Friday, September 04, 2009
Sunny Maine! Here's Portland from the air.
Posted at 9:19:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
We had a fantastic dinner at Fore Street. Showed up at about 4:50 to wait in line to try to snag a walk-in table (they set aside a third of the dining room for walk-ins, who get assigned tables at a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 5:00; first seating is at 5:30). While waiting, I observed that the menu (pinned to a bulletin board in the foyer) had an entire "chilled meats and offal" section!! We managed to snag a 5:30 table, so we walked around the block while waiting and bought some interesting drinks (I got Scots pine ale made out of pine and spruce!) at a cool beverage store. When we returned we were given a great table in the corner, right near a window, so there was plenty of ambient light for most of the meal, and I took some nice photos of my food.
Laura:
1. Fore Street's Wood Oven Tomato Tart. YUM. Creamy goat cheese mousse and ripe Jetstar tomatoes. Very delicious. Dean passed on it because of the goat. Extra goat went well with tomatoes donated from Dean's tomato salad.
2. Wood Oven Roasted Sardines. Heads, tails, and lots of bones. FUN to eat!! I did it like a cat in a cartoon. Too big to eat bones-and-all like with canned sardines. [I photographed both before and after, but after is prettiest, with all the delicate bones!]
Third Course = "The Sam"
3. Pan Fried Natural Veal Sweetbreads with Maine Farm Chicken Livers
and
4. Choose-Your-Own Offal. You select three from seven possibilities, and it's hard. I picked: a) chicken liver pâté with fennel gelée, b) heritage pork and sweetbread terrine, c) rabbit galantine.
Waaaaaaah! The sweetbreads (from #3) are so good. Aaah! So tender and juicy, and crispy on the outside. Soft and white on the inside. Delectable on all sides.
All the choose-your-own offal were good, too. Liverwursty. I couldn't finish though! And I only ate one of my chicken livers. They were giant! I think they were rooster livers. That's my theory. I still haven't gotten to try coxcombs yet. :-(
Dean:
Gin and tonic with Q tonic.
1. Spinach and Roasted Summer Squash Salad (w/sweet corn and spicy roasted pumpkin seeds). He loved it.
2. Local garden grown tomato, summer savory, sea salt, extra rich olive oil. Dean also loved this and kept talking about it later! I also devoured a portion of it. The tomato was a special extra-dark one, big and almost purplish! I liked the tomato-grabber utensil.
3. Wild and Exotic Mushroom Soup. "Yummy."
4. Fettuccine (w/tomatoes, saracena olives, basil, and reggiano).
Dessert:
Warm blackberry upside down cake with caramel and strawberry ice cream. I wanted ripe Maine summer berries because I was really full but I went with Dean's choice. Nice and moist and good caramel sauce. I didn't like the tiny blackberries that much (Dean said he did) and the straw ice cream had hard frozen strawberries in it (not a good feature). One of the other desserts had bacon ice cream! But we didn't get that one.
I keep telling Dean you are what you eat, so therefore I'm sardines, a cow (veal sweetbreads), a rabbit, a pig, and a rooster.
I made up a good idea for a Head to Toe restaurant. It has a tasting menu with a whole bunch of small courses that start at the head (brains and tongue) for the first course and go down to feet (trotters) for the last one. Lots of offal along the way in between, natch.
When we were at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, I came up with an even better restaurant. It has a prix fixe menu where each course is a different animal class, so you choose from a selection of a few different animals from each class for each course. It could have twelve small courses: 1) Cnidarians (jellyfish, for example), 2) Echinoderms (sea urchin, sea cucumber...), 3) Crustaceans (okay, that's actually a subphylum, but anyway you'd have lobster, crab, shrimp, etc.), 4) Gastropods (escargot, conch, etc.), 5) Bivalves (clams, oysters, mussels, etc.), 6) Cephalopods (squid, octopus, etc.), 7) Sharks & Rays, 8) Bony Fish, 9) Amphibians (frogs' legs, eye of newt), 10) Reptiles (turtle, snake), 11) Birds (whatever), 12) Mammals. Maybe no mammals. Twelve courses is a bit much.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
!! I got mini Profit melons at Suder's, and Dean actually likes them! He keeps begging for bites every time I eat one. They are very cool.
Posted at 11:42:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Maaaaaa, Jr. takes right after her mother. Lots of maaaaaing and crazy about grass. The original maaaaaa is still my best pal, though. She recognised me right away and let me pet her loads, even though I didn't have very much grass since there wasn't any growing close to the fence. She even butted Maaaaa Jr. out of the way when the little one tried to horn in on our friendship.
Posted at 7:47:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Kid on the trail: "Nice bikes!"
Me: "Thanks!"
Another kid, staring: "What are those?"
Cat Stats: tm 40'58 / dst 7.21 / av 10.5 / mx 14.2
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Oh no. I don't want to change my calendar. I was shocked to look at my watch today and see a scary 1 looming in the date field. I take it all back about not dreading autumn.
Posted at 11:28:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Just made another clafoutis, but I didn't take a picture (!) because it's not a new flavor. Blueberry + cinnamon & sugar on top. The best. And it smells heavenly. [Note: clafoutis is better if you use less than the 1/4 of sugar the recipe calls for. With a sweet berry, it's too sweet with the full amount!]
