One of our good friends and former roommate, Gal, was recently deported back to Israel due to visa issues. To commemorate his departure a group of us had a farewell dinner with a ton of good food and a liquid ton of good wine.

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Two weeks ago was the height of cherry tomato season at our farm share.  My roomates and I gathered about 9.5 pounds worth of tomatoes! Delicious…

They were all gone by the end of the week.

On July 4th, Megan, Gal and I had a picnic lunch at the top of Mt. Holyoke. Unfortunately the weather was quite cloudy, so the views weren’t as nice as normal, but at least it didn’t rain on us. At the top of the mountain is an old hotel which used to be quite the hot spot, hosting guests like Abe Lincoln and some famous opera singer whose name I forget. The state turned the area into a park in the 40s, and it is now a small museum. We toured the hotel, had some sandwiches, and wandered along the ridge for a bit, enjoying the scenery. Read more »

In late may Megan and I headed down south for her cousin’s wedding in South Carolina. Along the way we made a few stops, the first one in New Jersey to visit my family. My dad gave us a tour of his vegetable patch in the community gardens at Barclay Farms. I didn’t see any popcorn sprouts (they grows in small, microwavable bags, right?), but lots of other things were starting to come up.

Time to chronicle more delicious meals.

• BHD #13: Filip made pig with baked sliced potatoes
• BHD #14: Tim made Yaki Soba
• BHD #15: Filip made cod and Emily’s (in)famous rum cake (which has no rum in it, but lots of vodka)
• Intermission: Tim and Filip realized they had been cooking too often
• BHD #16: Gal and Avigail made a kosher meal with orange and apricot chicken, asparagus, and fresh baked challah

The Dinners

The Diners

My housemates and I are planning to get a farm share at a local CSA (community supported agriculture) this summer. The main options I’ve found for the Amherst area are Simple Gifts Farm, Riverland Farm, Brookfield Farm, Stone Soup Farm, and Foodbank Farm. Here is some info on each one.
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For my birthday I received In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.  The book covers how the American diet has changed over the last century, mostly due to influences from processed food companies. It is more than a little disturbing how much control these companies have gained over government health advice, and in turn, over our diets. Pollan argues that the food companies are increasingly trying to push processed foods into consumers’ shopping carts since they can be made more cheaply, and allow for a higher price markup, than regular food items. Pollan’s suggestions for a healthy diet make sense to me: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Read more »

The Cushman Market is a small grocery store and cafe up the road from where I live. The front half of the store has an eclectic mix of groceries, many of which are organic or locally made products. Walk back past the reasonably stocked wine and beer section and you get to a nice cafe that serves sandwiches for breakfast and lunch, and serves drinks all day.

It is great to have such a nice place within walking distance. We often head over there on weekend mornings for breakfast, particularly on Sundays when there is a small jazz band playing in the back. I’m partial to the “egg, cheese, and bacon on an everything bagel”… delicious.

Tonight we were short on food and it was beginning to snow, so I took a quick walk over there to pick up some food. I snapped this shot of the cafe, which is the first night time picture I’ve taken with my new camera. It’s a little blurry from me shaking (or shivering–it was cold out!), but it still came out pretty well.

I’ve fallen behind in posting about the important stuff (food). Over the winter break we had a bit of a slowdown in the approximately weekly “family dinners” my house started in the Fall. Now they are back in full swing. Here is the quick run down of eating Filip’s pet birds, Megan and Gal’s slow cooked meals, and my crepes. As usual, it was a delicious exploration of traditional and world cuisine (I should go into marketing!).

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On my dinner night I made two spanish dishes for Megan and Filip. The first was Patatas Bravas, the quintessential spanish appetizer of fried potatoes in a spicy sauce. This was accompanied by grilled pork on a stick, marinated in a mix of Spanish and Arabic spices.

I had made Patatas Bravas twice over the summer with a different recipe which had a separate, mayonnaise based sauce. The new recipe instead had you cook up the potatoes in spices and hot peppers, which was good, but I don’t think my sauce to potato ratio was quite right. I also had trouble getting the potatoes to brown while frying… I think in the past I’ve had better luck using vegetable oil rather than olive oil.

The second dish of grilled (actually broiled) pork skewers were marinated in a nice mix of coriander and cumin seeds, garlic, and paprika. Just like the potatoes, I’d like to try these again, but make more sauce and marinate the meat for longer.

I need a bit more practice before I can compete with some of the tapas places we visited on our trip to spain last spring, but it was still pretty good. Having the food with Este, one of the better Spanish red wine’s I’ve tried lately ($9 at Whole Foods), didn’t hurt either.