Boston Day 4: DIY Dinner

Perhaps I haven't been clear.  Yes, I am learning stuff!  After all I'm in the city of education ... where there's Boston College, Boston University, Harvard and MIT.  I have learned:

• I am staying at the very hotel where the Parker House roll was invented.  That fact is pretty indisputable.  The Hotel is called the Parker House.
• The first publicly funded school for African-American children was in Boston.
• Oh yeah, and Oracle SOA.  Which is why I'm here.  But I won't bore you with the geeky details.

It was a soggy day in Boston, so I didn't venture far over the lunch hour.  Just down to the African American Heritage museum, just around the corner in Beacon Hill.  The museum is in the old school house, and is right next to the African Meeting House, the oldest extant African-American-built church. 

I'm a big African-American history buff, and it was really cool standing in the meeting place where they came together and discussed, organized, worshiped and stood as a community.  When the Fugitive Slave act sent bounty hunters into the city pilching people from the streets (many of whom were NOT fugitive slaves), they stood by each other here.  When soldiers went to the Massachusetts Regiment in the civil war, the community took care of their families left behind.  And the doctrine of "separate is NOT equal" was born here, over a hundred years before Brown vs. Board of Education.  I find African-American history inspiring ... I may not "get" it on some level because I haven't dealt with racism, but I get how daunting the whole task of civil rights was, and still is.  That was lunch well spent.

So let's face it.  I have been a lazy ass when it comes to dinner.  I haven't lifted a finger to grill the salmon or drizzle aoli on the plates.  So I decided to go someplace where I can share the duties of the meal a little bit ... and so I ended up at the Q Restaurant for some Mongolian Hot Pot!

I have never MHP before, but now I'm a big fan.  Here's the setup.  You sit at a table with a smooth cooktop burner in the middle.  You order broth - for mine I got a "split pot" of regular and spicy broth.  (Spicy is on the right, you can see all the peppers floating on the top.  Ouchy!)  You get your choice of thinly sliced raw meat (I picked short rib), raw noodles and raw vegetables.  You take your chopsticks or a ladle and you dunk your meat, noodles or vegetables in the broth for about two minutes until they're done.   That's all it takes!  The flavor of the broth is heavenly, full of ginger and hot pepper, garlic and spices, and it is infused throughout the food.  Everything's fresh and very hot this way.  You get sauces to throw on top.  And if you want, you have a bown to just ladle up some broth and make yourself a side bowl of soup to munch on when your other stuff is cooking. 

"This is how the Mongolians conquered the world!" goes the blurb in the menu.  I think it might've had something more to do with chopping people's heads off, but whatever.  I would've been one happy conqueror eating this every day!

This being my last real overnight in Boston, I celebrated with high-end dessert over at Finale.  Peanut Butter pie ... and just the right amount of cream, and not too much sugar to get in the way of the peanutty taste!  The plate was littered with peanut brittle on the side and chocolate ganache in front.  A work of art!  Paired with a glass of 10 year old Tawney Port, it was the end of a perfect day. 

One more to go, and I'm back on the train to New York. 

Boston Day 3: We Are Going to Screw Up!

Amy taught me a certain method traveling in Paris, and I use it pretty much all the time.  Every day have a good breakfast, loaded with carbs and (if you can get it) butter.  A croissant does just nicely.  Drink
juice and lots of water.  Walk everywhere.  Skip lunch, and instead eat some trail mix occasionally when you're hungry.  Then eat a really nice dinner rather early in the evening.  Doing it this way you don't have to exercise - it's taken care of by walking everywhere - and you don't spend gobs on food.

The problem in America is getting a good carb-loaded breakfast that won't weigh you down unnecessarily.  Dunkin' Donuts?  I don't think so.  Here in Boston there are two within 3 blocks of each other.  I'd rather eat my Oracle Student Workbook.  And Capitol Coffee House wasn't doing it for me, so I plugged in "Bakery" into my Smart Phone and let it choose my destiny.  I first ended up at Just Croissants across the Boston Commons ... closed.  Next stop the Vanille Cafe in Beacon Hill.  I walked past the swan pond and Cheers and spent about 10 minutes looking for the door. 

And the angels descended from heaven and said, "Lo!  I bring you tidings of great joy!" Butter everywhere!  Mille feuilles, strawberry kayaks, pastel-colored petit fours, and a display case full of French Breakfast pastry.  I got on my knees and thanked the Lord!  And I could order in ENGLISH!  I got a croissant and an Escargot Raisins (a raisin danish - it looks like a snail.)  It was about 90% of the buttery goodness of the Paris counterpart, which was close enough for me, and as good as you're probably going to get in America.  If the dough was just a tad tougher and the taste toward American butter instead of French (less dairy, clover flavor), .... well, it was still the moist, flaky, airy croissant that I had fell in love with.  Tony The Tiger says Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and even if his particular version of breaskfast sucks, he's quite right.  I felt satisfied all the way to dinner time.

Noontime was a bust.  I mapped out a course to In Your Ear, a record store with a supposed inventory of 250,000 CD's.  I need some Elis Regina and Bossa Nova is a little bit hard to find these days, even in the era of widespread digital music. I took the T to Harvard Square ... only to find the store closed for the winter break, being a student-led affair.  Bummer. 

But Harvard Square is refreshing, and I got to see the legendary Clover restaurant. Clover started as a squadron of food trucks that brought fast, flavorful vegan sandwiches to the masses of hungry students.  They were extremely popular, and opened a sit-down restaurant.  On the window was a hand lettered epistle in white paint, "When I opened this restaurant I knew just one thing.  'We are going to screw up.'"  It went on to tell what things did get screwed up, and offered a pleading for time to fix them.  Restaurants can be one of the most dishonest, covert places in society, so this was kind of refreshing. 

For dinner, I landed at Lineage in the very hip Coolidge Corner neighborhood.  I'm a big fan of the farm-to-table restaurant, which is the big thing in Ithaca these days.  From an environmental standpoint, it makes sense to get your food as close to where and when you eat it as possible.  But I think, like vegetarian food, it has its own merits that you discover only after getting into it.  (Choosing food solely on moral grounds is ... ironically, humanly unsustainable!)  First, I think the body craves things that are "in season" and
going against it, like eating peaches in the winter, makes it somehow taste non-peachy.  Second, food that makes a very short trip is fresher.  (Duh!)  Third, and I think this is the most important, art flourishes amidst restrictions.  It makes one think deeper,become more creative.  It provokes surprise.  It's anti-corporate, anti-consistent.

So we get to Lineage, where farm-to-table worked perfectly.  Everything was in sync, from the smell of wood smoke in a contemporary fireplace, to the daily-generated menus, to the enthusiasm of all the staff.  I had grilled salmon with bernaise on a bed of assorted vegetables and the freshness of everything was astounding.  Lemme talk about the parsnips for a second.  Parsnips are your quintessential winter root vegetable. Here they came in chunks.  I bit into one that was soft on the outside, then hard on the inside like an underdone potato chunk.  It was weird at first, but it's brilliant!  Parsnips cooked all the way through have no taste.  Raw parsnips are intense but hard to chew and swallow.  But cook them halfway and you get just the perfect amount of parsnip sweetness.  Incredible! 

Coolidge Center was very beautiful, and I stayed around for awhile.  An Oreo ice cream sundae, followed by a movie at the local arthouse (The Descendants - an excellent movie if you like Alexander Payne, who's one of my personal favorites), and a ride on the T back home ... man!  I could live here. 

Boston Day 2: Come To The Dark Side!

At 3:00 AM I woke to a loud buzzing.  My fist immediately went to the alarm clock, banging on it in a half-awake stupor, but the buzzing wouldn't shut off.  A speaker in my room blared: "IF YOU ARE ON THE FIRST FLOOR, PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING.  IF YOU ARE ON ANY OTHER FLOOR, PLEASE GATHER YOUR BELONGINGS AND WAIT FOR INSTRUCTIONS."  Then the sirens wailed into hearing.

Great.  About 2 minutes later, the same speaker said, "The Hotel and Boston Fire Department have verified that all is clear.  Please resume your activities."  Meaning banging my fist on the alarm clock?  I thought of all the activities one could be doing at 3 AM that could be rudely interrupted by a fire, and drifted back off to sleep.

A minute later, again over the speaker.  "The Hotel and Boston Fire Department have verified that all is clear.  Please resume your activities." Nice.  Then a minute later.  "The Hotel and Boston Fire Department have verified that all is clear.  Please resume your activities." Repeat that every minute for the next hour.  ARRRGHH!  At 4 AM, I was finally allowed to sleep.

At 7 AM, groggy and miffed, I stumbled out of the hotel down to my new regular coffee joint, The Capitol Coffee Room.  Their muffins and croissants are not really very good there, but I'd rather poke out my eyes than go to Dunkin' Donuts.  I consulted the computer for more Boston Weirdness ... this was turning from a curiosity into an obsession.   Then it was back to Oracle University.  The view from Oracle University is pretty darn nice, as you can see on the right. It's hard not to daydream a little. Once I did my lectures and homework assignments, I was ready to explore.

At noon I hopped on the Green Line to visit the Darth Vadar building.  It is called this because ... well look at it and it should be pretty obvious.  I couldn't really see it well from the street level, so I looked for the tallest building in the neighborhood.  That would be the Prudential Tower, 52 stories tall. I bought a ticket to the top floor, and found the view a lot less white-knuckle-producing than the towers in Chicago.  From there, I could snap a really good picture of Lord Vadar.  You can almost hear the breath whistling out of the windows.  "Agggggg-haggggh.  Agggggg-haggggh.  Luke  I am your fath-ah!"

I just wanna say ... I Love, Love, Love the T!  I was able to get all the way from Beacon Hill to Back Bay, up the Prudential Tower, back down and to Beacon Hill again (with a quick stop for Starbucks Espresso) all in the space of an hour.  And all with my $15/week pass for all the rides you can handle.  I don't care if Charlie had problems with the subway (and you can pay homage to him by buying a Charlie Card).  I love it. It's part of my new love for public transportation in general.

For dinner, I decided to hike out to the Boston University turf.  The Boston Vegetarian Society recommended the Grasshopper for Asian Vegan cuisine.  Sounds like a plan!  The campus was a little dead this time of year (classes start next week).   But the night air supported a brisk 2 mile walk, making me one famished patron.  I ordered the Grasshopper Supreme and texted a picture to Amy ... who concluded "It looks like Animal from the Muppets or Jack the Pumpkin King."  Or at the very least glazed Duck and Bananas!  In fact, the Grasshopper Supreme is two long skinny eggplants, steamed and sliced up the middle to resemble a squid, a portobello mushroom cap in the middle, carrot slices, and a "hairpiece" of asparagus atop a bed of spinach ... the whole of which is smothered in brown sauce.  Think Garlic Vegetables.  It wasn't spectacular, but it was a lot of good wholesome food and it was just what the doctor ordered! 

I ended up back at the The Last Hurrah for single malt scotch (Ardbeg - I'm a creature of habit) and hot nuts.  Love those hot nuts. This will be an endless supply of jokes, I'm sure. 

Boston, Day 1: The World's Ugliest Building

La Vita Nuova is a lesser-known work by Dante.  It means "The New Life" and it'sa very romantic, heatfelt mess of sonnets and prose.  I feel like I'm living in it right now.  In the past week I've sold my house, moved to Ithaca, and started a new job at Cornell.  Everything feels new. 

And now I'm in Boston doing training for Oracle SOA Server ... I thought this would be all-consuming but our class is small and the instructor is very funny, informative, and kind enough to let us roam free on our lunch hour.  So I'm finding more free time than I thought I'd have.

Rather than eat lunch, I started walking around the Freedom Trail and ended up in Old South Meeting Hall.  This is where the rabble rousers discussed the Boston Tea Party before carrying it out.  The Meeting Hall has a long history of debating free speech and the merits of same.  Evidently in the 30's there was an outcry against Margaret Sanger, the champion of birth control and founder of Planned Parenthood, and a lot of people were pissed off that she was issued a gag at the city limits of Boston and was not allowed to speak.  A debate about "Boston-banning" occurred here as well.  I guess that sounds like Boston has more a history of censorship than anything ... but really, whereas other cities quietly banned that stuff or were just not interested, Bostonites dragged all their dirty laundry out in the open.

I found a book in the gift shop on "Weird Boston", and they mentioned the World's Ugliest Building, an honor bestowed upon the new Boston City Hall, built in the 60's.  Which means I had to go see it!  And man is it ugly.  Butt-ugly.  It's from the "Look How Hip I Am" school of architecture, trying hard not to be boxy buy failing miserably.  If that weren't all, it doesn't fit in with the surrounding architecture at all.  Yuck!

But if one can balance out the ugliness of a building withe the beauty of dinner, I did it!  I just had the best fish ever at Atlantic Fish Company.  They are pretty obsessive about the fish freshness there, and their menu changes daily to reflect it.  Today their catch was Red Snapper grilled and served weith butter-garlic sauce, and MAN!  It snapped my head back in amazement!  Most fish is flaky and kind of reminds you of an onion whose layers peel away with a very thin slimy film in the middle. This fish was more like beef or chicken - stringy and dense.  It was kind of like the duck we had in France - it barely resembled the classic American version.  It wasn't strongly fishy, yet it didn't taste "mild" - e.g. like water.  It was just the right amount of seafood.

On the side were mashed potatoes with shrimp and calamata olives.  A bed of perfectly-grilled asparagus graced the top.  A glass of Poilly Fume was the perfect pairing - tasting as strong as Pineapple juice on the first sip, then a pleasant aftertaste like dish soap (which sounds bad, but it's more like what smells good about dish soap, and nothing else).  For dessert - fruit crisp made with the fruit of the day, fresh from the oven and worked over with a blowtorch like creme brulee.  They bring it to your table and top it with a scoop of ice cream at the last possible moment so you don't get any meltage.

I ended up in the Whiskey Bar of the Omni hotel, reading an essay on the pianist Fred Hersch and nursing a single malt Islay Scotch - rich and peaty and smoky like a good one should be.  It was good, but was exemplrary were the nuts.  They toast them in the oven (and good ones only - macadamias, cashews, almonds) before serving them in a small bowl to you.

If you've ever put your fingers in a bowl of hot nuts, you know what a joy it is.  Eee gads.  Did I write that?  Oh well.  Not every sentence needs to be perfect in La Vita Nuova.