Ron's View

Having just written about our lunch yesterday at Rover’s, I need to add a post about the meal we just had at home that was every bit as good, thanks to Joel and Gail. You can see it above.

Joel made the entrée, Masitas de Puerco, using the recipe he found at a blog called Cuban in the Midwest, which in turn credits epicurean.com. He prepared the marinade yesterday, mixing together garlic, chopped onion, orange juice, olive oil, oregano, cumin and salt, and letting this sit overnight in the refrigerator along with the pork chunks. Today, he cooked it up with sautéed onions.

To complement the masitas, Gail prepared a massaged kale salad. She cut the kale into thin ribbons and rubbed salt into the leaves, altering both the flavor and the texture. Then she added nectarine pieces, green beans, and a lemon vinaigrette. Although the recipe didn’t call for it, she also added pink peppercorns. And avocado, as you can plainly see.

The result in both cases was a sublime mix of flavors. We’ve had some pretty good meals lately, but none better than this.

[From slideshow at Rover's website]

Two summers ago, we became lunch regulars at Rover’s, famed Seattle restaurant that is just over a mile from our house, and I wrote a series of posts about our meals there. They serve lunch on Fridays only, so there are weeks at a time when getting there for lunch isn’t convenient. As a result, we fell out of the habit. Indeed, our last lunch visit was with Joel two Marches ago, and our last visit altogether was for a magnificent dinner last August courtesy of our visiting Glaswegian friends/houseguests. I never did write about that. I meant to.

Yesterday, at long last, we returned for a Friday Rover’s lunch, again with Joel. This time I’ll write about it.

We arrived at noon, when they open for lunch. Seated before us at a two-top were a mother and son. We were put at a four-top at the other end of the restaurant, in a quiet corner. There are usually just four entrées to choose from, plus maybe seven or eight appetizers and two desserts, so there isn’t much to think about, other than that it would be nice to have all four entrées. You can see one version of the lunch menu here. It is close to yesterday’s menu. In fact, the same four entrées were available, but with slightly different treatments.

Gail and I chose the farro appetizer. The menu lists it as follows: Farro, Asparagus, Pickled Lemon, Almond, Snow Pea. We had a variant: farro, peas, spinach, pickled lemon, basil oil. Boy was it good. That pickled lemon! Joel had the soup, a chilled almond soup poured over marcona almonds. I wouldn’t have minded a small cup of it along with the farro. Gail and I got small tastes of it and it was a perfect summer soup.

For his main dish, Joel chose the black cod, which came with green garbanzo beans and cous cous. He said he liked it. We didn’t taste it, but I’m sure we would have been happy with it. Instead, Gail and I chose the roasted Wagyu beef, which was served with cubed potatoes, pearl onions, and peas. And something else that neither of us can remember right now. Very frustrating. I meant to write everything down. No matter. The beef was beautifully prepared, the sauce superb, the vegetables vivacious. Well, okay, maybe not vivacious. I’m over-doing the alliteration. But they sure were good, and I could have eaten more of them.

For dessert, Joel chose the espresso crème brulée. The menu mentions almond tuile, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come with that. Gail and I had the Chocolate Bavarian, with some sort of cream, but maybe not the “praline creme” of the online menu. Whatever the cream, the plate came with three chocolate cylinders — large, medium, and small. The large one was all chocolate with a dab of cream on top. The middle one had a cylindrical cutout in the center, filled with cream. The small one was the cylindrical cutout of the middle one. A lovely presentation.

Oh, I forgot that the beef and sauce were topped with little flowers of some sort.

I can’t imagine why we went over 15 months without a Rover’s lunch. We did eat multiple times in the interim at Rover’s new, more casual sister restaurant Luc, next door. A wonderful place. But not a reason to bypass Rover’s. The good news is that summer is just beginning and I should be able to get away from other duties for additional Friday lunches in the coming weeks.

Georgian Room

I wrote earlier today of our visit to the Wright Exhibition Space last Thursday afternoon, on the occasion of our 26th anniversary. Thursday evening, we continued our anniversary celebration with a dinner at the Olympic Hotel’s Georgian Room. This is always a natural location for our anniversary dinner, since we were married in the Olympic. We don’t make it there every year. Last year, for instance, we headed across the Sound to Alderbrook Resort & Spa on Hood Canal, a visit I wrote about at some length. But we were at the Olympic for our anniversary dinner two years ago, and I can’t imagine why we waited so long to return. It’s open, after all, on days other than our anniversary.

I realize now that I wrote about our two-year-ago Georgian Room dinner at the time. I had a lot to say. I expect this report to be briefer.

Let’s start with the menu. This link may not survive for long, and the menu displayed online tonight isn’t a perfect match with last Thursday’s, but it’s close. You might take a peek to start.

We arrived on schedule and were seated at one of the banquette tables along the back wall. These are two-tops designed for the diners to sit side-by-side on a sort of love seat to one side of the table, the other side being open. Sitting on the table was an arrangement with a dozen orange roses. (How did they know? I suspect it probably helped that I called Topper’s, a florist located on the hotel’s bottom floor, that morning.) We sat down, admired the flowers, then examined the menu.

A fixture of the menu is dessert soufflés, a standard one and a nightly special. In addition to deciding on our appetizer and main dish, we also needed to think about whether to order a soufflé early. More precisely, I had to decide. Gail didn’t. She always orders a soufflé. And we had to decide about wine.

In due course, we made our decisions. Gail chose the lobster appetizer. The online menu doesn’t explain it well. It came with a seaweed salad and some other item on the side that slips my mind. I had the onion tart, which is accurately described: Walla Walla Onion Tart, Baby Spinach, Warm Shallot and Bacon Vinaigrette. The tart wasn’t much more than an inch in diameter and an inch high, or maybe 1.5 inches. Next to it was another cylindrical stack, with greens and bacon in alternating layers. The salad stack was perfect. The onion tart was pretty good too, but I liked the salad even better. Gail was happy with her lobster, not so sure about the seaweed salad.

Oh, I jumped ahead, didn’t I, going from choosing appetizers straight to eating. Sorry about that. For her entrée, Gail selected the Roasted Rack of Lamb with Tomato Crusted Kalamata Olive, Sweet Pea Quinoa, Grilled Spring Onion. I’m going off the online menu, but it might have been slightly different. I chose the Filet of Angus Beef, Shallot and Oxtail Braisage, Young Organic Carrots. That’s what the online menu says, but our menus were different. Instead of carrots, I had mashed potatoes and peas. We also ordered a half-bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape La Crau, Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, and Gail chose to start with a Bellini.

The Georgian Room’s sommelier was soon at our table with the wine. He’s the same fellow I wrote about two years ago, from Austria, who regaled us with family stories for several minutes that evening after someone other table’s entrées were brought to us by mistake. This time, we learned about his nearly complete home kitchen remodel, even as a waiter brought us our amuse bouche and another brought Gail her Bellini. We didn’t mind. He’s awfully charming.

So, now I have things in the right order. We chose our food and drink, the wine came, the amuse bouche and cocktail came, then the already described appetizers came. I don’t have much to say about the amuse bouche. I hardly remember it. It looked interesting, but the taste wasn’t so memorable.

And then it was entrée time. We were both happy with our choices. My steak sat atop the peas, which were encircled by the mashed potato, extruded it appeared from one of those pastry extruder bags. A lovely presentation. Gail’s lamb sat atop the pea quinoa, which formed a firm rectangular block, a blended mix of peas and quinoa that looked inviting and tasted pretty good too. Off to the side was a waffle-shaped tomato crisp, and below were balsamic dots. When Gail was done, I tasted her pea-quinoa cake. It was so good, I finished it off, then I asked her why she hadn’t finished it or her chops, as I bit off the last of the meat. That’s when she pointed out that she didn’t know she was finished. She was just giving me a taste. Oh well.

By the way, I failed to mention it, but after an advance look at the dessert menu when we finished ordering the main dishes, I decided to join Gail with soufflé. She chose the on-going option, a black and white chocolate soufflé. I chose the nightly special, a peaches and cream soufflé. A waiter came by to ask about coffee just as we were reminiscing once again about the time we were eating at Topper’s Restaurant in Nantucket and Gail asked at dessert time if they had a Sauternes. Sure. She had a glass, and only when the check came did we find that it cost $65. We didn’t know how expensive Château d’Yquem Sauternes is, and we haven’t ordered it since.

But this was our anniversary, so Gail decided to go for it. She asked if it was possible to get a glass of Château d’Yquem. The waiter apologetically said no. She ordered cappuccino. Then the waiter returned a few minutes later, apologetic again, this time because he hadn’t pointed out that (a) she could have other Sauternes and (b) we could order a bottle of Château d’Yquem. Well, we sure as heck weren’t going to choose (b), but I urged her to go ahead with (a).

Soon the soufflés came. And the Sauternes. And the cappuccino. Everything was perfect. And some minutes later, the closing treat was brought to us, adorned with two lit candles making an arch and the message Happy 26th Anniversary written in glaze on the plate. The treat consisted of some chocolate disks, a little dish of honey, and a long narrow trough filled with white chocolate flakes. We were instructed to dip the chocolate in the honey, then drag it through the white chocolate trough. That worked well.

So ended our anniversary dinner. Except for a little confusion on the bill. The wine was missing. I suspected this wasn’t a parting gift, so I pointed the omission out to the waiter, who was effusive in his thanks. The adjusted bill came, we paid, we walked out, and we made our traditional journey to the Kensington Room, half a flight up on the balcony level that overlooks the hotel’s grand lobby. All the other function rooms looked pretty dead, but the Kensington was hosting a reception, so we couldn’t really stare in, as I like to do. Gail isn’t as caught up in this tradition as I am. The Kensington is, of course, the room in which we were married, and I’m always happy to point this out to any passersby. I resisted the temptation to crash the reception and tell the guests that they had the good fortune to be sitting in the very room where 26 years ago on that very day … .

I have already written about our first half-day in Portland, last Friday. Now I’ll go over the highlights of our one full day there, Saturday.

1. Heathman Restaurant. We couldn’t get in the night before, but no problem Saturday morning. We had a fine breakfast. Then we headed up to the room and got ready for our outing.

2. Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. We drove up to the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood, which includes the Portland New Chinatown/Japantown Historic District, and parked just a block up from the center. It opened at 11:00 and we were there a few minutes early. At 11:00, we headed in. There’s an on-going exhibit, Oregon Nikkei: Reflections of an American Community, that we were enjoying when a guide came up to us and asked if we’d been to the center before. Once we said no, she began to give us a tour. This was a mixed blessing, given that the exhibit itself seemed up to that point to be extremely well laid out, with excellent explanations of the photos and objects. She raced us ahead, not allowing us to absorb all the items, but she also had much to say that was of interest. Then another group walked in and she dropped us in mid-sentence. Fair enough. By that point, we were on the threshold of the exhibit we had come to see, a temporary exhibit scheduled to end a day later, Taken: FBI.

The exhibit is no longer listed online at the Center’s website. Too bad. Here’s a series of photos someone has posted. It was a small exhibit, focusing on a handful of the men and one woman who were rounded up by the FBI on December 7, 1941. Some of the relevant background is laid out in a series of signs as one enters the exhibit, the key point being that already in the 1930s, Roosevelt gave the FBI permission to start collecting information on Japanese Americans, so they would know who to pick up first if war came. Mind you, the people to round up were not dangerous. They weren’t spies, or collaborators. They were simply successful members of the community, community leaders. Those focused on in the exhibit led exemplary lives. Extraordinary lives even. As you read about how each of them lived before the war, and how they tried to restore their lives afterwards, the message of national madness, irrationality, and hysteria comes through clearly.

How could it happen? Well, the exhibit takes pains to remind the reader of the racial stereotyping taken for granted 70 years ago, not that that justifies anything. Only in the final exhibit signage is it hinted that we really haven’t advanced all that far, as we continue to narrow the rights of certain ethnic groups in response to war, a war we now find ourselves in that by definition will never end. And indeed we seem willingly to take away everybody’s rights. Witness last week’s extension of the Patriot Act.

But back to the internment of Japanese Americans. Just a week before our tour, the acting solicitor general of the US, Neal Katyal, wrote about errors made by his office at the time of Pearl Harbor.

The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by “racial solidarity.”

See also the LA times editorial on this last Friday.

3. Japanese American Historical Plaza. From the center, we walked two blocks over to the Willamette River to see the Japanese American Historical Plaza, a part of Portland’s Waterfront Park. As the park site explains, “On August 3, 1990, the Japanese American Historical Plaza was dedicated to the memory of those who were deported to inland internment camps during World War II. In the memorial garden, artwork tells the story of the Japanese people in the Northwest – of immigration, elderly immigrants, native-born Japanese Americans, soldiers who fought in US military services during the war, and the business people who worked hard and had hope for the children of the future. A sculpture by Jim Gion, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, also graces the plaza.”

We walked around, read the poetry on the stones, took in the atmosphere, examined the Gion sculpture. Most people milling around were overflow from Portland’s Saturday Market , which was in full swing just south of the plaza. We’d gladly have checked it out, but time was running out on our parking meter, and we had to get on with our plans. We could easily have spent the full day in Portland. Or we could have spent the day visiting wineries. We had decided to try to squeeze both in, and it was time to head out of town for our one winery visit.

4. Red Curry Thai Restaurant. We weren’t looking to eat Thai food. All we wanted to do was drive out past Beaverton to Ponzi Vineyards, where we thought we might hook up with our niece Leigh Anne. But when we were on the highway headed out to Beaverton, she texted us that she was a ways out, so once we got off the highway, we decided to stop at the first reasonable restaurant to eat lunch and kill time. The first reasonable restaurant turned out to be Red Curry. In fact, it was the first restaurant period. Just past the exit was a new strip mall. We turned in, found a 7-11, an Indian food market, and Red Curry. It didn’t look like much as we drove past. It’s extremely narrow, though deep, and we couldn’t see much. Once we walked in, we found it to be surprisingly elegant. I see now that it’s been open only two months. The reviews at urbanspoon that I’ve just been looking at sum it up well: “A very nice, elegant Thai restaurant in the ‘burbs! Nice decor and tasty menu!” “Don’t let the small store front fool you. They did a very good job decorating the place. The food can rival some of the better Thai restaurants.” “just the best food ever. … a fantastic meal. Service was very gracious. Decor is way above caliber for a restaurant in an office park.” We weren’t looking for much, but we had an excellent meal.

5. Ponzi Vineyards. Why Ponzi? No good reason, but there were reasons: (i) It must be the single closest winery to downtown Portland. As one heads west, past housing developments, one crosses Roy Rogers Road and all the development ends. I missed it, but Gail says there’s a sign saying you’ve entered an agricultural district. And moments later, there’s a turn down a small road that deadends at the winery entrance. (ii) The hotel gave us a card for a free tasting for two. Not that the tasting would have been so expensive. But we decided to take advantage.

The tasting room was crowded, and became even more so while we did our business. They start everyone off with a free tasting of their pinot gris. Then one can get a three-wine flight for $10. This is what our card entitled us to for free, so we took it. A rosé, a white, a red. I think they call their first one their rosato. Next was their new release arneis, which we were told would be sold out within the week. And then their lower end pinot noir. From there we could pay another $5 for their pinot noir reserve and $2 for their dessert wine, the gelato. We tried them. Then we asked how the reserve compared to the next level up in their pinot noirs, which was not available for tasting. She did pull from somewhere a chardonnay for us to taste unasked. And then we proceeded to choose wines to make up a case, with the 15% case discount. Four of the gelato, a few of the higher end pinot noirs, three of the arneis, a chardonnay, another white. Now we have some tasting to do.

6. Japanese Garden. We never did meet up with our niece. It was time to head back to Portland so we could visit the famed Japanese Garden. First we had to find it. I knew it was in Washington Park, just above downtown. I suspected we could get off US 26 at the zoo exit before reaching downtown, on the assumption that the zoo is in Washington Park, and then drive around until we found the garden. But I didn’t trust my suspicion. Or listen to Gail’s advice to take Canyon Road, the next exit. Instead, we drove right into downtown, back out to the park, but entered the park on a road that bypasses everything and puts you right back onto US 26 heading out of town. At that point, when the zoo exit appeared again, I took it. This had the benefit that we did in fact get to drive through much of the park and see what it has to offer. The zoo. The children’s museum. The world forestry center discovery museum. The arboretum. Holocaust and Vietnam memorials. The famous rose garden. And finally, the Japanese Garden. We couldn’t find parking, and suddenly we were right out of the park, into a fancy residential neighborhood that looks down from the hills to downtown.

We parked, walked back to the shuttle stop, took the shuttle up the steep hill to the garden entrance, paid our $9.50 apiece, got a map, and entered. Map in hand, we followed the suggested route and saw many of the sights. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the amazing view that would have awaited us on another day of Mount Hood, sitting above the city. We never did see Mount Hood. It was quite a weekend of weather, with showers, hailstorms, sun, rain, but never views of the Cascades. And our time in the garden was probably the hottest, sunniest time of the entire trip. Highlights? Gosh. It’s all really quite lovely. I’d like to go again earlier in the day. We were near our limit in terms of taking in new sights by the time we got there.

We walked down the hill to the tennis courts, considered going down below the courts to the rose garden, but decided instead to call it a day. Minutes later, we were back in the Heathman.

7. Lacrosse. This was Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Normally, that means I’m watching the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship semifinals. I wrote last week about the earlier rounds. We had already missed the first semifinal, in which Denver’s historic ride came to an end against Virginia, 14 to 8. But we were in our room in time to pick up the Maryland-Duke semifinal. Maryland won an amazingly low scoring game, 6-3. Time for dinner.

8. Pearl District. We headed up to the Pearl District, anticipating a meal at one of Portland’s renowned brew pubs. Alas, when we got to Deschutes, we were looking at a one-hour wait. We headed back to Henry’s Tavern, which sits within the old Blitz-Weinhard Brewery building. The doorman had warned us didn’t have the greatest food, though it did have the largest beer selection. And the wait was only 15 minutes. Soon we were seated. What we didn’t know was that we would then have a 40 minute wait for our appetizer, hummus and bread, which Gail wasn’t convinced we even needed. And 3 minutes later, our dinner came. A fiasco. The waitress apologized, I suggested we needed more than an apology, she said yes, of course, the manager already knew and would be coming to discuss adjustments. When the manager did come, she told us several tables had the same problem. The bread, it turns out, is really a thin pizza, essentially, with herbs but no toppings, and the pizza guy somehow flaked out. She assured us we wouldn’t have to pay for it, and we could have dessert on the house, which we did. Not the best experience. What can you do? Maybe next time we should wait at Deschutes.

9. Hotel. We had anticipated wandering through Powell’s Books after dinner, it being just the next block over. But dinner was so long that we were ready to call it an evening. We headed back to the hotel and our day came to an end.

This morning, I picked up the current issue of The New York Review of Books and discovered Alma Guillermoprieto’s The High Art of the Tamale, as fine a piece of food writing as one could ask for. In reviewing Diana Kennedy’s Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy , Guillermoprieto tempts the reader to book flights southward immediately, out of excitement for the described delights.

[Kennedy] was coming from the drab kitchens of postwar England, and in Mexico City just a short walk through any neighborhood market was enough to make her swoon: armfuls of blossoms the color of gold, the smoky perfume of dried chiles gusting through the corridors, the racket of a dozen vendors vying for her attention, waist-high pyramids of unheard-of vegetables, pumpkins of every description, gourds, melons, purple amaranth plants, shocking-pink cactus fruit, blood-red hibiscus flowers, and, above the general din, the metallic cries of the vendors…¡cómpreme, marchantita! Buy here! Buy here!

And then to huddle at a market stall and wait for an industrious woman in braids to chop up some barbacoa and onion and cilantro and spoon it all over a tortilla and hand the steaming morsel into her eager hands…Heaven.

And Guillermoprieto tempts the reader to book flights southward immediately, also, in fear that these delights won’t last long.

. . . the ecological and cultural devastation Mexico has been undergoing. I could go on at some length about our garbage-lined highways, the almost daily loss of native species, the forests logged by lumber black marketeers, drug traffickers, and landless settlers, the slow attrition of our beautiful markets thanks to the likes of Wal-Mart, and the takeover in local Wal-Marts of everything fresh by everything processed—for one small example, the replacement of locally grown raisins by imported dried cranberries—but I won’t.

Read it all. And book your flights.

Well, okay, it wasn’t really a travel nightmare, but it wasn’t such a great experience either, and my last post was called Travel Nightmare, so this seems like as good a title as any for this one.

That last post described the start of our trip to New York early last Saturday morning. This one is about our return trip Tuesday night. We were on an 8:00 PM flight out of JFK, with an announced delay earlier in the day of at least 15 minutes, and we were through security around 6:30 PM. With time to kill, we headed to the Delta lounge, for which we had privileges, and found a corner with three seats. Joel settled in and plugged in his phone. We headed over to check out the snack options — crackers and cheese, a packaged hummus spread, celery and baby carrots — and I grabbed a couple of the baby carrots as Gail moved on to the bar. As I caught up with her, I started chewing a carrot, and suddenly I bit into something really hard, like a small stone.

I didn’t quite know what to do. I didn’t want to swallow it, but had no napkin to spit it into. And anyway, a carrot? What could be stone hard in a carrot? As Gail ordered something to drink, I deposited the contents of my mouth in my hand, then threw it out. I then got some water, picked up some hummus spread and crackers on the way back to our seats, sat down, and wondered just what it was that I spit out. A clue was that something sharp in the back of my mouth was stabbing my tongue. A little investigation and I realized my tooth had acquired a sharp point. That stone must have been some dental work, or part of the tooth itself.

What it was exactly would stay a mystery for a while. I determined that the troublesome tooth was #18, the one in front of my rear left wisdom tooth. Fortunately, it wasn’t yet 4:00 back in Seattle, so the dentist office would be open. I called and made an appointment for the next day, yesterday.

The plane we were flying home on was late into JFK from Las Vegas. We boarded some 45 behind schedule, but thanks to weak headwinds and the enormous padding built into the schedule (what was once scheduled for 6 hours was scheduled for 6 hours and 40 minutes), we were just a few minutes late, landing a little before midnight Seattle time. Yesterday morning, I was off to the dentist.

The diagnosis — the carrot broke off part of my tooth. I spent the next 1 3/4 hours in the dentist’s chair. When I got home, the left side of my mouth was so numb, and my tongue so uncomfortable, that I could hardly talk. Gail thought I was over-doing it a bit with my mumbling. And I couldn’t eat comfortably either. I tried to eat some cheerios, but gave up. For the next hour, I was convinced some cheerios had lodged under my tongue, but I couldn’t move them out with the tongue and couldn’t feel them with my fingers. Every 5 or 10 minutes, after abandoning the preceding effort and figuring I just had to wait for the anesthetic to wear off, I’d try once again to find those elusive cheerios. There had to be a reason my tongue was so uncomfortable, talking or eating so difficult.

Finally, around 3:00 in the afternoon, I made one more effort and hit paydirt. There was something in there for sure. I grabbed hold, pulled, hoped my mouth wouldn’t turn inside out, and out came one of those hard cylindrical cotton rolls dentists stick in mouths. Relief! I could talk again. My tongue felt normal. Maybe I could even eat again.

But carrots? Forget it. I’m done with them.

We’ve had a pretty good run of dinners the last few days, thanks to Gail and Joel. i was thinking a brief rundown might be in order.

Wednesday: On Saturday night four weekends ago, we tried to eat at Lark, but couldn’t get a table. No problem. We simply went three blocks up and ate at La Spiga, where we had such a good dinner that we returned two weeks later to celebrate my (non)-birthday. There was a problem though, which is that Gail had bought a $100 voucher for Lark a year ago for $50 and it would expire two nights ago. Plus, I wasn’t showing sufficient enthusiasm for going. So it was that Gail announced to me last Monday that she and Joel were going to Lark on Wednesday. I decided to join them.

As the website explains, Lark’s “menu features small plates of locally-produced and organic cheese, charcuterie, vegetables, grains, fish, and meats, all prepared with a signature focus on flavor and quality.” You can get a better sense of how they implement this by looking at the on-line menu. Each page of the menu has the note, “Our menu consists of small to medium-sized plates. We encourage family-style sharing.” And our waitress suggested that the right number of small plates for three people was 7 or 8. We had never eaten at Lark before. Therefore, it took us a while to sort through the menu and come up with an acceptable list of shared items. Here’s what we ordered:

From the cheese menu, “Smokey Blue: rich, hazelnut smoked blue.”

From the vegetables/grains menu, “Sunchoke soup with chestnuts, brown butter and duck confit” and “Rosti potatoes with clabber cream.”

From the charcuterie menu, a goose prosciutto that’s not on the current on-line menu, so I can’t quote their description. It came with marcona almonds and a balsamic spread. And we ended up with two plates of it through some misunderstanding, which was just as well given how few of the thin prosciutto slices came on each plate.

From the fish menu, another item not listed online, bacon-wrapped cod.

From the meat menu, “Meyer Ranch hanger steak with Provencale sunchokes, truffle sauce.”

Oh gosh, this isn’t adding up. What else could we have had. Oh, also from the vegetables menu, “Sautéed half wild mushrooms with garlic, olive oil and sea salt.” And maybe one other dish that I’m forgetting.

They came in waves. The cheese. Then the soup and prosciutto. Perhaps that’s when the mushrooms came also. The fish and steak. The potatoes at the end. They were fabulous. But then, everything was.

I think if I were to order for myself in a traditional way, I would have had the soup to start, the steak and potatoes next, and then dessert. Speaking of which, we ordered three desserts. I chose the chocolate madeleines with Theo chocolate sauce, not currently listed on-line, which is how I would have finished my meal if just ordering for myself. They were bite-sized and there must have been about 20 of them. (I shared.) Joel chose a tarte tatin. The menu lists “Bartlett tarte tatin with Calvados caramel and vanilla ice cream,” but on Wednesday the tarte tatin was made with pineapple. Gail had the mascarpone cheesecake.

We were glad we went.

Thursday: I don’t know where the idea came from that we should eat oxtail, but Gail and Joel decided Thursday was the night for it. They must have planned the whole meal. All I know is, when I came home, the meat was cooking on low heat and with Gail out until later, Joel got the sauce and the polenta going. Gail helped Joel finish on her return and then plated a beautiful meal. I wish I had taken a picture of it. The oxtail pieces sat atop the polenta, with the sauce ladled over it all. The raisins and blanched celery gave the sauce an interesting texture. The meat came right off the bone and was delicious.

Who needs Lark when you can eat so well at home?

Friday: Joel was out Friday, so Gail and I were on our own. I called from my office and we entered into a long debate, as I resisted the idea of going all the way up to the Northgate area just to get Indian food. But Gail was convinced that Saffron Grill was our best bet, as other long-time favorite Indian restaurants have declined, and I finally relented.

I know. I should always relent. A hard lesson to learn. Dinner was excellent. And the place was packed. It’s an old Denny’s, which is to say, it’s much larger than the typical Indian restaurant. Cavernous. Yet we were lucky to get a table.

What did we eat? Well, we’re pretty predictable. We always start with pappadam and vegetable samosa. Then we have Tandoori chicken tikka, chana pindi or (in this case) chana masala, and then, if we get a third main dish, lamb korma. Plus roti. All were superb. We don’t usually get dessert, but Gail insisted that I try their baklava. I should explain that in addition to Indian food, they serve Mediterranean food, which is why baklava finds its way onto their menu. And the waiter brought us a complimentary second dessert, kheer (rice pudding, with nuts and cardamom). I’m not usually much of a rice pudding eater, but given that their kind offer, I partook. Pretty good.

Saturday: As I mentioned in my basketball post last night, we found our way to Northlake Tavern, where we more typically eat on Friday nights. Not much to say. I love it, for unaccountable reasons. Salad. Pizza. Pear cider. And a thrilling UW overtime victory over Arizona in the Pac-10 championship game.

Sunday: Gail and Joel made a chicken stir fry on rice. Broccoli. Pea pods. Bamboo shoots. A great end to the week.

Has over a week really gone by since my last post? Well, I can explain. Not that I need to. Basically, it’s been a busy week on the work front, starting with a dinner meeting last Sunday evening that was the initial event of an intensive 48-hour review process I was chairing. I’ll confess, that dinner was at Luc, which I wrote about last June, so I hardly have anything to complain about. Then again, I wasn’t complaining, was I?

Luc is the more casual younger brother to neighboring Rover’s, the fine French restaurant I have written about several times, both owned by famed local chef Thierry Rautureau. It opened just last May and we’ve had dinner there three times, breakfast just once. For my business last week, we had two work dinners to plan for, with a list of recommended restaurants provided to us, most of which were near the university and some pricing guidelines. I was studying the list when I suddenly realized that Luc would be perfect. And so it was. Simple food beautifully prepared.

For the record, I started with the evening’s special salad, frisée with dried cherries, and followed with the grilled pork chop, prepared with a sage mustard rub and plated atop some greens and a few small roasted potato chunks. We passed on dessert, what with everyone being quite full and with one of us having flown in from a locale in the eastern time zone and being more than ready to go back to her hotel and go to sleep.

Dinner the next night was at Ivar’s Salmon House. I was hesitant to select it, even though it is the ultimate place near the university (if not the city) to take out-of-towners to, or maybe because of that. Indeed, on my first visit to Seattle, in 1975, I ate dinner there. And it’s where I took my family on the eve of our wedding. So what can go wrong? Nothing. And nothing did. I had the foraged green salad and the alder grilled wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, maple glazed over a butternut squash hash with pancetta, onion, and spinach. Yum.

I didn’t intend this post to focus on food, but as long as that’s where it is heading, I would be remiss if I failed to mention how well we’ve been eating at home this month. I wish I could remember all the great meals Gail and Joel have prepared. Joel has been taking an active role in the kitchen, assisting Gail or preparing dishes of his own design. I’m not much of a cheesecake eater, but I loved the cheesecake he made Wednesday to accompany Gail’s prime rib. It had a macaroon crust made from scratch and a filling made with mascarpone and Meyer lemons. The prime rib was pretty good too, as were the black bean burgers Gail made the night before.

Thursday dinner wasn’t so fancy, but was still pretty special. Joel made good on a promised holiday gift of a month ago, ordering Vienna Beef hot dogs from Chicago for overnight delivery (on dry ice). They arrived Thursday. He selected the Vienna Beef Mini Pretzeldog & Mini Bageldog Combo, described at the Vienna Beef website as follows:

A snack lover’s dream! The Vienna Beef Mini Pretzeldog and Mini Bageldog Combo gives you the best of both worlds. There is no need to choose! The 2 pounds Combo gives you 1 pound of each and the 4 pound combo gives you 2 pounds of each! Perfect for your next party or family gathering.

For a limited time: get 1 bottle of mustard with 2 lbs order of minies, and 2 bottles of mustard with 4 lbs of minies

I’m not sure about that pluralization of mini. And we really didn’t need two more bottles of Plochman’s yellow mustard. But we needed those pretzeldogs and minidogs. For sure.

So, should I finish up the week? Okay. As some of you know, Friday night is Northlake night in our household. Northlake Tavern & Pizza House. Especially if Russ is around. Gail went there decades ago, before I knew her, when she lived with Jessica and a roommate not far from the university. When I first knew Gail, I couldn’t believe she liked to go there. For one thing, it’s a bar, and there was all the cigarette smoke. For another, its pizza wasn’t my idea of pizza. Over the years, Gail came around to my idea of what good pizza is, thanks in part to our year in Princeton and joint discovery of the greatest pizza place in the country, Red Moon Pizza on Route 1 between Princeton and Trenton. On many a Friday, we got into the car and drove to the otherwise character-less strip mall that was home to Red Moon, becoming regulars. I suppose we stood out, what with Gail’s accent and a small girl and baby boy in tow. After pizza, we’d walk down to Crazy Eddie to check out the electronics. That was always fun. And we knew how to have fun.

But back to Northlake. Oddly enough, in recent years I have come to appreciate that their pizza is pretty darn good too, especially if you don’t compare it to real pizzas, those of the thin-crust family, thinking of it instead as its own food group. Plus, there’s good beer. And most of all, there’s Russ, their most important customer, whose coattails we get to ride on. As Friends of Russ, we’re special customers too, even on days when he’s missing. Fortunately, Friday was not such a day. Russ was there, in part because he called me late in the afternoon to confirm that we were planning to go, which we were — Gail, me, and Joel too. Great evening.

Yesterday was leftover day, with all that good prime rib waiting to be put into sandwiches, which we ate before watching the first movie we rented in many months: The Kids Are All Right. I hadn’t paid attention to the Oscar nominations earlier in the week, so I didn’t even know it had been nominated for best picture, best actress (Annette Bening), and best supporting actor (Mark Ruffalo). I loved it. Gail didn’t. I can’t figure out why. For one, she was upset with the plight of one of the characters. I couldn’t convince her that her anger was a strength of the movie. One highlight: part way through the movie, the son is wearing a t-shirt with a map of something on it. A familiar map. Nantucket! I stopped the movie and kept going back and forth frame by frame to see the shirt better, until we could read the wording above the map — Nantucket Island. Boy I miss it.

I might have gotten an earlier start on blogging today if I didn’t spend half the day at work, writing a draft report as a follow up to my meetings earlier last week. And there’s another reason for my blogging absence over the last week, the fact that when I finally had free time in mid week, I picked up a book I had started last year and got re-engaged, finishing it after midnight Friday night/Saturday morning. Of course, when I say I picked up a book, I am being metaphorical. What I really did is pick up my Kindle and click on the book to see where I had left off. More on that in a post tomorrow, the post I thought I was going to write tonight. And I have still another post to write about my new Kindle, and my new MacBook Air, and the failure of my two-month-old iMac. Another day.

I closed 2010 with a post about food. I may as well open 2011 with another food post, or what’s really a plug for the newly published article by my fellow blogger and e-pal Leslie. She’s a much better writer, as you can see by comparing the lame title of this post with the title of her article, Justice is Served.

What Leslie writes about is a dinner she prepared for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Since Leslie is both a lawyer and a chef, this was a most appropriate activity. And it may also be why she came up with such an apt article title. (Then again, her title reminds me of the famous Twilight Zone TV episode To Serve Man. Watch out, Ruth! She may have a hidden agenda.)

I won’t quote from Leslie’s piece, since it’s short and you should read it in full. If you want to know more about the meal, head over to Leslie’s blog for an accompaniment.

Here’s what Ruth missed by not dropping by our house today:

The picture is a little too small, but if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s a box of Hebrew National’s Beef Franks in a Blanket, described at the website as “the ultimate hors d’oeuvre. … the only frank in a blanket made with kosher beef and wrapped in a delicate puff pastry.”

I think she would have liked them. You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the girl, right?

Here’s a recipe for some good Boxing Day family fun, though it is perhaps best saved for a year when Christmas is on a Saturday, so that Boxing Day falls on Sunday.

1. Buy æbleskiver pan (as Jessica did for Gail a year ago).

2. Buy æbleskiver recipe book (as I did for Gail this year). This one, for instance, which Gail had conveniently put on her Amazon wish list.

3. Get Sunday NYT (as we do every week, being subscribers).

4. Stand around in kitchen while wife begins preparation of æbleskiver and son starts in on the NYT Sunday crossword.

5. Accept son’s invitation to work on crossword jointly.

6. Take break from crossword to eat wife’s æbleskiver.

7. Finish crossword.

Æbleskiver, I should explain, are “traditional Danish pancakes in a distinctive shape of a sphere. Somewhat similar in texture to American pancakes crossed with a popover, æbleskiver are solid like a pancake but light and fluffy like a popover.” I suppose it might be possible to make them better than Gail did yesterday in her virgin effort, but I don’t know how. I thought they were perfect.

And the crossword was fun. I rarely attempt the Sunday crossword, not because of its difficulty but because of the time it requires. As you know if you’re a NYT crossword regular, Sunday puzzles aren’t all that difficult on the weekday difficulty scale. Maybe somewhere between Wednesday and Thursday. But the grid is 21×21 rather than 15×15, which is to say, there are 441 squares instead of 225 — twice as many. That’s a lot of time. I’ve done a few by myself, as has Joel. We collaborated on one a few months ago. And so we did again yesterday.

It went well, except for one square that pretty well stumped us. We guessed it took a ‘t’, which turned out to be correct, but we weren’t too clear on why. The horizontal clue was “Difference in days between the lunar and solar year.” Five letters. We had the first four: epac. We needed the fifth, and this was simply a word with which we were unfamiliar. The vertical crossing word should have saved us. It was seven letters long, starting where epac? ended, with the clue “stir.” We had ?hepoky as the answer.

If indeed the square stumping us took a ‘t’, then the vertical answer would be “thepoky.” Is that a word? We made guesses at its pronunciation. Well, maybe it’s two words — “the poky.” If so, the point still eluded us.

Finally we looked up “epact.” Yup, it’s the standard technical term for the difference in days between the lunar and solar year, going back to the Greek. And as for “thepoky” as a synomym for “stir,” the point we were missing was to think prison! We had the wrong “stir” in mind. If only we had the benefit local NYT readers did of yesterday’s blizzard, then we might have been snowbound, going stir crazy, feeling like we were in the poky. Oh well.

Nonetheless, we had done the puzzle. And we had eaten well. It was a good morning.