This is One Reason I Love My Friends

The following text is from an email sent to me by a friend this weekend. I love these kind of messages, in fact, emails like this were what nudged me towards starting my blog. Actually, it was my sister nudging me, perhaps because I sent one too many emails like this and she said "Start a blog already!" Anyway, it sounds amazing and I will always welcome emails of this nature, keep 'em coming!



Girl-


Yesterday, we ate out twice- once for lunch (Sofra) and once for dinner (Oleana). If for whatever reason you come to Boston, you gotta go to these places. Both places are owned by the same lady, who's big into North African-type stuff. The lunch place is a small cafe and makes some of the most beautiful baked goods you've ever seen. Everything is done with an expert touch, and you can tell just by looking at the pastries that you could basically order anything, and be happy.

For lunch, a lamb shwarma with pickled cabbage and this really good flatbread that they then grilled on some kind of Moroccan domed griddle- I forget what it's called. The lamb had been braised prior to being shwarma-ed. Simple and slammin.

But that's not enough to write you, right? The real reason was dinner. A 6-course vegetarian tasting menu at her fancy restaurant. Beautiful:

1. Meze plates with two preparations on each plate of standard meze fare- but everything was done to perfection. We each had different things: baba ganouj with dill, warm hummous w/tomato and olive confit, red pepper dip with spicy chiles, walnut pate (amazing), some kind of tomato conserve with other stuff, and I forget what the sixth was.

2. THIS. COURSE. WAS. AMAZING: Parsnip hummous with chickpeas on top and beautiful olive oil (or melted butter- I'm not sure), yoghurt, cilantro tabouli, and the best crisp flatbread ever. It's weird for me to be so hyped up about this course, because it was basically hummous and tabouli- nothing out of this world, but again, the beauty was in the preparation. On top of the hummous were just some plain old chickpeas, but I had to do a double take, because however they were cooked, they tasted so rich and milky- and I even asked the waitress to find out if they had been cooked in evaporated milk, because that's how prevalent the milky flavor was. She checked, but apparently that wasn't the case. I'm not sure if they were punking me, or what, because I swear to God I knew what I was tasting...

3. Spinach Falafel with micro greens, beet puree, fresh pickle on house-made flat bread. Lovely. Expertly executed.

4. Savory garlic pancakes served on spinach and some kind of creamy concoction. SLAMMIN.

5. Fideos and chickpeas cooked in a vanilla saffron broth with some other stuff that made the one spoon I ate heaven. By this point, we were all so stuffed we could only taste one bite- but the good news is that we packed it up and are having it for breakfast today with some omelets. HOLLA!!!

6. Three desserts: walnut tart with a walnut gelato and something else (the best!!!); chocolate frozen mousse or semi freddo or something with cocoa nibs (slammin); some kind of fruity floral frozen dessert with pomegrante granita and a rose cream, or something (lovely- but by this time I couldn't keep the ingredients straight, lol).

To accompany the meal, we all drank a beer created especially for this restaurant- it was lovely and crisp, but not overwhelming- and scented with the three Cs: cardamom, cumin and coriander. I could drink this stuff all summer long.

In short- it was slammin.

Holla!