Reets Eats

While several of the meals I ate during this trip were leagues beyond my tastebuds' previous dives, sometimes it was the things just shy of comfortable that surprised me the most. Like this dish: sea bass with pan-fried veggies and a side of vanilla sauce. This was not, as I anticipated, a sweet maple-glazed salmon. No, the fish's flesh carried the slight salt of the sea, an appropriately flaked backdrop to the savory sauce, a concoction one part salty, one part bitter, and one part sweet. Each flavor did its own tour de la langue, before sliding across the palate to perform a satisfying symphony. 

We were in the thick of our second week of traveling with almost two-dozen undergraduates when we arrived in La Rochelle. For a northern port, the city was surprisingly sunny. With its arcade-lined cobblestone streets, framed by three-story limestone buildings and slate roofs leading to moss-covered piers flanking the historic marina, who wouldn't be charmed? After running around town sorting out meals for the group's three-day visit, G. and I settled under an umbrella on a wooden deck by the harbor, sailboats rocking in the green water as we supped on the day's catch. The moules marinière, with a side of frites and a glass of white wine, was one of the best quick sea-side lunches I had during the trip. Both refreshing and filling, a bowlful of mussels will carry you to dinner without making you feel like you're lugging a sack of bricks around town - which I needed, as we'd be doing just that within the hour, with our the students in tow. 

Before packing my bags, perhaps while I should've been writing my last paper of the semester, I found distraction in a book on French regional cuisine buried in the bookshelf in my living room. The book is an artifact of a heated debate with K about the merits of French and Italian cuisine, where I snagged the book on the former and K purchased the book on the latter (we concluded that the French know their meats and pastries, but the Italians take the proverbial cake when it comes to grains). Though the book included several vernacular recipes, I was particularly interested in the lists of local ingredients and preparations that would pepper my summer travels. In Bordeaux, the book told me, I should be sure to try, if I could pronounce it, l'anguille - lamprey eel. The one you see here, served on warmed slices of bread, followed my charcuterie plate. The sauce was delightful, not too heavy on the cream with an umami finish that makes me think they stirred in some potent beef reduction before serving it up. As for the eel itself: not my favorite texture (somewhere between tripe and calamari, of which I prefer the latter), but I'd give it a second go, to be certain it's the fish, not its preparation, that wasn't up to par.

When I was young, I looked up to my uncle, M., because I thought he was the coolest thing ever. He was a food and fashion photographer, got to travel around the world, and liked to eat strange things. I tried most things on his plate. Mixing Coke with milk? Check. Hawaiian pizza? Check. Cocktail shrimp? That one was an acquired taste. It took me years to stomach the cold prawns with a smile. Now, I'm a huge fan of chilled seafood and this: charcuterie. My first bite of pâté didn't go down too easily...and I seemed to have inherited my father's distrust of cold cuts. But a year of Parisian dinner parties set me straight, and for my second French dinner of the summer, I made a beeline for this plate. My only regret: there wasn't enough smoked duck!

A seemingly common misconception about French food is that it's either drenched in a creamy sauce, or comes in the form of a pastry. Let's clear that out of the way: the French make mean salads. Look at the menu of a typical brasserie and you'll see at least five variations on the theme, none of which will include the word "Caesar." Instead, you'll see toppings like smoked duck,  pâté , fois gras, walnuts, berries, and my favorite: goat cheese. After a week of heavy three-course meals, this bowlful of gooey warmth and bright, fresh greens was the breather I needed: there were many more button-bursting meals ahead!

The beau, A, joined me during my two nights in Bordeaux. Here's the Platonic version of our weekend: long walks along the Garonne, watching the sun set over fishing boats, sipping St. Emilion as we nibbled on slices of Comte. But twenty-one undergraduates make for less-than-romantic company, and that's who shared our table at our first dinner at Le Plana. An experience redeemed by the opportunity to revive a bit of the romance with a bottle of a local red paired with some choice red meat: lamb chops, browned to perfection and topped with a brown sauce. In some ways, typical brasserie fare, but served with a smile (unlike in its Parisian counterparts). The mashed potatoes were appropriately fluffy, as well. I'd recommend it. Ordering from the carte rather than the menu would be well-advised, as the blokes at the table over had a platter of seafood and choice beef cuts that were eaten too quickly for me to sneak a bite.

The architectural portions of my Grand Tour this summer were truly overshadowed by the wealth of first-time food experiences I stumbled upon while country hopping. Emboldened by episodes of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations streaming on Netflix, I decided to make this trip an unforgettable gastronomic event. For the first hedonistic adventure in France, I chose this: beef carpaccio. The cool thinly-cut slices of beef, refreshed by the basil and punctuated by the sharp tang of slivers of Parmesan, was a much appreciated respite from the warm summer day. With the heat wave still blazing along the East Coast, I'm tempted to revisit this memory. Now, to find a Cambridge butcher I can trust...

I developed a dislike for Mexican food as an adolescent mostly because my brother seemed to have the precise opposite perspective, and when it came to choosing a place to eat out, he'd pitch the local Tex-Mex joint, and I would vehemently protest. One might say that I was a contrary child. But in this new-found enthusiasm for making my own meals, instead of relying on the chefs at the university's dining halls, or the other ladies in my life, I'm also on the hunt for foods I didn't think I'd like. Considering that I have a healthy appreciation for corn, black beans, peppers, cheese and sour cream, I'm not sure why I held on to the icky-Mexican mantra for so long. This layered lunch was a recipe from Whole Foods (of which, how exciting, there are two within a 15-minute walk of my Cambridge summer home!). The idea I like, but as usual (and I think I'm going to start automatically tweaking seemingly-dubious recipes for this), it lacked some zing. Updates for the next go-around: maybe some cumin, or real chili powder (I only had paprika), some fresh salsa to top it off, and I'd consider adding some sugar to the bean blend to play up the tartness of the limes.

French fries are really Belgian, French bulldogs trace their origins to Nottingham, and French toast? According to our ever resourceful guide, Wikipedia, the idea of soaking stale bread in milk and then frying it can be traced back to a Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius. The French, of course, do it with a too-crunchy baguette. Since I woke up last weekend with a craving for French toast and no stale loaf, I whipped this up with some fresh oatmeal bread slices, a swig of milk, the half-dozen-too-many eggs in our fridge, a dash of vanilla extract and some sugar...and though I followed my mom's recipe as best as I recollect it (2 tbsp of sugar for every egg, 2 eggs per diner, and enough milk to turn the mixture a canary yellow) it didn't taste quite the same. Now my eggs were more orange than any my parents ever brought home, and I didn't know oatmeal bread was an option until last weekend. This version was a bit sweeter than what I ate as a kid (didn't even need the honey!), but it hit the spot. I find that when longing for comfort food, it's best just to give in, don't you?

My second course at Paradiso Perduto was the dish for which I came to Venice: spaghetti in cuttlefish ink. Nothing, seriously, nothing, I have ever eaten before (and that includes all the crazy bull testicles and cow nerve I found in Rome) prepared me for this meal. All I knew is I'd be walking away with teeth as black as night. I didn't know that the sauce would taste of the sea but be as creamy as melted brie. The cuttlefish itself is reminiscent of calamari, and the pasta, well, it was Italy. Not only would I gladly eat this again (and I did, in Spain, but as a squid ink paella), I'm wondering if Boston has a fish market that'll sell me some of this stuff!

I was born in Bombay, long enough after the British days to not remember the pacifist  struggle for Independence, but not so late as to have still studied at Queen Mary's school for girls (and those lucky boys that toddled their way through 1st standard). Bombay, as can be quickly noted by glancing at a map, is a seaside monster of a town, a collection of islands-turned-mega-peninsula. And as a city married to the water, locals grow up consuming fruits de mer like there is no tomorrow. My parents, physicians in a small fishing village to the north of the city, were sometimes paid in whole fish when rupees weren't to be found in their patient's pockets. So you can imagine the utmost glee with which I wolfed down Venice. Talk about a city married to the sea (I only missed the official annual ceremony by a day!): every morsel was a briny bounty. I was led to a fantastic restaurant, Paradiso Perduto, a fair walk away from the touristy center, by a friend of a friend, where this heaping plate was my first course: piled high with fried fish, clams, sauce-drenched sardines, clams in their shell, mussels, crayfish and grilled octopus. Literal lip-smacking might not be appropriate at the dinner table, but I didn't let that stop me.

I just read an article on the Paleo diet. And while plateful upon plateful of veggies and sausages sounds divine, I'm absolutely positive that the agrarian Italian community that magic'd grain into pasta had it so, so, right. And then there's the specialty Sardinian cheese, casu marzu, that would never be allowed to wriggle its way past my lips. Not to mention no more daal! What are these people thinking? But back to the tortellini: Bill Buford (whose book, Heat, I devoured while in Italy - quite appropriately) was right - these charming little Florentine belly buttons were perfectly proportioned, with just enough sauce scooped up in each crease to make every bite a pitch-perfect medley of salty cream and smooth pasta. Both darling and delicious, what's not to like?

I'm going to try very hard these next few days to not sound like a broken record but here's the thing: for the meals I most enjoyed during my European séjour, I could count on one hand the number of ingredients slipped into a pan and set on the stove. Here, at Trattoria Zaza: steak, potatoes, olive oil, rosemary and thyme. To that, Florence was kind enough to add some Chianti Classico, a bit of new-found company, and a rainy evening. We stumbled on glimmering cobblestones as we wound our way through moonlit piazzas to head home, satiated. 

There must be sandwich camps. That is, those stuff-every-topping-you-can-manage-between-two-slices-of-bread folks, and those humble-ingredients-exquisitely-choreographed folks. And a few strung along in between. I like sandwiches I can wrap my mouth mind around, thanks. If the necessary steps to create a sandwich take more than ten minutes, I'll pass, unless it's for the Queen. Which is why I fell so swiftly for these fellas (no, I didn't eat all three...at once) whipped up in a blink by the bronzed brothers at I Fratellini, quite literally a hole in the wall in Florence, from which came forth possibly my new favorite sandwich: proscuitto and truffle oil with a sprinkling of parm on freshly made bread. I tried a few others (breaking my eating rule and coming back within two days to the same place!) - but those few bites were a heavenly mid-day treat.

I confess: I was a bad food tumblr-er. I ate so incredibly well in Rome, and didn't document an ounce of any of the delicacies I devoured. So instead of the cow nerve, bull testicles, shredded horse meat, and tripe at Betto e Mary's, or the summer on a platter served up at Pizzarium, we'll start revisiting my Europe adventure in Florence, with this: freshly made fusilli tossed with parm and a delicate rabbit sauce. I know, delicate is not the first word that comes to mind when eating game, but these little morsels were tender, and the sauce was a subtle glaze to lightly season that fresh, fresh, fresh pasta. And forgive me, again, because like countless other food-lovers before me, famous, infamous, or incorrigible, I fell in love with fresh pasta in Italy. If I can find a rolling pin in this kitchen, I'm going to give it a go myself this summer, but I might have to pull a Batali and find a feisty Italian woman to teach me how to do it right.

Ah, potatoes. I thought I'd had enough of them, after three weeks of endless French fries (what passes for a vegetable side in Spain, and a tourist's hopeful default on a dubious menu in France). But then this recipe from Smitten Kitchen appeared on the horizon and I thought, starch and protein and a dash of veggies in one plate? Sure, why not. Two problems: 1. Potatoes take a while to cook when you boil them. They apparently take even longer to cook on a stove top, fried in a vat of olive oil, in spite of being lovingly sliced into 1/8" slivers. 2. You need the salsa. With nothing beyond salt, pepper and olive oil to add flavor to the tortilla, it's not exactly a party in a pan. Next time, I'll toss in a pinch of garam masala and a handful of garlic to liven things up...and par-boil the potatoes first.

And this certainly isn't Olive Garden's too-sweet chicken Marasala. Having never eaten 'authentic' chicken Marsala, I can't guarantee that this fits that bill either. Either way, it made my night, and is one more step in my growing affection for Giada de Laurentiis. Ladled on a base of locally made noodles tossed with butter, salt and pepper to bring out their slight egginess, the dish packs a punch: the meaty umami of baby bellas, chicken crispy on the edges but ready to melt on the tongue, and the zing of mustard rounding out the sweet wine and almost-caramelized onions. Given that this took less than an hour to make and tasted like it had taken ages, I'm putting it down as definite yes for future weekend dinners.