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About
An irreverent restaurant and food blog penned by Boston's most adventurous blogger. Think of it as a life coach in the form of a dining diary.
I also travel and blog about my bizarre life: I was a beauty pageant contestant in Miss New York USA 2010 and ate delicious brains on video. (Separately.)
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A four course hot dog dinner? Yep. Trina’s Starlite, baby.
dranky drank
I wasn’t sure what to expect from a four course hot dog dinner at Trina’s Starlite in Inman Square. Overwhelming hot dog? Haute hot dog? Hot dog on a stick, coated in corn meal, then deep fried to a caramel crisp? Answer: not quite any of the above.
The blogger’s event featured (and I’m not sure whether to your real names or your online handles… so here we go): Julia Rappaport, FoodieMommy, RitaRepulsa, ToastRusso, ManlyEats, EatBoston, Amy Traverso, The Boston Foodie, and CambridgeCarrie. Thanks for all the hilarious dating tales, guys, and thanks to Nicole for organizing it.
I was treated to dishes like ponzu-braised banh mi dog (a slivered hot dog, topped with a carrot and cucumber salad and pickled sweet onion) which struck me more for its inspired wine pairing. Riffing on the classic Vietnamese sandwich, it maintained the American bun but added a fluorescent slaw and flavor-soaked strips of dog.
Ponzu-braised banh mi dog, cucumber carrot salad, sweet soy aioli, pickled sweet onions
My first thought: too salty. But then I took a sip of the wine, a pinot blanc, and it all came into focus. In tandem, the wine pinned down the flavors of the banh mi, cleansing the palate and made the saltiness a pleasant counterpoint, rather than overwhelming. I’m pretty uneducated on matters of wine, but it’s moments like these where I wake up for a second and think, wow, this is really greater than the sum of its parts.
No Comments »Cooking for a Cause, Boston Symphony Orchestra food drive – Boston events
Food can feed in many ways. Aside from sampling high end restaurants or making a muck in the kitchen, there’s plenty of routes to rising above merely filling one’s stomach.
Here’s two upcoming Boston events that you should consider attending and donating to:
Cooking for a Cause - Thursday, March 25, 2010, 6-10 p.m. at the Harborview Ballroom in the Seaport World Trade Center. Super hot chefs (like Jody Adams, Tony Maws, and Jamie Bissonnette!) and mixologists serve up their best to benefit worthy cause East End House, a community center and social service agency.
Boston Symphony Orchestra food drive for The Greater Boston Food Bank – Thursday, April 1, Friday April 2, and Saturday April 3 at Symphony Hall. Either drop off canned food (no glass or baby food/formula) before and during intermissions of 8pm performances of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. Or, if you can’t make the concert, just leave your donations in the collection boxes between 7 and 8pm. Even better: make a cash donation.
How to make and eat biscotti
Here is a template for an ideal morning:
Wake up early, exercise. Shower, put on a dress and heels. Apply lip gloss, even though it’ll come off on the coffee lid. Brush your hair by running your fingers through it. (You don’t own a comb.)
Stop at a coffee shop (it can be Starbucks, but better pastries are to be had elsewhere). Buy black drip coffee and biscotti – just one. Get your own table, and a magazine. Nothing too serious, a tabloid is best. Eat and drink very, very slowly. Write down the things you want to accomplish that day, but don’t feel bad if you only get around to half of them.
Linger, then leave.
When I confessed that I wanted to make biscotti, my friend Daniel admitted, “I don’t bake. Baking is not cooking. It’s science.”
He’s right. You can just substitute oil for butter and expect an equally delicious result. The issue is, I come from a culinary tradition of imprecision.
I remember watching my mother bake her cakes in the brown glass dish on Saturday mornings. She has two cakes my tummy knows well: apple and sticky rice. Whenever she comes to visit me at school, she’ll bring a slab of sticky rice cake, lined in red bean paste and presented in white Tupperware. It’s always presented along with a set of clean bed sheets, or admonitions to exercise (I do, every morning, I’ll protest).
Tags: baking, biscotti, cookingNo Comments »
Lemon risotto, shrimp, split pea soup, and strawberries – Lingbo cooks her first real dinner
I knew I was in deep shit when I got out of Crate and Barrel with a new set of measuring cups. The rain had intensified into a downpour, my grocery bags were breaking, and my feet were soaked. So I put away the umbrella and soldiered through Back Bay, 30 pounds of food hanging from my arms. By the time I got around to picking up the dry cleaning, my fingers had gone numb.
The rain compounded a circuitous shopping trip. Trader Joe’s did not stock white wine, arborio rice, or split peas – the latter two were main ingredients. Shaws, to add to my frustration, refused to take my ID because I was under 25 and out of state. So I found my cheap white wine elsewhere, only to be chased down in the rain when I forgot to take my purchase.
I soppily ran my last errand. A petite Asian girl in peg-legged jeans looked over as I came into the dry cleaner’s, then retreated back into her work. Blunt bangs framed her pale moon of a face, which was chattering away into her headset. I cleared my throat.
“I’m here to pick up dry cleaning,” I said.
She nodded, then went back to babbling. Another minute as I tried to get my bearings. At least it was dry inside. “I’m here to pick up the dry cleaning,” I repeated, a bit louder.
This finally registered.
So when I dragged my body up the stairs and began cooking, I was calmed. Chopping was easy; I was dry; I only had to fret over tossing in another carrot.
Strawberries awaiting slaughter - I especially like the rainy view outside the window.
My menu, thrown together from recipes from my friend Daniel, Ina Garten, Epicurious.com, and an idea of my own, included the following: split pea soup; lemon risotto; shrimp tossed with tomato, parsley, lemon juice, and olive oil; and macerated strawberries with sour cream and sugar.
4 Comments »Alligator, yak, and ostrich, oh my: Student Prince in Springfield, MA
You will never go to the Student Prince . First off, it’s a 90 minute drive away in western Massachusetts – so far off, you might as well be teetering on a fiery lip overlooking the nothingness of the end of the world.
Who knows what spiny, lantern-jawed fish are fit to survive so far from Bostonian civilization.
But I braved it anyway. I hoped to do the foodie equivalent of resume padding. It was the last night of February – and the last night that Student Prince would be serving exotic game meats. Lipoff had tipped me off on yak, bison, elk, alligator, and boar in hearty preparations.
The trip wouldn’t have been possible without Lipoff’s battered-but-spunky Peugeot, riddled with quirks. The seatbelt, for example, is backwards: you pull up from the bottom left to affix it above the right shoulder.
After a delayed start, we arrived, 90 minutes later, in Springfield, MA. Student Prince is unabashedly German, and there’s a pleasantly institutional feel to the place. (Meaning established, not infirmary-like.) You think about how many years it’s taken to accumulate the beer steins on the wall, the knick knacks and ski lodge-esque wood paneling, and the loyal clientele – primarily white and older on the night I went, a score of families bonding.
Travel is surreal: I remember the tired, cheesy desperation of the ferry that shuttled me across across the strait from Dover to Calais. This wasn’t hopping between England and France, but the past 90 miles in the Peugeot felt inadequate to match the impossibility of where I sat.
3 Comments »Taste of Iceland at Rustic Kitchen, Boston, March 11-17
Icelandic Arctic char, potato and herb puree, pineapple
As part of Boston’s Taste of Iceland event (March 11-17!), there was much insanely delicious food and drink at Rustic Kitchen for a kickoff on Tuesday. Chef Thorarinn Eggertsson of Orange served up melt-in-your-mouth deliciousness, although he left out crazier proteins Icelanders eat. Here are my belated photos from the event, which I attended courtesy of the ineffable Christine of Citysearch. It made me miss my trip to Iceland a bit as I reminisced about the whale steak and rotten shark I ate there, along with things like geothermal pools and lack of daylight. And great exchange rates.
It was lovely meeting freelance writer Cheryl Fenton, Trish, and JustinCanCook - who gave me an awesome pizza recipe that I’m hoping to try out next week.
1 Comment »Giving Raw Food the College Try
I began to worry after I’d eaten my seventh banana in two days.
I had embarked on a three-day raw food veganism challenge, relying on fruit, salads, and some unroasted convenience store nuts to fill my uncooked days.
I had no blender, knives, or kitchen. I did, however, have a lot of homework, social commitments at restaurants, and HUDS produce. I already knew that gourmet raw food—which I had sampled at all-raw Grezzo in the North End—was a sensory delight. But my DIY approach smacked of banana-infested, blender-lacking monotony.
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Food porn: Dinner at Helmand in Kendall Square, Cambridge
Time for tapas at Ken Oringer’s Toro in Boston
The streets are slush. It’s late, past 9pm, and the MBTA’s 1 bus is late, too – lumbering around the corner like the crankiest of grandfathers, bearing nothing but ill will and obligation. It wheels through Cambridge to Boston, ribbed rubber floor collecting more slush as passengers board. My dining partner boards at Commonwealth and Mass Ave, half grin, hat pulled over eyebrows. Off we go.
It’s late, but Toro is busy. It is a Tuesday night, the kitchen closes in a half-hour, and the place is still humming with all the might of a scenester beehive. We wait as diners linger. Waiters zip through the crowd, dropping off fried treats: a platter of patatas bravas, crisp and golden, in front of a lucky diner at the bar. I’m jealous.
The bartender offers us a drink menu; I peer at it, but want to hold every last inch of stomach space for the food. The hostess apologizes for the wait and brings a peace offering: two perfect bites. I miss the explanation, but pop it into my mouth. Not bad. Then our table opens up.
I like Oringer’s restaurants a lot so far. Viscerally speaking: they’re slick, they’re full of people, and they have plenty of offal on the menu. He has this way of knowing, mysteriously, precisely what I want to eat. Or maybe he teaches me. The lows are not so low, and the highs are very high – an octopus dish at Coppa, recommended by the waitress, was so well composed it sang. My favorite bartender, Asher, keeps vigil over the swank environs at KO Prime and mixes a mean martini. Tonight, it’s a chance add-on of Erizos En Suquet, a catalan stew of sea urchin, lobster and crab meat. It comes red, velvety, and proves luscious on the tongue.
1 Comment »Russell House Tavern to open in Harvard Square
Chef Michael Scelfo
Word on the Internet is that Harvard Square will soon have another restaurant to add to its roster – Russell House Tavern, headed by Chef Michael Scelfo from Temple Bar. Its opening is set for late March or early April.
Their Twitter account is currently silent, although following and being followed by well over a 1,000 tweeps. What kind of food will it serve? According to a Craiglist ad calling for service staff, the eatery will have “seasonally-changing, classic American fare with contemporary influences, carefully-designed cocktails and a resolute selection of American wines and local craft beers.” Expect a focus on local, seasonal ingredients.
Scelfo’s Twitter chronicles a bit of the excitement: “confirmed on 1st equipment delivery for this thurs -my highlights: double hearth oven, large cabinet (cold/hot) smoker, immersion circulator,” he wrote yesterday.
It looks like he’s got some good people helping out with his new baby as well: “solid 1st impression from new crew at RH, everyone on board showed up to clean & organize. 3 weeks of cleaning ahead, always rule number 1″ says a tweet from February 25th.
A recent blog post really gives away nothing about the restaurants menu, except that it won’t veer too wildly far from Temple Bar’s spirit – “I followed was to be mindful and respectful of Temple Bar’s style,” he writes, trying to balance competing interests.
Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s got in store!
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