Last restaurant week, my husband and I ate a little too much. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from a food blogger, but it’s true. We went to Capital Grille for lunch exactly 6 hours before going to Rasika. For the most part, our food was delicious, but after Cap Grille’s steak and crab & lobster burger for lunch, we had to take most of our Rasika meal home. On the plus side, I can vouch for it being excellent the next day, naan included!
Appetizers
Delicious texture but a little salty.
Friends, summer squash season may be past, but a good squash torte can be fine dining fare all year long if you kind find some decent zucchini and/or yellow squash on hand. Granted, I’m all for eating local and seasonal, but I also lack the discipline it takes to eat root vegetables all winter long if that happens to be the predominant produce available in the climate of my current residence.
Yellow squash, potatoes, and zucchini make for a yummy torte good all season 'round, (though best in summer).
Great as a side dish, you can add a bit more cheese (mozzarella) to beef it up as a main dish.
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I love Halloween! And to help everyone celebrate this year, Matzo and Rice asked our good friends at the Molotov Theater Group to do a guest blog on how to make your home made edible blood!
And now, a guest post by Lucas of Molotov Theater Group!
Halloween is my favorite holiday because it is all about glorifying the bizarre and grotesque. Washington DC’s Molotov Theatre Group, “America’s Second Oldest Theater of Grand Guignol (Theater of Horror),” relishes keeping the Halloween spirit alive year-round. As a horror-centric company, we go through stage blood by the gallon. I imagine the loyal Matzo and Rice reader might be thinking, “What does this have to do with food?” Well put a sock in your inner monologue and I’ll tell you.
A wound from Molotov Theater Group. (c) Molotov Theater Group
Today is my boyfriend’s birthday. We celebrated this weekend with a good deal of good food, too. On Saturday we went to Woodberry Kitchen and had an all-around wonderful meal, simply wonderful (review and pictures to come). I can’t say too many good things about it. I had tuna seared with Moroccan spies; he had braised leg of lamb with lamb sausage and eggplant and other good things. I could go on, but I’ll save that for another time.
We continued the food good times Sunday night with steamed crabs covered in salty, delicious Old Bay seasoning. At the end of the meal, the proprieters were so good to let me bring in the cake I had baked for his birthday.
This cake, in fact:
Tres leches cake made with a rum milk syrup.
Some people love brownies, but I love blondies.
A feast for the eyes and tastebuds.
And the love grows infinite when you discover that they’re also insanely easy to make. Hit by a craving while I’m–I don’t know, carving a chicken, washing dishes, wrassling my cats–I can whip up a batch in two shakes of a rack of lamb’s tail and about 30 minutes later there’s a warm batch of gooey goodness on my counter, which I always intend to share but never really get to because theyr’e so good they’re seemingly gone before the pan even cools.
MSN Money has an interesting pictorial slideshow about how much different families across the world spend on food in a week. Though this was an article on their money page, what struck me most keenly was the not the money spent but the food purchased. The most “developed” nations also were the ones with the most packaged food.
Hungry Planet" excerpt © Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio
I’ve always wanted to try tea eggs, and inspired by this post from Tiny Urban Kitchen, I might just have to try it this weekend.
Fall makes me want to eat all things pumpkin. I’m already revving up my oven to make a pumpkin roll or two, but with the leftover pumpkin I’ll inevitably have, I think I’ll also have to try these pumpkin oatmeal bars from Framed.
After tasting some tres leches cake at La Tasca a few months back, I’ve had a hankering to make one of my very own. I might start with this recipe from Masa Assassin or this one from Allrecipes.com.
Rice and I just got our 30,000th hit! We were also *this* close to making it in under a year. Oh well. None-the-less, Rice and I are holding a contest to honor and reward our faithful readers. Rice and I met in 1999 when we were placed next-door to each other in the dorms. Since we met in the great state of Wisconsin, why not have a beer themed contest!? Rules after the bump!
Hooray for beer!
We are looking for a steak house we love more than the ones we went to back in Chicago. We chose Capital Grille for restaurant week lunch this year. We wanted dinner, but they only offered lunch. It’s located on a corner in Penn Quarter. You’ll recognize it from the ferocious lions guarding the door and the window into the aging meat locker. Yummy. Review after the bump.
There are 2 lions at the front door, guarding the delicious foods within.
Beer. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.
And now? BORSCHT.
I have no interesting stories of beet-related trauma. I don’t believe my lips even touched a beet until June this last year, in Rome of all places. My boyfriend’s brother took us to Trastevere for apéritif and at a little bar with a buffet table full of various salads, breads, and other such appetizer food, I tried some beets that were pickled and in a sort of mayonnaise dressing. They were quite delicious. My boyfriend was particularly taken, though. We returned home on a Saturday, and after fighting sleep long enough to avoid jet lag, we crashed in the early evening and woke up early enough on Sunday to hit the local farmer’s market where, among our first purchases, was a handful of fresh beets.
Top with sour cream and fresh parsley.
For weeks I only did two things with the beets: (1) roasted the roots in olive oil, peeled and sliced them, and marinaded them in red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper; and (2) sauteed the beet root tops in olive oil, salt, and pepper (simple is best). I wasn’t as keen on the roasted beets as my boyfriend was, though, so after a while I began trolling for new recipes.
Because I’ve become quite obsessive about food, I talk about it a lot. I talk about it at home. I talk about it at work. And so I of course talked to one of my coworkers about it, and she happened to have studied abroad in St. Petersburg back in her undergraduate days, and so borscht came up and stuck in my head on my “to cook” list.
Holy apple, peaches, and pumpkin pie! This chocolate chip & pretzel cookie bar with peanut butter at Brown-Eyed Baker is making my head spin in matter of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Must. Bake. Now.
I had blackberry panna cotta this last weekend for the first time and it was divine. I’m thinking it’s definitely not going to be the last time, too. I might continue this positive trend by trying out this violet panna cotta with blackberry coulis (though perhaps lavender will replace the violet, as I am still obsessed with lavender).
While Rice is all about the sweet, I’d like to show a little savory action. The Streaming Gourmet made their version of Guy Fieri’s Pretzel & Almond encrusted chicken breasts. They’re browned and crunchy on the outside, but look moist and juicy on the inside.
The Passionate Eater gives us a photo tour of all the yummy things she picked up at the Zurich Farmers’ Market. This scruptious (but not her favorite) pretzel sandwich with butter and prosciutto looks divine. Perhaps one of our readers can perfect it? Rice – I just laid down our first challenge. Ha!
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