Big Ben, Parliament!

June 3rd was the 29th time that my body, confined to this planet, circled around the sun. If you got the title of this post, then you are a big dork. I've been working on this blog post off and on since then...

The birthday was good. Very good. It started out with a new Dama Bialetti espresso maker from my darling wife, which was immediately put to use in preparing mochas for me and the wife. Yummy. Also a couple of needed odds and ends. I also got to sleep in somewhat...I am normally in charge of the boy for the first hour or so of the day.

I went to work for a while, came back for a quick and uneventful checkup for the boy, went for a run, and then got all jazzed up for a night on the town. I need to put this night into writing somewhere, so it might as well be here. The dinner was something to remember. A very very good friend of ours decided we simply must experience this restaurant called Moto, and so my present was a dinner with the wife (she also baby-sat for us) at a this incredibly hip downtown establishment. The whole thing was a surprise for me...I had no idea where we were going, although I did know that it was all on our friend's tab.

When we arrived, the decor was simple, but elegant. Off-whites, modern but comfortable furniture, and soft lighting was the setting. The menus arrived, and it was clear this was going to be a whole lot of fun. The menu itself was printed on an apple wafer, served next to a piece of asparagus and asparagus puree, accompanied by lemon-truffle creme-fraiche, and a slice of black truffle. There are three choices...the 5 course, the 10 course, and what they call the GTM...we were also ordered by this friend to get the 10 course meal, with the accompanying wine progression. Eating the menu is the cue to the staff that you're ready to order, so we dug in. Immediately the waiter came, took our order (the wife got a single cocktail as she would be driving), and we were off and running.

Greek Salad:
The first course was the "Greek Salad" which was hard to see in the dish we got, but who the hell cares when you're served incredibly tender marinated north african octopus tentacles, accompanied by a puff type cracker made from puree of kalamata olives. It was served with pureed creamed parsley. The accompanying wine was a 2005 Torlesse Sauvignon Blanc from Waipara, New Zealand. It was clean and sweet, without much of palate cleansing acidity I've come to expect out of S.B.'s. Perfect with the dish.

Greek Salad, Again:
The second course was basically a shot of dressing. It was a palate cleansing bouquet of lemon, light oils, and some other crisp flavors that I couldn't quickly identify. It went by too fast to really describe it much better.

Nitro Pineapple:
This was a very good dish. It was two pieces of pineapple, with an allspice type of rub, freezer burned onto a "grill" that had been brought down to -320 degrees F with liquid nitrogen. This paired excellently with a glass of August Kessler Rheingau Riesling 2004, which was actually a bonus glass, according to the staff. Next to the cold grill was a plate containing a lightly fried piece of black sablefish (an atlantic catch) served in two sauces/purees that I couldn't identify by taste, but which were delicious. The slight crisp to the fish was amazing, and a good pairing with the buttery soft texture of the flesh. This was perfect with the pairing of the Sayuri Nigori sake (an unfiltered sake with a very floral bouquet). The sake was creamy in texture and taste from not being filtered, and was a good companion to the texture of the black sablefish.

Eggplant Parmigiano:
A "tomato" was fashioned from a sundried tomato gelatin outer, and inside was an eggplant puree with 15 year aged parmesean mixed in. The "leaves" of the tomato were made of basil, and it was suggested that we have a small piece of basil with every bite of the faux tomato. It was a good suggestion. On the far left corner of the plate was a dab of 100 year aged balsamic vinegar. Apparently there were only 3 bottles of it from some guy or distributor named Drake, and they got one of them. The staff suggested just tasting the balsamic on our finger a bit. It was intense. A well aged port kind of flavor dominated for me, and the staff told me there were hints of mediera [sic?] in it as well. At the end of the dinner they gave me a glass of the Mediera to taste, but I confess I couldn't make the tie-in with flavors such a long time after having the balsamic. There was a scattering of young arugula leaves on the plate, which had a nice bite to them, and it was all on top of a parmigiano type spice rub that wasn't rubbed. A pretzel stick cemented vertically to the plate with 15 year aged parmesean was delightful. This was the worst wine pairing in my mind, which is not to say it was bad at all. It was a 2006 Cote-De-Brouilly Beaujolais. It was very very good with the balsamic vinegar, but not as good with the other items in the dish.

BBQ pork and beans:
This dish was quite good, and marks the beginning of the main course type dishes. One of those morsels of meat that is incomprehensibly satisfying given its size. The kale was actually delicious! I say "actually," because I've never had good kale before. It was steeped in flavor, but I have no idea how it was cooked. It sort of informs me about kale though...the next time I cook it, I should maybe treat it like something that's supposed to absorb flavors, as it doesn't stand well on its own. The beans were tasty, but weren't as remarkable as the pork. They were good mixed with the meat. The wine was a pinot noir.

Pasta and Quail:
A high end play on the comfort food end. Moto's version of Mac and Cheese may well have been my favorite dish of the evening. On a small amount of denatured macaroni with 5 year aged greuere cheese, a delicious piece of crispy quail was served. I would describe quail as a light version of duck. The meat was incredibly tender, but not as fatty and thick as duck tends to be. Not a bad thing, that, but I just thought it the best way to describe it. A white truffle powder was sprinkled over the entire thing, and the dish was dominated by the flavor of the quail and of the truffle. The mac and cheese part were more of the canvas for the dish. I think this wine was my favorite as well. It was a granache wine (Betts and Scholl, Barossa Valley).

At this point, I was truly close to the peak of a gastronomic high. When I've been eating really good food, and getting a delightful buzz on from good wine, a smile starts to creep onto my face that I'm not really able to remove except by a strong exertion of will. I wasn't about to go and do that, so I was starting to grin like a damn goon at this time.

Braised Duck:
Roadkill platter! I find it great that such a good restaurant doesn't take itself seriously. I think that is part of making really good food. It's supposed to be fun. This was pulled duck meat "splattered" on the plate with beet puree making for a puddle of blood. The road lines were made with a yellow bean puree. Gin foam scattered on the "carcass" was the unfortunate creature's brains. Hawai'ian volcanic rock salt (by itself intensely delicious!) was the asphalt. I was almost starting to giggle now, I was so intoxicated with the meal. The dish was served with Muga Reserva, Rioja 2004. I remember it going quite well with the dish, but not much more detail than that.

Grapefruit:
A respite from the intensity of the main course. This was something like a jello shot, actually. Gin and tonic was encased in a grapefruit semi-solid gelatin, which was placed on a spoon. Underneath the spoon was a pile of grapefruit vesicles (seperated by hand!) next to a grapefruit foam served with a bit of sweet coconut candy.

Popcorn ball:
I kind of lost it on this one. This dish went by fast, but it was hilarious. There's these two balls of candy in front of you. A soft candy outer shell was encasing a very sweet sugary liquid that somehow managed to have a popcorn flavor (in a good way). The thing that made me start laughing a little insanely was that they managed to have the thing full of poprocks, so soon after eating one of these, my mouth was full of poppy crunching noises.

S'mores:
Dessert was great. A flourless chocolate cake was formed into a hollow ball which contained this graham cracker flavored syrup. The dessert was actually set into tiers, with the cake and syrup on the top level just next to a ledge. Underneath the ledge was a "pool area." The diner's job is to cut into the cake, letting the syrup drain into the waiting pool below, which was formed by a loose arrangement of marshmallow and graham cracker. The drinks served with dessert were a very young tasting port (Sutton Cellars, La Solera 2nd bottling) and a glass of mediera which I was supposed to compare with the 100 year aged balsamic that they served earlier in the dinner. I didn't honestly make the connection between the mediera and the vinegar, mostly because they were a bit too seperated. Too many flavors inbetween. The mediera was awesome though, and I was insanely intoxicated, both by the wine and the food.

A fantastic birthday present!

42.4 Miles

This week. Lots of stuff going on, running still isn't at the forefront, but 40+ miles ain't bad, I suppose. The clock's now ticking towards closing on our house, which is a really sweet place. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that nothing (else) goes wrong, and that the place will be our's (or our bank's) in a matter of weeks. We'll have our own private pond, 7+ acres (with a trail going around which I'll mark out 400m), and oodles of other great stuff.

In the meantime, I have a serious running goal looming in the future: The Triennial, a trail relay along the Fingerlakes Trail which is very close to where we'll be living. It's tough to train specifically for this at the moment, since there are no serious trails to speak of in Chicago, but some decent aerobic building should be good, and I'm going to try to be hitting the weight room from time to time. Technical trail running really is a significantly different sport in comparison with road racing. There are muscle groups that you never knew existed until after a good trail race. The stabilizers are heavily recruited. When we arrive in NY, I'll have some time to hit the trails and get some good tempo style backwoods running in.

I'm starting to look forward to my new job, too. Teaching is something I really need to get back to. It gives structure to the life of research, which is inherently unstructured, and stop and start so far as progress is concerned. It will be busy though, and it's going to take some time to find out how to "git 'er dun."

Anyhow, now that home buying stress should be leveling off, I want to try and get back to the grindstone so far as training is concerned. 60+ weeks would be nice. We'll see what I can manage.