About Town

I was starting to put together this post with some brief thoughts about food and eating in Ann Arbor when the blog-surfing Shana pointed out the voluminous commentary on annaborisoverated.com about the quality of the food experience in Ann Arbor. The post and the reactions were exciting to us here at G3 because it was exactly the ambivalence reflected in the commentary that got us started on all this. Ann Arbor is a GREAT food town! Ann Arbor is perpetually in the culinary doldrums of mediocrity! It is SO challenging to eat well here! It is SO easy to eat well here. And so on. We’ve been taking a little while to get this blog in shape (come on people, we have day jobs. We have scholarly publishing to do and digital libraries to build. There are children to care for and aged relatives to visit. You think we spend all our time thinking about food? Well, we pretty much do, but not writing about it) but we are dedicated to exploring both our frustrations and our excitement about cooking and eating in this town (and a few other towns as well). Hope we can get some of that aaisoverated energy going here.

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Lost Weekend

OK, it seems like I never have such rich food-filled weekends (at least lately!). You guys are artists of eating. Can I just tell you how pathetic I am? OK here goes.

Friday night Lenny had rehearsal so I sat drinking the end of a nice cabernet from a few days before and went to all my favorite online shopping sites and put clothing in the shopping carts. I didn’t buy anything. Then I had a delicious dinner of frozen weight watchers lasagna (which I always doctor up with some red pepper flakes, and crumbled dried oregano, plus a lot of extra fresh grated parmesan cheese in order to negate the weight watcher-ness) and I had a salad with sundried tomatoes, mushrooms and pine nuts to go with it.

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The Weekend in Food

This weekend was kind of a test of my notion that if you buy good ingredients and are a bit careful, you can’t really go wrong. Well, nothing went terribly wrong, but for the most part it wasn’t great . . .

Friday night we went to David and Anthea’s house (friends of ours, and, it turns out, neighbor’s of Anne’s). They live in kind of a funky seventies brick ranch with a great older open plan kitchen. They made us a simple dinner of pesto and penne and salad and we drank a lot of wine and the two ten year old girls did a marathon Simpsons viewing and the eighteen month old boy ran around with the laundry basket on his head. The meal was great and reminded me how good food tastes when someone cooks for you with friendship.

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Weekend roundup

It was a weekend full of noodles and chocolate, though, blessedly, not together.

We got off to good start with vietnamese beef noodle soup at Paradise, which I learned about from a post that Kitchen Chick did a while back on pho kits. The broth wasn’t as aromatic as I’d remembered it, but it was still delicious, and sustained me for a big night out with friends for the Girl Talk show, dancing, and bourbon drinking.

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G3 (and friends) Cook For Each Other

The first G3 Potluck (so highly anticipated that Shana even decided against running off for a weekend in Mexico just to attend)

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Chicken Soup: Three reviews

I’ve been sick these days. Luckily, it seems a minor winter cold, replete with sniffles and sneezes and head-fogginess but thankfully lacking achiness and fever. Mostly, I lay around for a day or so, reading trashy magazines, blowing my nose, and viewing early Steven Speilberg films (Duel and Sugarland Express, both brilliant). The boyfriend and the roommate took turns playing nurse–buying me truly funky fermented energy drinks, chiding me for not staying in bed, making me tea, and getting me chicken soup. In fact, I had chicken soup for three meals in a row, from three different Ann Arbor purveyors: Noodles and Company, the People’s Food Co-op, and Zingerman’s. I conclude, dear readers, that Ann Arbor is not a haven for this humble, health-giving elixir.

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3 foods it’s fun to watch a toddler discover

This week Nick has engaged with three new foods:

• Guacamole. Tastes good and ever so fun to eat. Hours of pleasure standing at the coffee table with a single chip shuttling small globs of guac into your mouth. We have not yet imposed a no double-dipping rule on him. Don’t want to kill the spirit of adventure.
• Capers. Smally and salty. What more could an eighteen month old boy want?
• Lettuce. Is it food? It’s certainly intriguing. Unfortunately right now, “eating” lettuce means depositing a leaf temporarily in your mouth, sucking off the dressing and spitting out the resulting slime. We hope for more civilized salad eating sometime soon.

He’ll be a gastrokid yet.

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Quick Thoughts on The Earle

The food is just never as good as the wine.

The Earle is romantic and cozy, particularly in winter and particularly in the wine bar. The wine list is probably the best in town and the prices for bottles are very reasonable. I almost always have a great bottle there. But I am also always wishing the food measured up. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I don’t mind that it’s traditional French and Italian, but I just want it to sparkle a little more. The bruschetta was a little bit too much like slices of Texas toast. The linguine with garlic sausage was overwhelmed by the sausage; there was a whole pile of it left after we had eaten the pasta. The skirt steak with roasted potatoes and saute-ed green beans was very nice, and I expect that’s what the Earle does best: nice cuts of meat. I return to the Earle once or twice a year thinking it will be a great place for a bottle of wine and some small plates to go with it. But, in truth, it just seems to be a great place for a bottle of wine.

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