In recent years, I've had the pleasure of traveling to Bethesda every 4 months or so.  Of course I don't always go back to La Miche, but it has become a bit of a tradition to return every fall with a rather large group of my colleagues to enjoy a wonderful French meal.  This year, I decided to bring Husband with me to enjoy some of the wonderful food in the Capital area, as well as see a bit of DC itself.  Yes you read that right, enjoying the food was clearly the top priority of the trip.  We'd previously been to the Capital but that was before we had the food passion.  This trip was definitely about food!  In reality, it was a good thing because fall in DC can be dicey and our trip hit a terrible wet and cold patch that made the sight seeing a bit less enjoyable than we'd hoped. We were not disappointed, however, with the food.

On the first night of our culinary adventures we made my annual visit to La Miche, in Bethesda, MD.  I always get the Crab Cakes because they are excellent.  Since my last visit,  La Miche became a 3-course prix fixe restaurant which meant we all had La Miche's trademark Soufflés.  Husband and I had chocolate while some of our other dinner mates had the Grand Mariner.  They were an excellent way to complete the meal.

The remaining two nights were spent dinning in DC.  We intended to spend the day visiting the capital and then have dinner around 8:30pm.  We assumed museums etc would be open until 8 or 9pm.  We were wrong.  Everything closed at 5:30.  Sadly, on the first night this meant we walked around in the rain for an hour, browsed some uneventful shops for an hour, and had cocktails in the restaurant where we were to dine for an hour.  The cocktails part was ok but the other two hours were not great - especially with the rain.  The restaurant was Vidalia which serves "regional American cuisine with a subtle southern influence".  For a cocktail, I had an interesting mixture composed of apple cider, apple brandy, Carmel, and a cinnamon sugar coated martini glass rim.  It was quite good and I just may have to try reproducing it at home.  In fact, everything about Vidalia was  excellent.  My dinner was four small vegetable plates, each of which got better and better.  The first was a small salad, the second roasted carrots, the third a butternut risotto with chanterelle mushrooms and the final a potato latke like pancake.  Of course, none were as simple as just a salad or just carrots.  They were very intricate creations by the Chef. I really really enjoyed the chanterelle mushrooms in the butternut risotto, so much in fact that I tried to reproduce the dish this past weekend.  My attempt was good but clearly no match for the Vidalia version.  Vidalia also has a very nice cheese course with cheese from the Artisanal Cheese Center in New York City.  It just so happens that my favorite cheese book, "Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best", is authored by Max McCalman from the Artisanal Cheese Center.  Trying the cheese course was a given and we were not disappointed.  

Our last night in DC, we went to an Italian restaurant.  Most fancy or top-tier restaurants we've dined at are not Italian so this was an interesting experience.  The meal began with a wait.  Reservation timing can be difficult for restaurants and Tosca handled it well apologizing and providing us a complimentary appetizer because we waited twenty minutes for our seat.  Other than the wait the meal was great but I think after the large dinners the two previous nights we were overloaded with food - hey it can happen to best of foodies! 

DC has so many outstanding restaurants that I can't wait for my next visit to try more.  Yet, I am a creature of habit and I just know I'll be back to these restaurants sometime soon. Once ignited the food passion is not easily dampened and once discovered restaurants are not easily lost... 

As you've heard me say before, I love pizza.  I've had pizza at lots of different places throughout the United States.  I've also had pizza in other countries including the UK, Thailand, Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand.  Many were good and some were not so good.  The pizza in Fiji wasn't great but the meal itself was because we shared the pizza in a hostel with about 10 other backpackers from all over the world showing that food isn't always the centerpiece of a meal.  At any rate, a recent meal got me thinking about weird pizza toppings.  I've had two pizzas that I would classify into the weird pizza toppings category.  One was from New Zealand and the other I made just last week.

These days people put all kinds of things on pizza that my parents generation would never have put on pizza.  When I grew up, we strictly ate pepperoni and cheese, although my father would occasionally get onions or mushrooms.  But, as a child I never had anything "exotic" on my pizza.  My standard pizza toppings, these days, at local restaurants include spinach, ricotta cheese, apricots, almonds, and sometimes pineapple.  So toppings are evolving. 

What is now considered unusual or weird?  I guess it all depends on what you've previously had.  But to me pickles, grapes and port are pretty weird things to put on a pizza.  The pickles were part of a pizza I had in Picton, New Zealand. Picton is the gateway to The Queen Charlotte Track a wonderful 4-day hike, or track as they say in New Zealand, around the Queen Charlotte Sound at the top of the New Zealand South Island.  The restaurant, The Barn Cafe & Restaurant, is one of only a couple of places to eat in Picton and we ate at it both before and after doing the Queen Charlotte Track.  The pizza had a bit of everything on it including veggies, meat, pineapples and gherkin pickles!  I consider the gherkins such a weird topping that I still remember the pizza 6 years later. 

Earlier this week we made a pizza that sounded weird yet tasted great.  I consider it unusual but not as weird as gherkins.  The pizza is called Gorgonzola and Grape Pizza.  It has red grapes covered in a Vin Santo wine reduction served over a mixture of Fontina and Gorgonzola cheese.  I didn’t have Vin Santo so I substituted Port.  The wine, grapes, and Gorgonzola definitely are what lured me into the recipe but putting them on a pizza seems, at least to me, a bit unusual.  Husband was particularly leery. He generally will try anything but he wasn't sure we should make this pizza.  I, however, love blue cheese and wanted to try it.  I'm glad we did - we enjoyed it and I can add it both to the list of weird pizza's pizzas we've tried and the list of pizza's pizzas we'll have again.

I'm sure many of you have had even more unusual toppings on your pizzas so go ahead, add a comment to this blog and share with the rest of us what they are.  Perhaps I'll even be lured into trying some of your suggestions on my next pizza!

Have you ever cooked a meal in someone else’s kitchen?  I don't mean help someone cook a meal I mean cook the entire meal.  I find it awkward, confusing and even frightening.  I like to think I'm a good cook.  I enjoy my food - Husband enjoys my food and guests never say its horrible :).  Yet shouldn't a good cook be able to cook anywhere?  Last month, I visited my parents and cooked a couple of meals for them.  While My Dad really really liked the four cheese macaroni and cheese and my Mom wanted the recipe for the Portobello mushroom quesadillas, I thought the meals only turned out OK.  That is, I felt they were not as good as when I make them at home - why? Was it the kitchen, the equipment, the ingredients or me?

It’s not like I haven't cooked other places before.  I've cooked while backpacking and car camping. Yet that's different - expectations are much lower than a home cooked meal.  But, after our 13 month remodel I thought I could cook anywhere.  During the remodel we had increasingly less kitchen.  For seven months, we used our dinning room as the kitchen and had our kitchen sink outside on the side of our house. And for the last 2 or 3 months we pretty much lived with a bathroom sink, toaster and microwave.  After that experience I thought I could cook anywhere - but perhaps one quickly forgets the pain or when you are not suffering remodel stress you notice what the food actually tastes like!  It could also be that tools matter more than the environment.  Even during my remodel I still had access to my favorite pots, bowls, knifes etc.  Certainly making the quesadillas in a smaller frying pan was an obstacle.  Also not having ultra sharp, or even relatively sharp, knifes was a problem.  This combined with the use of an electric stove probably led to the confusing and, in the case of the knives, frightening aspects of the cooking experience.  You know you're in trouble when the blade is so dull that cutting mushrooms is difficult...

But surely a good cook can make the food still taste the same?  Perhaps, but what if the ingredients are different? Its not that my parents live on the moon - they do have grocery stores.  But considering the problems I had finding two simple ingredients, Fontina cheese and Prosciutto, I question the quality of some of the ingredients I used.  I can see a store not necessarily having Prosciutto but not having Fontina?  Yet, the first grocery store we went to, a Top's in Western New York, did not stock either!  Fortunately, the area has a somewhat new small Italian Grocer and they had both.  But its not always a matter of just having an ingredient, it is also the quality and taste of that ingredient.  While I found everything I needed, I'm not sure the quality or taste of the ingredients was the same as I get in my local stores.

Looking back, it seems my problem cooking away from home was a combination of a different kitchen, the cooking equipment, and the ingredients.  Overall, the food was still good and my parents really enjoyed the meals.  It was me that wasn't entirely happy with the result.  What will I do to make the next "off-site" cooking experience better?  Know the potential limitations and be prepared. Specificaly, I'll consider whether or not the ingredients will be available and how variations in the ingredients will change the taste,  when picking the next recipe to cook at my parents.  And I'll bring my own knives...

Recently, I wrote about Foodie Fast Food - what you cook when you don't necessarily feel like cooking.  Today, I'm good to raise the bar a bit from packaged Macaroni & Cheese, pizza, and grilled sausages to something more substantial - Fast Gourmet Food.  Each month, Gourmet Magazine has recipes listed under the section "Ten-Minute Mains" which begs the question is it really possible to make gourmet food quickly? And if so how fast? Ten minutes is really fast, I'd be happy with under twenty minutes if the result was something gourmet.  I have to admit I was a bit of a skeptic.  Certainly not every recipe in the Gourmet "Ten-Minute Mains" can be that fast, or be that gourmet tasting.   But, the "Ten-Minute Main" we made this week, Four-cheese Ravioli with Mushrooms , was fast and it did taste gourmet; leading me to say that yes it is possible to make fast gourmet food.  

No matter how fast the food is to prepare, however, gourmet food requires choosing the appropriate high quality ingredients or the resulting creation will suffer. In the case of Four-cheese Ravioli with Mushrooms, the essential ingredients are fresh raviolis, shiitake mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, and a nice dry wine.  We were fortunate that we had recently gotten our first, eagerly anticipated , Esterlina Wine Club shipment with a bottle of Dry Riesling which perfectly suited this recipe.  The other ingredients were readily available at the local market -- even the fresh ravioli.  Preparation was quick but it did take more than the 10 minutes the recipe claims because I cut my own mushrooms.  I'm not sure where Gourmet expected me to find pre-cut shiitake mushrooms but my market doesn't sell them, does yours?  Perhaps they intended that I would cut them at an earlier time but I would still count that towards the overall prep time.  At any rate, cooking only took moments and voila the meal was done in about twenty minutes total time.

We served the dish with the remainder of the Dry Riesling. The mushrooms were amazing with the ravioli.  The combination of the two types of mushrooms, shallots, and wine made a very complex mixture that varied with every bite.  Although, next time, I will probably double the amount of mushrooms to make more sauce. Overall, this was a quick, easy and excellent dish we will definitely have again - it is Gourmet Fast Food at its best.  In fact, this dish didn't take any longer than our Foodie Fast Food pizza and may have even been faster!  I'm now converted and will strive to find more Gourmet Fast Food recipes so that I can abolish those boxes of mac-and-cheese from my pantry...