Puccini, or Not

I said in my last blog post that we were going to dinner. It was a good dinner. As is our tradition, I'll blog my side.

Went to Tosca last night here in DC, and did not know that the waiters were refilling my glass with pinot noir as I focused on my food. I was a tad loopy on the Metro home (the Sherbs, as always, was very tolerant of my shenanigans).

My meal was as follows:
1) Red mullet and sardines with fava beans and tomatoes - did not taste like the sardines one's used to. Salty, tasty, and the beans were terrific.

2) Quail stuffed with shiitake mushroom. I love me some quail, and this was deliciously moist, on a bed of wilted swiss chard and grilled artichokes. I have never had chard so good, but I tend to stay away from chard and kale because they can be bitter as all get out (still, we're making a dish featuring kale at home in a couple nights - and may make more if kale stays at 99¢ per pound).

3) Gorgonzola ice cream with candied celery and rosemary - as soon as I saw this incredibly Iron Chef-y dish on the menu, I knew I had to have it. Verdict: I loved it. My father (for whom dessert is chocolate) would not.

I believe, in my drunken stupor, I told the Sherbs "it's like an appetizer, for dessert, but sweet." It's a little more than that, but the drunk summary suffices for rough work. The ice cream itself is not sweet; it's more neutral and gorgonzola-flavored. It's eaten with the candied celery, which is like a relish or a fruit topping, and also mixed with the honey syrup that the ice cream is placed in.

The sommelier's wine selection was excellent (we took advantage of his recommendations), and I loved the plum tomato foccacia in the bread basket.

Pre-Breakfast Post

Last day in Israel - probably going to be low key as my flight leaves tomorrow at what is officially TOO EARLY. May see a "tel," or huge mound o' piled up past civilizations. Will try to eat more Burger Ranch. We will see what happens.

Forgot to mention the big food surprise yesterday, which is that the cafeteria-style restaurant near the Latrun Tank Museum / Fallen Tank Officers Memorial is officially Not Bad, exceeding Mediocre by a wide margin. The salads were tasty and they can roast a kebab.

The tank museum is also worth going to if you, like me, love to look at tanks. They had three, count 'em, three, mobile bridge deployment vehicles. I think I had a GI Joe version of one. I impressed The Sherbs with my ability to determine the country of origin and special features for post WWII tanks; sadly for those single guy readers of the blog out there, I do not think she would have been as impressed had she not already been engaged to me - the tank museum is not a good first date unless your date operates a tank herself.

Salads and Knife Fights

Mostly touristy foods yesterday; we saw the Israel Museum, which was jam-packed, half-closed for renovations, and had some tasty kosher for Passover salads (the sandwiches, I heard, were a little disappointing). Once again I am impressed with the mixed greens of Israel.

Also tasty was the shwarma place called "Big Shwarma" 1/3 of the way down the pedestrian part of Ben-Yehuda Street. The chopped meat on a rotating spit was well-spiced and quite tasty, and served with fries and veggies (no pita this week, for obvious reasons).

I also discovered, while scanning the local cable channels, that Israel has its own version of Iron Chef called something like "Knife Fight." In Knife Fight, each chef prepares a course for a celebrity panel, and they vote yay or nay; the yays and nays are tallied up per course throughout the five-course meal. Sadly, the French chef ("Stephan") beat the local hero, even though he made what looked like sweetbreads. As I've mentioned before on this blog, you can make sweetbreads taste good.

Another Quick Comment From the Link Archive

A man who clearly watches what he eats is grossed out by his 5x magnification of the fat blobs in processed meats. Clearly he does not share the Men's Vogue editors' appreciation for a fine slice of American mortadella, with its visible-to-the-naked-eye chunks of fat. The Men's Vogue article is also notable for name-checking Chris Cosentino, who was a competitor on The Next Iron Chef and is evidently making his own mortadella now.

The closest the Sherbs and I get to The Next Iron Chef is that we live close to the restaurant of Morou Ouattara, who was eliminated early for doing the exact same plating every time.

Times, Responses, and Other Excuses to Change the Subject

To play off the Sherbs's previous post: yes, Ikea in Woodbridge, VA has at its restaurant a meal special which pairs fifteen Swedish meatballs in cream sauce with a healthy portion of macaroni and cheese for $5.49. There is also the small dollop of lingonberry sauce (I originally thought it was cranberry, but no - it has to be Swedish, and it has to look like salmon roe) that suffices as the concession to the existence of vegetables in the meal. The Swedish meatballs are in a gravy that Ikea calls "cream sauce." It is delicious. It is food that will kill you.

Today we went to Mai Thai in DC, as the Sherbs had to work late and I believe that eating at Mai Thai gives me a trifecta on credit card points and various other loyalty reward programs. We each had our own soups, which were tasty, but it seems that everything but the tom ka soup uses the tom yam soup base with extra stuff in it. If you love spicy lemongrass soup, you'll love these.

A parenthetical before I continue with the main dishes - the Sherbs and I had a conversation just now about the fact that it was nigh-impossible to find the Thai soups I am blogging about using the Food Network recipe extension for Firefox. Looking on Food Network's programming, there's basically no non-white ethnic food on the channel. Ever. And excessively Caucasian food hosts like Paula "smear it with lard" Deen and Sandra "You Can Make Angel Food Cake Hawaiian by Adding Runts Candy" Lee get tons of airtime. Make no bones about it, I watch a lot of Food Network - but are they racist?

Getting back to our Thai dinner, the Sherbs and I shared a salad and an entree. The salad was made of shredded mango and chopped red onion in a dressing that tasted like lime juice, cane juice, and cilantro. Little bits of toasted coconut were added for texture. Once we get the mandoline blade sharp enough, we are going to try to make it ourselves.

The entree was drunken noodles with tofu. I don't know how authentic the spicy candied version of drunken noodles is, but it's tasty - how could pan frying chow fun noodles not be? We ate every last molecule of it.

Meat and Salad

I just had a salad with meat on it for lunch. No, it wasn't that Hillshire Farms prepackaged stuff; it was from a deli across the way.

But, thinking about it, I do love my salad with protein. Meat's good, cheese is good, certain types of tofu are acceptable. Nuts, seeds, and some beans are also okay.

I also like my salad with dressing. Doesn't have to be fatty, but I don't like to feel like I'm just eating leaves.

Pineapeño

Today's dinner was fish, which means that the Sherbs was nowhere nearby. I liked it anyway. It was tilapia, baked with pepper, served over rice with a pineapple and jalapeño relish and a honey and balsalmic vinegar sauce.

It was delicious, but I don't know how it would work without some dead animal protein, to which the Sherbs is opposed.

A short search of the Food Network recipe library (you can add it to your Mozilla search tab on this page) reveals that the only pineapple and jalapeño recipe they have is Emeril's "Pineapple Jalapeño Sorbet." And people wonder why I always change the channel when Mr. Lagasse is on.

Seriously, though, the sorbet has a perverse fascination for me. Spicy cold dessert sounds like it shouldn't work, but it just might. Maybe if the sorbet was mixed with some limoncello (lemon would be a complementary citrus flavor to the pineapple), which would make it a dessert which is cold, spicy, and alcoholic, then you'd be talking.

(how to I "peño" everything? HTML special characters, my friend.)