Heck Yeah! Heckla!

We all have certain flavors we love to eat. For dessert I am a chocolate lover. Give me the triple chocolate mousse with chocolate ganache and a side of chocolate please. Lou always goes for the fruity dessert. Strawberry shortcake, mango sorbet, and the fruit tartlet are all favorites of his.

For breakfast I have a thing with cinnamon. Cinnamon cereals, cinnamon toast, cinnamon rolls (ok everyone love cinnamon rolls but you get what I am saying)

Recently Lou and I came across the Hekla at City Feed in Jamaica Plain, Ma.

The Heckla is a flaky rolled pastry with a cinnamon flavor and topped with a vanilla glaze. I save this breakfast of non-champions for the weekends when I have time to work it off later with physical activity, but it is so worth it!

Roof Deck Now Open for the 2010 season!

We have officially opened the roof deck for the 2010 season! Although this is Boston, and we are sure to get a couple more cool days, there is an open invitation to our friends to come on over and enjoy the views.

We may even finally break down and buy a grill, and Lou might break down and learn how to cook on it! For now the first meal consisted of salad and pizza!

Here's to our first of many meals this summer. We hope you can join us.

Roasted Vegetables

There are probably a lot of you out there who already know how to do this, but somehow I got by for 40 years not knowing how to roast vegetables well.

I work part time for a good friend, Rachel Nason. She is the owner of D'Lish a private chef and catering company. When Rachel does parties, she is nice enough to let me help out and I have been lucky enough to pick up some new techniques. One is roasting veggies.

The first time I worked a big party for Rachel she had the most amazing crudite I have ever seen. Say goodbye to cold carrot and celery sticks mixed in with cucumbers, radishes and cherry tomatoes. Rachel uses things like mini zucchini, mini squash, sweet peppers, broccoli, and cauliflower all roasted and arranged like a work of art. Don't like cauliflower? What about brussel sprouts? Everyone likes their veggies when roasted this way. I have proved many a picky eater wrong with Rachel's technique.

Recently I made some roasted veggies for Easter. Here is the recipe.

High heat 425 to 450 oven

Any veggie you can cut to have a flat surface on one side, cut. ie. Broccoli spears, Cauliflower spears.

Lay veggies onto a sheet pan and generously cover with olive oil

sprinkle with kosher salt

place sheet pan on bottom rack of oven and roast until bottom has a nice golden brown.

Careful, don't over crowd the pan, veggies will steam and not cook uniformly.

The finished product below looks nothing like Rachel's beautiful platters, but wanted to show you the array. I did some sweet potatoes at Lou's request

Toro, Toro!

Toro

1704 Washington Street

Boston, Ma

617-536-4300

Menu: Spanish Tapas

Atmosphere: Rustic, Authentic, Casual dining.

Kid Friendly: I would be surprised to see kids here

Prices: $160 for four of us with drinks and dessert and as you can see lots of food.

Last Friday Lou and I hit up Toro in the South End with our good friends Zev and Maureen. I think we all had a long week and were ready for a great meal. Toro is mainly a tapas restaurant with a few large meals for sharing as well. It is owned by Ken Oringer, and if you read my post on Clio in the Elliot Hotel, you know I am a huge fan of all Ken Oringer restaurants.

Toro doesn't take reservations, so if you don't like waiting too long, you might want to get there early. Even on this rainy night, there was a 45 minute wait by 6:30 pm for a table of four. If you do run into a wait at Toro, it is worth every minute. While your waiting, try one of their original cocktails. I went for the Cold River Rickey. Besides being fun to say, it is a Raspberry Lime Rickey with Vodka in it. A drink that mixes two of my favorite drinks?!?!? How could I go wrong?

We had been quoted a 45 minute wait, but were seated much faster in about 15-20. There are two types of seating in Toro. There are stand alone tables in the front and along a banquet, and then there are long high tables in the middle of the floor which usually you end up sharing with other parties. I have sat at both and had a great experience each time. Sitting with people you don't know at a tapas place allows you to check out what they ordered and add to your choices!

On this trip we sat in the banquet and had our own table of four. The only complaint I have about the seating in Toro is there isn't enough!

One thing I love about Toro is the server station. There is a large wooden table in the back that looks as if you would prepare a meal on it or eat at it. This is where servers keep there silverware and bread for tables. It is clean, blends with the atmosphere, and speaks to the attention to detail Ken has within all his restaurants. There are no dirty bus tubs, or silverware trays. There is only the desire to make everything about this restaurant appetizing.

When we sat for dinner, I switched drinks from mixed to wine and got a glass of the Tempranillo at Maureen's suggestion. It was excellent and served in a glass which was a cross between a juice glass and a highball. I have a friend whose dad is off the boat Italian. He makes his own wine and serves it this way. I know, Italian not Spanish, but you can tell this glass choice was deliberate when creating the atmosphere in Toro. It's laid back, rustic, the kind of place you bring good friends to share great food.

This is what we ordered with some pictures to tempt you:

Datiles con Jamon- Dates stuffed with marcona almonds and blue cheese wrapped in jamon

Uni Bocadillo-Pressed Uni sandwhich with miso butter and pickled mustard seeds

Gambas a Ajillo-Garlic Shrimp

Croquetas de Bacalao- Cod Fritters

Maz Asado con Alioli y Queso Catija-Grilled corn smothered in a garlic sauce and covered in aged cheese. oh my I said smothered and covered like waffle house, but this is no waffle house!

Panza de Cerdo-roasted pork belly with sunchoke, escargots, fava beans and smoked maple crumble

Asparagus with pickled ramps and almonds

Costilla de Buey-braised short ribs with armagnac soaked prunes

Garbanzos con Chorizo- self explanatory

and for dessert we had Churos with dark chocolate for dipping!!!!

One final thing to mention about Toro is they have dishes to share and not just tapas. On this trip we vowed to return to share the paella!

The Whiskey Priest, or Whiskey the Priest, either way, I am intrigued

The Friendliest Place in Town is now The Whiskey Priest, or it could be Whiskey the Priest the way the sign reads, either way, it proves being friendly alone does not make a good restaurant.

Next to Atlantic Beer Garden there was a restaurant which had been there for years which boasted it was "The Friendliest Place in Town" but that never made me want to go in. It had a wrap around patio on the harbor, a roof deck, and I still didn't want to go into it. Being friendly and having a great location are a good start, but if you don' t have good food and good service, you are going to be dead in the water. It looks like this may have been the fate of this place. I can't even remember the name of it. It's slogan saying it was so friendly stuck out to me, but so did how dirty it looked from the outside and the fact that it never really looked packed. Honestly, if I had a group of drinking buddies and we wanted to take over a bar and be raucous, this place seemed to fit the bill, but that never happened and now it is gone.

I can't judge the friendliest place in town on whether it had good or bad food, but if they were relying on the friendly angle, I am not surprised they closed. I have a theory, you can have great food and not so friendly service and survive, ask the soup Nazi from Seinfeld, but you can't just be friendly and serve bad food.

Tune back in for my review of The Whiskey Priest or Whiskey the Priest, I guess I will figure it out when it opens....

LTK A.K.A. Legal Test Kitchen

Legal Test Kitchen

225 Northern Ave

Boston, Ma (Seaport District)

Menu: Seafood, various size dishes

Atmosphere: Loud, large bar crowd, identity crisis.

Kid Friendly: Actually there were a ton of kids there the last time we went. It added to the chaos.

Price: Expensive for what it is.

If you haven't been to the Seaport area of Boston in the last few years, you are missing out. restaurants, residences and hotels have sprung up all over the place, and the area continues to grow.

The old mainstays are there like No Name Seafood, Yankee Lobster and Anthony's, but there are bunch of new places which have opened.

One of the first of the new was Legal Test Kitchen or LTK because in a world of texting you need to have an acronym. Don't worry, they aren't trying to horn in on Legal Seafoods name, they are owned by Legal Seafoods.

I went to LTK within the first couple weeks it was opened, and I have visited about once a year since. I still don't know what the concept is all about. In all honesty, I think they suffer from identity crisis.

When they first opened they were one of the only new places in town, so everyone was checking them out. I would have said back then they were a test kitchen created to try new concepts out which would potentially be used in Legal Seafoods. At least that is how I understood it. They had wireless flat screen computers they would give to kids to keep them busy at the table. They had ipod docs if you preferred listening to your own music. The menu was mostly smaller dishes almost like a tapas feel with some bigger entrees, and a create your own dish section where you could pick the fish, the sauce and the side, noodles, rice, etc...

The first few times we ate at LTK it was clearly a restaurant with a bar. There was attention to detail with the food. The food was very good, as well as the service. I would say they were going for more of an upscale ambiance. During those first days, wait times were long. They had seating outside, but they weren't very good at planning for rain. I was there once when they sat the whole patio and it was apparent the rain would start any minute. When it did start, our wait shot up an extra hour, and nobody took the time to let us know. Since that time, the outside seating was covered with a very practical year round canopy sporting sides which can be opened or put down depending on the weather. Smart move LTK.

After my first two visits to LTK I didn't go back for about a year. When I did, I noticed the menu seemed a bit less original and a little more typical. I don't remember a burger being on the menu before but not only was there a burger but a hot pastrami sandwich. The wireless computers and ipod docs were MIA, and the bar crowd seemed to have swelled to a healthy after work crowd. The food was still good, but not quite what it had been when they opened. I wondered if the management had changed? I wasn't sure I was going to come back. I thought the prices were a little steep for what was turning out to be an average meal.

About a week ago, I broke down and gave LTK one more shot. This time there was more of a bar crowd than anyone eating in the restaurant. The crowd was so large we had several people almost hovering over our table when we first sat down. Our server was nice enough, but I could get the same service at Applebee's for about half the price. We got the Calamari to start. LTK does theirs with lots of hot peppers on top of a garlic aioli. It's a little spicy but they always cook the calamari perfectly which means tender not rubbery. For dinner I got the hoisin glazed salmon on top of pad thai noodles. Lou got the lobster mac and cheese. His lobster was scarce, my salmon had too much hoisin and the thai noodles had an abundance of scallions in them. The noodles themselves were a bit hard. We only drank water.

For this meal we paid $54.41!!!! Sorry LTK but I think you have turned into a local watering hole. My suggestion is stop cooking food. Leave the testing at the corporate office and make lots of money on the bar crowd.

Moonlighting and Le Fontainebleau

Le Fontainebleau Hotel

4441 Collins Ave.

Miami Beach, Fla

Atmosphere: Luxury hotel in Fla. Miami Beach, relaxing sprawling pool, junior suites with awesome balconies. View from my room.

Pricing: I didn't have to pay to stay, but let's just say there was a Lamborghini parked out front when we pulled up.

Kid Friendly: You will much more fun without them.

Ok, I admit it, I'm a moonlighter, but if it means getting to stay at Le Fontainebleau for free, how can that be a bad thing?

For those who know me, I am a Customer Service Manager for Avaya by day, and by night I work for a few other places. Since my other jobs don't have anything to do with telecommunications, there is no conflict of interest, and these extra jobs give me a nice break from the grind.

One of the things I do, is I assist facilitators at a team building company called Leapfrog Innovations. Leapfrog takes the group hugs and kumbaya out of team building, and they make it fun and challenging for everyone. Check them out if you are in the market, www.leapfroginnovations.com. Same name as the kids toys, but completely different concept.

Recently Leapfrog did a big event at Le Fountainebleu in Miami for a large pharmaceutical company. My good friend Jimmy and Gina, and I got the privilege of traveling down to Miami, staying in the hotel and enjoying a nice break from the never ending New England winter.

Le Fontainebleau is a luxury hotel on Miami Beach, with an amazing pool area. We were there for work and only in town for 1 1/2 days, but we got to enjoy some sangria, crudités, and bruschetta poolside. All hotels tend to have overpriced food and Le Fontainebleau is no exception, but the food was exceptional, and expenses helped to pay for a portion of the cost. After traveling all day. Sitting in the sun, having a couple sangrias, and eating deliciously prepared food, was worth the extra cash.

The Crudités we ordered were amazing. I am only mad I didn't get a picture. There was lightly blanched broccoli, fennel, and cauliflower, as well as, raw carrots, celery, tomatoes, and cucumber. The vegetables were bountiful and fresh, and they came with a yogurt dipping sauce and a mustard vinaigrette.

The Bruchetta was also a bountiful portion. There was enough for each of us to have 2 pieces. The mixture on top was sweet and tangy, but items like this are all about the bread, and this bread was outstanding. It was lightly toasted and served warm.

The Sangria was served in plastic wine glasses since we were by the pool, but these days plastic ware has come a long way baby. The glasses, although plastic, still had an heir of sophistication about them.

The food alone was fabulous and enough to leave me longing for a trip back to Le Fontainebleau poolside, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the atmosphere. Low cushioned rattan chairs and loveseats allow you to slip immediately from travel mode to vacation mode, and we weren't even on vacation! I am attaching a picture of one particular area at the pool where people can lounge. If only we had, had the time....

Lobby bar at Le Fontainebleau Miami. This place was packed Monday night, we later found out The Situation was in town from Jersey Shore, as the show moves from Jersey to Miami Beach for its new season. Like the good Jersey girl I am, I yelled at The Situation as he walked through the bar with his Entourage. You can take the girl out of Jersey but you can't take Jersey out of the girl.