Kivrin

It is Restaurant Week in my town, which means that many high and higher-end eateries lay on special prix-fixe menus in the hopes of hooking patrons for later full-priced visits. Sometimes that works out - B&R and I went to one of our favorite special-occasion restaurants during a restaurant week and have been back many times. Other times, we just take advantage of the opportunity to have a meal that ordinarily would fall outside our budget.

Tonight we went to a restaurant that specializes in "progressive Israeli cusine." That means we had delicious hummus, a platter of eight different salads from tabouli through shredded-beets-with-tahini, and then made choices off a tapas-like menu. We had fried haloumi (a kind of sheeps-milk cheese) with a fruity sauce, fried califlower in yogurt-mint sauce, house-smoked salmon with dill, yogurt, and a kind of fruit we never identified, and sauteed brussel sprouts with whipped feta cheese, and then grilled fish with potatoes (for B&R) and grilled chicken confit with couscous (for me.) And, finally, poached pinapple with pineapple sorbet and pistachio shortbread and almond semifreddo with hazelnut crisp for dessert.

For the ultimate in indulgence, I also had a cocktail called The British Mandate - black-tea-infused gin with lemon and citrus bitters. Unsurprisingly, given my powerful taste for imperialistic alcoholic beverages (India Pale Ale and G&Ts), I found it delicious. B&R had an excellent drink of bourbon, muddled mint, lemon, and verbena.

In short, yum.

Last week I made couscous to eat with a jar of Trader Joe's Morrocan squash soup. I bobbled the proportions, and ended up with an enormous vat of couscous which has been brooding at me ever since from the second shelf of the fridge. Tonight, I remembered this post about a good way to use leftover spaghetti, and realized the same technique would probably be good with couscous. And it is. I wish I'd made twice as much.

Here is the recipe.

( Leftover Couscous Egg Thing )

When I went down to the break room this morning, I had to stop and have breakfast, even though I was late to work and really should have gone straight back to my desk with my tea. But there were Frosted Flakes.

No cereal with added sugar was one of the rules when I was growing up, right along with 'no commercial television' and 'no toy guns.' We ate Cheerios, and occasionally Raisin Bran, and when desperate my father's Shredded Wheat or Grape Nuts. I remember sitting down to a bowl of straight-up wheat germ, though that might have been my own Ramona-ish request. The bright-colored boxes with cartoon characters on the outside and bright-colored shapes within never came home with us, no matter how my brother and I begged, just as no matter home many times I crept into my parents' room on summer mornings and shook my mother awake to ask if we could watch cartoons, the answer was always a sleepy 'you can watch Sesame Street, honey.' (Yet these same parents who gave me unfrosted carrot cake for my early birthdays also fed me maple syrup on toast, so the grand scheme had some kinks.)

When we traveled, however, all the rules were different, especially when it was just Mom with the two of us kids. When she took us on the train to Chicago to see our cousins, and we trooped to the cafe car for breakfast, we could have any kind of cereal we wanted and sometimes a pastry besides. I don't think I even noticed that the raspberry danish in the plastic envelope was vastly inferior to the figure-eight raspberry-and-lemon one that I sometimes got to have as dessert when we walked down to Lederman's bakery on fall evenings - it was a danish. For breakfast. We were... well, let me not speak for my brother, I was, the kind of child who loved highly processed food. (Though there was that incident when I refused a glass of soda and asked for milk instead.)

Anyway. Alongside the delight of the danish, there was the cereal, the wonderful enticing sugary cereal. I always picked Frosted Flakes, in the blue box (blue was my favorite color) with the visible sugar on every piece (I used to suck the sugar off the raisins in Raisin Bran), without even an allusion to mock fruit. My mother tried to open up the front of the box, insisting that there were perforations, but eventually she had to recognize that there weren't any and pour the cereal out into a plastic cup. I ate it dry, with a plastic spoon (even now I still only put milk on shredded wheat or grape nuts) and it was very nearly the best thing ever.

Is there a significant difference, flavor-wise, between key limes and regular limes?

My scones look terrific. I really want to eat one but the receipe only makes eight so I should restrain myself so as to have a decent number to share tomorrow.

There is the tiny problem that I forgot to put in the orange-flavored dried cranberries that I walked all the way to Trader Joe's to buy especially for this scone-making project, and I also forgot to put in the chocolate chips. But the fact remains that my scones look like scones, not lumps, which they looked like the last two times I tried making scones.

I used the receipe here, which is pretty straightforward. The glaze bugs me a bit, because even just one egg makes far more glaze than is necessary, and the extra just goes to waste. Maybe next time I'll add some milk and sugar to the leftover egg-and-cream glaze and see if I can bake it into a very small custard.

I think I'll be making this tonight:

( Butternut Squash Soup with Sage and Parmesan )

I'll need to skip the pureeing part, and get some prefab vegetable broth on the way home... and, hm, possibly an onion too. The receipe comes from here, which despite all the low-carb craziness, seems to have some very tasty-sounding dishes. Cilantro-lime soup, for example. oooooooh....

(I'll probably be lazy and will make myself some spaghetti with sauce from a jar and frozen spinach. But one night soon - butternut squash, oh yes.)

I want an Orange Julius. Or the similiar concoction called orange frost that my mom used to make in the blender.

I wonder if a little orange juice and vanilla ice cream whipped together by my feeble one-pronged electric mixer would in any way satisfy.

I've been charged to contribute a jello salad to the Easter dinner I'm attending. Anyone have a recipe that's either not too horrifying or horrifying in an amusing/tasty way?