V.H.

Peach gelato with Toigo's peaches. Yummy peachy goodness.

Jason sells some small bags of chocolatey confections in addition to the bon bons in his shop. On our last visit there, we picked up a bag of dark chocolate, toffee, pretzel and crushed cocoa nib things. These things are almost as addictive as the crystal meth caramels. The toffee adds that slightly salty buttery note that goes so well with the chocolates. And for those who get the Arlington Sun Gazette, Jason's got his picture in it this week in an article about small Arlington businesses.

Roast the turkey, invite your friends over for Thanksgiving in July and ask everyone to bring their fav holiday dish. Minimal cooking for you, maximum fun for everyone. I find Thanksgiving dinner out of season to be so much better than the one in November.

We lived at Millbrook for two years and then I worked at the Mark Center for another three. Places to eat... -Han Sung Oak in the Harris Teeter shopping center at Columbia Pike and Lincolnia for Korean -Full Kee in the Trader Joe's shopping center for shrimp dumpling soup, shrimp paste stuffed eggplant, oyster casserole, and all sorts of other tasty Hong kong dishes -an Afghan sandwich shop in the same shopping center as Temptasian. For $4, you get a sandwich made wtih Afghan bread freshly baked and meat grilled when you order. Obviously this is not fast food but simple and tasty -wander on down Little River Turnpike, specifically in Annandale. Lots of great Asian shops and grocery stores. There's a place called the Food Factory that's very good. I think it might be another Afghan place but they serve a lot more than just sandwiches. Some really wonderful simmered things that they pour over fragrant basmati rice. -stop by Eden center at Seven Corners for Vietnamese deli sandwiches and really good bread at Banh Mi So 1 Not so much that you can walk to from Millbrook but so much great inexpensive food within a short drive. Also, Annette's BBQ Heaven on Van Dorn is pretty decent. It's the shopping center just past the BJ's.

I did the pizza stone on the grill a couple of weekends ago and what I found that worked well for me was to cook the dough on one side for a couple of minutes and flip it over so that I was topping the precooked side. I slid this back onto the stone and ended up with a thoroughly cooked pizza. As for toppings, my onions and mushrooms were thinly sliced and raw but peppers and eggplant I grilled ahead of time.

At seven years old, I don't know if your son would be too cool for this but Arlington County has two water spraygrounds. Both are near the Clarendon part of the county and an awesome concept. We went to the one at Hayes park this evening after daycare and it's a very nice playground geared more towards the 2-5 year old crowd but the piece de resistance is a solar system themed concrete water area with spraying fountains. There's a nice grassy area with plenty of room for games and running around, a covered pavillion (don't know if you need to reserve), tennis courts, and picnic tables. Might be worth checking out for age appropriateness. The other one at Lyon Village (near the Italian Store) might be more age appropriate.

Toigo does the Falls Church market on Saturdays as well. We happened to be over in that area going to the Home Depot yesterday morning and stopped off at the farmers market. We used to go all the time last year when we lived in Falls church but our move to Arlington has us at Courthouse most weekends we're around. Yesterday there was a guy at Falls Church selling crabcakes, $9 for jump lump and $5 for lump. He was frying up and offering samples that were pretty good. He also had a number of magazine articles laid out in front of him that referenced his operation, but of course I can' remember his name now. We bought a pork shoulder roast from Cibola farms and some of their buffalo snack sticks. I'm looking forward to smoking the roast today. Cibola also had chicken, eggs, sausages in both pork and buffalo, buffalo and pork in various cuts, and goat. I love this time of year at the markets. We brought home strawberries, yellow wax beans, basil, chinese broccoli, sugar snap peas, and red and yellow onions. Everything was plentiful and a lot of the prices are affordable.

Do a cheater's smoking. Prepare a nice pork shoulder roast with a spice rub, smoke for an hour, then take out, place in a covered pan in the oven and bake at 250 until the meat is fall apart tender. This takes another 4 hours or more at my house but the result is quite good for those days you just don't feel like tending the smoker throughout the day.

For those searching for canning supplies, I have found glass jars, lids, and pectin at Shoppers Food Warehouses around the area. Sur la Table carries a $12.95 canning starter kit that includes a jar lifter, tongs, a plastic stick with a magnet for lifting the lids and one other tool. I canned last year without a jar lifter and I have to say that it was a million times easier this year with one. I found low sugar pectin last year at Shoppers Food Warehouse and wasn't able to find it again this year when I made my strawberry jam. Last year's jam made with 4 cups of sugar instead of this year's 7 cups of sugar tasted more intense to me and my family. Since then, I've been on a hunt for low sugar pectin and found some no sugar pectin at Wegman's in Pennsylvania this weekend. The no sugar pectin looks promising. I'm not looking to do sugar free, but the ability to tailor the sugar level to highlight the fruit itself is appealing to me.

After eating one of the salted caramel chocolates from Artisan Confections yesterday, I had a hankering for a hunk of caramel. Made Fleur de Sel caramels from Epicurious. I made this a couple of times last winter and they were delightful. Tonight, they were still delightful, but much softer given that my house is currently 10 degrees warmer than it was in December.

We stopped by Jason's shop on Lee Hwy this evening and picked up a small assortment of truffles by the piece. Since it was just for personal consumption, we got them unboxed, and they were only $1.25 a piece. Delicious and easy on the wallet. We also picked up a pound of bulk 72% Valrhona bittersweet chocolate. These come in the form of small oval disks, perfect for snacking. Jason's truffles are really outstanding. The flavors really enhance the flavor of the chocolate without overpowering them. We picked out the malted milk chocolate (my 2 yr old liked that it was blue), salted caramel, and the mint. All really good and making me wish I'd picked out more.

I don't belong to Slow Food but my friend heads the Youth Garden at the National Arboretum, which I think is the Edible Schoolyard-like project you're referring to. It's a wonderful program and they work really hard to make it fun for the kids. "Fresh air, warm sunshine, rich soil, good friends and a freshly tilled garden plot…for the first time ever, Kayla, a third grader from Northeast Washington scoops out a handful of earth and plants a tomato seedling. For more than three decades, the Washington Youth Garden at the U.S. National Arboretum has given the District of Columbia's children a unique, hands-on educational experience. The year-round program is a window into many unimagined and otherwise unattainable worlds for city, grade school children. It not only "grows green dreams," but nurtures and nourishes a new generation of gardeners."

I don't understand the Beef Proper. I had it once with my family and both my parents, my husband and I, and my brother thought it was really odd. It was deep fried little strips of beef with a sweet bit of glaze, but the beef was so dry and stringy that you couldn't help but think of beef jerky. My favorite dish there was the black pepper shrimp, which was huge platter of jumbo shrimp very lightly dusted in flour, fried/sauteed, and finished off with an addictively good, not too spicy dark sauce. I can't remember what else we ordered that day but the best and worst stood out in my memory.

I buy the Prosciutto San Danielle from The Italian Store. I believe it goes for $17.99 a pound while the P. di Parma is a dollar less. I quite like the domestic from Litteri's for $12.99 a pound for sandwiches, but only when they are in the good meaty part of the ham. I find it a bit too salty when they first start cutting into it, and a bit hard and salty when you start heading into the skinny end.

Dead frozen bivalves? Ick. How can you be sure that you don't get a couple that were processed already dead? At least when they're alive you can tell.

I am so thankful to whoever turned me onto the My Organic Market chain as an alternative to Whole Foods. The first time I tried it was sometime this winter when I went to the Arlington WF in search of apples but all I found were soft bruised things for $2 a pound. My stop at MOM's (near Cheesetique) turned up wonderful organic apples in great shape, at about $1.29 a pound. It's certainly not the gourmet food experience that WF is, but if you're looking to buy a week's worth of organic produce for under $30 and Trickling Springs milk in a gallon jug, this is the place to go.

Two things my husband has said over the last few months remind me how far he has come from the boy who ate a turkey sandwich every day for lunch for a year that I met 10 years ago. At Easter, my daughter was naming the stuffed animals on the table: a lamb, a bunny, and a duckling. My husband looks over at me and says, "mmmm, delicious baby animals..." The rest of his family was grossed out, their loss. More recently, he ducked into a Weis to grab a chocolate milk as a recovery drink after a bike race, gets back into the car with it and proudly tells me, "Look, I picked this one because it didn't have High Fructose Corn Syrup and had the fewest number of ingredients." Those who have met him know that he is definitely not a foodie, so these kinds of statements just make me melt.

I consider myself quite the baking hack in that I don't always follow baking recipes to a T once I've made them a few times. One recipe that we make quite frequently in our house is Gale Gand's molten chocolate cake recipe (with freshly whipped cream instead of the mint sauce) from Epicurious. I love it because it lends itself to scaling down to 2 or 4 servings fairly nicely, and has not suffered from me changing it to 3 whole eggs for four servings instead of two whole eggs and two egg yolks. The batter even bakes up quite well in my daughter's tiny little muffin pan, staying just molten enough for her to enjoy it but not so much that we get a chocolate covered 2 year old. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/104604 The other standby in our house is Mark Bittman's chocolate mousse recipe. We recently celebrated three birthdays in April and I made a three layer yellow cake with two layers of mousse for each of them. The first cake had to be transported to PA in warm weather, so I baked the cake in a springform, reassembled it with the mousse layers back in the springform, and froze the whole thing overnight for transport. Glaze, carried separately in a container, was half bittersweet/half semisweet mixed with enough heavy cream for a good consistency and a bit of corn syrup for gloss. Assembling the cake in the springform was great for people like me who lack finesse when it comes to baking. The only potential downside is that each cake made about 20-25 very rich servings, and after three of them, we're a bit moussed out for a while.

Bonaparte bakery was at Annandale last year, great place to pick up a wedge of quiche on the way to work last year. Interestingly, some of the same producers come to the Thursday Annandale Market and the Saturday Falls Church market but the prices can be lower at Annandale. The buffalo trail sticks from Cibola Farms are like some kind of virtuous Slim Jim. Delicious and a bargain at $1.25. Available at either market.

Kotobuki is across the street from Blacksalt. Not walking distance, but maybe on your way home?

Pork bulgogi deliciousness alert. The Grand Mart at Seven Corners today had jars of Pork bulgogi marinade on sale for $1.99 instead of the usual $4.99. This was right above the frozen sliced pork butt. Each jar marinates about 8.5 pounds of meat. Buy a jar and invite some friends over.

There was a very nice selection of potted herbs at the Courthouse Market this morning. We walked away with two tomato plants, chervil, lovage, sage, rosemary, two basils, and chives. One of the vendors had some baskets of berries out but they looked awfully pale.

Where do you find fresh sablefish/black cod in this area? I've been keeping an occasional eye out for it ever since I had it at the 2941 DR.com dinner back in November.

Picture of the unglazed quarry tiles. Don't let the Home Depot folks try to tell you that you can't use these for cooking. I think they're something like 30 or 40 cents a tile, 6x6 inch. Burnt cheese stains not included... Those were from the days before mktye told me about parchment paper, bless her...

My cherry blossom/Corduroy experience was not anywhere near as exciting as Chris W's. I headed downtown with the 2.5 year old and my mother-in-law last Friday morning to see the blossoms. We had absolutely beautiful weather and were there early enough that the crowds weren't too bad yet. After a leisurely 3 hour stroll around the mall to check out the monuments, we headed over to Corduroy for a light lunch. Kat brought out a couple of the spring rolls for us to enjoy while we waited for our entrees. My mother-in-law had the halibut and I had the lamb. My mother-in-law was floored by the quality of the food and thought it was a perfect ending to our outing.