Food is Fun: A Weekend of Delicious Eating

Winter in Boston means fighting the desire to stay inside to cook, watch movies, and snuggle up under a warm blanket on the couch.  Last weekend I had two great events to motivate me to get dressed up and head into the city. Both events were at fabulous Boston hotels and filled with delicious food and delightful company!

My extravagant winter weekend started on Saturday at the 5th annual Gamma Phi Beta Boston Alumnae Chapter High Tea. A group of alumnae met at the Taj Boston for an afternoon of mini sandwiches, rich pastries, and great conversation.

Our group loves tea at the Taj. The service staff is fantastic and we always have a wonderful experience. The Taj Royale is a manageable amount of treats (if you didn’t eat lunch!). My absolute favorite is always the egg salad sandwich. Thankfully you don’t have to share anything as they give you one of each item. No worrying that you won’t get your favorite!

While the sandwiches are delicious and paired well with my vanilla earl grey, it’s the pastries that really steal the show. They are decadent and some are topped with gold leaf. The lemon curd is rich, tart, and creamy and it was hard to put down. On top of cherry scones it was even better! Renee could make a meal of scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam alone. She talks about them for days before tea. You can see her setting up her photo shoot below.

Some of the ladies at the table didn’t polish off their pastries like me….and we took home delicious packages for a late night snack!

After an indulgent tea, I went to bed without dinner. The next morning I woke up excited for my second adventure of the weekend. I decided that a fabulous brunch deserved an equally fabulous outfit and got myself ready to head downtown. I skipped breakfast to leave more room for total food overload. My destination was The Langham Hotel for the City Brunch in Café Fleuri. I met up with 14 fellow food lovers, the Boston Brunchers to experience the extravagant Sunday brunch.

Thanks to the Langham, my brunch was complementary. I did splurge on a delicious grapefruit mimosa ($9) and made sure to leave a generous tip for our fantastic server, who asked us why we weren’t live blogging through the meal. Our answer? We were too focused on food to think about blogging or tweeting while eating! I was not required to ‘review’ brunch and the opinions below are my honest thoughts about my meal.

If there is one breakfast food I love more than eggs, it is smoked salmon. The City Brunch did not disappoint when it came to salmon offerings. I started with the house smoked maple cured salmon topped with finely diced eggs and red onions. My next stop for salmon was the rolled-to-order sushi station. The salmon nigiri was a beautiful shade of coral and melted in my mouth. Ask my table mates, I had at least 2 pieces of salmon on my plate at all times. Even for dessert (salmon nigiri and a chocolate chili brownie). Just look at the beautiful offerings:

One of the other unique offerings at brunch were the hot out of the fryer beignets. After one bite I can see why they pass these out one at a time. If they were on the buffet everyone would overdose on them! The sugary exterior enclosed a light, airy, steamy interior. I savored each bite with a cup of hot coffee making it last as long as possible.

I think I finished the meal having taken at least five trips to the buffet. Some trips resulted in just one or two items and I ended up not finishing all of my dessert. The chocolate croissant bread pudding with caramel sauce was a decadent end to the meal, but it was almost too rich for the amount of food I had already consumed.

More fun than the food was the company! The Boston Blogger scene is filled with friendly, unique, creative, and fun people! No matter who ends up at your table, the conversation is lively and enjoyable. It was great brunching with everyone!

Top photo, left to right: Justin, Katie, Meghan

Bottom photo, left to right: Emily, Athena, Renee, Brian, Bianca, Sarah

After a lavish brunch most people would head straight for the couch and spend the afternoon in a supine position. When it comes to food adventures, I am not like most people. I don’t regularly have the car in the city and wanted to take advantage of it. Renee nicely agreed (well, I was her ride home) to join me for a trip over to Central Bottle Wine and Provisions and Flour Bakery and Café. I love the Blue Room (same owners as Central Bottle) and chat with Central Bottle on twitter, so I knew we were in for a great experience. Of course you can’t visit a wine & cheese shop and not taste the cheese. There was house marinated goat cheese, aged gouda, creamy cow’s milk cheese and more. I chose a tangy little Bijou Goat Cheese from Vermont and Renee took home a wedge of mimolette and Cabot clothbound cheddar. It was impossible to leave without picking up wine also.

I spotted a red that looked interesting – Marche Rosso Fontezoppa. I chose it because I know that I like the grapes in the blend (50% sangiovese, 40% cabernet, 10% merlot). Another bonus, it was $11! When it came time to pick white, I had no idea what I wanted. Thankfully I was able to explain my likes/dislikes to the friendly staff who presented me with four different options in my desired price range. I haven’t opened that bottle yet, so I’ll save it for another post. I paired the red with a variety of dishes and it was dry, coated my tongue (which I love), and kept me going back for more. I paired it with a grilled goat cheese, fig, and lavender sandwich and a hearty bowl of lentils with a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette.The flavor paired well with the bold flavors in the food and was perfect for a cold wintery day.

And of course I should mention what delicious treats I got at Flour! I was so full from brunch it was hard to decide. Since the hubby didn't enjoy either of the meals (he did get the leftover tea pastries), I picked something I knew he would like. I took home two beautiful cornmeal lime cookies. They were the perfect combination of sweet and tart. The lime glaze on top was amazing - I need to try to make that at home!

Now you can see why Healthy Snacks Wednesdays are so important! When you know you have a lot of weekend eating on the schedule you have to be more healthy during the week. Don't forget to enter the giveaway for two vouchers for your choice of Veggie Patch products. You can enter through Tuesday night.

What fun food adventures do you have planned for this weekend? I hope they are delicious!

Healthy Snack Wednesdays: More than Snack Time

Planning is essential for fitting healthy eating into a busy schedule. Most of us eat on the go and it can be hard to resist the urge to eat unhealthy fast foods. Today’s healthy eating post is dedicated to a healthy breakfast that could also be a great lunch or late snack. You can make it on Sunday and be ready for the week.

Before I talk about the new recipe, congratulations to the winner of the Chobani yogurt giveaway! Using Random.org, the winner is Nicole of I am a honey bee, who said...

“I tend to use a lot of sour cream so I would swap that out and use plain Chobani on things like baked potatoes.”

Thank you to everyone to stopping by to enter! I really enjoyed reading the creative uses for Chobani! They included:

• Yogurt in my baked potato soup
• I would mix it with Frank's Red Hot - my favorite hot sauce! And I'd probably add garlic too, because I love garlic.
• It's great on top of nachos, and in soups. I've made a wonderful spicy green tomato soup that needed a little cooling down so I mixed up some chopped cilantro and plain chobani and drizzled it over the soup
• I use it mixed with herbs as a swap for mayo on sandwiches too.
• Love mixing Greek yogurt and jam together...favorite snack and quick breakfast.
• I just recently tried it in my corn pudding recipe instead of sour cream and it was fantastic!
• It's great in a whole wheat pumpkin bread with cranberries
• I would love to use Chobani in place of cream when making a Thai Curry!

Check the bottom of this post for another great giveaway! This week’s giveaway is from Veggie Patch for some delicious vegetarian food. Now on to this week’s creation!

If you are like me, breakfast before work is an on-the-go type of meal. I eat in the car on the way to getting dropped off at the commuter rail station. With an hour commute, it isn’t reasonable to wait until I get to work to eat breakfast. Some of my regular breakfasts include low-fat waffles with almond butter, toast and peanut butter, and a microwave egg on toast. These can all be made in about 2 minutes before heading out the door. But you’ll notice something is missing from all of these – fruits and vegetables! I do try to eat a piece of fruit for a morning snack at work, but that doesn’t always happen.

On Sunday I decided to come up with a new idea for this week’s healthy breakfast. It needed to be in individual serving sizes and easy to reheat before work. I decided on mini-muffin omelets and turkey bacon. For the omelets I used eggs, broccoli, and a little Monterey jack cheese. I also baked turkey bacon while the muffins were cooking. Turkey bacon has less fat and calories than regular bacon and adds additional protein to power up your morning. The turkey bacon I buy has 35 calories, 1.5 grams of fat and 6 grams of protein per slice.

A fun fact about broccoli - did you know that the peak season for broccoli is in the winter? It is available year round, but its peak season is between October and April. Broccoli is also a good source of iron and vitamins A and C.  The cheese adds some healthy dairy to the mix for a well-rounded breakfast!

This recipe makes 12 muffins, you could easily cut it in half to make 6. For a bite sized treat you could cook the muffins in a mini-muffin pan. If broccoli isn’t your favorite, throw in any leftover vegetables like diced peppers, chopped spinach, mushrooms, or tomatoes. To keep the muffins fresh for the week wrap 1-2 muffins in plastic wrap. If you plan to eat them the next day, place them in the fridge. If not, place them in the freezer. Take out a package the night before and put them in the refrigerator to thaw overnight.

To reheat, microwave for 45 seconds - 1 minute on high heat. You could also pack these for a light lunch or late afternoon snack if you are working late. If you want an easy way to make these even more portable, roll up a muffin and a piece of bacon in a tortilla for a breakfast burrito or between two slices of whole wheat bread!

I’ve noticed that this protein packed breakfast has kept me full until lunch this week. I throw a piece of fruit in my bag for a snack but often don’t eat it until the afternoon. I hope this inspires you to think about powering up your breakfast and starting the day right!

Weekday Mini-Omelets and Turkey Bacon
6 eggs
1/2 cup low-fat milk
1/4 cup shredded cheese (I used Monterey jack, you could use cheddar or Swiss)
Chopped veggies (I used 3-4 small pieces of broccoli per muffin tin)
Salt and Pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
Spray a non-stick muffin tin with cooking spray, making sure to coat well
Whisk together eggs and milk
Mix in shredded cheese
Pour about 1/4 cup of eggs into each muffin tin
Add broccoli pieces or chopped vegetables into each tin
Bake for 20 minutes until cooked through
Remove from oven and carefully remove muffins from the tin (a mini spatula helps loosen the edges)
Cool completely before putting in the refrigerator or freezer

Easy Turkey Bacon
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper
Lay out the turkey bacon in a single layer
Bake in the oven along with the muffins
After 10 minutes carefully turn over the slices of bacon
When muffins are done (20 minutes), remove the bacon and cool on a paper towel
Wrap well in plastic wrap, then foil (you can either refrigerate or freeze)
To reheat, wrap in a paper towel and microwave for 30-45 seconds

Enjoy!!

Win 2 coupons for Veggie Patch Products!
This week the lovely folks over at Veggie Patch are giving one lucky winner 2 vouchers for Veggie Patch products of their choice. Veggie Patch makes a variety of vegetarian and soy products like broccoli and cheese bites, meatless meatballs, veggie dogs and falafel (just to name a few).

If you have a great recipe that sneaks vegetables into something delicious, check out the Veggie Patch Ultimate Sneak-Away Contest with best-selling author and culinary expert, Missy Chase Lapine—known as The Sneaky Chef—to give moms clever new tricks for sneaking real vegetables into some of America’s favorite foods. The Ultimate Sneak-Away Contest, hosted on Facebook invites you to share your “Sneak of the Week” – a favorite tip, trick or recipe designed to sneak veggies into a meal, snack or dessert. One lucky “Sneak of the Week” submission will win The Ultimate Sneak-Away grand prize, including an exclusive, in-person culinary consultation with Missy Chase Lapine, where she will share cooking tips and provide custom nutritional advice. In addition, Missy will prepare a delicious dinner for the family while you sneak out of the kitchen to enjoy a relaxing spa treatment. The contest will run through January 30 2011, with three recipes selected weekly by Veggie Patch and Missy Chase Lapine as the featured “Sneak of the Week.”

To enter to win 2 vouchers to try out their products, here’s what you have to do:

Required Entry: Comment below and let me know what your favorite vegetable is and how you like to eat it!

Bonus Entry #1: Follow GoodCookDoris on Facebook, subscribe to the RSS feed or add to Google Reader (see the Connect tab up top)

Bonus #2: Follow Veggie Patch on Facebook or Twitter

Please leave a separate comment for each action below. Entries will be accepted through 9:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, February 1, 2011. One winner will receive two vouchers for Veggie Patch products. The winner will be announced in next week’s healthy Wednesday post!  For an extra chance to win, and some more great healthy snack ideas, visit Renee over at Eat.Live.Blog!

Full Disclosure: Veggie Patch generously agreed to sponsor a giveaway as part of the Healthy Snack Wednesday series. Veggie Patch is responsible for fulfillment of the prize. I was not compensated for this post and do not have any personal tie-ins to the Sneak-Away contest, it just sounds like fun!

Happy snacking!

Back to School: Thinking about Food

Winter break is over and I've headed back to school for another semester. After taking a year of MBA classes, I decided to follow my passion for food (some might say obsession) and take classes in the Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) in Gastronomy program at Boston University. The Gastronomy program is not culinary school – it’s a program about the study of food – food business, marketing, culture, history, tourism, and more. My classmates came from many different backgrounds: food enthusiasts, career switchers, professionally trained chefs, and other food industry veterans.

Last semester I took an introductory course, Understanding Food: Theory and Methodology. Each week we explored ‘food’ through a different liberal arts discipline. These ranged from philosophy to art history to archaeology to sociology. With a little dose of theory thrown in the curriculum helped me to understand the different lenses through which you can study the broad subject of food. Going from thinking about accounting problems to contemplating the globalization of corn was quite a switch! While it was challenging, it was a thought-provoking and enjoyable semester. How can you be unhappy when your assignments include a cookbook analysis, observing farmers markets and writing a research paper about a topic of your choosing related to food?

Charles Square Farmers Market

I spent a lot of hours working on my final paper. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a great start for not having done a research paper in at least 10 years! I combined what I was already doing regularly, visiting farmers markets and interviewing vendors, with some academic research for a paper discussing female food entrepreneurs and the Boston farmers market scene. I typically visit a farmers market 1-2 times per week in the summer and biweekly in the winter. Through my observations I was intrigued that most of the non-farm food vendors were female owned and managed. I started thinking about why this was the case? Was it something about the Boston market scene? Something about the women? The nature of the food business? There were a lot of angles to consider. I reached out to a number of these women who graciously agreed to answer questions about how they got into business and their experience at Boston area farmers markets and in the food industry. I won’t bore you with all 30 pages of my paper and exhibits, but I will work on an edited version to share on the blog.

Chatting with Atlas Farm on the last day of the Copley Square Market

This semester I am enrolled in another class, Anthropology of Food. I am fascinated by how people think about food, how it defines cultures, and its role in society. Do you ever think about how much food likes/dislikes can tell you about someone? And how people readily share this information? You wouldn’t normally tell a casual acquaintance about health issues or personal secrets, but you’ll readily share your food preferences (which can reveal a lot about you, I think!). The class will look more broadly at what food can tell us about human culture and society. From food centered life history to globalization to social structures, the class will look at how anthropologists approach these topics along with the necessary methodological tools.

Some of the assignments include conducting an interview and writing an essay on a food centered life history, observing a food related environment and analyzing the experience, and researching, preparing, and presenting a dish based on one of the course themes for our final class.

It is going to be a lot of work, but it will be engaging, challenging, and I think enjoyable! My blog posting frequency will likely decrease with the increase in homework, but I will do my best to keep to a regular schedule. I’ll try to sprinkle in learnings from my class along with regular recipes and features.

Thanks for your continued support and readership. I’m looking forward to a great 2011!

P.S. Don't forget to enter for a chance to win Chobani Greek Yogurt! Winners will be announced on Healthy Snack Wednesday! Enter here.