Two blogs collided

Here's where blog meets blog. My sister, author of domisworld, and her husband brought my nephew Domingo to visit his tio in Boston last week. By all accounts it was a fantastic weekend, and we managed a worthy culinary encore to my parents visit a couple weeks ago. Domi is the sweetest baby in the whole universe and it makes me sad that it will be at least several months before I see him again. He is really the most agreeable and easy going baby I know. He hardly cries at all, and he is always smiling and laughing and snuggling with you. I think he liked Boston and his tio's house. And, while he's still too little to eat many things and eats mostly milk, baby food, and little bits of what his parents are eating, maybe someday he'll look forward to visiting and eating at my house.
Somehow we failed to take a picture of the empanadas we made upon my sister's arrival. I made the traditional filling out of free-range ground beef and organic eggs--not your typical empanada--and bought pastry disks for the shell from the Brazilian butcher in union square (they are definitely not the same as my tia's homemade dough, but they do the trick). We froze some to fry up later, so we'll be sure to snap a picture and perhaps post a recipe as well.

Our next item of business was a trip to formaggio kitchen, a cathedral of fine foods near harvard square, and definitely the widest selection of cheeses I have ever witnessed. It's the kind of place that makes you wish you were very, very wealthy. Really, only cheese and perhaps sushi (see below) make me second guess my career choices and wonder whether I should have tried my luck on Wall Street.

Dinner was a thai squid salad, with avocado and mango. It was light, fresh, and very flavorful. Perfect after the fairly heavy lunch of empanadas, of which we all had one or two more than we probably should have.

The salad was also perfect to precede our cheese course from formaggio kitchen. We picked out three cheeses: an italian robiola, wrapped in chestnut leaves with pronounced goat milk flavors, a french sheepsmilk, and a swiss alpine style cheese. It might start to sound like I'm crying wolf, but this robiola was even better than the 'la tur' I wrote about two weeks ago. It was like no cheese I've had before. As my sister's husband said, "there is not moment of doubt; this cheese is good from start to finish." The sheepsmilk was very good as well, but I'm afraid I don't remember the name, and the alpine style cheese didn't really pair well with the other two, but was very good grated onto some breakfast sandwiches a few days later. We also picked up some fresh figs at formaggio.

We started off the next day by visiting the farmers market, where we picked up some vegetables and some free-range pork and chicken that would go into that evening's special dinner. Then we went out for dim sum with my brother in-law's best friend who just happened to be in Boston to meet domi! Dim Sum is one of my favorite cheap and delicious meals. It's a great breakfast, believe it or not, particularly after a night of drinking. This was Chau Chau City, which people say is the best dim sum in Boston.


After a little bit of sight seeing in the Boston Public Gardens, we headed to New Deal fish Market to begin preparation on what would be one of the best meals I've cooked since I started this blog. We picked up two lobsters, some mussels, and clams that would go into a paella along with the chicken and pork we got earlier that day from the farmers market.

After several minutes of Homer Simpson-like groaning, we debated whether this was 'the best' or 'one of the best' paellas we had ever had. My mom makes fantastic paella. It is always a very special occasion dinner, and Alice and I have had many so we couldn't conclude outright that it was the best we had ever had. But Chris and David said they had never had better. It certainly helped that the seafood, and the meat too, I suppose, was as fresh as it could possibly be. Even the peas were so fresh and sweet from the farmer's market that we shelled them and just sprinkled them onto the finished paella raw.




Here it is plated with a glass of Chilean Cabernet. Clockwise from the lemon are mussel, chicken, lobster, country-style pork rib, and clam.
The next day, our plan was to go to the beach and have a light salad as lunch before we went to an early dinner at Boston's best (and most expensive!) sushi restaurant, oishii. The salad was all from the farmer's market, fresh peas, radishes, arrugula, green onion, and boston lettuce.
Here we are at the beach, but you will notice--no salad. We realized after we'd been on the highway for twenty minutes that in the scramble to make sure we had the baby and all his things, change of clothes for the restaurants, printed out directions, etc., we had left the salad sitting on the coffee table in the living room. We ate it the next day, and it was still very good.


And here is our appetizer from oishii, complete with iceblock. It is Kobe beef tartar with fried shallots and osetra caviar. This has got to be the fancy-pansiest thing I've ever eaten. In the very corner you also see white salmon sashimi, served with plum sauce and tuna tartar. Everything was carefully prepared, and beautifully presented. The sushi was amazingly fresh and had an exquisite texture that melted in your mouth. But it's certainly not cheap. If wealth has it's benefits, oishii is one of them.
Before my sister's visit, I experienced an important first. The first meal that I have cooked for David that he hated. It is strange, because I liked it just fine. I've made meals that I've been critical of and he has not minded, but he really had to force this one down. I wasn't terribly hurt, because I realized that in the nearly four years of our friendship, this was the first time it had happened. The offending meal was turnip and purple cauliflower gratin. I was lazy and didn't parboil the greens, which would have tempered their strong 'turnip' flavor. I think David would have liked it otherwise, but he also said it was too 'casserole-like' for him.

Luckily dessert was to follow. A leftover blueberry waffle from breakfast with vanilla ice-cream and some of the strawberry rhubarb compote still in my fridge.

We are leaving July 9th, and their is still a lot of food in my fridge and in my pantry. In the next couple weeks we'll be trying to use up as much as we can, so it should result in some creative combinations.