An even better treat than going to a restaurant for dinner is heading to someone's home for dinner. Granted, I'm shockingly blessed with friends and family who are not just good cooks, but great cooks. (Thank you, Food Gods!) Seriously - some of the best tastes I've ever savored have been courtesy of none other than my parents, grandma, and aunts, not to mention in-laws and friends. Veal scallops a la danoise (my father-in-law), roasted goose with cabbage, lardons, and whipped potatoes (Dad & Susanna), fresh lemon-coconut cake (Suz), grilled tuna on Georgica Beach (Bartley), guacamole on Georgica Beach (Maud), grilled leg of lamb (Carol), Christmas prime rib roast (aunt Mary), apple pie (aunt Marge), crispy homemade pizzas (Kathie), Greek salad (Mary P), spanikopita (Mary P's mother-in-law), almond puff pastry (Mom), braised lamb (Stu & Debbie), heirloom tomato salad (Rudy & Ana), oyster stew (Andrew), fried fresh walleye with garden green beans (Grandma & Grandpa Meyer), Schaum torte (Polly), oven-roasted potatoes (Harry)... Oh my goodness, I could go on and on and on. It's unbelievable, really. From the simplest to the most involved, all completely memorable. So there you go, proof that I remember fondly damn near everything I've ever eaten. (Curse or blessing? Not sure...) Hey, if I am what I eat, I'm so jamming! As well as French, Greek, Mexican, Italian, Danish, German, British... NICE!

Also nice? In fact, where I'm going with all of this? (Sorry, I tend to get a little carried away with my reminiscing...) We're going to Suz & Cory's for dinner tonight - yays! For raclette - melted cheese served with all sorts of tasty Frenchy/Swissy accoutrements: potatoes, ham, pickles, vegetables. Little wine, little chat, little checking out Planet Earth in high def (The Coreman, like The Batman, has all the best toys). Aaaaahhh, Total Tasty Relaxation. Thank you in advance Shuberts! Wheee!

I'll hope for you that you're lucky enough to be heading to someone's home for dinner tonight too. If not, whip up a little somethin' somethin' for yourself (perhaps a simple pasta with broccolini with a nice glass of red) and...well...pretend? (Actually, it works, I do it all the time!)

Happy President's Day!? Actually, very happy because Nathan is home from school, always fun. We celebrated more yesterday than today, first with brunch at Stacey's with my mom. We pulled it together pretty quickly (our original plan was to go out, which we bagged when we realized how much more fun little Cooper Cuteness would have at his own house). And as often occurs under those rushed circumstances, something rather delicious happened. Stace set out for Isles Buns for the most killerest cinnamon rolls on the planet - huge, soft and dangerously yeasty, studded with soft pockets of cinnamon and dripping with gooey, creamy icing. And that was brunch, all good. Oh wait! Nope, that was the end of brunch, right, although those lovely buns would have sufficed as the entire meal, quite handily. But heck no, this is me - and the family that made me who I am - we're talking about here, so there was plenty more, plenty!

Including a pissaladiere - basically a savory French tart, but not a quiche, since it doesn't contain eggs. How did I settle on a pissaladiere? Well, I started thinking quiche, and flipped through Mastering the Art of French Cooking for inspiration and a good short pastry recipe. Then I started thinking that Nathan does not enjoy eggs (to put it mildly), and that I had some delicious sausage that could make an interesting tart filling on its own, and so into pissaladiere the concept evolved. And what a treat! Buttery crust filled in this case with browned sausage, caramelized onions, and tomatoes. No cheese, no eggs. Really rather fabulous if I do say so myself (and apparently, I do)! The crust is quite rich, so needs a good chill before quickly rolling it out. But it's worth the wait. We had it alongside a simple salad, which kind of hilariously served as a palate cleanser before... Those damn buns! My goodness we were full, not very moderate (despite my silly Valentine's Day pledge), uff. (Recipe posted in comments, below.)

Then we rushed home to greet the Shubert family! Yay! As many of you already know, wherever the Shuberts go, fun follows... In this case, they were here as a huge favor to me - the Coreman sweetly agreed to help me set up my new Mac system. Yes, I have made The Leap, this is my first official post on a Mac, not a PC. (Pause and listen to the singing angels...) I have a bit of a learning curve ahead of me, since of course we have made things as complicated as possible with our music and photo libraries, network, incompatible email, and printing with a printer that doesn't much like Macs, but we're pretty well on our way. Hey, at least I'm posting this! Much faster, much prettier (gorgeous, in fact), much more fun. And blogging was already fun! So woo hoo for additional fun! (Now I just need a kickin' new camera to take better food pics with...but don't hold your breath on that one, awww shucks.)

Suz and the kids tagged along to make for a very fun afternoon! A little beer, a little buttery popcorn, some major video-game playing for the kids, some major Mac Magic for us adults, not our typical Sunday by a long shot - as in, very productive! Hopefully today will yield the same progress, and tasties (of course), stay tuned...

A definition:

Stomach: a saclike distensible enlargement of the alimentary canal located between the esophagus and small intestine; it stores food, adds gastric juices, begins the breakdown of proteins and churns food into a liquid mass.

Um, ew. Liquid mass? Way to make eating seem
totally disgusting (ha). Perhaps I should read that (Webster's) definition every time I get hungry for things I shouldn't be eating. It's definitely way ruder to imagine pizza or a burger as a liquid mass in the middle of my body than say, strawberries, which just sounds like a smoothie. A semi-digested rather acidic stomach smoothie.

Sorry. I've been in a wicked sh*t of a mood the last few days, John too, we've written it off to prolonged lack of sunlight. The post-holidays, post-birthday, snow-sucks-after-Christmas blues. You know it, too, I know. Meh. I've even been trading emails with Suz bemoaning the idiocy of the masses and chatting over coffee this morning (Friday Morning Coffee with Suz!) about the Holocaust. Egads. But I'll admit, I'm not opposed to using the saclike distensible enlargement of my alimentary canal to cheer myself up, namely through the filling of it with lovely (at least before chewing into a bolus) foods and the occasional sip of wine and/or bubbly.

Like last night. Date Night! Movie followed by dinner with John at (Uptown) Campiello. I know it's not all about Campiello the way it was when the place opened, but it was still festively hopping on a Thursday night and the food - D'Amico knows what the heck they're doing - was delish. We particularly loved the king crab appetizer - pieces of butter-tender crab tossed with julienne carrots, jalapeños, and scallions, served alongside a horseradish panne cotta. Unusual and spectacularly delicious, with a cool-creamy, sweet-spicy-crunchy thing going on. Our entree was a bit more traditional - ziti tossed with lemon zest, dried peppers, garlic, olive oil, and Parm. Simple, chewy-spicy deliciousness. Nothing makes a cooler (smoother?) bolus than king crab and ziti. Rad.

And lunch today, yum. At Yum Bakery, my mom treated Stace, Cooper, and moi to a post-Stephanie-is-41-(sigh) celebration. Yum Bakery is the perfect girlie lunch spot - sunny and buzzy, with a long list of spot-on comfort food tasties. Mom and I chose the salad sampler - good ol' fashioned tuna, egg, and chicken salads (with modern twists all of them, top-notch) spread on fresh foccacia bread. Cream of mushroom soup. Stace and Coop shared beef stew. We all dived into frites (but of course). And Happy Birthday to me...coconut cake. YESSS! Sooo good, a real, buttery scratch white cake, filled with coconut custard and iced with white icing and showered with sweetened, flaked coconut. Just exactly how it's supposed to be, ridiculously sweet and rich. Love, love, LOVED it.

Tonight? Uh, I'm not very hungry? Funny thing, ha. What to eat on a not-hungry night? Well, there's always the option of nothing, but that's not very weekendy. Or moderate. So I'm leaning toward a simple quesadilla - two French Meadow (Fat Flush, worst product name evar) sprouted grain tortillas, sprinkle of cheese, toast in a pan until melty and dip in some spicy Salsa Lisa. Few hundred cals, five minutes to prepare, tasty (essential), done.

Happy Sunless Weekend! (Grumble.)

And oh! Another reason to eat monounsaturated fats (as in avocados, olives, and nuts.)

So, to pick up on a couple of riffs from yesterday (and no, don't worry, I am NOT drinking beer today, ha)... First, dinner at Fogo de Chao was fantastic! What a blast! What a scene! That place is hoppin', people, and while many of the customers were Badger fans (how do I know? Because Badger fans wear their red Bucky clothes all the time, including out for dinner at Fogo de Chao...), I have a feeling that the place does just fine on other nights too. It's HUGE! And festive, with adorable Brazilian gaucho chefs wandering around with skewers of succulent fire-roasted meats - lamb and chicken and tri-tip beef, oh my! The entire staff is Brazilian, as far as I can tell, so Mary (my college Portuguese professor) chatted up a storm (in Portuguese, natch) while I offered the occasional "obrigada" (thank you) and then asked Mary, "Um, how do I say, 'My name is Stephanie?' in Portuguese?" Yeah, great memory. I can remember outfits I wore to class... I can remember which football players were in my class (as my stepmom Susanna recently reminded me, I did have quite a soft spot for the football players in my Portuguese class, rarrr)... I can remember all sorts of (high school) French... But actual Portuguese, I got nothin'. Obrigada, brain, obrigada.

Anyhow, my camera battery was dying (thus the horribly grainy pic), but I just had to try to capture this unlikely scene: my tiny, pretty mother, she who birthed two un-tiny daughters (me-5'11" and Stace-5'10"), with her tiny appetite, staring wide-eyed at these big ol' skewers of roasted meats, totally being a good sport while the gauchos offered slice after slice after slice... I have to admit, I couldn't eat much either, I was too full from all that damn Badger Blast beer. And the several bites of the Be-Wiched roast beef sandwich John brought home for me (be sure to check out Be-Wiched, it rawks). But it was great to see Mary Schil, and her friends Ron & Linda and their daughter Brooke. Especially when I offered them a ride back to their hotel, thankfully only a few blocks from Fogo de Chao - seeing a man as big as Ron (he's the one next to my mom, above), riding on all fours in the trunk of my not-large wagon (the only way he could fit)... I haven't laughed that hard in a very, very long time. Thank goodness he laughed right along with us. Damn, I'm wiping my eyes all over again. Ron = Good Sport, fo sho.

So, oh! The second riff is that I'm definitely going for the roasted Chicko chicken tonight... I'll post later on the specifics, but for now my plan is to keep the first attempt simple. Nothin' but salt and butter, baby. And did I mention that Nathan and John are, as I write, making a run to Maverick's for their killer roast beef and brisket sandwiches (John's clearly got a sandwich thing goin' this weekend)? Uuuurrrrgh... Moderation, Moderation, wherefore art thou, Moderation? Stay tuned...

Alright, I'm back with my roast chicken update! The Chicko is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. After a bit of a beginner's hiccup (I initially had the bird legs-down, kinda like a headless Buddha, then quickly realized it was going to cook more evenly legs up - I also realized that breast-down means more succulent white meat, always a good thing), I was good to go. No turning required (I did baste with melted butter a few times), just a beautifully crispy, juicy, browned chicken. So it's official - I'm a certified Chicko-phile! A Chicko-Chick! Leggo my Cheeky Chicko! Well, when I actually get one... Which will be soon, I just ordered one; with as many times as I roast chicken for dinner, I figure I might as well make it as good as possible, as soon as possible, non? Thanks to Kevin and Kristi for discovering and proselytizing this little beauty, and to their disciple Lindsay for loaning me her Chicko in the (successful!) effort to convert me. Amen.