Washing dishes

There must be a genetic difference between men and women when it come to washing dishes.

At family gatherings, just as soon as people leave the table, the womenfolk quickly sweep the dishes off the table and into the kitchen, where they all stand around to socialize and wash the dishes. It doesn't matter if a female guest is a non-family member or even a just-met acquaintance, her genetic conditioning will kick in and she will go into dishwashing mode. I think if a woman knew that dishes would be left out unwashed all night long, she would be positively apoplectic.

Men, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to leave the dishes on the table after a big meal, move into the living room, and promptly fall asleep. The idea of gravy drying on the china on the table doesn't bother them one little bit.

Last night after dinner, with great effort I made myself debone the turkey and put the leftovers in the refrigerator. This morning, all the dishes, pots, pans, bowls, and the turkey carcass were all waiting on the counter to greet us. Now, as I hear all my female readers gasping, let me explain my logic that by allowing all the pots and pans to soak over night, they were infinitely easier to clean this morning. We had to hand wash everything today, and it took over an hour! I suppose it's a record for all my dishes to be washed by noon on Friday, cause usually I would have run one dishwasher load a day, and it often takes three days to get everything washed. One of the challenges of tiny D.C. apartment kitchens is that we don't have a dishwasher!

Cooking in a miniature kitchen was a challenge, too. My little oven is just barely big enough to hold the turkey roasting pan. We also have very, very little counter space, so the great logistical challenge of the meal was just finding places to set things!

Ryan's simple "white trash" menu and recipe requests were surprisingly easy and quick to prepare. Other than having to pop the turkey in the oven for six hours, there was basically nothing else to do until about an hour before dinner time, when the hardest task was peeling a bag of potatoes. Ryan couldn't figure out what my boiled potatoes were when they were sitting on the counter before the boiling cream and butter were added; I rice my potatoes instead of using a hand mixer on them, so I suppose they did look "different" to a non-cook like him. Everything else was just opening and mixing cans and boxes. I miscalculated a few grocery purchases; usually I go through a quart of cream on Thanksgiving, so now I have half a quart left over; no cream soup and using "Cool Whip" for dessert will do that. And, alas, the sad news of the week was that the lady who invented Stovetop Stuffing just died.

So, now, we're off to the Kennedy Center for a National Symphony Pops concert of all-movie scores. Ciao for now!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The turkey is in the oven and should be done in plenty of time for our target five o'clock feast time. Got up this morning to bake the pumpkin pie. It felt strange not to be baking pumpkin challah or other Thanksgiving breads, but Ryan wanted those store-bought brown 'n serve rolls, so that's what we're having. He wants everything to be very plain and simple; I hope my doctoring of the turkey (a basil and butter rub under the skin and all over the outside, plus wedges of onion and orange inside the cavity) won't violate his sense of "nothing exotic, nothing foreign" "white trash food" (his term). I indulge his wish for simple, country food cause the Ivy League and the East Coast really is quite a culture shock for western Indian kids. This is his third year at Dartmouth, and he's never been able to go home to his family in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, so I hope this keeps him from getting too homesick.

After the turkey went in, I fixed myself my traditional Thanksgiving cook's breakfast of slowly scrambled eggs and the turkey liver sauteed in butter with a splash of brandy. College boy was still in bed, so he didn't get any.

Here's our projected menu, as chosen by Ryan:

A White Trash Thanksgiving
Washington, D.C.
November 24, 2005

Plain Deviled Eggs with Paprika Garnish
Bread and Butter Pickles

Salad of Iceberg Lettuce, Diced Ham, Onions, Egg Slices
Cheddar Cheese, and Sunflower Seeds
with ranch dressing

Plain Roasted Turkey with Pan Gravy
Stovetop Cornbread Stuffing with Neck Meat and Giblets
Plain Mashed White Potatoes with Butter
Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Green Bean Casserole
Homemade Creamed Corn
Canned Whole Cranberry Sauce
Brown 'n Serve Rolls
Southern-Style Iced Tea

Mrs. Smith's Pumpkin Custard Pie
with Cool Whip topping

Time to check on things again in the kitchen.

Capital Q Texas-Style Barbeque, Washington, D.C.

We went to the Indian museum at the Smithsonian, which blissfully was not crowded this afternoon. I kinda wanted to eat lunch at their Indian foods cafe, Mitsitam, which was featuring smoked turkey, roast venison, grilled buffalo, and planked salmon, but holiday houseguest Ryan thought it was too expensive at $12.95 per person, so we ate a late lunch when we got to Chinatown near the movie theater, where he spent $18 on a little plate of barbequed brisket, pulled pork, slaw, beans, and iced tea! He's starting to learn Washington prices.......

I've always been curious about Capital Q Texas-Style Barbeque when I've walked past it right by the busiest corner in Chinatown. I just couldn't imagine barbeque here being any better than the dismal attempts at Mexican food. So, when Ryan wanted to eat at a non-ethnic restaurant (in Chinatown!!!) and our only choices were Hooter's, Fuddrucker's, or Capital Q, I encouraged him to pick the "non-national chain." Once I got inside and tasted the food, I was quite pleasantly surprised.

Capital Q is a small restaurant with rustic, Texas-themed decor. In the back is a food counter where you pick your meats and the attendant cuts your ribs or chops your meat to order, and also helps you pick your side items. Everything else is self-service. With that in mind, I thought the prices were just a touch on the high side for a barbeque joint—a pound of beef ribs was going for $26! My half-pound of chopped beef at $7 was worth it, though, because the meat was wonderfully flavored and juicy. Ryan had a two-meat sampler plate with nice slices of beef brisket and a big spoonful of pulled pork, which he particularly liked. The baked beans looked pretty normal to me, as did the cabbage slaw, but he didn't like the slaw because it had celery seed in the recipe. Nevertheless, I liked the place, and I'll definitely be back.

On our way out of the movie theater last night, it was snowing! The snow only lasted a few minutes and didn't stick, but first snow is always such a magical moment.

Thai Kitchen, Washington, D.C.

Leo and I went to a late dinner at Thai Kitchen on M Street in West End. We discovered it the other night while we were walking home from Dupont Circle and thought it looked interesting. The restaurant takes up a lot of square footage in a half-below-ground floor at the bottom of an office building, and their position allows them to have an entry plaza with a fountain and koi pond outside. A lot of the decor is Chinese in nature, including ba-gua feng shui items over the doors. Inside, one of the first things one see is a huge picture of the management with actress Angelina Jolie, who recently used Thai Kitchen to cater a fund raising dinner for one of her refugee charities. Continuing on down the stairs into the restaurant, one first enters the bar area, where a long bar snakes along two walls and bears a boldly decorated top. Around the corner in the dining area (bar and dining room are all one great big space), banquette line the window wall, tables and chairs are in the middle, and booths sit along the interior walls. The exposed architectural support columns are on 30-degree angles from the vertical; all are wood paneled.

The menu is very traditionally Thai and the prices are quite reasonable, especially given their West End location. Since the night air was chilly on the walk over, I started with a lovely hot tea with a light jasmine fragrance and medium amber color that hit the spot. Leo got a cocktail called "Kiss Before Dying," which was some kind of vodka, tequilla, Galliano, and orange juice concoction. We both ended up starting with Yum Nua, a grilled beef salad. The thinly sliced beef was wonderfully flavorful with a hot spicy lime juice dressing and bits of green scallion throughout. It was mounded directly on the plate next to a small pile of lettuce, which included long, curled shreds of carrot and two endive leaves.

I planned on just the salad for my meal, but Leo had another item, having selected the southern style red curry dish, Panang. There was a considerable quantity of tender chicken chunks in the center garnished with a few deep-fried basil leaves on top; a row of crinkle-cut zuccini rounds lined the edge of about one-third of the bowl. White rice came in a separate small bowl. He declared that the food here was better than that at the Thai place we usually frequent downtown.

Dessert, though, was a bit of a disappointment. Leo had the mango sticky rice and I had just mango, but, while he reported the sticky rice itself to be good, both of our mangos were very much far from being ripe. Nevertheless, he grabbed a delivery menu on the way out, so I think there's a good chance we'll be eating Thai Kitchen's food again.

Chevy's Fresh Mex, Arlington, VA

There's a little shopping center across the street from the big mall at Pentagon City called "Pentagon Square," noted mostly for the Costco, plus BestBuy, Linens 'n Things, and Border's Books, and we were there to pick up some household necessities. We decided to try one of the cafes there, Chevy's Fresh Mex. Leo said that back when he was fresh out of college with his advertising and marketing degree, Chevy's was one of the accounts on which he worked. So, it seemed like a fun place to try.

Since we came in from the shopping center and not their main door from the outside, we had to walk through the main dining room, where there were a lot of empty tables. We waited at the host's stand for probably five minutes before he talked to us, then we stood there probably another ten minutes before we were seated. He was very slowly controlling the flow of new tables into the dining rooms, and we had to wait for him to seat about five tables ahead of us (most were in the bar), answer telephone calls, and wander around the restaurant. There seemed to me to be no reason why all the tables couldn't have been seated immediately. I think, though, the problem was that they were short staffed on full-fledged waiters. There were tons of waiter's assistants and bus boys in the place, but not that many waiters. Our waiter was quite unfortunately scarce after taking our order, with the food brought from the kitchen by expediters and the assistants pooring drinks, filling chip baskets, and so forth.

Leo, who is supposed to be on a no-carb diet, started with a frozen margarita and an appetizer serving of "Dos Tamales," a large plate with one pork tamale topped with red chile sauce and one chicken tamale topped with a very hot green chile and tomatillo sauce, and all sprinkled with crumbles of white Mexican cheese. I ordered a Santa Fe Chopped Salad for my meal, so I opted not to do appetizers. Meanwhile, though, I tasted the salsa and it was very good, with a roasted tomato taste and a much darker color than most salsas; it was a touch sweet and rather thin, but I liked it nonetheless. My salad was good, too, and too big to completely finish. For a main course, Leo ordered chicken fajitas; they brought him a huge tray with a raised platform in the middle holding the hot, sizzling skillet of chicken strips, onions, and green pepper slices, with a lower compartment on the left holding a big plate of black bean (there were three different types of beans available) and Spanish rice, and on the right a plate with guacamole, pico de gallo, and sour cream. Tortillas came in a little paper bag placed on the table, but we didn't open it. One of the most interesting things on the main plate was their roasted corn salsa, which appeared to be a puree of smoky, roasted, fresh corn kernals with a powerful corn flavor and just a touch of pepper fire that was quite good. After abiding by the "no-carb" rules for his main course, Leo ended dinner with a great big flan garnished with a sliced strawberry and a little tiny, cactus-shaped sopapilla.

I thought the food at Chevy's was quite good, but I don't know if I'll make an effort to go back, since I thought the service abominable. When we paid, Leo even had to ask for his change to be returned (how dare the waiter assume he was being left a 30% tip!).

Cafe Nema, Washington, D.C.

One of my bigger culinary adventures was last weekend when I'd been at a Red Cross charity fundraiser and ended up going to a too-early dinner with a chemical engineer and a Ph.D. physicist. We wandered around the P Street strip looking for a place that opened at 5, and were unsuccessful, so we walked up to U Street to check out some new places there, but they didn't open til 6, either. Then, we just happened to notice a lower level cafe behind a staircase full of people, and Cafe Nema was open!

Cafe Nema is a Somali restaurant. For you geographically impaired, Somalia is a country on the very eastern tip of Africa, immediately east of Ethiopia and south of the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian peninsula. Just a few days before, Somalia had been in the news because of Somali pirates who'd attacked a cruise ship off the coast! Unlike Ethiopia, which was never colonized by Europeans, Somalia was British until 1960 and early on some provinces had been Italian, so their food is much more accessible to Western tastes.

Since none of us had been to a Somali restaurant before, we asked our very personable waiter to pick our meal for us. I guess he wasn't that comfortable with just bringing us stuff, so he kept questioning, and based on my dinner companions' less adventurous palates, he made the "decision." Drink orders came first. Since Somalia is one of those strict Sunni Muslim countries, I was surprised that they served beer here. I was disappointed that they didn't have iced tea! How un-American! We each got mixed green salads to start with a lemony olive oil vinaigrette that was fine, but I don't think very traditional. We all ended up with the same basic entree, a delicious stewed chicken dish called kalankal. Mine was served in the center of a plateful of rice, whilst my companions (both of whom claim Italian ancestry) had their kalanal mixed in with fettucine noodles. The flavor of the kalankal was very good, and unlike Etiopean stews, not hot at all. For extra spice, we were given tiny containers of a green mint and other spice sauce that was hot but not overpowering.

Our waiter said there were no traditional Somali desserts. That was a little disappointing, since I know that Somalia is a major exporter of bananas, but I also have to remember that desserts are not at all common in non-western cultures.

Cafe Nema was a fun place I plan to visit again. And, one of the best things, the bill for the three of us was only $37!

Lebanese Taverna, Arlington, VA

While on a Friday night shopping expedition to the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City and the "large" Harris-Teter grocery store in that neighborhood, Leo and I stopped in for an early dinner (early being the operative word, since had we arrived 30 minutes later, the place would have been packed with a line) at the Lebanese Taverna in Pentagon Row, the multi-use shopping and high-dollar apartment area just outside the mall, overlooking the outdoor ice skating rink there.

Lebanese Taverna is a part of a small, family-owned, local chain of restaurants specializing in Lebanese and middle eastern foods. I was pleased to try it, because I've always found Lebanese food to be amongst the best of modern middle eastern cuisine, and I've some familiarity with it, since all of the decades-old steakhouses in Tulsa are owned by Lebanese families and they've included tabouli, cabbage rolls, barbequed bologna, garlic sauce, and their unique meat marinade to the Tulsa culinary scene.

The Abi-Najm family does a good job presenting some of the variety of traditional Lebanese cuisine. One of the things their menus emphasize is the "mezza," which is a collection of small dishes in much the same vein as Spanish tapas (the Spanish learned the habit from their Muslim occupiers in the first half of the previous millennium). They also have a variety of hummus dishes—which they spell "hommos"—and plain chickpeas as a side item, and lots of lamb items.

Leo started with a hommos special from the mezza list, which was their version of the chickpea paste topped with a mixture of sweetly spiced ground meat, almonds, and pine nuts, served with a basket of pita bread halves. I tasted some of the meat mixture, and it was very good without too much cinnamon. I had a malfouf salad, which is a traditional shredded cabbage dish marinated in lemon juice and olive oil with garlic.

For main courses, Leo had a shrimp kabab with white and yellow rice and I had a sliced roast lamb dish (I forget the Lebanese name....shawarma??) with tahini sauce that was smaller than I'd hoped, but it was from the mezza list, so I guess it wasn't totally unexpected. What little there was was quite flavorful, though. I forget what Leo had for dessert; I had a melted white Lebanese cheese dish topped with a ground pistacchio and bulgar wheat, then drenched with orange blossom water syrup and a cup of strong Lebanese coffee.

The food here was very good, though the service was rather spotty.....had we been there in the midst of the Friday night dinner rush, I could understand, but in the early part of our visit, the restaurant was not yet full. I hear the family is opening a new restaurant and market in Old Town Alexandria next month, which should be fun.

More nouveau wine talk

Tried a glass of the Georges Duboeuf beaujolais-villages nouveau last night to compare it with the beaujolais nouveau we had earlier in the week. As you know with French wines, the smaller the controlled geographic area of the source of a wine's grapes, the higher quality the wine; a beaujolais-villages, therefore, should be better than a mere beaujolais.

The beaujolais-villages is noticeably drier than the beaujolais, but otherwise the tastes are similar, and in this case, I don't think the extra dryness is an improvement. The beaujolais-villages is only a little over a dollar more per bottle than the beaujolais. Nevertheless, for general drinking (remembering that all the "nouveaus" need to be drunk by New Years), I think I'd stick with the plain beaujolais.

Interestingly, the two liquor stores in our neighborhood with wine selections both are stocking only the Georges Duboeuf nouveaus, so I've not tried this year's beaujolais nouveau from any of the other wineries.

I miss my parish back in Oklahoma City. They would, no doubt, be pouring beaujolais nouveau this morning as a communion wine.