First Food, Then Chocolate - Max Brenner

This is probably as close to the modern day Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory as you are going to get.

We saw this restaurant featured on The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Pizza Episode. They just opened up a new location on Boylston St., so of course we had to go check it out! We made reservations for a Saturday night at 6 pm, which was a good thing because it seemed like a lot of people had the same idea. L is depicted here waiting impatiently for the feasting to start.



We started with an order of the kid's mac and cheese. There is a science theme, with many of the condiments arriving in laboratory measuring devices. Syringe marinara appeals to my nerdy side.





I had a Berry Nutty Professor Chocolate Cocktail. Delicious!



For my main dish, I chose the Yummy Baja Style Tacos. One of them is missing you will note. There was a lack of fish, but there was nice crunch and spice.



E ordered the Mexican Jambalaya which was super spicy (not depicted). I made the mistake of biting into a red jalapeno pepper ring thinking it was a red sweet pepper. Thankfully L had a big cup of milk that I cooled myself off with!

We finished off with a Chocolate Chai and a Chocolate Surprise Tiramisu. Note the Erlenmeyer flask with liquid chocolate and the graph paper plate!



There were many fondue options, but flaming pots at the table are generally frowned upon when dining with a toddler. There was a lovely backdrop aroma of burning chocolate and marshmallows as a table close by was having the Smores Fondue!

We'll be back because with such an extensive menu there are too many things that I need to try.



I forgot about my cool dance moves here:

A Year?! Birthdays-giving

L is ONE!! Last year at this time, she was smaller than our turkey that was prepared for 2. This year we had a bigger crew of 6 adults and she definitely outweighed the turkey. In fact, she started at a mere 5 lb 8 oz and now weighs in at 19 lb 8 oz.

I didn't want to have a whole cake to accompany the ridiculous amounts of Thanksgiving food, so I opted for cupcakes. Everyone says that you should have a "smash" cake for the birthday peanut anyway so cupcakes make sense.

What is better than having the cupcakes delivered right to your door in a van decorated with a cartoon panda? You can order them online and this satisfies my desire to never speak to a real person when making purchases. One of L's baby friends even called at the last minute to have her 1-year old cake special ordered and they were able to deliver (and deliver!). Great!



This was essentially L's first encounter with a confectioner's sugar and butter melange, so when we first placed it in front of her, I think she was unsure whether or not it was edible. Once I broke it up, she figured it out quickly.




The adult favorite was definitely the red velvet. They have lots of unique flavours like the "boozy" themed which is on our list to try next.

Thanks for helping us make birthdays-giving extra special!

Happy 4th Fruit Pizza

This is about as patriotic one gets when one is a Canadian living in the U.S.!

I made a tasty tasty fruit pizza with refrigerator pizza dough, ricotta cheese, lemon zest, shredded fresh ginger, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. The recipe that I modified called for grilling the pizza dough on the BBQ, but I thought it would give the pizza a strange meaty smoky flavour, so opted to do it in the oven instead.





Delicious!

Then Linnea got to try some cherries for the first time which made her look like some sort of patriotic blood sucker.


Hope everyone had a great weekend. Stay cool!

Danish Pastry House: Baby Friendly Cafe!

I was alerted to the existence of this awesome bakery/cafe by this blog. Please take note of the great chalk drawing of the very Scandinavian boat on the menu.

Oh course I had to try it, but trying things has become a little more challenging due to the need for planning. I finally remembered that I should try it (reference the mommy-mind-is-like-a-sieve syndrome) and figured Memorial Day Weekend should be a good time to check it out because:

a) the place is in Medford very close to the Tufts undergrad campus, which meant that with graduation having taken place last weekend, it would be less busy and I would be less likely to be overwhelmed by students (although I did run into one of my students, which was weird because I teach on the downtown campus! It was also weird because as I introduced her to E, she kept on bowing to both of us. E thought this was hilarious because he thought that meant she had the utmost respect for my teaching ability, while I am pretty sure it was just cultural)

b) people were beach bound because that is what people tend to do when it is 85 degrees out and it is a long weekend. Since our delicate baby skin is not good at the beach and E hates the beach, that is where we were not!

We love all things Euro as you may have noticed from my posts about Karl's Sausage Haus! So this place rocked! So much room for a stroller, loud enough to drown out the baby noise, but not so loud to freak out the baby and self-busing tables, so very casual. Even had Danish gossip magazines for you to peruse if you were so inclined!

And the food! So fresh and so tasty. E and I shared a sandwich with goat cheese I think and a salad. I had a chai latte which was not too sweet so I loved it.





The desserts were great too -- we shared a potato cake (marzipan I think with cream filling and a big juicy strawberry inside -- it doesn't look like much from this picture, but it was darn tasty)



And this awesome raspberry chocolate cheesecake which again was not too sweet, so appealed to my non-sweet tooth!



I also got a couple of chocolate chip cookies and a couple of macaroony things (pistachio and vanilla). Unfortunately, we left them in the hot car while we went into the evil BabiesRUs and also to the pet store to buy L her first biorb fish tank, so the macaroons got mushy but were still tasty and the cookies just got out of the car-oven fresh!

As you can see, L really loved it!



So for those of you with kids or just with taste buds... give it a try!

A Very Belated Post About the Meat Sweats

The fall has been quite the blur. I'll explain in due time, but one possible explanation would be that I was lulled into a protein induced coma by my road trip through Canada.

Here are two very meaty encounters that I had while traveling this summer. The first in Ottawa and the second in Syracuse, NY.

We went to Sweetgrass Bistro based on several recommendations from food friends and from some of my Ottawa pals. It was most certainly a unique dining experience since a) I had never had aboriginal food before and b) the air-conditioning was broken in the restaurant and it was a hot and humid Ottawa valley day and night.

We started with an order of Navajo Frybread which reminded me a lot of a beaver tail except more crunchy. It came with a little dish of honey for dipping!

We then shared the Hunter's Platter. I can't remember which meats were featured because I'm a bad girl and didn't write anything down, but I think there was some elk, duck, bison, wild boar and maybe some goose?



E had a huge slab of bison!



Definite meat sweats post this meal. I wondered whether this was what it would be like to be in a sweat lodge?!

During out meat-nanza, our friend Ted could not stop raving about this other place called Dinosaur BBQ. His glowing endorsement of the place pretty much solidified that we would be stopping there on our drive back from Toronto to Boston. Syracuse is about halfway anyway, so it made the decision that much easier.



Even though this place looks clearly like a biker bar from the outside, there was a very diverse clientele inside even at close to midnight! Here is one of the highlights of the decor.



Our appetizer was the fried green tomatoes and we shared the traditional sampler: 1/4 Chicken: Leg & Thigh, 1/4 Rack of Ribs, Texas Beef Brisket. It came with a side of coleslaw, mac and cheese and cornbread.





I think the best part of the meal was the peanut butter pie. Unbelievable and makes me sad for people with peanut allergies. What a perfect way to cap off our meat-venture. I am now curiously craving a salad...

Dreaming of ice creams past on a rainy day weekend

The last days of summer are leaving us in New England. Fall is my favourite season of the year so it doesn't really make me that sad, but others are lamenting the short summers and the return of school daze. I guess I am a true supertastic nerd and should stay in academia forever because back to school often gets me a little excited. If I could feel justified in buying a new pencil case or lunch box I think I would be even more excited.

But today it's pouring rain and nasty outside, so it's given me the opportunity to catch up on some summer posts that I've been neglecting. Last time I was here, I mentioned we were making a road trip up to Canada, so here is the first leg of the trip from Boston to Vermont to the Ben and Jerry's factory!

I must say that the factory tour was very short and not super exciting, but considering it cost only $3 and we got to sample some ice cream at the end, I probably shouldn't have expected much.

Since it was a weekend, there wasn't any ice cream production going on, which was a bit disappointing, but I guess ice cream makers deserve weekends off too. The factory was surprisingly small and I wondered how it could possibly fill all of my ice cream needs, but I'm thinking that this original factory is more of a figure head factory at this point and not one of their main production points.

We were verboten from taking pictures inside, but the flavour graveyard and the B and J's bus were the coolest parts anyway.





Here are 3 flavours that I wish I had a chance to know...







Here is one flavour that offends my public health practitioner/research ethics side, so it's probably better off dead... because really, who wants to eat an ice cream that reminds them of syphilis?!!



Mmmmm... maybe I'll go have some of that Coffee Heath Bar Crunch for breakfast. Coffee is a morning beverage after all!!

Oh No! A Mr. Bill Birthday

One of my pals, who is an amazing hostess, was throwing a b-day party for the man friend. I submitted an evite challenge to come up with a theme as all birthday parties have themes don't they? Or maybe this is a phenomenon that is supposed to end once you enter the double digits of age.

In response to the challenge, she very appropriately rose to the occasion and decided that she would craft a Mr. Bill cake out of fondant! Having never worked with fondant, she was quite intimidated, so contacted a pastry chef friend for advice. This friend quickly responded to her by saying, "I HATE fondant!!". Oh Nooooooo!! I don't think this was the response that she was looking for. She persevered, since she is a trooper and must really like this man friend and the result was fantastique!!

Mr. Bill emerged from his foil protective covering and proceeded to light it up at the party.



Birthday boy had a hard time making the initial incisions but was soon enjoying serving Mr. Bill up to the hungry party guests.



Here are some of the other delicious party offerings!

Prosciutto wrapped melon:



Tomatoes with yummy stuff on top (tapenade, pesto, hummus -- I think):



Vegetable frittata-like thing:



Toothpicks with more yummy stuff (mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, olives, artichoke hearts):



Everything was so delicious... and especially Mr. Bill! Thanks F! And Happy Birthday!

"Not too sweet" = a good dessert to me

This is probably a gross generalization, but most of the people that I know who are Asian are much more about the salty than the sweet. I find this is especially true of those of the older generation who did not grow up in the US or Canada. My possibly unfounded generalization has been anecdotally tested only in my friends or family who are Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese, so maybe this is not true of people who are of Korean, Cambodian, Filipino etc descent. If you knew me, my pet peeve is believing that all Asians look a like so we must like, do, behave the same way... uh oh, here I am falling into my own trap! Best I shut up now about this.

When I have cravings they are generally for salty snacks -- I could eat pickles and salami all day, which does not bode well for my future blood pressure. Usually if I am paying a dessert or a compliment I say, "mmmm... that was yummy because it was, "not too sweet". A lot of people think that is dessert and "not too sweet" sounds silly, but then again I'm silly so maybe that's why it works.





This place, "Bouchon Bakery" in the Time Warner Building, is for the people who like me, like their desserts, "not too sweet".





They even had a "not too sweet" beverage option! I like how they describe this as the "Grown Up Soda", because me choosing this soda is probably the only grown up thing about me.



Here is the the grown up Oreo type cookie, called the "TKO", that was not too sweet.



And an outstanding Wagyu beef sandwich which I shared so that I would have space for aforementioned grown up cookie. By the way, I got a lesson on Japanese beef terminology from my Japanese friend. Wagyu beef, generally refers to a type of cattle in Japan that has that nice marbled flesh (ie fat) that makes it taste good; whereas Kobe beef is a particular kind of Wagyu cattle that is farmed in Kobe, Japan. So all Kobe beef is Wagyu beef, but not all Wagyu beef is Kobe. And that is our lesson in sweetness and logic for the day.