Saturday Date Night: Some Lemons in Provence

Scallops Provencal, prepared lovingly by my beautiful wife

For our second weekend of culinary experimentation, we journeyed along the coast from Italy into France, visiting the Mediterranean cuisine of Provence, famous for more simple, fresh ingredients - and seafood. Provence was a favorite stomping grounds of the Romans, being one of the first lands outside of "the boot" that came under Roman rule, and they found its warm climate and beautiful landscape a nice place to repose.

For this week's meal, we went for dishes that were light and centered on different types of seafood. First, it was lemon shrimp with garlic linguine, a refreshing preparation that married the lemon zest with a bit of garlic spice on thin pasta, with the shrimp soaking up the remains deliciously. Then, we went on to Scallops Provencal, slightly dusted, fried in butter, and combined with a luscious concoction of onions, parsley, shallots, olive oil, spices, more lemon, and white wine. Combined as the main course, it was decadent and still lingers on my lips as I ready for bed. Instead of going for wine of the region, we polished off the other half of the varietal we had opened the night before, a Blind Dog cuvee that held up quite well to the scallops. It ended up being as dramatic as the last Harry Potter film that we used as nightcap.

Another Saturday, another success. We have not started planning yet for next weekend, but we are both excited about the possibilities of discovering some more fantastic food, right here at home. After all, there is no place like it...

Comments

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...

Journal : OpenRoadWorks

Search This Blog