What's the matter folks? are you on a diet?

[Ciro]

Hey, everybody, come on, let's start some cooking here

Ellen, Roger, come on, you are great writers but you must eat too?

Your comments about my recipes are important.

Ellen, if I remember well, you and your husband, had a favourite restaurant you used to go many years ago, and also you were very good friend with the owner? Yes?

What was so special about that restaurant? I would like to know.

Daymnnnn, Michael, I bought a book written for people who cannot eat sugar I am trying to create recipes that you can enjoy.

I want to pay something back for what you give me.

Ellen, I can feel so much peace and love in your writing.

Let me cook something for you.

Ciao

[Kat]

Ciro, I just love having you in the kitchen. You are a great cook and a wonderful person with a fabulous and joyous sense of life. I wish I were a better cook and I'm happy to be learning from the best. I'd like to try some of your recipes and I am really glad that you are making the effort to adapt to Michael's diet (no sugar, no alcohol). That has got to be a tremendous challenge.

I will definitely try making the pesto and tiramisu sometime. I usually buy pesto already made and put it on that tortellini you can buy by the bag in the spaghetti aisle of the supmarket. Where do I find pinenuts and what is that exotic cheese stuff in the tiramisu? I guess I'm pretty much a meat and potatoes gal. I don't think I will be making lobster. I don't like seafood, and especially lobster. Michael loves seafood though. I don't eat bugs and lobsters are just big ugly red bugs! Ick!

cheers!

Kat

[Ciro]

just big ugly red bugs! Ick!

lol, Kat, I love your young spirit as well.

You are right though that lobsters look like huge bugs. lol

Mascarpone cheese is very similar to philadelphia cream cheese,

just a little more sweet.

daymmmm I wish you were closer to virginia, I would cook all this nice food for you.

Ciao Kat, stay well!

Ciro

[Ellen Stuttle]

Let me cook something for you.

Ciao

Ciro, I feel terrible that I never got around to reading your post from December 10 until this very night. This is the first time I've read any of the posts in the Kitchen section. I have to admit to you that I don't like to cook and rarely do it, except to concoct something from cans, plus some boil-in-the-bag or steamed vegetables, that sort of thrown-together meal.

However, I love to eat. My husband and I often frequent restaurants. We have a number of favorites depending on whether we're just having a routine dinner or making an occasion of dining. In Bloomfield, where we live, there's a good Italian restaurant, a good Japanese restaurant, a superb Thai restaurant, and a "Tuscan" style resaurant which is very good -- the chef is an artist and makes fish specials which I love. That restaurant is about twice as expensive as the others, so we don't go there as often. If we're in the mood for a drive, there's a fine Indian restaurant about twenty minutes' drive from us, a fine Chinese restaurant about the same driving time, and a fine Mexican restaurant about half an hour away.

For special occasions, we have three favorites. One is the place where we go for Thanksgiving with the two friends who traditionally visit us then (our Thanksgiving Seminar, we call the get-together). That restaurant is "The Evergreens." It's in the Simsbury Inn. It's a beautiful building, luxurious decor, wide glass windows overlooking, you guessed it, a vista of evergreens (especially nice if we're lucky and have snow for Thanksgiving, as we did this last year). The meal is buffet style, enormous selection, all of it well prepared. And a dessert table which is so beautiful with an array of desserts around a large ice sculpture, it's almost a shame to destroy the beauty by eating the desserts.

Another favorite, where we often go for our respective birthdays and other times when we want a romantic evening, is an Italian restaurant owned by a guy who does photography himself and who has an eye for art.

And then there's The Pettibone Tavern, where we go for New Year's Eve dinner and maybe a couple times during the year -- also sometimes for dessert after a movie we've particularly enjoyed. That restaurant was founded as an Inn in 1770; it's one of the oldest continuous inns in the country (another, Avon Old Farms Inn, where we also sometimes go, is just a couple miles away from Pettibone's -- both were on the original post road to Boston). Pettibone's is currently owned by a man who is keen on history and has collected a lot of historic maps and drawings. The restaurant is complete with a ghost -- Abagail, supposedly the wife of one of the early owners, supposedly murdered by her husband when he came home from a business trip and found her in bed with another man. According to researchers, the truth of the story is dubious. But it makes for many entertaining tales spun by the Inn's staff and clients.

There's another restaurant we like a lot, but it's currently closed. That one's in an old grist mill. The grist mill machinery is still there above the top dining floor, and the stream and waterfall are visible from the windows. We're hoping the Hopbrook, as it's called, will open again soon.

I expect that if we lived in your kneck of the woods, we would be regulars at your establishment. ;-)

Fond regards,

Ellen

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[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen, if I remember well, you and your husband, had a favourite restaurant you used to go many years ago, and also you were very good friend with the owner? Yes?

What was so special about that restaurant? I would like to know.

Ciro,

I'm not remembering what restaurant you might be talking about which I might have mentioned. I mentioned Pettibone's in a post here in December, but that's not a restaurant we went to "many years ago." I wonder if maybe in a post somewhere I might have mentioned Sea Fare of the Aegean in New York City. That was a very special restaurant my husband and I sometimes went to (though he wasn't my husband then; we were Significant Others for years and years before we formally married). I was trying just a couple months ago to remember exactly what street the Sea Fare was on, but I'm not sure. I think it was in the 50's between Fifth and Madison. It was GORGEOUS. The owner was a wealthy art collector; the layout of the place gave it a feeling of openness and air and really did have an Aegean effect. There was a sweeping staircase and a balcony level as well as the main floor -- and on the main floor various private-seeming (because of the way columns and plants were placed) knooks. The food was to dream of. There was one meal I several times did dream of: enormous shrimp with a feta cheese and tomato sauce served on rice. It was so good. Umm. We used to save up to go there. An entree was about $15, which seemed a lot for an entree then.

I might have mentioned this restaurant at some point because among the owner's museum-quality collection of paintings were a couple Capulettis. But I'm not remembering mentioning the place. We weren't friends of the owner -- just admirers of his taste and relishers of the food prepared by his staff.

Ellen

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[Ciro]

Ellen, if I a have not cofused you with a different Ellen, it was on NB forum, during a time you were preparing a convention, or something, on Carl Jung? :-k

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ciro:

Ellen, if I a have not cofused you with a different Ellen, it was on NB forum, during a time you were preparing a convention, or something, on Carl Jung? :-k

Hmm. The only occasion I can think of which it might have been (though I'm not remembering mentioning this but possibly I did mention it) is a Jung workshop (not a convention; there were only about 30 people attending) when we had lunch at a restaurant which was a big favorite of mine and which has subsequently closed. The restaurant was called Cody's and had an old-West theme: many memorabilia and photos from "Wild Bill" Cody's era and earlier. I had a sense of home-going, I guess I could say, when I ate there. My mother came from a line of Colorado ranchers, and I visited the remaining Soward ranch once when I was in grade school and then several times in the summers during my college years. Plus my seemingly from-birth love of horses. (My mother once told me that she thought my first word was "Horse?" as in "Can I have a horse now?".) I did love that restaurant, with the memories it brought back. And the food was very good, in a hearty Western barbecue style. (They also had some lighter chicken and fish dishes -- a parmesan-crusted salmon, for instance -- which were what I usually ordered.) Their baked potatoes were the best at any restaurant I've ever eaten at: large, and dusted with some smoked-barbecue flavor spices before baking. (I'm salivating remembering.) And their cornbread!! Almost as good as the cornbread my mother used to make.

Ellen

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