three years i forced him to live in new haven, connecticut where there exists a celtics vortex and they only show new york and new jersey games.
so anyway, i'm gonna have a lot of time on my hands this month, even if i do follow through and learn how to knit this winter.

oysters, i can't get enough of them

2009-10-07T20:29:00.009-04:00

i feel like i have always eaten oysters but i'm sure that's not true. my earliest memories of eating them goes back to age 10 or 12. like many men, my dad loved to bbq. his signature dish was bbq chicken cooked over a charcoal grill. but i guess from time to time he liked to mix it up. so once or twice a summer he would take a drive out to tomales bay and stop into johnson's oyster farm and buy a bag of 100 oysters for something like $40. these were big meaty oysters that lacked the nuanced flavors that many east coast varieties have. and as you might be guessing from my lead in, we bbq'd them. threw them on the grill unshucked and let the heat pop them open, then pull off the top shell and smothered them in butter and bbq sauce. i remember one time my friend tam and i ate like twenty a piece.

at this point in my life i didn't know that people ate oysters raw and even after i found out that people did, i sort of thought that californians ate their oysters bbq'd and east coasters ate them raw. and i may have been a little right. for some of you uber foodies out there, when i mention tomales bay and oysters, you think hog island oysters. when i was a kid they were just a tiny fledgling company and they had yet to change the way people thought about california oysters. so we ate these mediocre oysters bbq'd because frankly they tasted better that way.

nowadays i wouldn't dream of bbq'ing an oyster. i'm a purist and will hardly put more than a squeeze of lemon on my oyster. one of the highlights of my wedding day was our raw bar. five or six years ago when we attended otis and marya's wedding in wellfleet, massachusetts (otis's home town) and i gorged myself at their raw bar, i swore that i would do anything it took to have a raw bar at my own wedding. well when your husband grew up on cape cod and one of his best friends is a salty lobsterman out of provicetown, all you have to do is ask. as our wedding gift, damian brought us bushels and bushels of wellfleets. seth's friends all took turns rolling up their sleeves and shucking oysters and clams so we didn't have to pay the catering company to do it. the only bummer was i had to do a lot of socializing and couldn't just slurp oyster after oyster down.

and one more thing i love about maine is the oysters! seth and i love to go into harbor fish marke t and see what awesome selection of oysters they have on any given day. the usually have 8 to 10 variety, with the majority being from right here in maine. and in truth the inspiration for this post was a recent article in the new york times about oysters in maine. we love to get a selection -- a few pemaquids, a few damariscottas, a few wellfleets -- and see how their flavors compare. it didn't happen last february, but this winter i swear i'm gonna make it into j's oysters for their free oyster happy hour at least once.

boston eats

2009-10-07T16:14:00.006-04:00

my friend sarah has been making these restaurant review movies for the last year and they are really fun to watch. she lives in boston so she aptly named them boston eats but she does have some episodes in new york and we are gonna try to do one next time she comes up to portland. follow these links to check out her restaurant reviews:
paromount
mi tierra
building on bond
sofra
jose's
number 7

we are (almost) all going green

2009-09-12T17:37:00.004-04:00

i was in hannaford today and as i was checking out, i happened to look around and notice that EVERYONE who was checking out had reusable bags with them. it just made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to think how far we have all come. as i have mentioned previously, i remember buying a cloth bag at stop and shop in dennis, massachusetts and being told i was the first person to ever buy one.
but of course i'm not totally naive. i'm pretty sure that it's not like this every where. it definitely wasn't like this in new haven, connecticut one short year ago when we were living there. and i did see a kid (yeah he made me feel old because he had tattoos so i knew he was at least 18 but he for sure looked 13) bag his cantaloupe. really? i get that people want to bag their tomatoes or nectarine cuz you eat the peel. but a cantaloupe does not need its own plastic bag to make it home to your kitchen. it basically has its own container.
and yesterday i was at a medical conference and they were serving juices and sodas and waters in plastic bottles and there was no where to recycle them. the garbage was almost completely full of plastic bottles with just a few pieces of real garbage mixed in. i put my cranberry juice cocktail bottle in my purse and brought it home to recycle.

corn and tomitillos

2009-09-12T17:33:00.003-04:00

here are a couple of recipes i made this weekend. both new. one for tomitillo salsa and one for corn bread. (okay so i actually wrote this post a few weeks ago but i was drunk when i wrote it so i wanted to read it over when sober before posting it and then i forgot all about it)

tomitillos were from the hampton farmers market across the street from my work. at that farmers market i was reminded of how lucky i am to live in portland and have such a rich farmers market two times a week. into the tomitillo salsa i added cilantro and jalapeno from saturday's farmers market and i added one ear of fresh corn to the corn bread, also from saturday's market.

i thought the corn bread could have used more fresh corn but the others eating it said the ratio was good with just one ear and had i added more it may have upset the balance. this is great moist corn bread. i have been looking for a go-to recipe for corn bread for a while and i think i found it.

the recipe for tomitillo salsa calls for roasting the tomitillos under the broiler for 5-7 minutes and then blanching them. they were quite soft and well cooked after broiling them, so i skipped the blanch. i also somehow decided that it was really spicy with half a jalapeno when making it. but then when i went to eat it, there was no spice at all.

creating food memories

2009-09-09T10:27:00.006-04:00

this past labor day weekend my friend brian and his fiancee lane visited us. brian and i spent 10 months together in ghana when we were 20 years old and juniors in college. we lived on the campus of the university of ghana, in legon, a town just outside the capital city of accra. we shared a lot together in those ten months and in remembering it, there are a lot of food memories. brian loves food. in ways that are different and similar to me, but he loves food. this vague memory came back to me of taking a long taxi ride to some unfamiliar corner of accra for pancakes. brian was in heaven and i think i remember him making some very homer simpson-like noises as he devoured his pancakes. as anyone who has spent an extended time in a land with very foreign food knows, the simple pleasure of a familiar food can be so very comforting.
he also frequently came to my dorm room for dinner of pasta with red sauce. living in the dorms in ghana was both similar and different to living in dorms in the us. there are cafeterias but they only serve lunch, so students set up make-shift kitchens on our porches to cook. on my wobbly table i would chop tiny onions and garlic cloves. i owned one pot and an electric hot plate that had only one setting -- very hot. once the onions and garlic were sizzling in the oil i threw in tomato paste, imperfect little fresh tomatoes, and lots of salt. when the sauce was done i transferred it to one of my few bowl and boiled water in that same pot for the pasta. i can't remember what i would do if the water wasn't running. take it from my bucket stored full of water for my bath? once the pasta was cooked and drained, i poured the sauce over it and heated everything up. brian loved it. and truly its really the basis for the marinara sauce i make today. i even considered making brian my much improved spaghetti and meatballs while he was here.
instead brian and lane wanted to treat us to dinner as a wedding gift. we chose fore street. i have been wanting to try this restaurant for some time but it just hasn't been in the budget. so when brian emailed me a list of restaurants to consider, i told him i was dying to try fore street.

our reservations were late: 9:30 on a sunday night. we decided to head over there a little early to have a drink and see if they could seat us early. we were in awe the moment we walked in. the decor with the exposed brick and open duct work and all the wood is just beautiful. the hostess said she thought a table would be available early and so we headed into the beautiful bar to get a drink to start. before our drinks even arrived our table was ready and the hostess let us know that our drinks would be brought to our table for us. we were seated at this amazing table right by the window with a view of commercial street and the harbor.
brian, lane, and seth all got special cocktails and i had a glass of shiraz. the wines by the glass were really reasonably priced and there were quite a few choices. brian picked out a great bottle of wine to go with dinner and he said that there were a lot of price points to choose from on the list of bottles.
for appetizers seth and i shared a beautiful salad of rocket and fresh tomatoes as well as a charcuterie plate with fois gras, duck sausage, and sweet breads. both were amazing. seth made an observation that the serving sizes on the charcuterie plate were perfect, because if you eat too much fois gras you are asking for a stomach ache. lane thought she really wanted to try some maine oysters but didn't want to miss something spectacular on the appetizer menu. so she asked the server for his favorite and he said he could eat the oysters any time of day. lane loved the beautiful briny and slightly sweet damariscotta oysters.
i actually ordered the pork chop for my main dish at first because i was so interested in the idea of a pig from berwick, maine. but then before the server could leave i changed my order to the pan seared duck breast. this was definitely the right choice for me. while i know my own pork chops probably don't compare to chef hayward's pork chop, it is something i can and do make a home. duck on the other hand is a protein that still scares me a little as a home cook. i love the dark rich meat and order it out when ever i can but i'm still a little shy about making it myself. this duck breast had a thick layer of fat that was seared crispy and was served with transcendent white beans that were firm to the bite and just kissed with the taste of sage (sorry to use such a word but the beans really did bring me to another level).
the meal was wonderful; the company was wonderful; and in the end this was one of our most memorable wedding gifts.

there really is something in the bread

2009-09-07T14:59:00.004-04:00

i knew we had great bakeries in this town and i have spent time extolling their virtues in a previous post. but its always nice to see portland's bakeries getting some real recognition in the form of a great review in bon appetit magazine.
there are also little blurbs about the great breweries, seafood, and just great food we have here in portland.
credit to portland food map for posting these links.

guarenteed good meal

2009-08-12T16:42:00.003-04:00

there are two places that seth and i go to on a regular basis and we know we will always get a good meal. and i have never written about either of them! in the portland food blog-o-sphere, both restaurants have gotten their fair shares of reviews, but let me tell you why i love caiola's and the port hole.
the port hole was the first restaurant i ever ate at in portland. one very raining march day, seth and i rolled in to portland to check the city out for the first time, and marya and otis took us here for lunch. i was immediately charmed by the rustic ambiance. i'm sure i got the haddock sandwich, which is served with a home made tarter sauce on fresh baked foccica bread and fresh cut french fries on the side. i'm sure i got this because it is something i order fairly regularly. they also have the most amazing fish chowder i have ever had. last night when seth and i shared a bowl it had huge chunks of haddock and was flavored with fresh herbs. for my main course last night i went with the angus burger and it did me right, though it was a little over done for my ordered temp of medium rare. i also love and adore their grilled salmon wrap served with greens that get deliciously wilted by the heat of the salmon. the atmosphere can vary widely depending on when you show up. in the middle of winter, there is nothing better than brunch with the fire going (is the fire still there after the remodel?). during the summer the deck is where its at, and you can usually find a table out there if your are in for breakfast or brunch or dinner on a week night. then there is the madness of friday nights and weekend late afternoons and evenings.
caiola's is a west end gem and my favorite restaurant in portland. we were also introduced to this place by otis and marya (they inspire us to be better foodies!). i have been here countless times for brunch and just a couple of times for dinner. i have never put anything in my mouth at this place that i didn't love. the last time we went in for brunch i ordered the lobster benedict from the specials menu. it was your typical bene with lemony creamy holindase and topped with sweet morsels of lobster meat and chantrel mushrooms. the meatyness of the mushrooms was an amazing combination with the lobster, fooling the mouth into thinking there was more lobster than there really was. seth and i frequently order the eggs tostada studded with little nuggets of chorizo. if you go for dinner it is an absolute must that you order the antipasto plate as this is likely the most awesome antipasto you will ever have, with roasted and marinated veggies, bean salads, and cured meats, usually including some breakfast sausage. it may sound strange but it is so right. the decor is simple but gorgeous, in what i think you would call french country. there is a wonderful patio out back that is so enjoyable on a summer morning with a bloody mary.
so there they are. my perspective on two of portland's great restaurants. since i just ate at the port hole last night maybe i will head to caiola's this weekend.

street and co.

2009-07-12T15:43:00.002-04:00

well i am a married woman now and i am hoping to have some extra time to get back into this blogging thing now that i'm not planning a huge party. once i have a little space from it i plan on writing about tips for an 'affordable' dyi wedding. but for now i will return to a topic i'm quite passionate about -- eating food!
we didn't take a honey moon and spent a little too much time with family and friends after the wedding for my taste. don't get me wrong, i love these people and under any other circumstance i would have been thrilled to spend this time with them. but all i really wanted to do was be alone with seth. so once we got back to portland we decided to use some of our wedding cash on a nice meal out. mostly at marya and otis's recommendation, and because seth cannot get enough seafood, i choose street and co.
we had reservation at 7:15 last sunday night and i was a little surprise to arrive to a very full restaurant. we were seated immediately in the middle dining room where the open kitchen is located. as seth likes to always face the entrance, he also got the view of the kitchen. the room was wonderful and warm with exposed beams and brick walls. the atmosphere is casual with the wait staff in white shirts and khaki shorts. its the kind of place you can go dressed up or dressed down and enjoy really great food.
seth doesn't really drink wine these days so he ordered a plisner urkel and i asked the server to bring me a glass of her favorite white of the by-the-glass menu. i don't remember what it was but it tasted great and went well with all our varied food choices.
we started with two 'tastes': bresaola in olive oil and lemon and maine crab stuffed egg. these tastes were perfect for the two of us to have just a bite of each. the bresaola's saltiness was contrasted perfectly with the bright tartness of the lemon juice. it surprised me that seth wanted to order the stuffed egg, because it was really just a fancy deviled egg, something he is not a fan of. but we both enjoyed it as an exceptionally delicious deviled egg.
unfortunately the appetizers came a little too quickly and i didn't feel like i got to savor my 'tastes' quite enough. but they were so delicious it didn't really matter. we ordered the local squid cooked with chorizo and a red oak lettuce salad with home cured bacon, fried shallots, and a cherry vinaigrette. the squid was mind-blowingly tender. i really didn't know it was possible to get squid to be so tender. the salad, ordered mostly because of the home cured bacon, was also phenomenal with generous amounts of bacon and those amazing fried shallots.
maybe because our appetizers came so quickly, there was kind of a long lag before our entrees came. seth ordered one of the specials. this seemed a little funny to me because they change their menu daily, so isn't everything really a special? but in any event he devoured his seafood stew in no time. really i don't think i had a chance to even try it, he ate so fast. i ordered the grilled whole lobster served over linguine with butter and garlic. when it came i was sort of disappointed that it was really just lobster, pasta, butter, and garlic. but once i dug in i realized that there was really nothing else this dish needed. the soft shelled lobster was split right down the middle which allows for removing all of the tender morsels of meat with ease. the juices of the lobster mingled into the garlicky butter to elevate each bite of pasta to so much more than just noodles and butter.
by the end of this feast we had no room for dessert. we sat and digested a bit while i had a cup of excellent coffee. the meal was amazing and special as a post wedding meal should be.

another bakery to love

2009-06-10T19:06:00.002-04:00

my friend jen just introduced me to a new bakery in portland. its called katie made bakery and katie has actually been in business for nine years but just opened up a retail space. its super cute with just a few window seats to sit and sip your coffee, eat your amazing baked good, and watch the traffic go by on cuberland avenue. they are serving pre-made sandwiches for lunch and katie can bake you a cake to order for you next special event.
its worth a trip to the east end just to check it out and eat a decadent brownie or out of this world peanut butter cookie.

cape cod travel series, part 1

2009-05-20T21:20:00.003-04:00

i have been spending a lot of time on line recently doing wedding stuff and it leaves me with little energy to blog. one thing i have been doing is putting together my wedding website with lots of cape cod tips for all the guests from out of town. i figure since i pay for the website and i will soon stop paying for it and lose all that hard work that i would transfer the info over here so that its accessible in perpetuity.
seth grew up on cape cod and we spend a lot of time out there. i started visiting about a year into our relationship, so nine years ago, and i just fell in love. as a california girl i really only had limited exposure to the east coast and virtually no exposure to new england, even though my mom grew up in south eastern massachusetts. i remember being initially struck by the sizes of people's yard and the fact that there was a lot of grass and no fences. i love cape cod like a second home and i am so excited to share it with all of my family and friends for our wedding.
so here is what i will call the first entry of my cape cod travel series. i plan on adding a bunch of info about great places to eat and i will post that here too, if i get around to it.

To the Beach!
As the cape is surrounded on all sides by water its no surprise that going to the beach is what most people do when on the cape. In addition to ocean beaches and bay beaches there are also dozens of ponds if you are more into fresh water. Follow the OnCape Beaches website to all of your beach info needs.

Out on the Water
There are lost of different opportunities to get out on the water on Cape Cod. I've never done it in all the time I have been visiting the cape but i can only imagine its a lot of fun! The Lobster Roll Cruises goes out of Sesuit Harbor in East Dennis. Think sunset cruise with a lobster roll! Hyannis Whale Watchers Cruises and Provincetown Whale Watch are good if you want to see those big mammals!

Shopping
There is a lot to buy on cape cod! If you are into antiques this will be a dream come true for you as you cannot throw a stick without hitting a antique shop. A drive along route 6A would be a perfect shopping outing! Eden Hand Arts has beautiful jewelry and is the original home to the cape cod ball bracelet and have quite a cult following. They don't actually have a website but the link I included has some pictures of their lovely jewelry. Seth grew up going to the Brewster General Store. And while it used to be a little more functional and a little less touristy, it is still fun to get a bag of penny candy and relax on the benches out front. Lemon Tree is just a nice collection of shops, including great chocolates, beautiful pottery, and a great kitchen shop.

Hiking and Biking
Okay, so Cape Cod is virtually flat so their won't be too much strenuous hiking but there are lots of places to take beautiful walks and nice mellow bike rides. And don't think bike rides are out of the question just because you don't have your bike. You can rent bikes right at the Rail Trail in Brewster at Rail Trail Bike Shop. Nickerson State Park is right in Brewster and also has lovely ponds for swimming and fishing. The OnCape website has hiking and biking cape wide.

winner winner chicken dinner

2009-04-30T21:09:00.003-04:00

i love fried chicken. i have a lot of favorite foods but when it really comes down to it, my most favorite foods in the world are pizza, french fries, and fried chicken. if i had to eat one food for the rest of my life it would not be any of these three, but at least one would be part of my death row meal.
like so many foods i really love, i have a history with fried chicken. i can still see my mom shaking her chicken legs and thighs in no more than flour before frying them up for dinner. we used to go to this restaurant called zim's when i was a kid that was little more than a fancy denny's. but they had the best fried chicken wings, which we called drumettes for some reason (little drumstick?). we used to go there every christmas day for a number of years and all order those drumettes. my mom would try to replicate these delicious bits of fried goodness at home with ranch on the side for dipping. i am a total sucker for chicken fingers and fried chicken sandwiches, both with ranch dressing too.
i have needed a good fried chicken recipe for a while. seth makes chicken cutlet schnitze l which is dammed good but just not the same as picking up a piece of fried chicken in your hand and taking a bite. so a while back when everyday food arrived with a recipe for rosemary fried chicken, i didn't hesitate to make it. i have made it three or four times now and i just made it again last night. it is so good and so simple! i love it cuz you don't have to stand over a hot stove and fry the chicken all the way to doneness. you just get a nice crust on it and let the oven finish it off. its worth it to let the chicken marinate in the buttermilk for a few hours and you must use extra rosemary. i use just thighs cuz they are so meaty and delicious and the skin fries up really nicely.
if you love fried chicken like i do, cook this dish up in a hurry!

is there such thing as a free lunch?

2009-04-30T20:27:00.005-04:00

i think that if you read this blog you get the idea that i love food. and there is one type of food i really love -- free food. one of the perks of being a health care provider is that you can take advantage of pharmaceutical company sponsored dinners. these meals do involve a lot of ethical questions but for the most part i choose to ignore those questions and just focus on the free meals at really great restaurants.
since i work on the seacoast of new hampshire these restaurants are in portsmouth and last week i found myself at jumpin' jays fish cafe listening to a lecture on smoking cessation in primary care. while i love a free meal i only go to topics i am interested in and smoking cessation happens to be a strong interest. with cigarette smoking increasing ones risk of all causes of death by 5,000 percent, i wouldn't be doing my job as a nurse practitioner if i didn't discuss quitting with my patients, and i do at every opportunity.
but this is really suppose to be more of a restaurant review than a post about health care so let me return to the restaurant at hand. i have wanted to try jumpin' jays for a while and i was excited that a good restaurant and a great topic were being offered together. the way these things work is like a prix fixed meal. this evening we had a choice of appetizer, salad, main, and dessert. the service is always quite wonderful and they start you out with a glass of wine the minute you walk in the room. they serve the appetizer and salad while the lecture is going on and dinner and dessert are served after.
i started out with the maine crab cakes served over baby greens and a wasabi remoulade. the cakes were almost all crab, spiked with kernels of sweet corn, and accented wonderfully with the spicy wasabi remoulade, which was a lot like spicy ketchup-mayo, but tasty all the same.
for my salad i went with the straight up caesar. i am a true caesar connoisseur as my mom makes one of the best most garlicky, anchovy-y caesars i have ever had. and i have to say that jumpin' jays caesar was pretty great. i find that many restaurants don't put a lot into their caesars, which tend to just be romaine lettuce with packaged caesar dressing. the dressing is usually thick and tangy without enough saltiness. but the caesar this evening was dressed perfectly with a dressing that really pulled in all the flavors of a true caesar. it did not come with anchovies but the dressing tasted like they were in there.
for my main i had the pan seared diver scallops served with a garlicky spinach and mashed potatoes. they were cooked well though they weren't really hot when they reached me and the serving portion was huge. yes this is a good thing but after an appetizer and a salad, not to mention two glasses of bordeaux, i was stuffed and couldn't finish all of my scallops.
being as full as i was and in the interest of getting back to portland at a semi reasonable hour, i left without waiting for dessert.
the lecture was surprisingly good, though of course all about the smoking cessation drug chantix. i tend to think its kind of funny that pharmaceutical companies think that by giving you free food and pens and boxes of tissue that you will actually prescribe their drugs more. but the reality is, if it didn't work they wouldn't spend their money on it. i for one am not swayed by the freebies and i always try to prescribe generic drugs to save my patients money. the trouble is, chantix really is the best drug for quitting smoking, its very expensive, and there is no generic.
and here is where the ethical question comes into play for me: if the pharmaceutical companies didn't pay for all these fancy dinners, or sponsor the doctors who give the lectures, would they be able to offer their drugs to consumers at a more reasonable price? but like i said before, i choose to focus on the free meal.

arti-choke-y

2009-04-19T17:35:00.004-04:00

i was just going to write a little post about artichokes when i checked mark bittman's blog to find a post about artichokes. the march issue of saveur had a great article about artichokes in which the author (david plotnikoff) summed up, more eloquently than i ever could, my childhood experiences with artichokes: "the big, meaty artichokes on my family table were served in an unpretentious style: steamed, pulled apart leaf by leaf, each leaf dipped in melted butter or best foods mayonnaise and pulled through clenched teeth to scrape away the flavorful flesh, until all that was left was the succulent heart." like the author, artichokes were commonplace on my family dinner table as a kid growing up in california. it wasn't until moving to the east coast that i realized how strange this strangest fruit really is. multiple times, when buying artichokes at the supermarket, i have been asked by the checker and other customers what they are and how are they cooked and eaten. they make me think of my mom and her obsession with best foods mayonnaise.
my cooking is pretty tame when it comes to preparing artichokes. though we eat them quite frequently, it is usually prepared as they are above. i do make this amazing turkey and artichoke stuffed shells that i can't get enough of. i substitute the ricotta for tofu, which i do in every recipe that calls for ricotta. its a great easy way to get some extra soy protein and i swear you can't tell the difference. i also prepare the recipe with whatever red sauce i feel like making. most recently we started buying big jars of marinated hearts at bj's and throwing them on pizza and in pasta.
the saveur article mentions that while most artichokes come from california there is a farm in maine that grows artichokes! four season farm in brooksville, me is run by barbara damrosch and eliot coleman. they have a farm stand that is open from 1-5 pm, Monday through Saturday, June 16 through September. it will definitely be on of my summer day trips to pick up some artichokes! and i am going to be adventurous and try some new artichoke recipes.

vietnamese penicillin

2009-04-06T19:36:00.006-04:00

last weekend seth started to get a scratch in his throat. he was craving something that would soothe his sore throat and warm his insides. he knew what he needed, and it was pho. that delectable noodle soup that is eaten morning, noon, and night in the country of vietnam and is conveniently accessible in portland, maine.
now we usually hit up thanh thanh 2 but we have been meaning to try huong's downtown at 349 cumberland ave, so off we headed on foot. it was just after noon when we entered the tiny restaurant which is in serious need of a face lift. the eight or so tables are dominated by a large try of asian condiments. the walls and ceiling are a sad shade of white and of course there is the requisite collection of vietnamese kitsch decorating those sad walls. the menu is limited, only a few pages of classic vietnamese fare. but i never hold it against a place when they do a few things really good, and this is just what huong's did.
we started out with the fresh summer rolls with shredded pork, and incarnation i had never tried before, and i have had my fare share of summer rolls. they were wonderful, fresh and salty, complex and simple all at the same time. needless to say, we both ordered the pho, seth choose the beef pho while i stuck with the chicken. they were awesome! i love adding in the extras: fresh basil, mung bean sprouts, unidentified leafy greens, and fresh lime. i always add some hot sauce and hoisin to my steaming bowl to get just the right kick.
i carefully eyed the table of vietnamese diners to see the way they consumed their pho. in their right hand they held the chop sticks and in the left the soup spoon, which both ladled broth into their mouths but also aided the chopsticks in scooping up the solids.
the meal was a deal, as vietnamese should be, topping out at around $20 with tip. i remember this one place in the south end of boston that charged like $15 for a bowl of pho and all i could think about were the suckers that paid that much when the could have gotten a better, cheaper bowl in chinatown.
the pho did the trick in soothing seth's throat but unfortunately he still ended up with a full blown head cold and i inevitably started to feel that scratchy tickle in my own throat the following tuesday. as the day progressed i knew there was only one thing that would help my raw throat -- pho! seth did not complain when i suggested we hit up thanh thanh 2 for dinner that night.
on a side note, thanh thanh 2 is one of the reasons i decided portland was the town for me. i really thought i would love portland even before i visited but i truthfully envisioned myself stocking up on pho in boston's chinatown to store in my freezer for just such an occasion. so when seth and i first came to visit portland, on a very rainy weekend in early march, and marya and otis took us to thanh thanh 2 for dinner, i knew i had truly found home.
this time we started out with the fried egg rolls which are always delicious but a bit hazardous. they are so good yet served directly from the fryer and so i always burn my tongue in my hurry to consume their goodness. again i choose the chicken pho with the biggest difference between huong's and thanh thanh 2's being that the latter serves it with sliced jalapenos and less unidentifiable leafy greens. as always i loaded in the spicy and by the end of the bowl felt my sinuses clear and my throat soothed. seth branched out this time and ordered the thanh thanh mi vit tiem, a whole duck leg soup with yellow noodle and chinese broccli. otis has been raving about this bowl of soup for some time and seth felt it lived up to the raves. its pretty similar to pho, except its served with yellow noodles instead of rice noodles and there are more vegetables cooked in the broth.
as much as i consider myself to be a very adventurous eater, i only order two things at vietnamese restaurants: chicken pho and bun (rice noodles not in a soup) with grilled pork and hopefully egg rolls. its not that i am not willing to try new things, its just that these two dishes are so delicious and i don't want to be disappointed with something not as good. a lot of the time i look around at what other people get and it sort of looks like chinese food to me. if i wanted chinese i would get chinese, so i always order my standbys. there is one exception and that is when i have the pleasure to dining at pho viet huong on mulberry street in manhattan, where i always order the grilled beef and paypaya salad. it is always on the special menu and it is literally the food of the gods. if i had to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life this would be it. i have ordered grilled beef salads off of many a vietnamese and thai menu but none has ever compared to this one.
so i would like to say that eating the pho last tuesday healed me and i woke up wednesday a new woman. but i can't. my sore throat never did turn into a full blow head cold, but it did linger for quite a few days. in any event, we are lucky as hell to live in this northern new england city and have such awesome vietnamese food so readily available. seth and i suffered through three years in connecticut with only a few month window of good vietnamese food. so get out and enjoy these great options in the almost endless array of ethnic food in portland.
and someday, as portland food coma pleads, we may actually get some decent mexican in this town.

stimulating the economy with a staycation

2009-03-11T11:25:00.004-04:00

i have had this fantasy for a long time about secretly planning a trip to some tropical island and surprising seth with it. its a fantasy i can't make a reality yet but i did try to come close.
back in early february i was checking out the weekly email from travelzoo about great travel deals, when i noticed a special at the inn by the sea in cape elizabeth. this small hotel sits right on crescent beach state park, one of my favorite beaches, and the deal was really great! i thought, i can book this hotel for seth's birthday on march 6th and surprise him with it. so that's what i did, and i almost made it all the way to his birthday without telling him. i thought he needed something to look forward to so a week before his birthday i told him about the surprise.
let me just talk about how amazing this deal really was. the price for a fireplace room for one night was $129. i know this is a splurge but this room is $300 to $400 in the summer. and it was truly a beautiful room. the whole place was redone in june 2008 and it is comfortably luxurious. the bathroom was obscenely huge with a glassed-in shower the size of my whole bathroom at home. we had a view of the ocean from our room, a plush king size bed, a comfortable sitting area, and a huge flat screen tv.
when i was making the reservations i check out the hotel restaurant, sea glass. the menu looked great but it was a little spendy so i figured i would find some place nearby to dine. around the same time i was checking out the list of restaurants participating in maine restaurant week, which just happened to coincide with seth's birthday weekend. and there it was: sea glass was participating in restaurant week. for $30.09 per person we could get a three course meal! so i made reservations.
the dining rooms is quite small, which creates an intimate feeling with the warm furniture and over sized chairs. we were presented with both the restaurant week menu and the regular menu, which allowed us to see what a deal we were really getting. most of the entrees at the sea glass are around $25 so to get a 3 course meal for $30 is really amazing.
for our first course i choose the beet and spinach salad and seth picked the lobster bisque. my salad was delicious with both red and gold beets and what the menu termed a "snow" of goat cheese and smoked bacon. seth really liked his lobster bisque but felt that by the bottom of the bowl the tarragon oil overpowered the other flavors.
for our main courses i choose the grilled gaucho steak frites with chimichurri sauce and seth had the maine seafood paelle. i think the cut of steak was a new york strip grilled to a perfect medium rare. i love when i can get a steak that has a little char on the outside but still manages to be pink and juicy on the inside. the frites were amazing and quite reminiscent of duck fat fries in the flavor but not shape. i'm a big fan of chimichurri sauce, but i did think this one could have used a little more brightness. though i'm not sure i am one to comment as the chef is argentinian (once grilling season starts i will share my recipe for chimichurri). the paelle was slightly modified from the regular menu with the omission of lobster, but seth love it just the same. it contained all native seafood with maine shrimp, wild mussels, local clams, and calamari. seth could not stop raving about the smokiness the chorizo added.
for dessert i got the flourless chocolate souffle cake and i talked seth into getting something different in the vanilla creme caramel. the chocolate cake was absolutely decadent and dense. i like the creme caramel which was basically a flan served with this amazing passion fruit sorbet, but seth didn't care for it.
they have a full bar at the sea glass but seth went with a couple of local beers and i had a glass of wine. they don't serve beer on tap but they do have a good selection of beers in bottles. their wines by the glass selection was decent and well priced. our server was great -- efficient and helpful and never left us wanting for anything. all in all it was a great meal and i would recommend that people go out of their way to dine at this unassuming hotel restaurant in cape elizabeth. a couple of weeks ago i did notice they were doing a weeknight special of three courses for $25 but i don't see it on the website now.
after dinner we headed back up to our room to do what seth most wanted to do on his birthday night: watch the celtics play the cavaliers on that big screen tv. the next morning we lounged around our room for a couple of hours, drinking the coffee by design coffee supplied with the coffee maker in our room. seth said it was his best birthday ever.
i made the statement to seth that we were stimulating the economy with this little indulgence. and that got me thinking that spending money right now is kind of a charitable act. so if you have a little extra money, go spend it on yourself and feel good about it! and even if you don't have extra money right now keep you eyes open for specials at the inn by the sea in coming winters as it is surely worth the splurge.

gwyneth and me, lifestyle gurus

2009-02-23T15:36:00.005-05:00

when i decided to start this blog WAY back in november 2008, i specifically chose a vague sort of name so that i could write about whatever i wanted to. i didn't simply want it to be a food blog; i didn't simply want it to be a blog about being a nurse practitioner; i wanted it to be able to grow with me and my changing interests. as my readers know jenner's mind is usually on food, but maybe it won't always be like that.
then i read an article about gwyneth paltrow in the style section of the new york times yesterday and i finally realized what this blog really is. just like gp i am trying to sell my lifestyle brand! i talk about food, i talk about eating out, i talk about health, i talk about the environment -- it's a lifestyle people!!! gwyneth's got goop, and i've got wijm (if you didn't figure it out -- where is jenner's mind).
so while martha and oprah might be watching out for gwyneth, gwyneth better watch out for me! if you haven't already, check out goop. its, um ... interesting.

7 to 10 days

2009-02-22T16:52:00.003-05:00

think of this posting as a public service announcement.

the average cold lasts seven to ten days. "colds", which in health care we call upper respiratory infections or rhinosinusitis, are caused by viruses. viruses can make you very sick. influenza, or the flu, is a virus and people are made very sick by this virus. viruses do not respond to antibiotics, only bacterial infections do. you are not less sick just because you don't need a antibiotic. you need to take care of your self. rest and fluids will do more for you then all the over the counter cold medicines combined. yes you are contagious and if i give you antibiotics you will not be less contagious, because as i just said, viruses do not respond to antibiotics.

save yourself money, save your health care provider time, and save many people from being exposed to your illness by not going to 'the doctor' when you have a cold. if you find yourself sick after 10 days or getting sicker after about 7, then you can head to your 'doctor' because you may now have a bacterial infection. this sometimes happens because your immune system gets run down from fighting a virus and all that snot in your head is the perfect breading ground for bacteria and wham you have a bacterial infection on top of your virus. this happens more often in people who smoke or have depressed immune systems. so quit smoking, eat well, and get eight hours of sleep a night!

the best thing to do for a cold is to not get one in the first place!!!! so again, take care of yourself! wash your hands like crazy in the winter, especially if you are around kid cuz they are little germ vectors. take more vitamin c -- i swear by emergen-c. i truely believe that one of the reasons i rarely get sick is that i eat garlic and onions in just about everything. they are both in the allium family and contain antiseptic, anti-viral, and anti-bacterial chemicals.

when i feel something coming on i drink a lot of tea and water. many 'hippy' brands of teas (traditional medicinals, yogi tea) make great concoctions for respiratory health and to sooth sore throats. peppermint tea is very good for respiratory health. to clear out those stuffed sinuses do a facial steam: pour near boiling water into a big glass bowl and tent your head over it with a towel and breath in the steam. if you have it, put five drops of a menthol-y essential oil (tea tree, peppermint, rosemary, eucalyptus) and benefit from their antiseptic properties.

i know this is a little different from my usual food-obsessed posts but i'm pretty passionate about health too and i'm a little sick of seeing my patients for colds! and its not even march.

the perfect bagel

2009-02-22T16:10:00.002-05:00

i have to start this entry by stating that i am not from new york city and so i'm a little more flexible than some about bagels. as mentioned before, i grew up in calfornia eating A LOT of bagel, almost all from marin bagel co. or noah's bagels. in santa cruz, where i went to college the bagelry put out some amazing combinations of toppings and flavored cream cheese that make my mouth water just thinking about them. with this said i love new york bagels and a trip to the big apple is incomplete without indulging in a chewy poppy seed bagel from one of the thousands of delis that puts out great bagels. and while my standards may be more lax than others, i still would rather not eat than have one of those pieces of bread in the shape of a bagel that many supermarket have in their bakery section and call bagels.
so after driving by many times and seeing an ad in the bollard for 158 pickett street cafe, claiming to be the home of the best bagels in the world, seth and i finally stopped in. its a super cute little cafe that has sort of a cabin-y feel to it. i was a little annoyed that their menu on the wall had no description of the items. am i just suppose to guess what is in or on each bagel and sandwich? i scanned the counter area looking for a printed menu with more detail but to now avail. so i decided to just go with the standby, poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, tomatoes, and red onion, but they were out of poppy. onion was a fine substitution.
in my mind i was wondering how this bagel would come out: open face or sandwich style? seth and i found a tiny little table, i got a cup of water in one of their reusable water cups, and i checked the place and the people out while we waited for our bagel. a few minutes later a very good looking guy with piercing blue eyes came over to our table with our bagel, served open face. first point in their favor as this is the way i think a bagel should be served. each bagel half was topped with a perfect schmear of cream cheese -- not too little not too much. two thinly sliced tomato slices and thin slivers of red onion sat on top of the cheese. the bagel was finished off with fresh cracked black pepper and big crystals of salt. after a couple of bites i realized there was also a drizzle of olive oil.
in my mind it was perfection. the bagel was light yet chewy with a good flavor all its own. the toppings were dispersed over the top of the bagel perfectly as to allow one to get a little of everything in each bite. but not overwhelming like when some places cut the onions too thick and all you taste is onion. it would have all been complete with just the salt and pepper but the olive oil really pushed it over the top.
all in all, i don't know if this was the best bagel in the world or even the best bagel i have ever had. but it was a great bagel and may be the best bagel in the portland area if not maine. and yes i have been to mr. bagels, a good bagel but not a great bagel.

a little peruvian beach action in maine

2009-02-15T21:03:00.002-05:00

seth did it again. he made an amazing creation utilizing sweet maine shrimp. this time it came in the form of cebiche (also known as ceviche). seth and i fell in love with cebiche while traveling along the pacific coast of peru and one bite of his maine shirmp cebiche brought my right back to an open air restaurant in huanchaco. a good cibeche can't be simpler with lime juice, cilantro, red onions, and salt as your only seasonings. this dish warmed me up on a cold february night in portland, maine.

i heart mark bittman

2009-02-15T20:36:00.003-05:00

in honor of valentine's day, i will admit i love mark bittman. if you happened to catch any of the episodes of the disappointingly boring spain: on the road again, then you know that mario batali, gwyneth paltrow, and that hot spanish chick all call him 'bitty.' oh bitty, you have such a way with food.
i have owned his cook book how to cook everything for a good 8 years now but i have only recently truly embraced it. it so amazing to think about something you want to cook, check the index, and there you find the perfect recipe for your meal.
this happened tonight actually. in a recent post on his blog, bitten, bitty shamed me into giving up canned beans for dried beans. so with a bag of dried cannellini beans calling my name from my pantry, i decided i wanted to make something with sausage. i checked out how to cook everything and before i knew it i was eating tuscan white beans and italian sausage. the dish was as simple as it sounds but in truth this is bitty's MO. simple food cooked simply and deliciously.
the cookbook has even converted seth who usually refuses to cook from a recipe. now i have come home on numerous occasions to find one of bittty's dishes waiting for me to consume. so if you don't already own it, go out right now and buy the tenth anniversary edition of how to cook everything.
(no i was not paid by the mark bittman omnimedia corporation to write this.)

bag lady

2009-02-11T08:49:00.004-05:00

i know it may be cliched to say but californians care more about the environment. and as i was born and raised in that state i have had a consciousness about the environment almost as long as i can remember. so when this new craze of going green popped up a few years ago, i was both excited and a little scared that it was just a fad. i also decided to challenge myself to find ways that i could be more green. this is when i decided to be more diligent about plastic bags.

no, i'm not talking about plastic shopping bags, i've been on the tip for years. i have used reusable bags grocery shopping since i started shopping for myself. i remember just a mere seven years ago, as i purchased a cloth bag in stop and shop, being told by the checker that i was the first person he had ever sold a bag to. seth has had a shtick for year where he tells the bagger his girlfriend is trying to save the world. i also have an obscene collection of reusable bags, and seth in fact calls me a bag lady, though my bag problem has grown significantly.

any person who is diligent about using reusable shopping bags knows that you still end up with a shit load of them because you forget to bring one into target or you don't speak up quick enough when they bag your one item at the convenience store. so that is one of my other ever growing collections of bags.

what i am talking about being more diligent about are all the plastic bags that everything we buy comes in. the plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, the plastic bag for my loaf of bread, the plastic bag for my frozen fruit, the plastic bag for my ball of pizza dough, the plastic bag for my slivered almonds.... the list just keeps going. and then there is the plastic wrapping and the plastic containers, and the plastic bottles, and the plastic forks. our world is fucking plastic and what is a girl who is a hippy at heart suppose to do?

i rinse them all out, dry them on my large aloe plant, recycle them, reuse them, or repurpose them. this creates another collection of bags. there is the collection of bags that are still strong enough and clean enough to be reused. and then there is the collection of bags that need to be recycled. portland is amazing about recycling (another reason why i love this city) but they don't recycle plastic bags at the curb. so every month or so, i bring my mammoth collection of need-to-be-recycled bags into hannafords or whole foods to recycle them.

of note i actually went to grad school with a woman whose father invented the plastic soda bottle. as you can imagine her family is super rich. she is a sweet person and i wouldn't want to wish ill will on her family, but maybe daddy should have to pay for some of the mess he has made.

one of my other new environmental challenges has been to get rid of all toxic house hold cleaners. the garden of eating blog has a great section on this if you want to take this challenge.

asian home cooking

2009-01-28T19:57:00.004-05:00

as i have mentioned before, seth really loves asian food, and i am a pretty big fan myself. so we have been cooking up some yummy asian food at home. seth recently made this awesome thai curry he has been making for years and i tried a new recipe for pork meatballs from this new cook book we got call food lovers vietnamese, a culinary journey of discovery. both recipes follow.

red or green chicken curry:
heat 1 oz oil and 2-3 tbsp red or green curry paste for one minute
add 3/4-1 lb cubed chicken until brown
add 1 cup coconut milk and 2 cup water, bring to boil, simmer 15 minutes
add veggies (tomatoes, snow peas, shitakis, etc.) cook 5 minutes
add 1 tbsp fish sauce, 2 tsp brown sugar, 2 tsp grated lime rind, 1/2 cup basil
toss well and season with salt and pepper to your liking
serve with basmati rice

this past time seth made this dish he used maine shrimp in addition to chicken. the shrimp worked beautifully. any protien really would. my only complaint about this amazingly flavorful meal is that the curry is never as thick as the ones you get in thai restaurants. in looking at the recipe it may be because you add so much water. cutting back on the water a little may help to thicken it. we also always use low fat coconut milk which probably changes the consistency a little. i'm sure we have tried to thicken it with corn starch before, but i can't remember how it turned out.

vietnamese pork meatballs (nem nuong):
2 tsp fish sauce
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 small shallot, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1lb coarsely ground pork
1 head tender lettuce, leaves separated
1 carrot, peeled and cut into thin strips
1 small cucumber, peeled, halved lengthwise, seeded, and thinly sliced into half-rounds
12 or more fresh mint leaves
1 tbsp vegetable oil
pepper

put fish sauce and sugar in a bowl and whisk until sugar is completely dissolved. stir in shallot and garlic, and season with pepper to taste. add ground pork and mix together thoroughly. cover and chill in refrigerator for 1 hour.
pinch off about 1 tbsp pork mixture and shape into small meatballs.
arrange lettuce leaves, carrots, cucumber, and mint leaves in individual piles on a large platter.
heat oil in a nonstick skillet, then add meatballs and cook, rolling them around, for 5 minutes, or until golden all over.
to eat, put meatball in center of lettuce leaf with carrot cucumber and mint leaf. wrap up and dip in your favorite sauce.

i served the meatballs with a super simple peanut sauce made by mixing equal parts water, hoisin sauce, and peanut butter. i also make a quick nuoc cham by mixing fish sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice, garlic, and thai chilies. both sauces were also from food lovers vietnamese.

the meatballs were delicious. the sugar sort of caramelized all over the outside so even though they were quite savory they had this delicate sweetness to them. we ate them as dinner but they would also be a great appetizer.

indulgences in fat

2009-01-21T21:00:00.004-05:00

for a while seth and i have been wanting to try the strangely named restaurant duck fat. but knowing that any restaurant with such a name would be an indulgence, we had to wait until we had a little extra cash. with some money burning a hole in our pockets we decided what better day to splurge than some random wednesday in the middle of january (in fact it is not so random a day in that we have a new president today, but this isn't really a political blog so we will stay away from that for now).
from our home in the west end we walked down to that foodie corner of portland, nestled between old port and the east end, which houses duck fat. it is so named because they use duck fat to fry their french fries. and oh what french fries they were! it is no hyperbole to say they were the best french fries i have ever had. it is rarely a french fry i meet that i do not need to salt, but these were perfectly seasoned, not only with salt but with little bits of fried garlic. we opted for truffled ketchup and garlic aoli as our dipping sauces. they were wonderful complements to the fries and quite ample portions. this is a lot for me to say, because as seth points out, i am a sauce whore.
they have a nice selection of panini, salads, and soups and today seth and i both went for panini. i had the tuna melt with provolone, capers, tomato, and cornichons. seth was a little skeptical at my selection but was pleasantly surprised to taste the deliciousness. this was no ordinary chicken-of-the-sea tuna melt, no doubt made with high quality canned tuna in olive oil (i don't know this for sure but its what i like to think for my $8.75 sandwich). it was salty and crispy and perfectly filling. seth went for the long island duck confit panino which he loved very much. the waiter suggested that for a mere $2.50 more he could add goat cheese. seth opted not to add it as the sandwich was already$9.50 but said that he did think the goat cheese would have been great addition. he thought their panini were wonderfully thin and commented on how it is difficult to find a panino with the right bread to filling ratio.
the service was excellent and even though you order at the counter the attention was better than table service at many places. with a tip commensurate with the fine service, our bill was just over $30. a bit of a splurge for a mid-week lunch for two. but as they are open until 9pm every night but sunday, it would be an affordable dinner. they also had some signs up about an awesome happy hour featuring a pbr tall boy and a small french fry for $5. sounds like a very happy hour to me.

i could get used to this

2009-01-18T20:52:00.009-05:00

seth is unemployed. in these hard economic times it is a little stressful, but we are managing. he has defiantly picked up the slack around the house, which includes making dinner. i have a very long commute to and from work and there is nothing better to coming home to a home-cooked meal, ready and waiting.
especially if that meal is vietnamese-style maine shrimp summer rolls and chicken satay with home-made peanut sauce. in an effort to keep himself from going stir crazy, seth set about cooking this extravagant meal this past tuesday night. he consulted 3 separate cook books for the peanut sauce recipe. it had a wonderful flavor but was a little thick for actual dipping. he julienned carrots and cucumbers, boiled up some rice vermicelli noodles, broiled the chicken satay, and blanched the shrimp. luckily he didn't roll the rolls himself because it turns out he is no good at that. so we each assembled our own rolls, one by delicious one.
the following night i cooked dinner for seth, otis, and marya. from my stack of recipes to try i selected a pork loin stuffed with figs and blue cheese and a quinoa and spinach gratin. the pork loin, from cooking light, turned out pretty good. it was my first time using my new probe thermometer and i didn't quite realize that i wouldn't be able to hear the alarm in the living room. so it was a little overcooked. and as much as i love that fig-y taste, i don't like the crunch of all the seeds. the gratin recipe i got from the garden of eating blog was amazing. i changed it just a bit, skipping the gruyere and just using some sharp chedder we had in the fridge and i didn't use any of the three fresh herbs the recipe called for. its winter in new england, i have no herb garden, and i'm not spending a small fortune for a few teaspoons of herbs. even without the herbs it was great. cheesy and comforting and filling without being heavy. i ate it with gusto as leftovers for days after.
for dessert marya brought a selection of cookies from two fat cats bakery. yum yum.

quite palace

2009-01-18T17:49:00.006-05:00

last saturday, after returning from my wedding dress shopping fiasco, seth and i headed out for a bite to eat. we decided we wanted indian, but had no leads to the best indian in portland, so we headed down congress to india palace (565 congress st.). there was absolutely no one in the restaurant. usually i take this as a message that i do not want to eat in such an establishment. but as i had just alerted seth that i was about to have a hunger melt down, we went inside anyway. needless to say, as the only costumers, the service was very prompt.
we quickly ordered the palace mixed platter (a favorite of seth's at any restaurant and any cuisine). along with our taj mahal beer, it came out fast and proved to be a plate of fried deliciousness. it included samosas, tikki pakora, paneer pakora, and papadam. the accompanying sauces, we will call them brown, green, and oniony, were great.
i'm a very adventurous eater, and in some circles the pure fact that i eat indian food would be considered adventurous. but in truth i tend to play it pretty safe when it comes to indian. for our mains we ordered chicken tikka saag, a perennial favorite, and malai kofta, a relatively new favorite. we ordered them at medium spice which was the perfect amount of spice -- enough to give the dish a nice heat but not so hot that all other flavors are overpowered. along with some naan and basmati rice, the dinner was really great. both dishes were richly flavorful and aromatic. it absolutely satisfied my indian food craving and didn't cause a stomach ache later on.
the atmosphere of the restaurant was a little lacking, though this may have been helped if there were other people in the restaurant. as it was a saturday night at 7:30 pm i can only imagine that india palace must do a great lunch business in order to stay in business. but in these hard economic times, maybe less people are going out for indian.

david's bridal fiasco

2009-01-12T19:30:00.002-05:00

i could tell you all about it but this sums it up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEphYTA-s50
check out this amazing video made by my fabulous friend about our trip to david's bridal, or db as we like to call it.

a shower a day keeps the mrsa away

2009-01-08T19:39:00.003-05:00

i won't delve into the gritty details of the events that inspired this posting, but i will ask the simple question: why wouldn't you want to bathe on a regular basis? i personally shower just about every day though i'm known to skip a day on the weekends. and i frequently do suggest to my patients plagued by eczema that less frequent showers may be good for their oh-so-dry skin. but when i say less frequent i mean every other day or every two days, i don't mean skipping a shower until you have the undeniable odor of human stench.
but i wonder if i am missing something important here. has my stinky patient suddenly found herself and her family homeless and without means to clean her body? is she so horribly depressed that she can't bring herself to bathe? or does she simply have very bad hygiene habits? these are things that are difficult to assess cuz what do you say? hey honey, i noticed that you reek, why is this so?

i've got a crush on you

2009-01-07T21:54:00.006-05:00

i have a thing for bakeries. it is such a serious thing that seth says i get crushes on bakeries. its true, a good bakery can win a special place in my heart and visiting such a place can make me fell all warm and fuzzy inside. so i am pretty lucky to be here in portland because we have a few excellent bakeries.
my favorite is scratch baking co. in south portland. it is truly one of the cutest bakeries i have ever visited and i consider moving to the willard beach neighborhood just to be close to it. in portland proper there is the quite adorable two fat cats bakery on india street in the old port. walking into this place you just get a sense that the women who work here truly love their jobs. it was even written up in bon appetite magazine. also in the old port, right on commercial, is standard baking co. in a beautiful space with beautiful baked goods. its located right under fore street, which it is actually affiliated with (and with two fat cats i just learned).
my standby is always a chocolate chip cookie and a cup of coffee. i've heard the chicken pot pies at two fat cats are amazing and the madelines are light and fluffy at standard.
let me know if you have a bakery i should check out! i wouldn't mind a new love affair.

i can't help myself

2009-01-07T17:06:00.002-05:00

call it what you will, but i love crappy tv. seth has frequently said to me, "jenner, it's amazing that someone as smart as you could like something so stupid." so with those sentiments in mind, when i saw that the new season of the bachelor was starting i quickly and shamefully dvr'd it before he could notice. today, on my mid-week day off, as the snow fell outside, i enjoyed the guilty pleasure of the bachelor. i will say that i could never watch it on live tv again, as i must fast forward through the inevitable moment when one of the bachelorettes reads the bachelor the rhyming poem she has written just for him.
in my defense, i have to use my brain a lot at work. i spend a lot of time just listening to people and trying to find something meaningful and motivational to say to them. between people with sky high blood pressure and cholesterol, obesity, and borderline blood sugars (that is all one patient) and everyone from teens to adults with anxiety to arguing with patients that want antibiotics for their viral upper respiratory infection and treating anal warts, my work can take a lot out of me. and on my day off, god dammit, i want a little brainless activity to relax to. and if the bachelor doesn't fit that bill i don't know what does.

bring on the bbq!

2009-01-03T13:54:00.002-05:00

some may argue that a girl from california, who lives deep in northern new england, and has only briefly visited the south, does not really know barbecue. and this may, in fact, be true. but i do love the barbecue that i have eaten in my life and i fantasize about a bbq road trip through the south.
so i was quite pleased when we freshly moved to portland and marya and otis took us to beale street bbq in south portland. it was great and to my, albeit bbq naive, taste buds, it tasted authentic. plus the service is wonderful.
we started with these amazing fried cheese curds that had cinnamon in the batter and were served with a sweet and tangy dipping sauce. i chose for my main course a half a rack of st. louis baby back ribs, which come with corn bread and choice of two sides. mac and cheese and greens, please! the servings are very generous, and even though i like to eat A LOT i had about half my entree to bring home and enjoy for lunch the next day.
we went again a month later, again with otis and marya, and the food was again terrific. i ordered exactly the same thing and again it proved to be a great and pleasing choice, with leftovers!
well last night seth and i decided we were in the mood for a little bbq so we headed over to south portland, this time without otis and marya, to get our bbq on. overall beale street bbq let me down this time. first, they had changed their cheese curds. they were still good but no longer had cinnomon in the batter and are now being served with a creamy garlic sauce. they really were quite tasty but if i had my choice would pick the old cheese curds.
as i can be a creature of habit, i ordered the same thing again for my entree. the sides were consistent and wonderful but of my six ribs, four were so over cooked they were like jerky. what a disappointment! seth had a better ratio of meaty verses jerky ribs but he still had a couple jerky.
i don't know if it was just a bad night for beale street, or what? we will defiantly give them another chance, cuz 2 out of 3 isn't bad. but i may try buck's naked bbq in freeport before going back.

christmas cooking and eating

2009-01-01T14:33:00.009-05:00

i was going to try to write about my christmas cooking before new year's eve rolled around, but it didn't happen. so will write about christmas today, january 1st, and try to get to new year's eve in a couple of days.
for christmas cooking inspiration i looked through my december cooking magazines from present and past and again martha stewart provided me with many of my dishes. in defense of martha i will say this: her recipes are well written, easy to follow, and produce delicious food. and what is so wrong with that?
for christmas even we went to sandy's house, who is seth's dad's girlfriend. this is our second year in a row so i guess it's becoming a bit of a tradition. its kind of a riot because the guests include sandy's daughter and partner, her daughter's father and his wife, and her two sons. its like this huge extended family that by all cliches shouldn't get along, but do. and lobster is always served. who can beat lobster for christmas eve dinner? the one thing i realized though is that i rush through my lobster. as much as i love that sweet lobster meat, it drives me crazy to have my hands so dirty. i think i prefer a lobster roll, cuz i can take my time to enjoy the lobster without getting messy.
let me talk about what i brought. i have been quite literally obsessed with pepperdews recently. pepperdews are these amazingly sweet and hot little peppers from south africa. i find them in the antipasti bar at the supermarket. i must have had this dish at some point, but i decided that i had to make pepperdews stuffed with goat cheese as an appetizer. they were as wonderful as i imagined they would be. the creamy, salty, tangy, goat cheese was the perfect complement to the sweet spicy crunch of the marinated pepperdews. seth and i also picked up some fresh maine shrimp, which i blanched and served with cocktail sauce. everyone loved their unique flavor and texture.
as it is christmas i had to make some cookies and for christmas eve i made banana chocolate chunk cookies. i have made them before and they are so so so good. the banana improves on something i didn't think could be improved on, the chocolate chip cookie. the recipe calls for walnuts which i leave out and part whole wheat flour. if i had whole wheat flour i would use it but i just sub white flour for the whole wheat.
for christmas dinner we went over to the manach's. just before christmas the patriarch of the family, greg manach, passed away. as christmas is always at the manach's this was in some ways a informal memorial to greg. it was wonderful to be with family and friends and the food was wonderful. greg was an amazing cook himself and he made his living as a butcher so holidays with him were always guaranteed to be delicious. the main course on christmas is always bbq'd beef tenderloin and this year ethan did an amazing job. i contributed to the meal with a wild rice salad and almond-orange cookies.
the almond-orange cookies are just a variation on italian christmas cookies, which is really just the same cookie as mexican wedding balls or russian tea cookies. other than chocolate chip cookies, this is probably my favorite cookie in the world and is so full of memories for me. growing up my dad spent a lot of time hanging out at the fairfax bakery, the local bakery in my hometown of fairfax, ca. he would bring my brother and me in there a lot and sometimes if i was passing by on my own, i just might be lucky enough to spot my dad in the bakery. he would always buy us a treat and my stand-by were two russian tea cookies and a carton of milk. yum-yum.
in addition, i made potato latkes twice in two days to celebrate hanukkah. as a variation on the traditional, i love to mix sweet potatoes in with the regular potatoes. they are super labor intensive and result in a cook that smells like chinese food (as my friend emily frawley pointed out when we met her for drinks later that night) but they are worth it!

deals, like everything, are relative

2008-12-14T15:30:00.003-05:00

just found an interesting article on lobster in the new york times. according to the author, lobster is a steal in new york city right now at $10.99/lb. seriously?!!!! it is $3.99/lb right down the street from my house! this is yet another reminder that i need to take advantage of these amazing lobster prices more often.

another reason to love maine

2008-12-10T20:47:00.005-05:00

maine shrimp. the small sweet, naturally pink morsels of deliciousness. otis and marya had told tales of these treats many times. on monday december 1st, i heard announced on mpbn that the maine shrimp season had officially started and would be an especially long season, i knew i was going to be indulging within days.
saturday, as we did our grocery shopping, we picked up one pound of unshelled maine shrimp for about $4 a pound. later that night, as seth shelled them, he said to me "these are cooked right?" he was fooled by the naturally pink color because they were raw. we blanched half and had shrimp cocktail and sauteed the rest in olive oil and garlic and put them on top of our pizza. SHRIMPALICOUS!!!!
we may have though our shrimp feast was done for the week but it wasn't. sunday night we went to otis and marya's for dinner and after some amazing appetizers of wellfleet oysters in the nude and rockefeller and blue fish smoked by otis's father, we dug into some amazing maine shrimp etouffee prepared by otis.
i have no doubt there will be much more indulging on maine shrimp.

i love me some pizza

2008-12-03T20:28:00.004-05:00

so today, wednesday, is my week day off. yes i am a very lucky woman and i only have to work 4 days a week. its a new and amazing thing, being a nurse practitioner and actually making good money, good enough to only have to work 4 days a week.
so as it is my day off i am responsible for cooking dinner. i was craving a pizza and i had noticed that the pizza dough from hannaford's is starting to do that crazy thing it sometimes does when the bag gets huge and looks like it will pop. i'm sure it has something to do with the yeast. i have been making some especially tasty pizzas recently with home made roasted red peppers, oven roasted tomatoes from whole foods, winter squash, pesto, garlic, onions, and basically whatever else i have in my kitchen that i think would be good on the pizza.
i called my friend jen, who is also a nurse practitioner and also has wednesdays off, to see what she was up to. turned out she was going to lunch with some friends of her's at flatbread company and wanted to know if i wanted to join her for some pizza lunch. that would be a yes! and guess i have to plan something else for dinner. as i have a long commute to work, i decided to walk and meet them at the restaurant. jen was accompanied by her adorable daughter lucy, her friend pete who was visiting from boston, and pete's friend sean, who lives in kennebunk.
the restaurant was pretty quite, as it is a weekday afternoon. we settled into a table in the back corner and convinced each other that a beer with lunch was appropriate. i was reminded of my many years of waitressing and how jealous i would be when people came in for a leisurely lunch on a weekday and ordered booze. and there i was, doing just that, with my allagash white in hand.
the food was great. we started with two house salads, one with goat cheese and one with blue cheese. they came with a light dressing, seaweed, and sesame seeds. delicious! we moved on to our two pizza selections. the homemade sausage pizza is also topped with sun-dried tomatoes, caramelized onions, mushrooms, cheese and herbs and we added tomato sauce as it is a white pizza. we also created our own with roasted red peppers, carmalized onions, kalamata olives, tomato sauce, and cheese. they were both great but i especially loved the briny kalamata olives as the only food seth will not eat are olives so i don't get to partake often.
after lunch we walked over to micucci grocery co., an amazing italian import store with a great deli, pizza and they even offer cooking classes on monday nights. then it was off to whole foods so we could pick up supplies for our respective dinners. jen was making chicken provencal out of how to cook everything (bittman just came out with a brand new edition) and i had decided to make rosemary fried chicken (another martha recipe) after craving it for days. i hope jen's dinner was good because mine was great!

thankful

2008-11-30T18:04:00.008-05:00

while i take time to ponder what i am thankful for on most thanksgivings, this one has been especially poignant in the thankful category.
first i was thankful for some time off. lord knows i deserved it after only one week and two days of work! so with five days off ahead of us, seth and i headed to cape cod for thanksgiving time with his family. we spent the actual day of thanksgiving with his mom. it was a glorious day as i was able to cook all the day away. for an appetizer i prepared a mushroom and bacon dip. it was delicious and far from low fat. i also made a cranberry ginger relish, and i again was forced to ask myself the question: if making cranberry sauce is so easy, why would anyone buy the can? i also made a chocolate pumpkin pie which was utterly decadent. i left off the drizzle of milk chocolate but i don't think the pie suffered.
together, seth's mom and i prepared the stuffed turkey breast that i suggested we make this year. we stuffed it with a sausage, sage, and apricot stuffing. it turned out great. i think it could have cooked a little bit less and i would have rubbed under the skin with butter instead of just over the skin, but it was wonderful. seth's mom completed the meal with string beans and roasted sweet potatoes.
the day was quite good and i was left feeling thankful for seth and good food. i do love martha stewart, but i have to say i was a little disturbed when i realized that everything i prepared, except the stuffing, was a martha stewart recipe. not sure what to make of that.
the part of the weekend that really made me thankful came saturday, when seth's best friend's sister, nena, was married. nena's father, greg, is dying of cancer. there was doubt that he would make it to the wedding, but he did. he is an amazingly wonderful man who, along with his wife betty, have raised three of the most awesome humans i know. greg and betty are two people that i look to as role models for parenting. they are only human and have their flaws, but they are amazing and manage to have so much dignity in such a difficult time.
this experience, with such strong emotions, both high and low, remind me to be thankful for many things. for each moment i have surrounded by loved ones. for those people in my life who love me for who i am. for tradition and change and loving each other and learning from one another through everything.

mainer fnp

2008-11-24T20:01:00.002-05:00

so in one day i got my dea number and my maine driver's license in the mail. i know the dea number means that i can prescribe narcotics, but does the maine license mean i am a mainer? can someone from away ever really be a mainer? i think no.

oh my miyake!

2008-11-24T19:46:00.005-05:00

all i can say is oh my god. this meal was unbelievable. like i said last post, we went really early for dinner in fear of having to wait. we were the first people in the restaurant, which is not our usual style but i like to think we got a little extra special service.
after running next door to the west end deli (133 spring st.) to pick out a bottle from their extensive saki selection (miyake is byob), seth and i decided to partake in the tasting menu #2, putting our dish choices in the hands of the chef. this was a fantastically brilliant choice as our five course japanese meal was something to remember.
it started out with a plate of sashimi containing about eight varieties of the freshest fish. i don't eat uni often but it was WOW! our second course was a northern new england welk. i was so excited because andrew zimern ate welk on last week's maine bizarre foods and i really wanted to try some. it was slow cooked and tender, served cut into bit sized bits in a tastey butter mixture right inside its own shell. third course was braised pork belly. do i need to say more! quickly dipped in soy sauce and spicy mustard it was a party in my mouth. fourth course was soy marinated black cod. yum yum yummy! finally we were served an amazing maki with two types of toro. we finished the meal with a green tea tirimisu and hurried home in the very cold night. yes people, this place is walking distance from my house.
two hours after the start of our meal we left the tiny restaurant. and while it was much busier than when we arrived, we could have still found a spot for the two of us.

exhausted and hungry

2008-11-22T15:33:00.003-05:00

so i started my new job this past week and while i am exhausted from using my brain so very much, it was a great week. its quite strange to call myself nurse practitioner. very strange, in fact. but i love it.
my new job is not exactly the setting i imagined myself in when i was in nursing school and all of my clinical placements were in community health centers in ghettos. that's kind of where i thought i would end up. but finding that job in maine proved difficult. finding any job in maine proved difficult. that's why i am commuting one hour each way to work in new hampshire in a private family practice in an affluent community.
but enough about work. after only one week i don't have much to say except that i have a lot to learn.
as a treat to finally finding and starting a job, seth and i are finally going to indulge our sushi craving. portland has an abundance of sushi restaurant and we love sushi. but being so broke we just havn't been able to rationalize a sushi dinner. we knew that once we could, we would be going to food factory miyake (129 Spring St), at the recommendation of our friends otis and marya. so monday we both started dreaming about our soon to come sushi heaven on saturday night.
we were also anticipating the maine episode of bizarre foods with andrew zimmern. mostly we were watching because he attends the bizarre food death match and otis and marya were there and we wanted to get a peek of them in the back ground. but he also goes to miyake! it is already a very popular and tiny restaurant that is hard to get a table in, and now this! not to mention, it makes us look like johnny-come-latelys. anyway, we are headed over there very early this evening so we don't have to wait. i will write tomorrow about the experience.

brunswick and beer

2008-11-16T17:11:00.002-05:00

yesterday seth and i took a very rainy 'sunday drive' to brunswick. never mind that it was a saturday. brunswick is home of bowdoin college and has an adorable historic downtown. we arrived hungry and we were looking for cushing street and el camino restaurant, supposedly the best mexican restaurant in maine. as a native californian i crave mexican on a regular basis. this place had been recommended by more than one friend and was mentioned briefly in the november issue of food and wine. but we didn't find it.
as we drove across the bridge spanning the androscoggin river, into topsham we spotted the sea dog microbrewery and restaurant. the location cannot be beat! it is inside the former bowdoin mill which is a beautiful brick structure that clearly harnessed the power of the androscoggin river to mill whatever they once milled. the designers of the sea dog have left all the brick exposed and have old-timey photos up from when the mill was functional.
beer and the plenitude of breweries that exist in maine have been a sweet treat for seth and i since moving up here. so naturally we ordered the 10 beer sampler. most were quite tasty, though not being a fruit beer fan (except when i was 19), the 5 ounce taster of the wild blueberry ale was just as much as i would ever want.
the food we ordered ended up to be a mixed bag. we started with the fried calamari which was served with a fire roasted pomadoro. it was served piping hot but the sauce simply tasted like tomato sauce and there were very few tentacles on the plate. overall it was okay. for our main courses we shared the seadog ruben sandwich and the haddock soft tacos. the ruben was good, but not great, though i would order it again if i was having a ruben craving. the haddock soft tacos, on the other hand, were amazing! as the menu stated, they were pan blackened with some yummy sauces thrown on, the most tasty being the avocado crema. i took the side of baja cole slaw and put it inside the tacos cuz whats a taco without a little col (spanish for cabbage). the side of black bean rice was mediocre and tasted like they mixed black beans, rice, and jarred salsa. i'm a little biased because i can make a simple can of black beans into something sublime with little more than chopped onions. but even with the mediocre side i would absolutely order the tacos again.
they also have a nice big deck overlooking the river which must be great on a hot summer day. i would defiantly recommend the sea dog, if only for the amazing setting and great beer.
after lunch we drove back across the river and spent a good hour in the in-door flea market in another amazing mill building. we purchased a very cool, old school moxie soda bottle and a book on the history of the world published in 1912. we then took a short, wet walk through downtown brunswick, finishing up at little dog coffee shop for a hot cup of joe. the place was packed with undergrads so there was barely a table to be had. not that it mattered cuz seth isn't one for hanging in cafes. the coffee was great, thanks to coffee by design. one of my favorite things about them, other than their local philosophy and awesome coffee, is that they design brews specifically for the different cafes that sell their coffee. now i love coffee and i can tell the difference between a cup of rosbusta from a cup of arabica, but i probably couldn't tell one cafe's brew from another. its just a fun thing.

thai buffet is a-okay!

2008-11-16T10:39:00.006-05:00

i should preface this post with the fact that seth and i love thai buffet. seth in fact loves any food of asian origin. imagine his dismay when i spent 10 days in hong kong enjoying as much asian food as can be fit into that time period, without him. we had this thai buffet that we loved and frequented often when we were living in new haven, ct. when we came to find our portland apartment in august and we spotted the opening soon sign in the window of Thai Chef Buffet (511 congress street), i saw a light come on in seth's eyes.
so this past thursday we visited thai chef buffet for the second time since it opened on october 9th. for $8.95 you get quite a selection of both meat and vegetarian options. its actually divided into meat island and veggie island. in addition they have a salad bar, a small selection of sushi rolls, and an italian option. in my opinion, there is no reason to waste your time on a salad bar when there are so many tasty treats to try and i would never eat italian ANYTHING at a thai buffet. some of the especially good dishes are the chicken basil, thai summer rolls, crab rangoon, and curry puffs.
try to get a window seat because there is some great people watching on congress street. the first time we went there was also some interesting employee watching, but this time the inside of the restaurant was a little tamer. for a buffet, the service is very good and friendly. our waters were refilled frequently, if not obsessively.
they have a full menu as well, which i haven't tried. but if i learned anything from our favorite thai buffet in new haven, its that the buffet rocks but the regular menu is not great. if you try the regular menu and think otherwise, let me know!

lots of eating out

2008-11-09T19:43:00.005-05:00

it was a big weekend for eating out. yesterday seth and i took a drive to saco. seth likes to call any drive we take during the weekend a 'sunday drive.' i'm not clear why it can't just be a weekend drive seeing how it was saturday and he can't see why it bothers me so much.
anyway, we drove south to saco to check out ferry beach, a beautiful little spot where seth went to summer camp during high school. maine's southern coast is very much a tourist destination and as it is currently early november there was very little going on. in old orchard beach, which is one of those classic beach boardwalk destinations, most of the businesses are closed for the season. as a tangent, i love such destinations in the off season because there is such an eeriness to the emptiness. in actuality, almost every business along this stretch of coast was closed. except wormwood's restaurant.
wormwood's, so named for the owner's last name, is quite an experience. according to my internet search it is something of a landmark. the only way to describe this place is OLD SKOOL!!! wow! literally like taking a step back in time. we were one of maybe four table on this raining saturday in november. the majority of the wait staff looked like they may have been working there since the place opened. but the service was actually very good. the menu was very heavy on seafood prepared in classic new england style. it was a little on the pricey side but it is seafood. i appreciated that they had smaller portions available of almost everything on their menu. so did the over 65 crowd that seems to keep this place afloat in the off season.
i was having trouble deciding between lobster stew and chicken fingers (i know!) while seth zoned in on the seafood pies. i went with the chicken fingers with a side of ranch, french fries, and canned pickled beets and seth ordered the crab pie in a newberg sauce with garlic potatoes and pickled beets on the side. seth loved his pie and my chicken fingers really did hit the spot and satisfy my craving for some fried goodness dipped in ranch. i love beets but i'm not sure i have ever had canned pickled beet before. they were surprisingly good, but i will not be picking any up on my next trip to hannaford.

i had long standing dinner plans at with a large group of ladies. i'm really new to portland and so i don't have too many friends here. one of my few friends is marya, the wife of one of seth's friends from high school. in fact, otis and marya are a big reason why we moved to portland and they have been a big support to us. anyway marya invited me to join in on this ladies night organized by her friend jenn.
it took place at local 188 which has a spanish themed menu. the food is quite tasty but a little on the pricey side. marya and i shared the chorizo with sage, apples, and sherry appetizer which was very good. for my main i ordered off the raciones menu and got the wild main mussels with seasonal greens in a roasted garlic cream sauce. this was also very good but maybe wasn't the best choice for me, with my lactose intolerance. only seth's suffers. some of the other ladies had some complaints, such as medium-rare steak appearing closer to medium-well. the service with not great, but we were a very large party and it was quite busy. the other ladies said that the service was pretty typical.

this mornings seth and i were rousted out of bed by phone calls from both otis and marya, asking us if we wanted to have breakfast at the rehabbed miss portland diner. this was only their second weekend open, and while they still have some wrinkles to iron out, its pretty great. we sat in the new dining room, which has been built to look retro, with old booths and 'tin' ceilings. the original worcester lunch car looks beautiful and i can't wait to eat in there. i knew i was going to order hash and eggs before i even got there and it was home made and tasty. all of our breakfasts could have been hotter and the waitress was pretty flustered, but she kept the coffee refills coming. all in all miss portland will likely become a regular spot for breakfast. i will just give them another month to get things running smoothly.

lobster feast in these hard economic times

2008-11-07T20:16:00.003-05:00

as one of my favorite things in the world is food, i will write about my dinner this evening. LOBSTER!!! i live in maine so some might think that lobster is a no brainer. but in truth the price of lobster usually puts lobster in the special treat realm. but going along with this big economic crisis, lobsters are pretty damned cheap.
well, kind of. as one drives around portland there are many fish markets and they all have their price for lobster posted outside. the signs currently read 'lobster $3.99/lb'. but once you get in the store you realized that means chicken lobsters, or lobsters under 1 and a 1/4 lb lobsters. by the time you make it up to a 1 and 1/2 lb lobster it is $5.99/lb. and that is for soft shell lobster. hard shell are still quite pricey, starting at $8.99/lb for a smallish lobster.
soft shell means they just recently molted and so there new shell is soft. this is the type of lobster that is used in processing lobster meat. and here lies the cause of the low lobster costs. the processing plants can't get credit, so they can't buy lobsters from the fishermen. so the market is flooded with lobsters and they are cheap.
but i was writing about my lobster dinner tonight. well, seth and i went ahead and bought culls. culls are lobsters missing one claw and they are always cheap. we actually learned this tip from seth's high school buddy, damian, who is a lobster fisherman on cape cod. the culls cost $3.50/lb and we got 3. plus a six-pack of geary's hampshire special ale and it cost us a grand total of $21.66! for a lobster dinner, people! and we each got a tail and a half, which is truly the sweetest meat of the lobster. we just steamed those buggers up and made a nice tossed salad. free range fish and lobster was unfortunately out of bread so we went without but we did melt a little cabot butter to dredge our lobster meat in. delicious!

first musings

2008-11-07T19:51:00.000-05:00

i have been thinking about starting my own blog for some time. basically what i have decided is that i complain a lot and no one person wants to hear all my complaining. so why not write my complainings down here. really i think my partner, seth, might leave me if i keep at him. so in a way this is kind of like therapy. yeah if i don't have insurance and can't pay for therapy then i will use as an outlet. it will be cathartic.
in truth i once had a blog before. seth and i started a food blog. but it was doomed from the start. seth started it for us just as i was starting grad school. so i didn't really have much time for writing. and when he was entering the title of the blog he missed spelled foodie. so our blog was entitled 'sethandjennersfooieblog'. FOOIE! whatever happened to proofreading! i wrote a few posts about things we had made or restaurants where we had dined but it petered out after only about two months. seth never wrote a post.