Graph Paper

In the last 24 hours: pickled cabbage, pickled green beans, vietnamese grilled pork, homemade banh mi, grilled chicken wings, chicken stock. Was going to make rice paper too, but maybe tomorrow.

Cocktails
Anisette Bening

Snacks
Ruffles have Bridges
Mark Ruffleos
Darren Pretzelnofskies
Crispian Kale

Salad
Jesse Eisenberg Lettuce Salad with Shaved Jeremy Fennel and Javier Bacon Lardons

Soup
The King’s Beets, Geoffrey Russian Style

Mains
Natalie Porkmans
James Franc’n’beans
Roasted David O. Brussels Sprouts
Joel and Ethan Coen on the Cob, with Salt

Afters
The Cakes are All White
Nicole King Dons
Selections from our Helena Bonbon Cart
Lady Finchers

Last weekend, we had a situation. Mistakes were made.¹ See, we had decided to share a quarter of a cow with a couple of other parties,² which was, of course, occupying our packed downstairs freezer. At some point, I tried to fit some stuff in there, rearranged a bit, and (thought I) closed the door. At a later time, the door turned out to be open. Luckily, only a little of the meat³ had thawed beyond recovery. While we couldn’t refreeze the rest, we could salvage it — all we had to do was cook it all. So for the next five days or so, we had steak every night, along with delicious fruit cobbler⁴, while we also cooked and then froze a 10 lb brisket, a 6 lb roast, and an appalling number of meatballs.

As we stand today, the meatballs have been cooked and frozen, half the brisket was turned into corned beef yesterday, the other half was prepared and frozen to this recipe, and half of the roast went to failed carnitas while the other half went to a successful braise (which was just the carnitas recipe without the burning-to-a-cinder step). All in all, a reasonable recovery from a dumb mistake. More or less.

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¹ By me. E appreciates me being clear about this.
² For those keeping score at home, this works out to 1/12th of a cow in our freezer. It was about 40 lbs all told, which cost us somewhere around $130. A good deal, even if a lot of it was ground chuck.
³ Just some of that ground chuck, which frankly we won’t miss that much, certainly not as much as we would have missed the New York steaks.
⁴ From the frozen not-at-all-inexpensive fresh organic fruit E had painstakingly gathered, she would like me to mention.

I wrote this in september and somehow didn’t post it:

She’ll be nine months in three more days. She’s currently eating: chicken, cheese (extra sharp cheddar), beans, zucchini, green beans, avocado, broccoli, sweet potato, plums, pluots, peaches, prunes, cheerios, yogurt, carrots, tomatoes. She’ll play with small pieces of stuff like cheerios, chicken, and cheese (one-finger method; I’ve tried showing her opposable thumbs but she’s not interested) while you shovel the mashed stuff into her mouth. She usually isn’t interested at first and will block but will eventually accept some food, if you start with something she likes (like vanilla yogurt, right now) and keep her occupied. Every meal takes at least an hour.

Our last day in Montreal was for Jewish food. We went to St. Viateur Bagels and walked down the street chewing on our bagels on our way to Cheskie Bakery for babka and rugelach and so on. We didn’t feel up to poutine, but we did stop at a Frite Alors! location for some yummy fries before going up to the mountain to see the view and then heading back to Vermont.

View Montreal Thursday 10/1/09 in a larger map

Our second day, we vowed to wander around eating as many different things as we could. We started by taking the subway up to the Jean-Talon Market, where we immediately fulfilled our vow by sampling a maple bar, a churro, some meats of various nationalities on sticks, and some local produce. We then sought out Chez Apo, renowned for its Armenian-Lebanese pizza, a sort of flatbread topped with spinach, feta, and zaatar and totally delicious. Then we wandered around and ended up at Sablo Kafe, where we had a tasty tandoori chicken sandwich, and sheltered from all the rain. Later that night we managed to get into Pintxo for great tapas dinner. We may have done something not food-related, but I don’t recall.

View Montreal Wednesday 9/30/09 in a larger map

We arrived in Montreal around midday and just headed out to wander around. We had a couple of articles and some ideas of streets to explore but no really clear idea of where to go. Which can be fun. We were staying in the old quarter, which was lovely but not really what we wanted to see, so we initially just headed up St. Laurent. Going that way you first hit the Chinese quarter, where we had lunch at Pho Cali, which was pretty good.

As you continue up St. Laurent, it gets kind of sketchy and red-lightish, but once you cross Sherbrooke, there are lots of boutiques and restaurants. We passed the infamous Schwartz’s of smoked-meat fame, which we didn’t manage to eat at this trip. We did stumble across a european grocery called “La Vielle Europe” which had impressive selections of cheese, meats, coffee, and chocolate — we weren’t able to escape without some salami and chocolate “for later”. After that we went in and out of several boutiques along the street, including m0851 and a place called U&I, where E tried on some great shoes. We eventually walked over to St. Denis and back to the hotel that way, not stopping a whole lot but enjoying the variety from block to block.

That night we had dinner reservations at Au Pied de Cochon, which I’ll review separately.

View Montreal Tuesday 9/29/2009 in a larger map

Seattle magazine organized a mobile chowdown for this past Saturday, featuring some of Seattle’s best food trucks. We met up with Cnote for it but it was ridiculously overattended. Long lines for everything, so we said screw this and wandered around magnolia until we ended up at Niko’s Gyros. It was okay, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. Not sure about Yelp’s 4-star average. Anyway, so mobile chowfest, nice idea but jeez.

Since it’s essentially impossible to keep the floor 100% free of Nora-tempting dirt particles, why not just scatter the floor with crumbs of delicious, nutritious cheerios to decoy her away from the dirt?

My daughter will crawl halfway across the floor (a very large effort for her right now) to pick up and eat a piece of lint, and fight like a tigress to prevent you pulling it out of her mouth when you grab her with a horrified gasp, but she is not interested in the delicious pears, plums, chicken, cheese etc. presented to her at the dinner table and will turn up her nose at them in a frosty manner.