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Tandem Coffee + Bakery now has breakfast sandwiches (egg, cheese, and optional bacon on their jalapeño cheddar biscuits). They're delicious.

My Favorite Romantic Restaurants in Portland, ME

In honor of Valentine's day, here are my two favorite romantic restaurants in Portland. They are not new, because I can no longer keep up with where the cool kids are eating these days. I have no idea if they have availability for Valentine's Day, or if that's even a good idea given the impending Blizzard of Doom. I generally feel like going out to dinner on Valentine's Day is a mistake. But I also am fully in support of romantic restaurants. Do with that what you will.

1. Miyake. I’ve been to too many restaurants recently where the roar of people and music makes it impossible to actually talk. Miyake has a sort of hush to it. There are people talking, and there’s music, but it feels like the whole place is a whisper. Everything is incredible elegant, but in the nicest and friendliest and most low-key way.

And of course, the food here is so, so good. I order the omakase (chef’s tasting menu) always, and it is always surprising and wonderful. Last time I went our meal started with some of the best uni (sea urchin) I’ve had. It tasted like the ocean, except richer and sweeter and with just a bit of the vegetal funk of seaweed. And then we had more delicious things: incredible red snapper sashimi, grilled duck breast, some kind of spectacular pudding situation with mushrooms and lobster.

Unlike some Portland restaurants, their desserts are also really great, which I think is key in a romantic restaurant. Again, last time I went I had a green tea tiramisu that hewed more closely to the magic of a traditional tiramisu made with raw eggs* than I think I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant. There was a chocolate pudding with a salty caramel-y (am I remembering correctly that miso was involved?) cream.

They also have a great selection of sake and beer. The staff are, again, really helpful in navigating the sake list if it's unfamiliar.

2. Emilitsa. On their website they call themselves "Traditional Rustic Greek Cuisine" but I'm not sure I'd call the food "rustic." It's not pretentious or avant garde or fussy, but it strikes me as very precise and, again, kind of elegant. The lamb has not ever been bad, and the moussaka is out of this world for what is essentially a lamb or eggplant casserole.

The restaurant itself is small and narrow with maybe only 15 tables. Except for a table for 6 or 8 people toward the back of the restaurant, all the tables are in a line along an exposed brick wall. The result is that you're not really looking at other diners as you eat. The decor overall is kind of warm and neutral-- the brick wall, a long bench with deep warm grey and yellow cushions, wood tables, a round flokati rug-type wall-hanging. It feels very intimate. The staff are friendly but unobtrusive.

I have a great fondness for ouzo, and they always have some good ouzo cocktails.

* If you are making dinner at home for your Valentine (do it!), consider tiramisu for dessert. It's so good! It's a little boozy! You do all the cooking and prep ahead of time! This is the one I've made.

#valentines day #portland maine #restaurants

Composting!

I don't write about composting enough. That ends now!

At one point in my life I had a vermicompost bin. Vermicomposting is "using worms to recycle food scraps and otherorganic material into a valuable soil amendment called vermicompost." (Thank you, Cornell Composting) It was awesome. I loved those worms. They and I traveled by UHaul from Boston to DC. I had to give away my bin after about six months of it living in the closet of our DC apartment, which was disappointing but probably the right decision.*

When we finally moved into a house with a yard after a decade in apartments, I had big plans for a vermicompost system. And then...other stuff came up. I ended up raking about two years of decomposing leaves into a pile behind the garage, and then staked a small wire mesh fence around the operation to formalize things. I dump our eggshells, chard stems, corn husks, coffee grounds and other kitchen waste out there, buried under a few inches of leaves, and it's worked really well for a few years.

Here's a diagram, if you're interested in recreating this incredibly high-tech system:

[Image above: drawing titled Anatomy of a Lazy Woman's Compost Pile]

It's currently frozen solid and covered in three+ feet of snow.

So I caved and joined Garbage to Garden, a curbside composting program in Portland. I had been resistant for a long time because how dare I think I'm too good for the backyard pile of decomposing yard waste and because I believe composting should be a municipal service and not something individuals pay for.** Righteous indignation can only get you so far, as it turns out.

But Garbage to Garden is fantastic. I am a convert.*** I can compost all sorts of things I couldn't before: chicken bones from stock, shells, leftovers with meat and dairy, the "compostable" containers that you can't put in a backyard pile. And because it doesn't require any real thought about what is compostable and what isn't, it's really easy to get everyone on board and use it consistently (read: I don't pull banana peels out of the trash anymore). It also doesn't require trooping out to the backyard-- the full bins are picked up and replaced with clean bins on trash day. And I can compost through the winter.

That is, until we get the next billion feet of snow this weekend and all life grinds to a halt.

* Send me a message if you're interested in talking about vermicomposting more detail, otherwise I will assume everyone's happy letting the topic of rubbermade bins full of worms pass us by.

** I was also put off by a poorly executed marketing strategy that involved leaving an empty bin in our front yard to get blown around by the wind for a week when Bear was an infant and I was fully at capacity in terms of being responsible for things.

*** In case it wasn't clear by the general tone and content of my tumblr, I'm not paid or compensated to write about things.

#composting #cashew #will never NOT be interested in eating garbage #garbage to garden

Dave and I met in January 2002,* which means we've been together for just about thirteen years. I've spent my entire adult life with him.

Our dinner table over these years has moved from a disgusting student flat in East London,** to a tiny little table wedged in my studio in New York, to Montreal, to Boston, to DC, to Portland. It has grown from a table of two each night to a table of three, plus assorted friends and parents and siblings. I learned to cook over the years we've been together-- making my mum's lemon mustard chicken recipe and pancakes from my hand-me-down Joy of Cooking because I was too poor to eat out in London. He has come around to broccoli, leftovers, and pepper and has washed my stainless steel skillet probably a million times. I'm not sure I could tease out the things I like to cook from the things he likes to eat. Would I enjoy the day-to-day of cooking if he didn't appreciate it so much?

I grew up with a decidedly ambivalent view of marriage. I didn't want to subscribe to an institution that shut out so many others, and besides, marriage seemed to require more of me than I wanted to give. It seemed like so much negotiation and compromise and potential loss. I had this idea that I would live in New York and be independent and do exciting things and then maybe marry late.

It took me a long time after I met Dave to realize that the image of my life in my head was not the life currently unfolding in front of me. I don't think I had any idea how being with a person could enable you to be more yourself, to not feel so cautious. I'm not sure I even knew what it would feel like to not be so cautious.

Love is sitting at the table, day after day, week after week, year after year, and finding my partner there. When I think of the people who taught me to cook, I think of my grandmother, and my mother, certainly, and Irma Rombauer in that beat up Joy of Cooking with the binding half falling off. But if I am being honest, it is mostly Dave who taught me to cook, sitting across from me night after night, nodding and saying, "this is really good."

* There is some lack of clarity around the exact date.

** For real, one of my roommates broke a glass on the kitchen floor after coming home drunk one night and then LEFT THE SHARDS OF GLASS COVERING THE FLOOR UNTIL THE NEXT AFTERNOON.

Meal Planning

Today I'm taking a break from cabbage to discuss another decidedly un-sexy topic: meal planning.

I really like it when Dave, Bear, and I all eat dinner together.* But having dinner together before Bear's bedtime leaves little to no room for error. You just cannot fuck around if you work full time, have a kid in daycare, and are trying to get a real dinner made and on the table by 6 pm.

The thing is, my pre-baby dinner routine involved a LOT of fucking around. Paging through cookbooks, changing my mind about recipes, picking up an extra ingredient at the store, listening to NPR, having some wine, noodling over whether to make a salad. I enjoyed it a lot but it was the definition of inefficient.

It's taken a while to adjust to the new mealtime regime, and while there's lots of advice about weeknight dinners/dinner with kids,** the key for me is meal planning. More than prepping vegetables in advance, or using the rice cooker, or keeping frozen fish fillets around. I can mostly get it done if I have a very clear plan, and mostly cannot if I don't.

So, in the hope that this might help others who are struggling with getting meals together quickly, here's what meal planning looks like for me:

Choosing Recipes and Shopping

We go grocery shopping on Saturday or Sunday. So before we go, I flip through cookbooks and magazines and dig up the recipes I noticed online over the past week and make notes of things that look appealing. I aim for around 4 - 5 meals. If I plan for more meals, we end up with too much food leftover or I lose focus. If I plan for fewer we end up needing to go grocery shopping in the middle of the week. Here are some things I think about:

Ingredient lists. At least one or two recipes should have ingredients that won't go bad quickly.

Time. I look for things that will be doable in a fairly short amount of time, or at least that don't require a lot of hands-on time before we eat.

Complete-ish meals. So possibly a hearty vegetable soup, or something like the Middle Eastern Lentils that involve rice and vegetables and yogurt, or a vegetable plus a protein. This can be mixed and matched a bit, but the aim is to avoid eight different vegetable side dishes and no meal.

Backup recipes. In case the grocery store doesn't carry a particular spice that's important, or they don't have a certain fish, or some of the produce doesn't look great, I come up with alternatives that I can swap out while in the store.

Then I make a grocery list, and double-check ingredients that we might or might not have. If I have backup recipes, I'll put the ingredients for those together so I know not to buy, say, cilantro if I don't get the black cod.

Here's a picture of the grocery list from last week:

Staying Focused

Oh my god, this is the challenge. I write the recipes on a chalkboard that faces our kitchen island so they are literally staring me in the face. I try to start the week with the more elaborate recipes so by the time I get to Wednesday or Thursday I can coast a little. I also try to remember to make the dishes with ingredients that spoil first. When I am really on my game, I add meal ideas that rely just on pantry staples to the list so I have some backups.

And in case you were wondering, Dave does all the clean up.

* As opposed to pulling something simple together for Bear and making a grown-up dinner for after his bedtime. Also, I don't want to imply that because dinner together is important to me that it needs to be important to you. You know all that research about how dinner together is so good for kids? Apparently the key is the time together, not the actual eating of dinner.

** In looking for examples, I came across an article in the Boston Globe titled "How multitasking parents do it all, including weeknight meals." The first paragraph reads: "Moms are masters at adapting. They’re nimble, efficient multitaskers who can get dinner on the table in a hurry. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s dinner." Non-mom parents are treated as dead weight throughout. It is a marvel of benevolent sexism.

#weeknight #dinner #meal planning #adulting #not cabbage

I actually took pictures of this Fish En Papillote with Shitake Mushrooms and Orange but it was kind of meh. I loved it when I made it in 2010! What happened?

In any case, I also recently made Bon Appetit's Snapper in Packets with Squash, Date, and Lemon Compote and did love it. The packet deal is the same. The recipe is from BA's "Food Lover's Cleanse"* which has a bunch of actually really great recipes. That fish with the compote was delicious and continued to be delicious on salads at lunch for days.

I did not take a picture.

* I'm using quotes because I hate everything about "cleanses" and want to be clear that I DO NOT subscribe to the concept at all. Your body is not a mildewy shower, and while you may not feel awesome eating a ton of fried foods or sugar, it's not making you dirty.

#quote unquote cleanses #fish en papillote #dinner

The Conversation We Are Constantly Having in My House

Bear: Cashew ate the play-doh.

Me: Yes, Cashew ate the play-doh.

Bear: Cashew don't eat it!

Cashew ate the play-doh MONTHS ago.

#we have other playdoh #toddlers #and dogs

Cabbages, continued.

A few years ago I discovered I could just make soup. Without a real recipe. Just put soup-ish ingredients into a pot and cook them and have soup.

It was a revelation, and it also solved a lot of cabbage problems in our house. For a while I kept stumbling upon recipes that called themselves "cabbage recipes" that used half of one small head of cabbage. HA! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THE OTHER THREE POUNDS OF CABBAGE IN MY FRIDGE?

Cabbage soup can absorb a remarkably large amount of cabbage and not make you feel like a rabbit.

Here's a link to the one I like. It involves beans, tomatoes, parmesan rind, and garlic, among other things.

#cabbage #winter #soup

Eating Locally in Maine

I was not kidding about the cabbage thing.* In that spirit, I'm going to be posting some cabbage and potato recipes that I like.

First up: Braised Cabbage with Apples. This recipe really opened my eyes to how good cooked cabbage can be. Pair it with some sausage baked in a little mustard and maple syrup and it makes a wonderful dinner.

* In fairness to Laughing Stock Farm: I cropped out the rest of the board so you can't see that we also had the choice of daikon radishes, turnips, rutabagas, garlic, beets, carrots, celeriac, and sauerkraut. They do a remarkable job of providing a variety of vegetables through the winter.

#cabbage #winter #Maine

Are Quinoa, Chia Seeds, and Other "Superfoods" a Scam?

In case you're not interested in reading the full Mother Jones piece,* the answer is yes.

Or sort of. They're good foods, but not really any better than rice and beans or red cabbage or blueberries or parsley. And if your CSA is anything like mine, you're getting lots of opportunities to really go deep in exploring the superfood qualities of cabbage these days.

* It's interesting and short! Go read it!

Photo: A plastic grocery bag full of blueberries that I picked a few years ago.

#superfoods #produce that is not sexy

madamebarry

vrai-lean-uh

I haven't been posting as much lately, but I've been keeping busy.

Three things of note from my hiatus:

1. You will get no respect when you tell people that your very, very painful burn came from canning applesauce. It will also take approximately eight times longer to heal than you think it should. Watch out for boiling things with high sugar content!

2. Get your knives sharpened right now! Right this instant! And then delight in chopping onions!

3. We're making gestures toward healthier eating, which means we stopped keeping tons of cookies around. This has resulted in both of us periodically eating handfuls of chocolate chips where we once would snack on cookies.

#knitting #adventures in cooking

Saying Grace

A funny thing happened about a year ago: I started saying grace.

When I was a kid, we said grace before formal meals, but not every night. And we only said grace in an eyes-closed, holding-hands, prayer kind of way when we had holidays with our more religious aunts and uncles.

As I got older saying grace didn't really even cross my mind. We'd have family over, I'd cook a meal, we'd get it to the table, and then we'd just start eating. Or Dave and I would sit down together after a hectic evening of baby-wrangling and launch into our food, barely glancing at each other.

We had a somewhat stressful Thanksgiving at our house a few years ago.* I was eight months pregnant and took a very long head-clearing constitutional that resulted in Dave being sent out on a search & rescue mission. By the time we sat down for dinner, we sort of forgot to say grace. It suddenly felt sad to me. And I began to feel its absence at all our meals. I wanted a moment of recognition of my effort in cooking and meal planning. But I also missed the moment of recognition that one of us bought the food, bought it with money we had the good fortune of earning, that it was grown by someone and picked by someone, requiring care and work and expertise. If we were eating meat, an animal had died. And then I wanted to acknowledge that we had finished another day and here we were, sitting at a table together, our child asleep, the lights on.

I am not a religious person, but there are a million small blessings involved in a meal and I suddenly very strongly felt a need to acknowledge those blessings in some concrete way.

So we've started saying grace before dinner. It's a secular grace-- acknowledging effort or expressing gratefulness rather than thanking God. Now that we're eating dinner with Bear more often, sometimes grace is capped off by a hearty round of cheers. When it's the two of us sometimes it's just a pause, a beat to look at each other and nod. Yes, here we are.

And then we eat.

* The whole faux thanksgiving saga is helpfully captured here.

[Photo: "Neffsville, Pennsylvania. Saying grace before carving the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner in the home of Earle Landis" by Marjory Collins, 1942. From the Library of Congress]

#thanksgiving #saying grace

The New York Times put together a second map of Thanksgiving recipes, based on our collective googling habits.

If I'm being honest, "pumpkin whoopie pie" is probably a lot more representative of Maine than "lobster mac & cheese."

(The first map, and my commentary on it)

#thanksgiving #whoopie pies #maine

Curtis Sittenfeld wrote an essay for Slate on how having a child with food allergies has made her more thankful. We discovered Bear's allergies about a year ago, and as I think back over this year of doctors visits and EpiPens and pantry purges, gratitude is not necessarily the first emotion that comes to mind. But this lovely essay reminded me of how much I have to be thankful for:

- Bear's wonderful doctors, who are so incredibly knowledgeable and kind and seem to have infinite patience for both my questions and my toddler tearing up their offices. (Not to mention my work and Dave's work, who give us enough time off to go to these appointments.)

- Our daycare providers who looked up videos on how to use an EpiPen, and make sure their daycare food is always free of nuts, and help me feel safe leaving my baby every day.

- My sister-in-law who excised her house of nuts and made us nut-free granola for our yogurt when we came to visit.

- My friends and family members who also have kids with allergies, who answered my questions and talked through my worries and made me feel less panicked.

- The waiters and bakers and cooks who answer my questions and double-check ingredient lists and still make us feel welcome in their restaurant.

- All the other people with allergies and parents of children with allergies who have worked to make the world a bit less dangerous for Bear.

Like Sittenfeld, I'm so thankful.

#thanksgiving #food allergies

I didn't realize how many Facebook friends I have from Minnesota until the New York Times' story The United States of Thanksgiving came out. People in Minnesota are angry about the grape salad. And honestly, I would be too if it were decided that my state was represented by hot grapes covered in sour cream and brown sugar.

But that's not the only point of consternation.

Friends from Massachusetts are appalled by the use of "dressing" instead of "stuffing." Everyone knows you call it stuffing in New England, regardless of where it's cooked. And how come California and Hawaii get to have stuffing?

Garam Masala pumpkin tart sounds delicious, but has the New York Times forgotten that there is an entire community of people live in DC who are not politicians or diplomats or visiting dignitaries?

I for one am deeply jealous of the people in Indiana who are eating persimmons. How did I miss that this was a culinary option in all my visits to my in-laws over the past ten years? Where does one buy these persimmons? Has my father-in-law, who grew up in Northern Indiana, ever eaten a persimmon?

Maine ended up with Lobster Mac and Cheese. That's a fine dish. We have lobster in Maine. Only a a person with a heart of stone would deny mac and cheese. But even though I have family who go out lobstering, spend my Fourth of Julys eating lobster rolls, I have only ever encountered lobster mac and cheese in a handful of restaurants. I have never, ever eaten it in someone's home. Other Mainers, am I mistaken? Or is this tourist food?

I was all ready to express great outrage on behalf of New Hampshire, which I consider one of my home states, and is the generally accepted to be the embarrassment of New England. But you know what we got? New England Roast Turkey, "an adaptation of an old Yankee recipe that is as solid and unfancy as granite itself."

NPR had a very amusing story about the kerfuffle, and suggests that those interested in making a 50-state map that touches on regional culture: "Read every entry you have and think to yourself, 'Am I basing this on actual information, or am I basing this on something droll I read in The New Yorker?'"

I agree. But I might also suggest that a person making a 50-state map that touches on regional culture rethink the entire premise. I know they're fun! I clicked on the article! And sure, there are meaningful regional differences across the country. But it's not possible to sum up an entire state with one word, or Thanksgiving dish, or vice, or car, or whatever. Even in Maine, a state that is 94% white (non Latino or Hispanic), we have people with different backgrounds and cultural heritages. The diversity within our country and states is a lovely thing, and certainly worth celebrating at Thanksgiving.

#thanksgiving #maine #grapegate

My New Favorite Bakery in Portland, ME

Restaurant reviews are one of my least favorite things about this blog (apart from posting regularly, ha ha, sorry everyone).*

But I feel remiss in not telling you about the new Tandem Bakery.

Photos from the summer. Also, sorry about how it's crooked.

Tandem Bakery 742 Congress St. Portland, ME 04101

I am not a coffee connoisseur. But I do know my way around a baked good, and the baked goods at Tandem are GOOD.

Every time I go I order a new thing that is more fantastic than the last. The poppyseed grapefruit bundt cake was spectacular. The jalapeno cheddar biscuits are perfectly tender and soft with just the touch of crispy edges. I mostly hate scones, but these ones are light and buttery and come in flavors like plum rosemary. The chocolate chip cookies are somehow both sophisticated and nostalgic. The sticky bun, guys. It's so good.

The space is lovely with classy and low-key wood counters, tall windows, and filled with hip, attractive young people who smile at you and wear vintage skirts (I am there in un-ironic normcore shoes with a toddler who keeps yelling "CITY BUS!" so don't feel intimidated).

The bonus is that the windows look out onto Congress Street and it's just up from the fire station so there's a regular parade of city buses, firetrucks, ambulances, and an assortment of delivery trucks driving by. That means I can sit and enjoy a mocha and a baked good while Bear presses himself against the full length windows in delight.

Also, unlike basically everything else in this town, it's open on Sundays.

It's very expensive.

(There is a curb in front of the main door, but there's also a side door with curb cuts. The doors are not automatic. There's some parking along the side of the bakery, although it fills up quickly. The space inside is fairly open and visually spare, with big windows and lots of natural light.)

* Why? First, most restaurants aren't terrible or amazing, and that middle ground is boring ("the salmon was fine but not as good as the one I had last week at this other restaurant"). Second, while I do have strong opinions about things, I take the idea of recommending a restaurant pretty seriously. I don't want to suggest that you go spend your hard-earned money and babysitter time on a place that's actually pretty mediocre. I also don't want to do harm to a local business because of a fluke off-dish. I've had dishes I really did not enjoy at restaurants that I otherwise love, and I've had great meals at places that were consistently terrible every other time I went. And sometimes there's a dish I just don't personally like, but others love. I'm not a restaurant reviewer.

#Portland Maine #tandem

The day that Bear had a cast put on his leg, I decided that he and I needed a restorative walk. I strapped him into his stroller and headed over to a neighborhood coffee shop. We got there; me, feeling exhausted and sad about a long and difficult doctor's appointment and REALLY looking forward to a cookie; and Bear, all 30 pounds of him, with a cast, in a stroller, after a long and difficult day. And I discovered that the coffee shop had no accessible entrances. There were four or five large stone steps, a heavy door that opened over the steps, and a busy intersection behind us. I managed to get us inside, but it was hard, and involved swearing, did not feel particularly safe, and took an awkwardly long time. People were staring. And when we finally got ourselves into the place, the stroller took up a ton of space, and I felt like we were in the way. I felt like I was in a space that did not want me there.

It sucked. But if I had been in a wheelchair, or Bear had been in a wheelchair, or I had been a little less forceful in maneuvering those stairs, we would have had to turn around and leave. That would have sucked more.

Another story: one of my relatives loves the restaurant Five Fifty-Five in downtown Portland. She looks forward to going every time she visits us. She also has rheumatoid arthritis that causes pain in her knees and hips and makes walking up stairs challenging.

On a recent visit we arrived at Five Fifty-Five to discover that our table was up a steep flight of stairs (with no bathrooms on that level). It hadn't occurred to us to ask whether our table was up a flight of stairs. There were no other tables available. She had to decide in that moment, when we were all hungry and wearing our nice clothes and had hired a babysitter, whether to do something painful and difficult or leave the restaurant and try to find someplace else to eat (at 7 pm on a Saturday night).

I was reminded of those experiences when I heard about Access Together.

"Access Together allows you & friends to crowd-source community accessibility. Working together we can create an accessibility data-set for every neighborhood to improve access, inform City Hall and ensure everyone has access to their community."

The idea is that we look at our favorite stores, restaurants, coffee shops with fresh eyes, paying attention to the accessibility of those spaces. Access Together creates a platform for recording and sharing what we see.

That platform would help someone find a quiet restaurant to go out to eat with a parent with hearing loss. Or a museum with a bathroom large enough to fit a wheelchair. Or a shop that doesn't have lighting that would be problematic for a kid with a sensory processing disorder.

It's in beta testing and has some kinks. And Portland is mostly empty. But this weekend, as you go about your life, maybe pay attention to some of these questions of accessibility and fill in the details on the shops, restaurants, or cafes in your neighborhood.

http://www.accesstogether.org/community/04101-Portland-ME-US

Thanks!

#Portland Maine #accessibility #being good neighbors

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