He who eats alone chokes alone

Boy what a week of eating and cooking I've had! I've just passed through the culinary highlight of the year, and it's nice to have this blog posting to reflect on it. Each year my parents come out to visit me in Boston for about a week, and we spend it cooking together and searching for Boston's best restaurants. It's really a very important week for me, because without foodnetwork (or cable television) eating out is really the greatest source of inspiration and continued learning for my cooking. But it all has to happen in one week, since David and I can't really afford to go out very often on our own. Its pedagogical purpose aside, my parents' visit is one of things we look forward to all year. We have a lot of fun, and it makes me really happy to have them as part of my life here, since I am far away from my family most of the year. I love showing my parents and close friends who visit where I do my grocery shopping, what bus I take to school, how I make tea in the morning, where I pick up lunch in a hurry, where a good bar is. All the little details of my life that they would know unconsciously if they could share it more regularly with me. It's strange, I really love my life here, my apartment and kitchen, and--at least in some broad general way--the work that I am doing and career I'm headed toward. But it often seems really incomplete without the many close relationships and dense domestic life I've shared with friends and family in earlier stages of my life. That's why I'm always happier when people visit and I can cook for more than two.

Here's what we ate:



Most recently, and I think the best meal I made this week, was grilled shrimp zarandeado with saffron fettuccine and green garlic mojo. This is a twist on the traditional camarones al mojo de ajo.. We used some more of the huge wild-caught pink shrimp from New Deal Fish Market, and the same guajillo chile marinade I used to grill them last time. The sauce for the pasta is made by cooking a probably 3 or 4 tablespoons of chopped garlic in 3/4 cup of olive oil at very low heat until it is silky, golden, and sweet, about half an hour. You then add the juice of one lime, and a chopped chipotle chile. We used green garlic, the plant's 'baby' stage before the hard bulb and papery skin forms, from the farmers market. It lent a mellow garlic flavor to the fruitiness of the olive oil and married perfectly with the smoky sweetness of the chipotle and the fragrance of the saffron. Alongside this was mixed farmers market salad greens, french breakfast radishes, and avocado, with a lime and whole-grain mustard dressing.



Steamed lobsters with breakfast radishes and spring turnips, braised with their greens with bacon and balsamic vinegar.



Followed by a cheese course and fresh farmer's market strawberries. To the right of the strawberries is 'la tur,' an Italian robiola-style cow, sheep, and goats-milk cheese with a creamy and sometimes almost liquidy texture and dubbed by one food critic 'as close to love as a cheese can get.' This is one of the best cheese I've ever had and I highly recommend finding it or the similar and also excellent 'robiola rocchetta.' Clockwise from there are some bread from the Davis Square farmer's market; a small portion of lavender and lemon goat cheese, also from the farmers market, a truffled semi-soft cows milk cheese, and 'queso al romero' a semi-hard spanish sheeps milk cheese with rosemary.

Standing prime-rib roast, with horseradish rosemary crust and salad of Boston lettuce with strawberries and black sesame dressing. The balsamic and chinese black vinegar reduction I made a couple weeks ago, along with toasted sesame oil, black sesame seeds and some red wine vinegar, was an ideal match for the sweetness and perfume of the strawberries . The roast was perfection. I knew when we picked it up from savenor's market from the beautiful and even marbling that it would be the best beef roast I have ever made. It's expensive to get your meat from such a high end butcher, but if you enjoy meat I think you owe it to yourself and the animal to do it right.


Desert was the debut of the cheeses described above, but with an anise-spiced rhubarb and strawberry compote.
Vietnamese fresh spring rolls filled with roast pork, sliced steak, and fresh herbs. We made an afternoon snack of this to use some leftover pork chop and steak frites from central kitchen--a restaurant that gets my highest recommendation for consistently excellent food and great value. We tried our best to make mojitos out of some pretty sad limes, they weren't great, but they did the trick.


My mother discovered fiddleheads--the not yet unfurled bud of a wild fern available only in the spring time--at central kitchen, where the spring market vegetables was by far the most inventive, freshest, and most flavorful dish on the menu. It came as a trio with sauteed fiddleheads, minted breakfast radishes, and a little turnip and maitake mushroom 'package.' We found some fiddleheads in the supermarket and decided to give it a shot. This dinner was roasted duck breast, spiced with star anise, red chili, and black pepper and served with a blackberry port-wine sauce. On the side are Yuca gnocchi with leeks and fiddleheads sautéed in brown butter.

Before my parents came we celebrated the start of the farmer's market season with two different meals. Below is basil linguine with braised grass-fed beef-rib and arrugula salad with local organic fresh mozzarella cheese. For those of you following the discussion of short rib braising chowhound, using the pressure cooker worked perfectly. The meat was falling off the bone in less than an hour; so much so, that the main drawback to this method is that the ribs loose their shape too much and are not as elegant as the much longer oven braise usually required.


Finally, the first farmer's market meal of the season, more than a week ago, was red-leaf boston lettuce with blueberries, pickled onion, lavender-lemon goat cheese and balsamic-maple vinaigrette (thanks to Hanna for the dressing recipe :) ). We wait all year for the farmers market, because, while you can certainly get lettuce all year round, it just cannot compare with what you get directly from the grower. Just-picked lettuce has an amazingly soft texture, its not so crisp and full water as what you get at the store, and it tastes greener and more 'leafy'.