Dessert
Piattini Gelateria and Match mini burgers
It’s Reading Period! I granted myself a free day wander down Boston’s beautiful Newbury Street, visit some fabulous friends, and eat some junk food… because I deserve it.
I have a good relationship with gelato. We’ve gotten along thus far – I had some truly makes-your-mouth-sing gelato on my brief stopovers in Rome and Paris. (Not as glam as it sounds, I was on a rowdy Topdeck tour that produced utterly cookie-cutter photo-op travel experieces.) I still fantasize about those heavenly fig and honey concoctions that I ate two years ago. So I was looking forward to some inventive varieties.
I saw recently opened Piattini Gelateria and Cafe and decided to give it a try. The super sweet waiter patiently explained every single flavor on the menu (rosemary honey, turkish coffee, fior de latte, thai coconut milk, chocolato scuro, frutti de bosco. And the sorbets were grape, mojito, limone, and pesca).
I sampled a chocolate with hazelnuts that wasn’t on the menu, which was so intensely rich that I decided on spoonful was enough. Rosemary honey felt like chugging floral-scented lotion, so that was a pass. Fior de latte (Amish milk) had the “lightness of vanilla without the vanilla flavor” – it seemed more like a fluffy absence of flavor than a flavor.
At an impasse, I gave thai coconut milk and mojito sorbet a go.
I think the major weakness of the gelato was that it wasn’t very cold – by the time I ate it, it had become soft and a bit melted. It also had a lot more air that I would normally expect. It seemed that chocolate flavors are you best bet here. I had been hoping for something deliriously coconutty, but rather, it was seemed more like run of the milk coconut ice cream.
The mojito had a nice sour, puckery note and icier, grainier texture of sorbet worked well with the flavors.
The bill for this small dish came out to $4.82. Plus tip, this ended up costing me about $6. My credit card felt a little sad.
I wish you had been a more transcendental $6 spent.
Getting fat again
So I use “fat” in a tongue-in-cheek way. But I definitely spent the last few weeks watching what I ate, which meant no crazy banquet dinners, dinners of scrambled egg whites and vegetables, and the occasional helping of cheese dip, heaped high with guilt.
As a result, my stomach became a cast iron tank. My collarbone and ribcage took greater prominence. When I lay down, I marveled at how my skin stretched over my gently jutting hipbones. It felt like a lesson in skeletal anatomy.
So on my first day back on Planet Girl, I felt totally free to go on a carb-and-calorie rampage. I was going to eat EVERYTHING and ANYTHING I could possibly ever want to eat. I was going to ignore stomach pains. I was going to consume whatever was put in front of me, especially high in simple starches, sugar, and fats. I was going to try to undo whatever I had done to myself.
The night before, I’d made good work of a ginger-and-scallion lobster dish, a beef/pepper/pineapple stirfry, and a salt and pepper fried squid at Peach Farm in Chinatown. The verdict: the cooking was a bit rushed, and the quality suffered as a result. My dad commented on how slapdash the dishes seemed to be put together, although the beef stirfry was meltingly tender and delicious. Then I topped it off with a half a red bean bun as I stalked around on my 5 inch clear heels, bronzer still caked on my stomach, legs, and arms.
Photo of the Day: Chocolate terrine with thai basil ice cream, sea salt
Thai basil ice cream (tastes precisely like thai basil, except it melts in your mouth) on sea-salt specked chocolate terrine, found at Ten Tables Cambridge.
Sweet treats from around Boston
This is a durian shake from Chinatown. Durian is the infamously stinky fruit that is sometime even banned by law from consumption in certain places since it smells like… an outhouse on a hot day. But its spiky exterior belies a decadently rich, creamy custard-colored flesh, which has been ground up here into a shake. A friend and I drank it one sip at a time, speculating what notes we picked up in it. Bizarrely, I kept thinking, “Garlic! It’s kind of like raw garlic!” and pinned the aftertaste down as black sesame. Anyway, odd – but still tasty, and very sweet.
So sparkly, yet edible. A miniature carrot cupcake from Sweet.
I got bulldozed into eating some Berryline (my life is so difficult!) when out with a friend who insisted on buying me one. I got blackberries, my favorite. I don’t think I could ever get sick of the tangy-sweet flavoring.
No shirt has ever been truer.
Little insects make your honey. No, really.
It's good I am not scared of bees, since I took this closeup.
Read my article at GoodEater.org about the joys of beekeeping wearing funny looking suits.
I’ve still been working on my little jar of Mike Graney’s honey, produced in Boston’s Jamaica Plain. I’ve now mixed it into my nonfat plain Greek yogurt from Trader Joes, along with some Bola granola (see last post), a pretty damn awesome combination. Bizarrely, I kind of like my yogurt to be kinda thin and watery, though.
I also eat it with torn off bits of ciabatta dipped straight into the jar. Hygiene highly questionable. But delicious. Mmm, honey.