Too Long

16 days? No posts? Well, folks, I have excuses and reasons. But none of them explain away the lack of typing. I was sick but I cooked then and still know how to make a mean macaroni n' cheese. I traveled but great food happens on the road and I loved the Diwali celebration at Mother India last weekend. I bought new books to read but they're all about food, farming, and history (of food). Really I've just been lazy about writing. So we have esoterica tonight...

Esoterica in Print Form

I will miss reading this from time to time but it got me thinking about both cooking magazines and about traditional media in general. When I started this cooking madness I subscribed to and read four cooking magazines. I still have the subscriptions, and I still love them, but I don't know that I'd miss them as much as I would have if they had stopped publishing several years ago. I haven't had cable at home for four months now and I still have a modicum of knowledge about pop culture. Even though we don't have Gourmet anymore (and I think it's crap that Gourmet and it's million subscribers are screwed and Conde-friggin-Nast goes on), but we'll still talk about fine food and cooking.

Esoterica in Restaurants

I hit up B. Bistro in Bolton Hill last week for Ms. S's birthday shindig and was not disappointed in the least. Great wines, great people, great charcuterie. A frisee salad with lardons, a perfectly poached egg, crumbled tangy blue cheese, and a mustard vinaigrette. That dish, more than any other we had that night, was a classic bistro dish. Paris-style. Perfect. Add to that to pork belly entrée surrounded by Cassoulet-style white beans and covered in wet whole-grain mustard; and you’d have a happy food blogger. There were some misses, like the beet salad that was over-oiled and the fried-green tomatoes that sogged a bit because they were the bed for a whole fish. Our server was a nice’un, but it took him a while to get sorted out on the pacing of ‘please sir, bring us more wine.’ Then again, perhaps that says more about us than him. He did have to put up with a table of serious food whores on a random Wednesday night shift.

Esoterica in Signing-Off Form

So I leave you with this thought for a rainy night on the water. If you saute two shallots and three cloves of garlic in olive oil, add about 3 cups of sliced cremini mushrooms, start about a half pound of pasta to boil, add some spinach to the saute, throw the almost done noodles into the saute pan with a few ladles of the pasta water, put it on a plate and put parmesan cheese on it...you'd have had dinner tonight too.