FoodNerd!

my brother is bringing me a whole smoked duck from Dietrich’s Meats in Pennsylvania Dutch country, plus some lard and crock-fermented sauerkraut and a bunch of other stuff. Yay!

Today I woke up, walked down the street to Antojitos Cafe and had a delicious homemade gordita and an iced coffee, then I went to the farmer’s market. On the way home we stopped to check out the new food court in the basement of the Indian market, and bought a refrigerated coconut and a straw from the nice man with the machete. Cold coconut juice straight from the nut is pretty great on a hot day. And for dinner we are going to check out the — wait for it — new Vietnamese place on Moody St. Yes, my prayers have been answered and if it pans out I will be able to buy pho and banh mi without getting in my car.

A delicious main-course salad I happened into while using up leftovers.

large can butter beans, drained and rinsed
can of tuna, drained
jar of marinated artichokes
big handful of dill, chopped
1/2 cup or so of ajvar

Mix all this up together with a drizzle of olive oil, some brine from the artichoke jar, and black pepper and hot paprika if your ajvar isn’t the hot spicy kind.

How do I know I am drastically overbooked? Because today the latest Bacon-of-the-Month-Club shipment arrived, and I have not yet partaken of the last one. *swoon* THE HORROR!

The only appropriate response to this is to acquire the last red ripe tomatoes of the season and have a leisurely BLT this weekend, but there is no time. I have to be on the road by 10:30am, which is barely time to get the tomatoes from the farmer’s market. And Sunday I have a similar wake up and go schedule. Bah humbug.

I think I have to find a weeknight this week to have a few people over for BLT dinner party. Not sure how, but I think it has to happen. A girl must have correct priorities.

Apparently the new compostable packaging for Sun Chips — a GENIUS idea — has cost them a significant number of customers… because the bag crackles too loudly. So the company is returning to its standard packaging, in deference to this mind-boggling idiocy.

Really? Really, America? You can’t stand a crackling bag impinging on your salt-and-fat-laden snack experience in order to keep a little bit of trash out of landfills? Seriously?

I’m appalled. You have got to be kidding. We are doomed as a nation, and as a species, if we can’t do a little better than this.

We’ve been sick, busy and tired here at FoodNerd HQ lately, so sorry about the lack of posts.

However, in other news, today I ran 3.25 miles without stopping and did not die. YAY!

I had a plain cake donut and a hardboiled egg at about 9:30 this morning, and have only had a few cups of black tea since then. It’s now 3:45pm and I’m just about to get hungry. DANG.

Sometimes I worry that I am a bit of a hoarder of food: various treats, tidbits, jars of whatever cramming my cabinets and fridge. But then on nights like last night, I remember why that is awesome:

Without actually doing much of anything, I can have a cocktail nibble spread hefty enough to serve as dinner for four.

Yay!

I really enjoy The Publick House in Brookline. It has awesome beer and very good french fries, and a congenial atmosphere. (I enjoy nerdy beer snobbery.) But it does seem there’s a spottiness to the quality or at least the execution.

The french fries are even better than last time, which would have been difficult, but now they are *crunchier*. I didn’t detect quite as much meaty flavor, which makes me wonder if they changed cooking fat. If so, I guess I am willing to trade crunch for porkiness. And the sauces, good lord, the sauces: truffle oil mixed into ketchup. garlic mayo. spicy mayo. mayo-mustard whatever it is. YUM.

But my arugula salad with duck cracklings really missed the mark. The cracklings tasted off, stale, as if the fat was old or they’d been sitting around. It made the otherwise acceptable baby arugula mostly unpalatable, and I would go further to say that the goat cheese didn’t do the duck flavor (even had it been at its best) any favors. Bummer.

The ribeye was delicious, with a bit of truffley butter and an unusual and surprisingly complementary diced salad of minted tomato and cucumber, but its shaved potato gratin wasn’t sufficiently cooked. Just because you cut a potato paper thin, y’all, doesn’t mean you get to skip out on cooking the damn thing. I dunked it into the truffley ketchup and ate it anyway, but it bummed out the tallasiandude.

All was forgiven, though, because the Rodenbach beer was so terrific. It’s a Flemish red ale, light in body and extremely easy to drink, especially on a hot day, with a strongly sour flavor, almost like a citrus drink but with more complexity and a bit of bubble and bitter. Absolutely delightful, and just the thing for me after a long couple of days at work getting to a release deadline. Hurray!

Cut up about 3 summer squashes (yellow/zucchini/whatever) and an onion into large dice. Sweat the onion in a scant tablespoon of bacon fat (or butter or olive oil), then add 2 large cloves minced garlic and the squash. Sprinkle with Lawry’s seasoned salt, and let cook, stirring occasionally, till squash is almost tender. Dump in a bag of Trader Joe’s Soy-cutash, grind in some pepper, add a little more Lawry’s if needed, and cook till hot and squash is tender.

Eat over rice with grated cheddar. Yum.