J5’s Blog

Jono, you hate Heathrow, I hate San Paolo airport. I ended up missing my flight even though I was at my gate two hours ahead of time. Turns out they changed the gate and by the time I was about to board a plane to who knows where (they didn’t check my ticket when I boarded) my name was called. By the time I fought through the crowd coming into the plane my plane had taken off. I managed to get on a flight four hours later.The real hero in all this is Juliano Bittencourt who happily came to pick me up at the later time. I met him at the Bossa conference and I have to say the hospitality I have received in Brazil is top notch even if their airports aren’t.

So I needed a drink. I ended up having a bottle of Terranova Cabernet/Shiraz with steak in wine sauce. I must say even though they killed the meat (it was medium well, good steak should be medium rare) it was quite good. The Terranova was good but didn’t blow me away. The white Terranova Moscatel I had in Porto de Galinhas did blow me away so I was expecting a little bit more but it wasn’t bad.

Tomorrow we check out the OLPC/Red Hat/AMD booth and then head off to one of the schools which is doing a trial (all these armchair technologists who said we should be doing trials - well duh!!!) of the OLPC. I can’t wait to ask the kids what they want to see on the laptops, what issues they are having and how they use the machines.

If anyone needs to contact me while I am here I am in room 562 of the Novotel hotel.

I’m a bit under the weather today but I did manage to squeeze in the Wine Expo this Saturday with Richard and Debbie. It was quite good but four and a half hours is not nearly enough time to see everything. I think next year I will opt for the Grand Cru tasting if only to get away from the crowd. There were quite a few nice wines and also really bad ones but the real star of the day was not the wines but the cheeses being sampled at the igourmet.com booths. I tried some really good Gouda and a wonderful Boschetto al Tartufo Bianchetto. They even had a chocolate goat cheese which tasted like a tangy cheese cake. I ended up buying a $10 plate of cheeses to compliment the wine I was tasting. They gave me a plate which had a place on it to hang the wine glass from . This made sure I could walk around the floor without having both hands tied up.

Afterwords we were not quite finished so we hitched a cab to the North End and got a bottle of wine at Stanza dei Sigari, a cigar bar on Hanover street. After about an hour we finished up the bottle and proceeded to find a place to eat on one of the side streets. Surprisingly or perhaps not so surprisingly given the area there was a huge wait at every place. I don’t know how Debbie did it but we managed to get a seat within ten minutes of picking a place even though it looked like there were tons of people waiting before us. An antipasta dish, veal rollatini and pasta e fagioli later I bid Richard and Debbie adu and called it a night.

After hearing from a number of people that they enjoy reading my entries about cooking class (I think I have already convinced a few to start taking classes) what do I go and do? Stop blogging about food for a couple of weeks, of course. Sorry for the hiatus but every time I went to post I got a case of writers block. Well last week was my last French course but fear not. I will be taking a break until the spring or summer, depending when the Italian course starts but as it turns out our class got along so well together we are going to do a dinner party at some point and I will blog about all the wonderful meals made there.

Until then let me start with my second to last class, the Burgundy region. If you are a fine wine and fine food enthusiast this is the place to be. Unfortunately I was a bit hung over and tired from the Red Hat holiday party the night before (which by the way had excellent food catered by Wolfgang Puck’s catering company). So while everyone else was taking on two dishes, it was a small class this time around, I did one.

What you see is the hanging mass of Cervelle de Canut. That is correct, for you French readers out there - Brain! It isn’t really brain but a herbed cottage cheese that when placed on the plate does somewhat resemble gray matter. Case in point:

That is basically how my brain felt but hey, it tasted really good. The rest of the dishes turned out amazing.

The French Onion soup, my favorite soup in the Universe, was rendered lighter with half of the beef stock replaced with chicken stock and white wine used instead of red. Who knew there were so many ways to make it and all of them pretty easy.

The Salad Lyonnaise, which was basically a salad with bacon fat as dressing, along with the Gougere, an egg and cheese bread, were the perfect
first plates to get the digestive system going.

My brains were served right along side the Flageolets a la Creme or green beans in cream. And the piece de resistance Longe de Porc Dijonnaise - a pork dish with a dijon glaze surrounded by apples sauteed in butter.

Those apples were great. They reminded me of apple chips which I suppose you would get if you took those and baked them.

And then there was desert.

The Pain D’epices was a flowerless molasses bread, the Clafoutis aux Cerises, a cherry pie and the Le Gateau au Chocolate a la Bourguignonne a decadent chocolate cake with raspberry jam filling.

It was a great meal, made with good friends but by far not the best. That honor goes to the last class of Normandy/Brittany in which I made what I would say was the best dish I have ever cooked or for that matter eaten. If the reaction I got out of a couple of female classmates is any measure, this is one the dish every man should know how to prepare…but you will have to wait awhile to find out what it was.

P.S. There is a wine expo going on this weekend in Boston for those who are interested. I will be there on Saturday.

I picked up an excellent Riesling from my local wine shop. It paired well with the monkfish I cooked. This time I rushed out the door so I forgot my camera at home. Luckily I got a picture of the wine bottle the day before but missing a chance of showing the starting product was a bit of a letdown. I literally felt like I was thrown into an episode of Iron Chef where the secret ingredient is some slimy creature. “And the secret ingredient is Lockness Monster. Have fun!!!”. When I opted for the recipe a couple of people turned around and said they wondered who was going to take that recipe.

Thank god the head was cut off. Those suckers are ugly. However after skinning and filleting the fish (it has a slimy rubbery skin) the fillets looked like any other white fish you might eat. The cooking procedure was simple. Wrap fillets in bacon, put in oven and check back in fifteen minutes. Bacon wrapped seafood is awesome because it requires little to no seasoning and the fatty bacon allows for mistakes as it keeps the seafood moist. The hardest part of the dish was the prep work and keeping the side garnishes of broccoli and wild mushrooms warm. There was also a butter emulsion sauce made from butter, sherry vinegar and shallots. Lorraine-Alsace is not known for their low fat foods being so close to Germany We also had an awesome cheese salad, and a pork and kraut dish among others (sorry no quiche).

This coming Sunday is Burgundy. I am itching to pick up a nice pinot noir which counts among my favorite types of Red Wine (that and chianti). Hopefully I will remember to bring my camera this time around.

Thanks for all those who had suggestions on wine last week. Please feel free to point me in a good direction for Burgundy too. Also if anyone will be in the Boston area around February 10th and 11th there is a huge wine expo going down at the Seaport World Trade Center. With over 440 wineries one can’t go wrong.

Next weeks cooking class focuses on Alsace and Lorraine. Since others brought such good wine last time I figured one good turn deserves another. I would like to get a perspective on what wines from this region of France, that I can get locally in Boston, I should look for. I understand the region is primarily known for their white wines of which I am particularly fond of Rieslings. In any case please post a comment on your own favorite wine that I should look for and the price range I would be looking at. Bonus points for those who can tell me where I find their favorite Alsace-Lorraine wine in the Boston area.

I guess the food was just too good for me to remember to take out my camera before I ate it all. Or perhaps it was the wine a couple of students brought to class. This week was focused on the Bordeaux region of France. The mussels with cream sauce (Moules a la Bordelaise) was accompanied by a chardonnay which was used for the sauce. The chardonnay wasn’t much to my liking. I usually like them dry and sharp, this one was too mellow. The mussels however were simply amazing. The salad was Endives with Roquefort Dressing (Endives au Roquefort) and the main course was a roast lamb of pauillac (Agneau Roti de Pauillac). With the entree we had two red wines which I can’t remeber their names. One was a French which was very good and an organic blend from Whole Foods which was surprisingly complex.

There also a couple of side dishes, white beans, string beans and mushroom that were all very good however this meal was heavily focused on desert. Since I didn’t get to do the mussels (a couple spoke up before me), I decided to do the Boule de Neige or Chocolate Snowball. It was basically a chocolate custard covered in whip cream. Most of the prep work was dumping a bunch of bitter sweet chocolate into some coffee and making sure it didn’t burn. The rest of the steps were really easy since the eggs were cooked by the heat of the chocolate mixture. Anyone who has tried to make anything containing eggs over an open flame knows what happens if the mixture starts to boil. The mixture was then strained and put into ramekins and baked in a water bath. After cooling in the fridge and removal from the ramekins we all took turns piping whip cream to make them look like snowballs. I’m telling you this was as good as anything you would get at Finale and most likely cost as much judging by the amount of chocolate that went into the recipe.

To round out the deserts we had a prune ice cream with armagnac (Glace Aux Pruneaux A L’armagnac), pears poached in wine and a rice, raisin and prune pudding (Maritsa).

So after chopping fourteen onions and cooking a great French Onion Soup (I never realized how much wine goes into it) I am back at the OLPC offices trying to get a release out the door. This will be for our first prototype builds running on the actual hardware. At some point in time people will see me in the T with a bright green lunchbox looking machine. Feel free to ask me questions and have a look if you spot me.

It seems that OLPC has won the best of whats new award in the computing category. Pretty cool. More and more people I meet actually know about the project though there are still some common misconceptions that go around. I always love it when people say, “oh, the hand crank laptop”, which happened last night at the Peoples Republik bar. That was one of the first ideas thrown out the door. The laptop will not have a hand crank but will have some other way of generating power from movement. The design has yet to be finalized.

XO is the codename we have been using here for the machines and it suites the project well in many aspects (think of the olpc logo placed on it’s side). One place we are using it is for the file extension of activity bundles. For instance the TamTam bundle is called TamTam.xo. Bundles are self contained apps which can be run by simply unzipping them to the correct directory on the system. The idea for the future is to have these bundles be signed and able to be upgraded and installed in a peer to peer fashion. So, if someone has a newer activity or one that you don’t have and you wanted to participate in it, it will automatically get downloaded, checked and run. That is the goal at least and there will be a lot of issues we have to deal with but that is what makes working on OLPC so much fun.

Yesterday’s cooking class was all about eggs. There was poached, hard cooked and coddled eggs, crepes, souffles, fritas and piperade. Sufficed to say we were all egged out by the end of class. I did the quiche. Unfortunatly I only got to use my new knife set to cut butter and some chives but I did get to make a quiche crust from scratch by hand. The whole time I wasn’t sure if I was doing it quite right but in the end the quiche came out pretty tasty. The best part was I didn’t have to clean up afterwords and believe me when I say I made a big mess. I ended up getting to know a bunch of people in my class this time around. There was the student from Harvard, an editor of a local food magazine and a babysitter. The reasons for taking the course was as mixed as each individuals background. The diversity makes an interesting class even more interesting.

After class I relaxed until the evening when I met up with Nalin for a wine tasting fund raiser run by the Cambridge Center for Adult Education benefiting their scholarship fund. It was held in the Crate and Barrel store in Harvard Square and ended up being three floors of fun nibbling on some good cheeses and drinking some decent wine around all the shelves of house wares. I even got to window shop for things I need in my kitchen. There was a silent auction going on and I think I won the bid for the pirogi making lessons for me and five friends. At least I was the top bid by the time I left at 10:30.

They had a really good jazz/pop band playing downstairs and I ended up meeting a few people while dancing. We continued the party at Daedalus. I had one more glass of Chianti there and then Nalin and I called it a night and went to Philipe’s for a quick burrito (i swear, wine goes great with a spicy burrito). I ended learning about Boston Uncorked which is a club which throws wine tasting events around Boston. I might end up going to more of these wine tasting events. If you can’t go to the vineyards, have the vineyards come to you.