Hello, fellow GFers!

I got a couple of comments on the Gluten Free reveal, so hello to you!  But best of all was Shannon pointing out that Moxie (new bakery on N. Market that I was feeling bitter about not being able to sample) sometimes has GF goodies.  I also hear tell that La Dolce Vita over on Carroll Creek does, too, and even sometimes has GF buns for their sandwiches.  Woo!  I’ve eaten at both Volt and Isabella’s with my new diagnosis and found it easy to dine.  At Volt I was getting the express menu, so I just asked for things w/o bread or croutons or what have you.  no trouble.

This weekend, I was near Berkeley Springs, WV with some friends and we went to Panorama at the Peak Restaurant.  First–the VIEW!  Holy moly.  I live on top of Braddock Mountain and I have a pretty nice view of the Middletown valley from my back porch, but it’s like a view of a brick wall compared to what you see from Panorama.  The menu at this time of year is about 90% local.  Entrees were in the 17-30 dollar range for dinner, but there were sandwiches earlier in the day that looked good.  It’s very cozy (the weather was cold and wet, so that fireplace was welcome) and seemed to be pretty popular.  GF items are clearly labeled, woo!  The food was very good.  Not Volt-good (or, honestly, Isabellas-good), and probably not worth the prices, but a nice treat nonetheless.  I was only feeding myself, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.  If I’d had my family along, I’d likely have…well, I”d have left when I saw the prices.  Can’t feed a family of 5 there.  I’d try it again if in the area and either alone or with my husband.

So, fellow shunners of the Evil Gluten–where else to you eat around town?  Not being able to eat Asian foods is KILLING me.  know of anyplace in the DC or B-more area that’s using tamari instead of soy sauce?

More good Middletown eats

I had lunch at The Main Cup in Middletown today.  I’ve eaten there several times and it’s been consistently good.  Last week I had a great salad with goat cheese and candied nuts.  Today I had the grilled veggies on cibatta bread–super yum.  The pasta salad I got on the side had a good flavor, but the texture was off…gummy somehow.  I’ve gotten the “build your own bruschetta” before and it was enough for a light meal on its own.  There are loads of veggie options, the prices are good, the atmosphere is charming.  Patio dining!  It’s not fast food, so if you’re in a hurry, it might not be your best bet, but it’s not unreasonably slow for made-to-order food.

If your dining partner swings both ways, my husband said the fish and chips was the best he’s had in Frederick County.

check it out!

Grocery stores

I need to grumble.  I do most of my grocery shopping at MOMs or The Common Market, depending on whether I’m feeling more loyal to my former employer and friend or my vague socialist leanings.  But sometimes I do need to go to a “regular” grocery.  Leaving aside the heart palpitations I get when I see what other people are eating or, worse, feeding their kids (and this is not a money thing, really, non-organically-grown apples are still FAR better for your kids than green apple fruit gushers.  Whole wheat gross soft bread costs the same as the same brand of white),  the check out is leaving me snarly.  I’m a union supporter (see “vague socialist leanings,” above), so I like to go to a store with unionized employees.  I used to shop at Giant before Izzy retired and it all went to crap.  When I lived downtown, I shopped at the 7th street Safeway, where the employees never. ever. change (that’s the sign of either a good employer or a hostage situation).  Now that I’m in Braddock, my conventional grocery needs could be met by the Middletown Safeway.  But oh  my  god  it is the slowest store in the world.  When gas was $10 a gallon, I shopped more at Giant Eagle so that I could get gas credits and I came to looooove that self-scan thing where I can ring up my groceries as I go and check myself out in about 2 minutes.  Love.  To go from that to the…European service at the Middletown store?  Oh the pain.  I have rung groceries and I have bagged (see “former employer,” above) and it is not that hard, people.  It doesn’t even require a lot of focus, really. Ringing should not take that long.  Bagging should not be that…”inept” is too passive.  It was almost aggressively contemptuous.  Bananas never go on the bottom.  Ditto tomatoes.  Someone bringing her own bags is not license to shove every thing in one bag, with the apples on the tippy top, ignoring the PILE of spare cloth bags just laying there.   GAH!  Friendly and relaxed is nice.  It is.  But efficient really is what I’m looking for.  Rant over.  I thank you for your time.

Aleko’s–Great Greek for Vegetarians!

Oh happy discovery!  Aleko’s Village Cafe has opened in Middletown.  It’s inside the Fountaindale Sunoco, where there used to just be subs and ice cream.  There are still subs and ice cream, but they no longer matter at all b/c there’s super yummy vegetarian food…and baklava (insert Homer Simpson drooling noise).

Owned and operated by the Tsinonis family (the NICEST people), Aleko’s offers plenty of standard carnivore fare (well, it might be fantastic, but I don’t need to care about that) as well as the spanikoptia and Tiropita that we veggies turn to, but the big difference here is Vegetarian Gyros.  They’re made with Morningstar Farms steak strips, which are pretty processed and far from actual food, but oh the yum!  It’s the real deal (except for the absence of lamb…the silence of the lamb…sorry), tasty strips, tzatziki, feta, lettuce tomato, onion, and french fries–yes, french fries, as god intended.  So good.

I popped in for lunch today and got a gyro and some sweets.  There are several kinds of cookie and mini baklava, as well as big ol’ baklava and rice pudding.  This afternoon, I tried the Melomakarona (honey cookies), the Koulouraki (Butter Cookies), and Kourambides (wedding cookies).  The gyro, as mentioned, was great.  The honey cookies were good, they tasted like gingerbread soaked in honey.  Crazy sweet.  The butter cookies were just barely sweet, with a dry crumbly texture that called out for a cup of coffee to go with them.  The wedding cookies were that cookie that every culture seems to have–Russian teacake, Mexican Wedding cake, Shortbread–these are almond instead of the pecan that often turns up, and are good.  Covered in powdered sugar, though, so be prepared to dust off.

Lunch was good enough that I decided to get take-out for dinner (Oh, really there can only be take-out.  In nice weather, you can sit at the picnic tables outside, but there is no inside seating) since I run a 4-H meeting on Wednesdays and don’t have time to cook dinner.  I called ahead for 2 Spankakopita, 2 Tiropita, one Veg. Gyro, and an order of Feta Fries.  When I got there, the owner (lovely woman) told me that they had run out of Spanakopita but she had more in the oven.  She offered to have someone drive it to my house, but didn’t think it would get there before 8.  Since I was feeding 3 kids, I said I’d pass, but then she suggested I could just finish baking it at home.  Brilliant!  I also grabbed some rice pudding (made, apparently, by the owner’s son) and a slab of the big baklava as well as one each of the wee ones.

While the spanakopita baked and the tiropita warmed, we ate the feta fries–they’re boardwalk-style, which isn’t my favorite, but the feta made them worth eating.  The kids hoovered them.  The tiropita was a huge hit with the kids and I’d be quite happy to eat it again.  The filo is super flakey and not at all greasy.  The spanakopita was still baking, so we took a sweets break: The baklava–available by the mini pan or by the slice–made my eyes roll back in my head.  Buttery, honey-y, nutty yum.  The minis are available by the pound.  They were good, but after the big baklava…no contest.  Then the long-awaited spanakopita was done.  It was a bit too spinach-y for the kids.  I thought it was fantastic, as I usually don’t think there’s enough spinach in my spinach pie.  It isn’t at all heavy, which is a nice change.  The rice pudding was our end note.  Delicious, good old-fashioned kind.  This is not Kozy Shack (not that I won’t eat that by the vat, too), but a product that clearly contains rice.  The kids were licking the bowls, so I’m thinking they approved, too.

When I mentioned to the owner that vegetarians were going to be so excited to find the meatless gyros, she exclaimed over how many vegetarians she’d seen.  Then she said, “I can make lots of other vegetarian things, just ask next time.  So I’ll be back. Oh yes.

The Village Green Grill

I’ve lived in Frederick since July of 95 and I hadn’t ever even gone into The Village Green Grill.  The “Fresh Pitas” sign was always enticing, but it didn’t strike me as a vegetarian sammich place, so I hadn’t gone in.  Plus, well, it’s in kind of an ugly location.  The Giant Eagle there is my grocery store of choice (when I’m not hitting The Common Market and MOMs, of course), but it is just the saddest strip mall.  There’s that empty, trashed building in the middle of the lot that used to be the fabulous and lamented Mongolian Grill.  Dollar General never classes up a joint.  The SuperPets is the most depressing pet store ever.  It’s not a location that inspires me to eat.

Once again, however, Steve and I tried to go out to lunch on a Monday and were confounded by closures, so we ended up giving it a try.  I had the vegetable skewers.  The service was…European, but the waitress told us that the fryer was down and that was slowing everything.  My vegetables were cooked well enough, but I’m always a bit bummed when I get green pepper on my plate. It came on a bed of well-cooked white basmati rice.  There was a wee “greek” salad on the plate as well.  You can tell it’s greek b/c there’s a dice of feta and one black olive.  The pita was, in fact, tasty, but the dish was not one to bring me back.   They have an all-day breakfast menu, but we’re unlikely to abandon our beloved Mountain View for breakfast foods.  The only other veggie options were grilled cheese and salad.

I’m hoping to try the little greek stand that opened in Middletown this week–vegetarian gyros!

What does Vietnam smell like?

According to my war-vet Dad, it smells like cilantro and fish sauce.  What moves a person to name a restaurant Viet Aroma?  And Frederick just got a Greek place with Aroma in the name too, didn’t we?  It just seems to be begging for jokes.  But anyway, the food was good.  And while there was cilantro whiff in the place, mostly it smelled like pho.  Steve is a big pho phan, so he goes there so often that they don’t even take his order, they just bring him what he always orders.  He was surprised to find they even HAD menus.  But I was glad, since soup is seldom a good bet for a vegetarian in a non-veg restaurant.  They had a good selection of vegetarian dishes, I got a coconut curry.  I opened with summer rolls.  I’d asked for them to be meatless, but they came with some manner of critter inside.  I just plucked it out, since I’m not THAT strict about what has touched my food. But it left the roll kind of sad.  An Loi (over on TJ) used to have SUCH good summer rolls.  I miss that place.  The curry was really good, though.  Sweet but not cloying, nice mix of crunchy veg.  Just very lightly steamed, the way I like it.  I had a similar dish at the new Vietnamese place over on Rosemont…cannot recall the name, but it’s in the old 7-11 that was Lillies for a while–and this one was better.  I haven’t been to Lucky Corner in a long time…I should pop back in there.  Now I’m hungry.

More on the coffee….

Tried the Ethiopian today and it was even worse.  Sour notes, the roast was too light…blech.   I’ll try this Black Dog by mail, but I’d sure like someplace local for when I run out and panic.

Ice cream update! With coffee rant bonus!

Last summer, I was going on about ice cream.  In the comments, I was asked if there was Gelato anywhere in town.  At the time, I did not think so, but now there is!  Gelato at the new coffee place: The Baltimore Coffee Company opened in a new shopping center on…Corporate Drive?  Or is it Crestwood?  I can never keep them straight.  Anyway, it’s behind MOMs.  We met a friend for coffee there yesterday.  It has that nasty flavored coffee whiff and the espresso was burned and the brewed coffee weak…but we’re serious coffee snobs.  People who are able to just enjoy coffee without judging may be perfectly happy.  Steve was bummed to see that they keep the beans in open bags, as light and air are the enemies of roasted coffee.  We went home w/half pound each of Tanzanian Peaberry and Ethiopian Yergacheff. Made the Peaberry today–bleh.  I’ve been getting Peaberry from the Frederick Coffee Co.  It’s better.  But still not great.  We used to get Peaberry from a roaster in Leesburg, but the actual roasting machine set the building on fire so we can’t get THAT anymore.  After that, we got Arabian Mocha Sanani from Starbucks, but they discontinued it and we don’t like any of their other coffee.  So now we are adrift, trying coffee here and there.  Steve roasted his own for a while, but his rigged up roaster broke so THAT was out.  Being a Polly Pickipants can be troubling.

Oh, the Gelato was pretty good.  I had Tirmisu, Steve had Chocolate Hazlenut.  Not stellar, but good.  It looks gorgeous in the case, though.  I’ll try a fruit flavor next time, since those are generally my faves with gelato.   I just wanted a flavor to go with coffee.

So.  yes, there is gelato.  Anyone got a great coffee secret?

As American as…

Apple pie!  A couple months ago, we saw the Good Eats episode about apple pie and it just looked soooo good.  But it required a few purchases before I could get started.  I got grains of paradise from The Spice House (don’t forget the “the” in that address or you will get a…different sort of website). I went to Amazon for my pie bird and a deep tart pan.  Then I went to Mountain Valley Orchard in Cavetown for my apples.  They have a great selection, really good prices, and they don’t spray the trees with pesticides past the blossom stage.  It’s not organic, but it’s better than nothing at all.  The Stayman are great this year.  They were my childhood favorite and I hadn’t had a good one in years.  Finally, I hit Trout Liquors for my Applejack.  I was ready for piemaking.

I used a mix of all sorts of apples, mainly stayman, gala, and fuji.  It was sort of an all-day thing, but well worth it in the end.  The apple juice reduction made the top crust super crisp.  The texture was just perfect.  And so pretty, look!

With the tart pan, you can just push it out and it looks gorgeous.  And when sliced, the apples just stay put, perfectly stacked, each coated with yumminess.

We each had a slice before bed and then a slice for breakfast…and then it was gone.  Sigh.  Guess I have to go back to the orchard…

Restaurant review–Volt

Steve and I had our 15th anniversary yesterday and we celebrated by giving Volt all of our money.  I’ve been dying to try it after reading all these great reviews and seeing the chef at the Farmer’s Market so often.  We got a chef’s table so that we could get a tasting menu.  As I mentioned before, I just love little bits of lots of things.  I was so thrilled that there was a vegetarian tasting menu–how rare it is for an upscale restaurant to offer more than a cursory veggie dish!  I’ve just finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and he couldn’t have more scorn for the herbivores.  But he clearly hasn’t had THIS food.

The chef’s dining room looks like it seats about 20.  Steve and I were given a 4-top, and we sat side-by-side so we could both watch the kitchen.  The room is clean and elegant–clearly refined, but not at all stuffy.  When we were seated, we were offered a cocktail menu.  I got a Negroni (which was served on ice, a no-no in my book) and Steve turned into a girl and ordered the cantelope mojito that the server recommended (“How about *I* order your Negroni and you order the mojito?”  “Oh no, if you want a girly drink, you have to OWN it.  Sure you wouldn’t rather have a Fuzzy Navel?”  “Or an Appletini?”).  We were brought house-made breadsticks brushed with olive oil and fennel pollen (“Did she just say ‘fennel pollen?’”  “Yes, I believe she did.”  “I call bullshit.”).  For the record–I tasted nothing that suggested fennel pollen to me.  But it was a perfectly lovely breadstick.

Our meal opened with canapes from the chef–a demitasse of creamed celery soup with white truffle oil (yum!), a cube of “compressed watermelon” with something balsamic on it (good, but kind of silly), and a “beet macaroon” stuffed with a goat cheese mousse.  Ho.ly. cow.  I have no idea how this beet thing was made, but it looked like a wee beet sitting on its head in a soup spoon.  But it was as light as air, it was some kind of beet meringue…I don’t know, but it was weird and delicious and interesting.  The beet part collapsed in my mouth, almost like cotton candy.  I could have eaten a box of those guys.  I dreamed about beet bon-bons while we tried to figure our how one compresses a watermelon.  I think it’s a big industrial press that goes really slowly.  Steve thinks they give the watermelon a high-stress job and a demanding family and then hound in until it collapses under the pressure.

The bread lady showed up (is there a fancy term for the bread lady, like sommelier for the wine dude?) and offered us a selection of breads.  I went with the french and it was so good I didn’t venture to the other sorts.  The butter was sublime and I think I saw the wrapper in the kitchen, confirming my suspicion that it was Vermont Butter and Cheese company butter, the kind that has sea salt chunks in it.  mmmmm.

Our first official course was a tasting of beets.  I imagined a row of different sorts of beets, maybe with a fancy sauce each, but no!  The weird beet meringue was back, this time in a long cylinder.  There were also poached beets and raw beets and, I think a couple of turnip chunks.  It came with that goat cheese mousse and was just delicious.  It might have been our favorite course.  And it was beets, of all things, a vegetable I didn’t even like until this year.  It was a shining testament to the fact that simple food, prepared perfectly does not have to be fancy (okay, the fluffy beet tube was pretty fancy.  But the other beets were just…beets).  All the dishes were just beautiful, too, and we could see the chef placing everying Just So.

Next came a shitake mushroom veloute with a sabayon of pine nuts (translates to smooth buttery mushroom sauce/soup topped with a smooth fluffy pine nut sauce) served layered so that it looked a bit like a black and white cookie from Brooklyn.  It had the occasional bit of thai basil flower in it, creating these little bursts of anise flavor.  Pheonmenal.  I seriously wondered if anyone would notice if I licked the bowl.  Maybe I should have caused a distraction…”Hey!  Brad Pitt just went into the main dining room!  Hurry!” nom nom nom.

Third course: Fennel and Farro risotto.  I had to look this one up, as I didn’t know what farro was and was suprised when my RISotto appeared to be made of wheat berries.  Farro, it appears, is some sort of ancient wheat that turns up in Italian food.  So, you know, wheat berries.  Which is not to say it wasn’t yummy, because oh it was.  It was topped with beets (it’s what’s in season, and lord knows they work ‘em). and had a really rich, full flavor.  If I hadn’t been assured it was all vegetarian, I’d have sworn there was a meat base to the stock.

The final savoury course was an eggplant confit on cannelini beans.  Confit, it turns out, means that a food has been preserved in its own fat, more or less.  Clearly that was not the case here, but whatever it meant, it was the only time I’ve ever really enjoyed eggplant.  Not at all mushy or oily, it was toothy and flavorful.  There was a really nice smokey taste in there somewhere as well.  As will all the other dishes, each bit was delicious on its own, but really fablulous when eaten all together.

There was kind of a long wait for our final course, a tasting of apples.  I kind of thought they forgot to give it to us.  We got the madiera, we got coffee….then they brought us a little cake with a candle on top to wish us happy anniversary.  It was, of course, very yummy.  We’d only had a couple of bites when the apples arrived.  This was the only real bungle in the service, I’m not sure what order things were supposed to have gone in, but as it was we got madiera, a wait, then coffee, then a wait, then cake and then the final course right on top.  I’d have liked to have had the madiera and the apples and then the cake with coffee.  As a final touch we got a tray with a fruit square (more please!), biscotti, and some chocolates (meh.  AND I was full, but I left those alone after one bite).

Other stuff: We both had the wine pairing.  I wouldn’t bother in the future.  I’d never done a wine pairing before, so I was curious, but the fact is, I don’t like white wine.  I’d just get a nice pinot noir and be done with it.  Also, I’m pretty sure the sommelier is just making stuff up.  “This wine is from the Fredonian region of Provolone.  The terrior suggests a hint of manganese and the floral notes of acidopholus.  The winemaker only smokes clove cigarettes so that his ash can complement this vintage.”  Then he takes it to the next table and tells them it’s made by blind elves in the center of a hollow tree.  Sure, okay.  Steve was reasonably certain there’s just one big vat of white wine with a bunch of tubes leading out, each labeled with a different varietel.  But it’s all Franzia in a box to us.  The reds were really nice, though.  And I LOVED that Madeira.  I was the driver, so I was just having a sip or two of each wine.  I should have just mooched off of Steve and saved a bit of dough.

Service: Aside from the dessert glitch, the service was impeccable.  Efficient, polite, well-trained.  They never made me feel like a clodhopper.  Best of all?  I don’t know ANY of their names.  None of them told me.  Which is good because I. don’t care.  Our main waitress clearly watches Mad Men and gave us a Joan-like “of course” at every request.  It was pretty amusing.  Since I’d just read the Bourdain book and have a bit of a thing for Gordon Ramsay shows, I was expecting a foul-mouthed chef yelling at Central American cooks, but no.  It was all but silent, with the cooks working diligently. In fact, we became convinced that we were looking at a sham kitchen and somewhere in the back there’s a lot of yelling and clanging pots and sudden fires.  There wasn’t even anyone calling orders.  They just seem to know what to cook.

And they know how to cook.   Volt is one of the best restaurants I’ve visited.  I just wish I wasn’t going to need to squirrel away money for a year to go again.  We’ll go a la carte next time as Steve wants more of the steak and I would like a trough of soup and wheelbarrowfull of beety poofs.