Eating in a box

We had half a day left in Boston and it happened to be Easter Sunday so our friends helped get seats at their favorite brunch spot near their place, T.W. Food by chef Tim Wiechmann. (The picture above was from our duck tour of Boston the night before) The restaurant was a small 12 top labeled as a New American/ New French cuisine featuring local ingredients. The staff was very knowledgable and professional. The restaurant was tucked away right in the middle of the neighborhood. I'll just dive into the food there's not much commentary to be had. I opted for the Charcuterie plate with Chicken liver mousse, mushroom pate, whole grain mustard and pickled vegetables. I know I said New French, my wife got the Italian Wedding Soup, it's a very different style than we were use to. The poached egg was quite good. Our friends got the sweet potato pierogi with cilantro pesto. For my entree I got the Spring Lamb, slow roasted leg of lamb with braised shoulder ove...

Day 2 of our trip to Boston, above is the famous Fenway Park home to the Boston Red Sox. I caught this shot during our first day viewing the panoramic scene on top of the Prudential building.  That morning we were preparing for our segway tour and took a walk thru Quincy Market. Quincy market houses a huge "food court" (much like you would find in any mall just lots bigger) with every type of food you could imagine. Next to it was an open air farmers market. We didn't get a lot of time to linger here since we were heading out to lunch. There were lots of street performances and I could see this being a nice "make a day of" shopping eating and entertainment.  We made our way to lunch at the Union Oyster house. It makes the claim to be "The oldest restaurant in America" and the plaque from the national park service (pictured above) confirms it.  As expected they had fresh oysters as well as littlenecks and cherrystone clams. Sitting in the...

My wife and I took a long weekend trip to Boston to visit some friends. We had a fabulous time visiting various historical sites and getting to try out some great food and experience "big city life". There's definitely a greater degree of hustle and bustle in Boston compared to Austin. The one thing I wish we could have in Austin is a mass transit system. The "T" was a wonderful way of getting around Boston and our friends told us that it was basically un-necessary to own a car.  Warning, lots of pictures on this post but this unexpected find at the end of the day generated most of the photos and made me dump some of the other pictures. We saw a bunch of stuff, but I'm keeping it all about the food here. We stayed at the Omni Parker House. It's apparently been a hotel with it's doors open continuously (this is what the clerk told me) since 1854. It definitely has a lot of that "ancient" feel. It's located right outside of ...

So for whatever reason my food blog news feeds have recently been posting more and more Polish food recipes. And when a meatball recipe came thru and I was pretty sure I had to do a Polish Bento. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I LOVE meatballs and like I said it's what got me to make enough time to cook. Klopsiki Pulpeciki is a meatball (I went with pork only this time) in a mushroom sauce. But since I'm going off gluten for a little while, I made this a gluten free recipe. The binder was breadcrumbs and I used a cornflake gluten free substitute, for the sauce I used some of my all purpose gluten free "flour" blend and it thickened up like charm, and of course I served it over a brown rice flour pasta (regular egg noodle pasta pictured above). The interesting part of this dish is the use of sour cream as part of the binder for the meatballs and a lack of sour cream in what tasted like a "Stroganoff" type dish. I seared up the meatballs ...

I took a mini stay-cation and on day two I set out to Lockhart Texas for the legendary big three bbq joints. Kreuz Market, Black's Barbecue and Smitty's have been around for a long time each have their own unique history, Black's claims oldest continuously opened bbq, Smitty's and Kreuz have a contentious history of it's own all lay some sort of claim of being oldest. I'll let you read up on the history and you can judge for yourself. The bottom line is: in Lockhart, they are hardcore bbq fans. If you haven't made the pilgrimage it's worth it just to check out the history in stores. I know I'm about to open myself up to all sorts of bbq religious zealot-ism in the comments with this post, but please keep in mind this is my opinion of what I ate and I'm actually not much of a griller so you're basic grill fanatic will probably detect more subtleties than I will and will have differing opinions on sauce/no sauce and cooking methods. Anyway,...