babka

strip clubs, luxury villas, and fraud charges. Apparently Buca had had more going for it than we thought....

But I was only doing what Jake said to do! I'd never dream of second-guessing him on wine provisions....

my stomach hurt because, I thought, I'd taken at least one bite of everything on the tables, but I'm still not recognizing half the favorites of this thread. Many thanks to everyone who came and helped, but especially to mktye, whose patience, work, and humor were much appreciated. (I liked the bbq pork dish with an mktye-made "vegan" side, myself), and whose crackers beat Komi's hands-down. The drinks, the food, the company, the split lips and bruised noses, the pork, the butter (russian!)--I can't think of a more wonderful crew with whom to eat, drink, and be merry on a sunny Sunday afternoon!

hothouse or no, I don't care: Season's first tomatoes!

If Memorial Day lunch is any indication, it’s possible to have a very good meal at Indigo Landing. Your odds of doing so, however, improve dramatically if you carry it there yourself. The restaurant’s deck overlooks a small, grassy hill with an old shade tree; drop $10 at your local grocer’s and grab a blanket. You’ll get the river and the D.C. skyline view, but you’ll come out far ahead on food. Indigo Landing is just south of D.C., but it could be in any town along the southern shore. The decor is Florida Keys meets yacht club, underscored, at least at lunch, by a loud, Jimmy Buffet-style soundtrack. “I could fetch the hats from the car,” mused the woman before us at the hostess stand. A comforting Virginia twang rolled out of her tightly stitched face: We didn’t have to see the hats to know that they were large and floppy, practical, and probably pink. She wanted to eat on the deck, where umbrellas have been ordered but not yet arrived; her companion talked her into the air-conditioned dining room instead. We had no hats. The music was dreadfully loud. We took the full sun. Outside, a family sat in the shade of an enormous, gnarled tree, their picnic spread upon the blankets. Further down, a man silently cast his fishing line into the softly lapping Potomac; his wife, clad in a white shirt and white visor, sat beside him on a fold-up chair. We ordered one entree, shrimp and grits, as basic as low-country gets, and sides of fried green tomatoes, oyster pie, and foie hush puppies. Biscuits arrived first, served in cutsy colanders and accompanied by a plate of butter with a thick dab of honey in the middle. We grabbed a biscuit each and were delighted to find they were flaky, soft, warm, and very, very good. “This place has potential,” I sighed, staring out at the water, the Washington Monument towering in the distance. Iced-tea hit the table, painfully sweet in Hillvalley’s glass; painfully bitter in my unsweetened one. “Is this sugared?” I asked, my face crinkling. Hillvalley tasted. “Nope. This is sugared,” handing hers over. Different, but equally wretched. We added the lemons and drank, pouting slightly with each sip. How do you screw up iced-tea? Hillvalley ordered a second glass before finishing the first, hoping something went wrong in the first pitcher. It wasn’t the pitcher. The appetizers were delivered, fried green tomatoes with shrimp remoulade and an oyster pie. We dug into the tomatoes while waiting for a second spoon on the pie. The neat stack of three hits all the taste buds at once: sweet and bitter, crunchy and soft, and I was dreaming of future holidays on the river. Then the spoon arrived and we tried the pie. The oysters were fat and sweet, but unless you nabbed one, you were eating warm milk with sauteed mushrooms dumped in. We abandoned it and waited for the next course. Hushpuppies followed, fat and round. Before Indigo Landing, I’d never met a hushpuppie I didn’t like: Here, they’re dry, painfully so, no sweetness to be found, and while they’re studded with foie, something went wrong along the way and the foie tastes like overcooked chicken liver. The slight sweetness that should be in the cornmeal got pumped into the peach dipping sauce, which tasted strongly like sweet peach yogurt. Hillvalley took a soft forkful of the shrimp and grits and made a face. “Can you write this up?” she asked. “I don’t know if I have words.” I tried them. I’m a Yankee. Oatmeal, not grits, runs in my genetic code. I’ve lived with enough Southerners to turn out something passable, not great, but here, I take a retrospective pride in my ersatz skills: Even I’ve never turned out grits so bad they taste like vinegar. I stabbed one of the shrimp: Acrid smoke clung to the fat rubbery meat. We left them uneaten, together with the rest of the meal. Across the deck, talking turned to laughter as a family of ducks--a drake, a hen, three babies--marched proudly onto the lawn below. The picnicking kids abandoned their blankets to fall in line behind the ducklings, one human papa trailing after lest his youngest follow the parade into the water. Just beyond, the fisherman's wife broke into applause as he lifted an enormous catfish, its whiskers still wriggling, into the air. “It’s a beautiful spot for fishing,” Hillvalley said, “but I don’t know if I’d eat the catch.”

The North Dakota thing isn't tenuous at all--I've been following it a bit in the North Dakota press, and NDFU is indeed the reason for the venture. They've been trying to get it off the ground for several years now. I don't know their current financing, but the old pitch, at least, was limited to members of the union. They Get Agraria back east ND co-op plans DC restaurant - Newsline I'll grant you, I've made my share of cracks about it to our ag reporter, but that's mostly because I'm from Iowa and he's from North Dakota and it doesn't take much to set us off anyway. [didja hear about the two dakotans who went to see a movie at the drive-in and died while they were there? yah, the movie was called "Closed for the Winter."] [didja hear what happened to the Iowa ice hockey team??? yah, they went into spring training and drowned.] But from an ag/lobbying perspective, the venture's legit--for some reason, the North Dakota Farmers' Union really has decided to further its members farms & goals by sinking money into a restaurant, and individual farmers have ponied up to do so. From the dining perspective, which is what matters here, we're all waiting to see how their concept translates to the table. They've made some good hires, they're in a pretty space with a checkered history, and I, for one, wish nothing but the best for my poor country cousins from the Dakotas....

trader joe's pinjur (a baltic dip/stew/spread of roasted peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, and garlic) and Jarlsberg cheese. instant food. instant good.

I have a brother. He was one boy to three girls growing up, but don't waste your pity, because he's the oldest and he could drive and drink and sneak girls in his window and nobody seemed to notice. Anyway, one boy in the family somehow produces half a dozen more when the dessert's good, and so we all learned self-defense at the dinner table. Forks at the ready and grab a hefty portion when the good stuff passes because it won't emerge from the testosterone end of things. Not so much an issue with the girls, who passed on dessert and then snuck portions from the kitchen late at night, but the boys, well--the parents expected manners, but there's times even they threw up their hands. So ladies--and you know who you are, you four kindly and comely lasses--can somebody please explain what the hell happened with the key lime pie tonight? Because all I saw was a glint of silver as the slice hit the table and then somehow half of it was gone. There was a pause, a small one, then another rush of silver and the plate was....empty?

It's 4 PM on a Saturday, and we're walking out of a theater with our heads full of sex, fascism, and schoolgirls. V. says the secondary lead is a Judas. R. says she's a heroine. I don't know what I think, except that we need to talk. R. hasn't eaten since breakfast; she says she's starving. V. is as well, I think, but he told me yesterday that he's fasting: No food until sundown. I'm the host for the day, but I'm also big on will-power and fasting these days. We're a week and a half into Lent, and I'm doing just fine on fasting from meat, thank you very much. (Well, I'm doing just fine now that my Unitarian minister friend has signed off on my once-a-week fast from fasting from meat.) V., I asked quietly as we walked down the street, just out of earshot from the rest of the group, how would you feel about sipping tea while we talk at a cafe so R. can eat? A cafe's fine, he said, but I can't drink. I stopped cold. The group caught up with us. 'You what?' 'I can't have water until sunset.' 'You threw away a thousand Islamic rules and you chose to keep the one defining a fast as fasting even from water?' I asked, voice rising, discretion abandoned for disbelief. V. was raised Baha'i, a religion that began in Iran a century and a half ago. I've had a soft spot for the Baha'i ever since V. told me that the gatekeeper who paved the way for their prophet, a man roughly analogous to John the Baptist in the Christian faith, is called "The Bob." V. shrugged. 'I didn't have much to do with the rules,' he said. 'Let's go to the cafe.' The group stopped outside of Saint-Ex, drawn by its beautiful, sunlit tables. I went in to find the hostess. We're welcome to sit outside, she said, as long as we're ordering dinner. I sighed. 'One of our group can't eat,' I said. She raised an eyebrow. 'Religious reasons,' I added. Eyebrow down. I love Generation Y. So we sat in the sunshine and we drank water and wine and we ate good food, except for V., who twice asked the waiter not to fill his waterglass. We hashed out the play and religion and politics and all in all, we had a lovely time, though I felt guilty as hell. I bit down a ridiculous impulse to ask the waiter if the kitchen had any mint or lavender that V. could sniff while we ate. I thought I had this religious thing down. Try to start events after sunset during Ramadan. Quietly ask Catholics about Lent diets well before the menu is set. When Muslims are coming to dinner, serve no pork and offer seltzer and two kinds of juice. Jews who keep Kosher fully understand why dinner is at their house, not mine. But Saturday flummoxed me. The group wanted to talk together; the group was hungry; and one of the group couldn't eat or drink. I could have asked R. if she could wait to eat until after we'd all taken a long walk to hash out the play, but it's so much easier to talk over food. So instead, I chatted quietly with V. while everybody else perused the cafe menu and placed their orders, slipping mine in at the end. V. was cool with the entire thing, but I'm curious: What would you have done? How do you handle religion and food, particularly when it's your food and not your religion?

When I'm flush, I want good food. When I'm broke, I want gentility to make me forget I'm broke. A bowl of french onion soup and a glass of cheap-ass wine at adams morgan's la forchette has done wonders for many a dispirited sunday afternoon. $10 plus tip. Similar concept with mussels at BdC, though the tab creeps closer to $15, and oysters at old ebbitt during happy hour, where the bill hits $20.

dreaming of CK's little crack rounds, I made up a batch of buttermilk biscuits last night. today, I'm still dreaming. any guesses as to how they produce those lighter-than-air salty/crunchy/buttery sweets?

we somehow wound up with just enough leftovers for one dinner for two, so we'll be redoing the original. made slkinsey's turkey two ways from eG and it was devoured....specifically, several guests pointed out that it tasted nothing at all like turkey, which was the primary goal.

kid whining for the new x-box? try this instead: Smash his glasses. Half an hour before Eastern Market closes--e.g., as dusk gives way to night--send him out, blind, on bike to fetch the turkey. For bonus points, rig his brake cable to snap two blocks into the journey. on the plus side, I'm alive, and the bird is safely dead in the fridge. edited to update three hours later: Turkey's no longer safely dead in the fridge. Turkey is half-butchered. Literally and figuratively. I'm trying to figure out how the hell I managed to completely avoid past intimacy with raw poultry. I'm wondering how I overlooked that lapse until after immersing myself in a thanksgiving meal for 15 that starts with deboning a turkey. The wishbone, for starters, is about 90 degrees away from where I thought it was.

Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. There's a reason she won james beard & julia child cookbook of the year for this: Her twenty-gazillion recipes, from basic to advanced, _work_, without fail, but she also offers enough information about the ingredients and techniques involved to let you understand why they work and so improvise in the future, if you want. It's replaced joy of cooking as my go-to reference for every dish that doesn't depend on meat.

except I think salt does penetrate, per the old Cooks Illustrated experiment weighing brined, water-soaked, and un-treated chicken after cooking--the brined chicken was significantly heavier than that soaked in water alone (which was scarcely heavier than the untreated one, if memory serves). I'd think that means the salt penetrated the entire chicken and denatured the proteins throughout, allowing them to retain more of the natural liquid than they would otherwise. carrying that thought into a marinade: If there's salt in the marinade, then maybe the meat would both hold onto more of its natural liquids and, possibly, absorb some of the aromatics and other marinade goodies that travel in with the salt? sheer speculation here, of course--I don't have a clue what I'm talking about. I do know that adopting Judy Roger's technique of presalting just about every meat I cook has made a world of difference to my dinner table.

yesterday's onion panade, panfried, with sincere & extended thanks to judy rogers, with a salad of greens, pancetta, and poached egg. if I'd had time to cook the squash, it would have been the perfect fall dinner.

i ate the apple. finally. I made my first visit to Eve today, after months of reading the mouthwatering notes here. She's more than earned her praise. Mapquest deposited me in front of a lingerie and stiletto display--not entirely incompatible with the luscious accolades, but not entirely helpful with my desire for food. A few random pedestrians and a quick trip into a real estate office soon set me rights as to "North" and "South" Pitt, a nuance, to be sure, unworthy of mapquest's attention. Lunch at the bar was a steal: $13.50 for two dishes from a limited menu. Hot bread--good bread--and warm butter, and she was already in my heart. The squash soup arrived tasting more of cool cream than warm squash, and a query to the fine bartender soon returned a warm, velvety bowl from which I lapped up every last bit with my bread. The salad du jour was perfect greens, sweet beets, sweeter tomatoes, and wonderfully cooked grouper, with a slight crunch on the face and fat flakes beneath. But what really stole my heart and made me very, very glad she's not accessible by metro jaunts was her service. From the kind host who pulled out my seat, until we realized that I wanted the special in the bar, to the bartender, who'd been in town for only a month but noted every quirk of my eyebrow, to the random chefs' whites and busboys strolling through--everyone was so kind! All I wanted was to read my notes and eat a good, quick lunch before my rental car was due back, and they were perfectly content to let me do so, with friendly hello's and how are you's and then on about their day. I felt like I was visiting an manor on an invitation of the host to do as I wished--and I did.

I'm gonna go stomp into my corner and sulk. Or find a friendly lawyer somewhere. Or see if hillvalley's willing to let us losers paypal $15 towards Coaching for College, since that's why Landrum generously offered the dinner in the first place, and then go use the other $30 to buy a really, really nice bottle of wine....

I'm unexpectedly hosting thanksgiving this year. I found one farm that still has heritage birds left, at $4.65 a pound, and requires a one hour drive to pick 'em up. Whole Foods has non-heritage at $2 a pound, plus $1.25 bus fare, and a local farm will deliver same to mt. pleasant for $2.65 a pound. I hate turkey. But I love thanksgiving--soup, mashed potatoes, onion panade, squash pie, leek pie, breads, cranberries, salads, wines--I've got so many ways to spend my limited food dollars that I can't believe I'm seriously considering $80 for a dumb bird. What're you doing?

Busboy and Poets: Where Babka Learned to Eat Mussels Without Silverware. And Found that they were Good and Cheap. (though they might have been better had we not requested utensils three times.)

osso bucco. R and I sucked our bones dry and then looked at the plate of our dinner guest, where the bone rested undisturbed. "Do you not like marrow?" R asked. "Marrow--like dogs eat?" said the guest. "Yeah," said R, nodding agreeably as she whisked the offending remnant off the guest's plane and onto her own. "Like dogs eat."

Cafe Atlantico, pre-theatre menu. Leave by 7:35, step onto navy-archives metro, step off at SW waterfront metro, and enjoy the evening. Reverse for post-theatre drinks.

I was walking down Wilson Boulevard this evening, cold and hungry, when a gentle oasis suddenly beckoned to me with big windows, white lights, and a strange bicycle sculpture. I squinted to read the signs: "Minh's" it said. "Minh's" I thought. Didn't I just read about this in Sietsema's chat? It was beautiful, but scarily empty--the kind of empty that has you walking through the dining room and then walking back to the entrance, trying to figure out if it's a museum or a food joint with wait staff. As I got back to my entrance and, by then, intended exit, a woman popped out. "Can I help you?" she asked, smiling. "Yes, please," I said. "One for dinner." I sat down at a table surrounded by windows. Horrible new-age vietnamese music was piping into the restaurant, but there was a fountain, or the sound of a fountain, anyway, and white linen tablecloths. I popped up to read Sietsema's reviews, then sat back down and ordered a recommended appetizer, shrimp cakes, and a special appetizer, crab soup with asparagus. I tried to order a third ap, chicken salad, to round out the meal, but the waiter waived me off. "The shrimp cakes are very large," he said. "It's enough food." The crab soup was a tasteless broth, a corner take-out battle lost, with cornstarch leaching flavor from everything else. But the shrimp cakes were a wonder! Crunchy fried sweet potatoes with a shrimp attached, lettuce leaves, cilantro, and a strange basil/mint plant. On the waiter's instruction, I wrapped the cakes in lettuce and herbs and dipped into the fish sauce-based dip and quietly, happily, melted. Salty, sweet, savory, bitter, and crunchy--you'd be hard-pressed to design a dish better suited to hitting every tripwire on the tongue. Three tables were occupied. Three! And their dishes smelled heavenly--I wished, suddenly, strongly, that I'd ordered the pork when the scent from a nearby table wafted over--but the dining room was enormous. With all the rotten Vietnamese in the District, I wondered, why on earth was this place so empty? When I paid my bill--$12.50, plus tax--I was still wondering.

cream of crab soup. with thanks to crackers for the craving and safeway for the crab.

I'm not a fried oysters kind of girl. I kinda think that nature made them perfect just as they are, with ocean liquor floating on the half shell. I was wrong. We went to Circle Bistro late Friday night, after a show at the Kennedy Center, and the place was happily buzzing with suited couples in the dining room and sweatered happy-hour goers who hadn't gotten around to leaving the hour seated in the bar. Outside, it drizzling miserably. Inside, it was soft and warm, and the music, while bad, was low. Most of the menu sang of the region, and none more so than the Bay oysters: Cox somehow wrapped the ocean and the oyster together in a perfectly crispy shell, served atop brilliantly roasted local potatoes in a mustard something sauce. We ate every last bit and then looked mournfully for more. (but 'settled' for Madeleines--it was almost midnight, after all.)