I have discovered blogging from my BlackBerry, and it is amazing!
Today, despite the hurricane conditions, we went to a newly-opened local winery. I constantly am dumbfounded at how such a wonderful establishment can be about fifteen minutes from my door.
Anyway, a proper review is pending, but as I wanted to try out mobile blogging I decided to upload our takeaway cheese platter. We don’t know what the brown is called, but it’s yumtastic.

There is something of a long-standing debate, if Top Chef informed me correctly, between Chicago and everywhere else as to what makes a good pizza. Should it be deep-dish?  Is it something Californian with salad greens and prosciutto?  Who knows, and frankly, who cares?

I’ve had two great pizzas in my life.  One was at a wonderful cafe in the sun in Rome, and the other was at To The Herbs, an Italian restaurant we used to frequent in Japan.  To The Herbs had numerous varieties, some traditional and some slightly more “Japanese” in taste, but the quality of the dough and the flavors were always extraordinary.

I’m sure we’ve all had our fair share of good pizzas, and even when abroad for a quick dose of “American” flavor I could always order Dominos or Papa John’s (bleh!).  But the one type of pizza that is truly lacking abroad (and in places like California, my friends inform me) is the greasy, super cheesy, Italian-American pizza from New York.  That is the pizza I grew up on, and it is difficult to eat, ridiculously bad for you, and leaves you feeling distinctly slimy.

That’s from Joey’s Place, our local slice of heaven/hell, depending on how you look at it.  The funny thing is that it’s one of the biggest foods I look forward to eating whenever I come home from abroad.  I guess you can take the boy from Jersey, but can’t take the Jersey out of the boy.

This past Saturday I was overjoyed by prospect of delicious seafood; Matt and I went to Hook in Georgetown, an upscale-but-not-stuffy fish bistro with a sexy bar, pleasant staff, and a menu that clobbers you over the head with its sheer seasonality.  Apart from a few strange characters sitting near us (including a man who informed his server that, after paying the check, he and his girlfriend were going to go ‘do it’), the dinner was excellent.

Matt and I shared tuna tartare and mussels in curry broth, though I say ‘share’ very lightly as towards the beginning of the meal I was still suffering from the effects of our Olympic party the night before.  In any event, the subsequent consumption of a bottle of wine and ample time before our dinners came out restored my appetite, for which I am thankful:  the Madai snapper I had was exquisitely cooked, and with its braised daikon, it reminded me of Japan like nobody’s business.  Matt had the bouillabase, which seduced me with its saffron.

But dessert was my favorite that night.  Matt had a sage pound cake with caramelized apples and sage ice cream, which was nothing short of ethereal, and I, I had this:

A lingonberry tarte with taleggio cheese ice cream!  I was excited for two reasons (besides the fact that it looked pretty and tasted like love).  The first being that my ice cream was the flavor of the very cheese that so dastardly eluded me during my last Challenge (a cheese of which we now know Matt is not fond).  I, however, enjoy it, and felt that at least if I couldn’t put it in my ravioli, I could put it on my tarte in ice cream form.

The second reason I was overjoyed was because it was lingonberry.  I had something of a summer fling with lingonberries last July in Finland, an affair under the midnight sun that involves rolling in gooey, melted cheese from Lapland and lots of white wine.  In Finland, you see, lingonberries are eaten with many kinds of foods, and my host and beloved friend Merit made sure my plate — and glass — was always full.

Unfortunately, I had a constant slipping of the tongue, most likely caused by a wine-induced haze:  I could not ever seem to remember the proper name of lingonberry, and in complete innocence would pronounce the fruit lingusberry.  I will not go into detail, but I’m sure some of you will get why this is not only amusing but highly inappropriate.

After our time in Finland came to a close, my friends and I found ourselves bereft of lingusberries, a problem which exposure to my tarte swiftly rectified.  The dessert brought back an air raid of memories of a beautiful place, beautifully tipsy friends, and of a time when I didn’t have to think about $70,000 worth of debt hanging over my head.

From Finland:

—Me eating poronkaristys, a traditional dish of sauteed reindeer with potatoes and lingonberry sauce!!
—Ed and me, eating reindeer meatballs with lingonberry jam.

In any case, friends, if you haven’t tasted lingonberries (or reindeer or taleggio cheese, for that matter), you’re wasting your life away!

I am not a fan of haggis.  I personally think that it tastes like a petting zoo smells.  Others might describe this taste as gamey, but I disagree:  venison is gamey; haggis tastes like chopped up farm animals seasoned with dead flies, excrement, and those smelly little food pellets children can buy for a quarter (although probably a buck now, with inflation) to feed the critters.

Okay, I’m exaggerating.  I can tolerate haggis just fine (though it really does taste like a petting zoo), and I’m sure PROPER haggis made by a sassy Scotsman is ever-so-tasty, but I was insulted (well, I would have been insulted if I wasn’t a guest and eating for free) that the presentation and texture (very mealy) of this year’s haggis was so damn poor.  Oh, St Cross, my fair St Cross!  How far you’ve slipped since I graduated.  Even the Scots complained!  Let’s compare.

Above is the 2009 haggis.  Lovely boiled meat, complete with a condom-esque hat made from stomach.  Presentation was spot on; this was some serious Scottish sustenance.  Unfortunately, the recession, laziness, or just the fact that Oxford wasn’t expecting its pickiest student to return to Oxford so soon after his graduation, produced the 2010 haggis:

Stripped of its stomachy yarmulke, our 2010 is dwarfed by crudely mashed swede and some disgustingly overcooked shredded cabbage.  Eating it was like chewing on a rain-soaked cardboard box that had been slept on by a sixty-five year-old wino.  I quickly swapped to the vegetarian version, made from nuts, and washed that down with copious amounts of wine and whiskey.

But that’s just how I roll on Burns’ Night, the only night of the year where you can get me to dance a ceilidh.  You can see the end result of all that liquor here and here.

The verdict on haggis?  You should try it, just so you can have some culinary street cred (much like I boast about eating heart, intestine, live fish, and whale sperm).  However, if you do try it, make sure you have some potent potables to wash (read: eliminate the aftertaste) it down.

After some urging from my mother, I decided to treat myself to a one-last-hurrah type of dinner in London.  Now, I know that in a previous post of mine I commented that most of the food here in England was total rubbish; I still stand by that, but if you’ve got the money to blow (which I really don’t) it is quite possible to have some truly grand gastronomical adventures in the UK.  We’ve all heard of The Fat Duck, after all.

I started off yesterday by very energetically researching places with tasting menus (to be specific and very precocious, I feel I should mention that my search originally began in French with ‘le menu découverte’).  Back in October, when my parents were visiting me for my Oxford graduation we went to L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in the West End.  The food was excellent — I tried foie gras and Wagyu sliders — but I had desperately wanted to order the tasting menu, an eight-course culinary orgy with items like a Parmesan and port cappucino, caviar, and coriander panna cotta.  The thing with tasting menus, though, is that the whole table Must Agree, or the deal’s off.  My mother, bless her, is not very adventurous when it comes to food.

So what better way to get what I want than go alone?  I flittered through numerous reviews on the web, a venerable mountain of menus, and felt I had pretty much uncovered every restaurant with le menu.  Unfortunately, the average price was over one hundred quid, before alcohol (and I refuse to go through a nice dinner without wine!), and my dream of a farewell-to-London dinner was in danger of dying.  It was about this time that I stumbled upon L’Autre Pied, sister restaurant to Pied à Terre, a super pricey two-Michelin star restaurant in the West End.  At L’Autre (which yes, literally means ‘the other foot’), reviews said, you experience Michelin-star dining but not the prices.  I found this hard to believe, and rung them up for a table for one. Continue reading →