Blue Ribbon Barbecue, Arlington, MA
Blue Ribbon Barbecue
908 Massachusetts Avenue
Arlington, Massachusetts
(781) 648-7427
I’ve generally been unenthused by Fourth-of-July festivities or culinary fare. The advent of the day often depresses me because it’s the day I realize one-third of the summer is already gone, in many cases wasted away with missed opportunities to soak in sun or enjoy the longer days. And fireworks — a series of short-lived, superficial bursts of color—just aren’t intriguing enough for me to endure crazed, screaming, or drunken crowds. Aimee Mann touched on similar sentiments in her song “4th of July”:
Today’s the fourth of July
another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
what a waste of gunpowder and sky
—from “Whatever,” 1993, The Imago Recording Company
Food-wise, for much of my teenage and young-adult life Independence Day meant a paternally imposed and catered under-the-back-porch cookout. The event was attended by my sister Bea and me and sometimes the family cat, with my mom “joining” us from the family room, just beyond the backdoor screen. Also present were the ol’ gnarly picnic table — which took up half the makeshift patio under the porch, the underside of which was laced with spider webs and other nests of nature (the locale was dark, dusty, and grimy, but definitely shady!) — charcoal-grilled hot dogs and burgers, buns, rolls, cole slaw and potato salad from DeMoulas/Market Basket, assorted beverages, and the ubiquitous squeeze bottle of Plochman’s yellow mustard. To thwart insectile attempts to join the feast, exposed food received additional shade in the form of a screen-food-dome-thingy most likely purchased from a Walter Drake or Lillian Vernon catalog. There was usually a fly swatter close by.
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Oh, how quickly a bunch of perfectly just-a-hair-underripe bananas, purchased with the best of healthy-and-light-eating intentions, can go from fit for snacking or slicing into a bowl of Kashi Crunch to must-freeze-for-pops-and-smoothies to oh-dear-its-time-for-banana-bread. The inevitability of an upcoming banana-bread episode fills me with both glee and guilt—glee because I have an excuse to bake one of my all-time favorite snacks breakfasts nibbles splurges, guilt because most quick breads and muffins—no matter how much good-for-you lowfat yogurt, whole-wheat flour, or unprocessed wheat bran goes in them—are sweet, calorie-dense temptations. You think I’m going to have just one slice? I don’t think so . . .
Two simple criteria make a recipe splurgeworthy. First, the taste, texture, and overall delight must be worth the time and trouble to make it. Second, the experience has to be enjoyable enough to justify the overabundance of fat, sugar, and calories I will end up consuming. Of course, finding splurgeworthy recipes takes considerable trial and error.
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June 24th, 2010 in
Cookbooks,
Recipe ratings,
Recipes | tags:
America's Test Kitchen,
baking,
banana,
banana bread,
banana muffins,
bananas,
bread,
Cook's Illustrated |
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For this post I’m writing from memory as old as a week or older; please forgive the lack of sensory detail as I write about our fine and not-so-fine dining experiences in Portland, Maine.
West End Deli
The West End Deli, 133 Spring Street, Portland, Maine
West End Deli, Spring Street, Portland. This photo is from Google maps; when we visited the deli, there were tables and chairs, not benches, on the sidewalk.
On Memorial Day we arrived at the Portland train station on the Amtrak Downeaster at about 2:35 and were quite ready for a long-awaited lunch. On the cab ride to the hotel, we kept our eyes pealed for potential luncheon sources. Just seconds from the hotel, we both espied a small storefront with tables, chairs, and a few patrons munching away. As we approached on foot, the sidewalk chalkboard sign boasted what would prove to be a most delightful lunch choice—the special of the day, the Roslin. This sandwich wrap contained, if I remember correctly, turkey, avocado, black beans, and apple salsa. I usually eschew the wrap part of wraps, opting instead for the “in-a-bowl” versions. But today, I wanted, and ordered, a wrap. I’m on vacation, dammit! A spinach wrap to be precise. It was the spunky tartness of the green-apple salsa that made this wrap memorable in a very good way. Gary ordered a quesadilla wrap and liked it. We ate at the outdoor tables, as the seating inside was cramped. West End is a deli-grocery store; we walked to the back to the deli to order our sandwiches and whatnot, took the slips of paper that detailed our orders, grabbed our bottled drinks from the refrigerated foods section, and paid the kind lady at the front register.
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So, it’s almost two months into my stop-eating-crap objective so it’s time for some pause and reflection.
The most noteworthy omissions from my daily diet are far from the most beloved. Through January and February, I had no SlimFast bars, frozen dinners, canned soups, store-bought bread, diet soda (except for one instance where no other low-cal beverage was available), 100-cal packs of anything, reconstituted hot chocolate, or fat-free half-and-half.
With these and other omissions came substitutions, trade-offs, and new habits. For example:
- Breakfast. With SlimFast and Kashi Crunch out of the picture, weekday breakfasts, which I eat at work, have been challenging. Mostly, I’ve been eating steel-cut oatmeal or 10-grain hot cereal prepared at home, scooped by the cupful into Rubbermaid containers, and nuked for about 2 minutes in the work microwave. Sugar, fresh or dried fruit, and maybe some chopped nuts are added at various points in this operation. Outside of hot oatmeal, there’s homemade muffins and breads, and the occasional bakery scone. If I were able to prepare and eat breakfasts at home, smoothies and omelets would rule the morning.
- Bread. Oh, how I miss the convenience of commercially manufactured bread and breadstuffs. My Pepperidge Farm Whole Wheat Swirl Bread! Kasanoff’s Marble Rye! Sahara Whole Wheat Pitas! Actually, I only miss the prepared pita, since a hummus lunch (yes, comercially processed hummus — more on that later) isn’t the same without it. This weekend will be my first try at making my own pita, but I’ve already had success with baking my own breads, muffins, and rolls.
- Beverages. Fat-free half-and-half out of my coffee; whole milk or low-fat milk in. Diet soda has been replaced with either water—tap where available and potable, else bottled—or hot or iced tea.
Anyway, throughout my two-month acclimation towards a non-crap diet, I found myself grouping potential edibles into five categories—five new food groups, if you will:
The five new food groups (according to No-Whining Dining)
Let me say from the get-go that many of these categories will overlap, as you will soon see . . .
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I’m going to start rating or grading each recipe I follow.
There are many qualities and characteristics to consider in a recipe, such as ease of preparation, length of ingredient list, healthfulness, availability of ingredients, taste, texture, expense (in money, time, and energy), and plated appearance. I don’t have an official list of grading criteria yet, but I will use a rough preliminary grading technique on the recipe for Sautéed Grated Zucchini with Marjoram from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.
The ingredients and technique are straightforward and simple: Coarsely grate a pound of zucchini, draw out excess water by way of salting and squeezing in a sieve, then sauté the drained zucchini in two tablespoons of olive oil or butter until lightly browned. Remove from heat, add chopped marjoram and pulverized garlic.
And now . . . the impromptu rating system makes its debut:
Sautéed Grated Zucchini with Marjoram
Source: The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters
Ingredients: Easy
Overall time estimate (with all ingredients at the ready): 35 minutes
Taste: Good. Well-seasoned with a mellow butter flavor
Presentation: Good. Pretty green vegetables and herbs with a nice golden overtone (I used herb butter in this trial.)
Healthfulness:Jury’s still out. If made with butter, not sure how this will fare. I will run this through NutritionData.com’s analysis tool later this week. In the meantime, see “practicality.”
Practicality (via No-whining Dining’s current food and cooking philosophies): Poor. One and a half pounds of zucchini were used for this trial, yielding maybe a cup or a cup and a half of shredded zucchini sauté. To accommodate the published serving yield (4 servings per pound of zucchini), each serving would get only about one-fourth of a cup. So much for filling half your plate up with veggies. Also, in a world where high-calorie, high-fat, low-nutrition foods are abundant and available around every corner, vegetables such as beautiful, sweet, fresh zucchinis are a welcome, safe, go-to tasty, healthful, low-cal oasis. WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO SPOIL THAT WITH TWO FREAKIN’ TABLESPOONS OF FAT?????? But that’s another blog entry.
Overall grade: C-
I’m not sure if the permanent rating system will have grades or scores. Since this system will be largely subjective, I might as well go with grades, or even just key words. Or something. I’ll figure something out. I’m open to suggestions.
Spicy Crispy Kale Chips from nutritiontokitchen.com
I ate a lot of kale this week, having purchased one bunch too many of the vivacious veggie at Whole Foods. What a spunky, curly green leaf bursting with personality! The leaves come across as bitter at first, but they can mellow with cooking, and shrink when prepared in liquid, without losing their characteristic curliness in the process.
Curly kale is just one variety of kale, of course. And kale is just one of many winter greens I desire to explore, in part inspired by the Eating Well article that included the recipe for Monday night’s meal of Kale, Sausage, & Lentil Skillet Supper. The Supper was wholesome, earthy, and satisfying, though I think a wee more spice or spark would have made it more interesting. And I added all the French lentils I had — about one and a quarter cup — which yielded an overwhelming amount of lentils. The recipe made more than four servings for sure.
OK, back to that leftover bale of kale (a baby bale?). A google search led me to Nutrition to Kitchen’s intriguing Spicy Crispy Kale recipe. Though I had decided to make this irresistible recipe on Superbowl Sunday so I can munch on something healthy while watching the Colts trample the Saints, I had nothing on tonight’s agenda so I figured I’d give it a go along with another skillet supper — this time with chicken sausage, Yukon gold potatoes, and frozen mixed vegetables.
The chips were fabulous. It’s amazing how they can enter the oven confident, firm, and flexible but emerge vulnerable, brittle, and crispy. Great crunch, great taste. Gary thought it would make a great garnish for a soup or casserole. I agreed. I will definitely be making these again.
February 5th, 2010 in
Banter,
Recipes | tags:
Kale |
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My minestrone soup of yore
Several weeks ago my cabbagephobic husband broke his cabbage taboo and fixed a vegetable and sausage soup. The deliciousness of the sausage would outweigh any ick or stink of the cabbage, so his reasoning went. Another unusual (for us) addition to this concoction: tomato juice. The combination of tomato-based broth and mildly crunchy cabbage reminded me of a minestrone soup I used to enjoy many years ago.
This minestrone, as I remember it, had tender red kidney beans and soft but assertive elbow macaronis. The recipe, which I just dug up, called for frozen mixed vegetables, beef bouillon cubes, and a lot of celery as well; but the memorable aspects were the cabbage, tomato, and macaroni. I had made a mental note to fix this memorable minestrone sometime soon. Then I forgot about it again . . .
. . . until I started looking for a suitable use for a large amount of curly endive leftover from an overzealous greens purchase I made in pursuit of my first salad ala Alice Waters. The salad consisted only of red leaf lettuce and curly endive, the endive being totally edible and nicely bitter, but a little tough. “I feel like a ruminant,” declared my husband between chews. I conceded that this hearty green might be more easily eaten cooked, so I searched the Web for ideas and found a minestrone soup recipe on the Eating Well site. Aha! I can dig up my old minestrone soup recipe and add the endive to that!
But wait! There’s more! Let me see if The Art of Simple Food has a minestrone recipe. If it does, I’ll make that instead!
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A simple fix: Wine vinegar, olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper
For the actual recipe, scroll down to the bottom of the post.
Just days after denouncing all dietary crap, I found myself in a little late-night quandary. While hastily preparing a portable lunch for the next day, I realized I had no crapless salad dressing on tap. In the home fridge we had Kraft Lite Ranch and Newman’s Own Light Lime Vinaigrette, the latter of which would have been good enough by my new standards but I really wanted to try to throw a dressing together before my quickly approaching bedtime. I’d just need a little guidance. Let me check a few cookbooks . . .
Hm. Fresh Tomato Vinaigrette or Blue Cheese Dressing from Healthy in a Hurry? Nope. No tomatoes on hand; no blue cheese to speak of. Okay, how about Apple Basil Dressing or maybe Orange Tarragon from Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites? Intriguing, but no basil and no tarragon. And I had no creamy cucumbers, no minted dill, no lemon tahini, no fresh buttermilk, nor any ingredient these seemingly basic dressings required. I was too stubborn to Google “viniagrette” — why did none of my cookbooks have a simple vinaigrette recipe?
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