Text 21012, 101 rader
Skriven 2007-10-03 19:31:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Jamestown RI 227
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Jamestown has its own little Sputniklike place
(as you may recall, Sputnik, out on the way to
Annapolis, is one of our spots for self-amusement
and a sort-of-romantic dinner) called Tricia's
Tropi-Grille, quirky menu, Tiki bar, that sort of
thing. Rosemary thought it would be a kick to
show me and described it as a noisy youthful
place, where we would be the oldest diners ...
she was wrong - we were above average, 'tis true,
but we saw some of her friends there, a few of
them quite well into their 70s and perhaps beyond.
The food, too, was not nearly so outlandish as I
was prepared for - fancy names, but essentially
the same old fusion stuff that I've been guilty
of for the last thirty years.

Rosemary doesn't like Chardonnay, so she got a
glass of Sebeka Sauvignon Blanc (Western Cape,
South Africa), which was your typical grapefruit
juice mixed with cat pee; my wisdom tooth ordered
the cheapest, rawest well whiskey, which turned
out to be the perfectly respectable Jim Beam white.

Ordinary foodservice rolls served with honey butter.

Shrimp in red curry with jasmine rice was quite
nice, big fat Gulf shrimp, a mild coconut curry,
and very convincing rice. I laughed at Rosemary for
ordering Gulf shrimp on an island in the Atlantic,
but it turns out her dish was better than mine.

I went for one of the daily specials, slow-cooked
spice crusted pork loin in a mushroom cream sauce,
as I figured slow-cooked pork wouldn't bother my
wisdom tooth as much as, say, a steak. Turns out
it was your ordinary pig cooked at your ordinary
350 to an ordinary medium well, so it wasn't the
fall-apart tender I was hoping for. The spices
were also pretty mundane - garlic, thyme, paprika,
and black pepper with some salt that was coarse
enough to get stuck between my teeth. Decent but
not spectacular food, nice sauce of your standard
demiglace and cream. So-called hibachi vegetables
were teriyaki-sauced zucchini and yellow squash,
stewed. Sweet potato fries, a little greasy but
pretty good.

While we were finishing our meal, an older couple
came by to say hello - the parents of Jason Coombs,
whom I've cooked with periodically and who was at
one time the chef of one of Wolfgang Puck's various
odd enterprises.

==
I know I'd talked about poaching halibut for this dinner party,
but it turns out that Dave's Market was having specials - pork
tenderloin for $2.99/lb and chicken tenders for $1.99, Tuttorosso
crushed tomatoes for 50c a can, and Barilla pasta (mediocre) for
50c as well, so we decided to go Italianate.

Started with the usual cheese, sausage, crackers - the sausage
was a commercial hot Abruzzese, not bad; Ann Z brought the
cheese from the fancy store down by the landing: cranberry
Wensleydale, one of those abominable layered Gloucesters with
blue dreck, and something called Bel Canto or Prima Donna or
something, which struck me as just like that Parrano stuff:
in fact, all these were $12-16/lb for stuff that you can get
at TJs for 1/3 the price. We also had some Piave stravecchio
that we'd gotten at the Wickford Gourmet ($17/lb) because Dave's
Market's Parmesan looked nasty, and Wickford doesn't deign to
stock anything so mundane as Reggiano any more. This gets glowing
descriptions on the Web and turns out to be a pretty flavorsome
very hard (almost waxy) cheese not too different from (but harder
than) the Trader Joe's grana padano.

I made a tuna-chickpea salad over romaine dressed with chickpea
vinaigrette; chicken cacciatore (some stale oil got into this
dish, which kind of ruined it); roast eggplant with the Piave
(which failed to melt!); a slow-roasted spice-crusted pork loin
with tomato sauce (I made this because of my disappointment
with the similar dish at the Tropi-Grille; it was actually
slow-roasted and very tender, though my teeth were behaving
better, so I didn't need that); green beans sauteed with garlic
and lemon zest; and linguini - the best of the Barilla pastas,
I find - marinara.

For afters, Courtney, Rosemary's foster daughter, made a very
good and authentic apple pie, accompanied by Haagen-Dazs natural
vanilla (nice, almost as good as Breyer's at only 3x the price),
chocolate (boring), and dulce de leche (tooth-cracking sweet).

==

The Providence Journal had a bonus - a sample Kellogg's
Crunchy Nut Sweet & Salty granola bar, which tasted like
a peanut butter-covered Rice Krispies treat with extra
sand and pebbles in it.

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