Restaurant Review: Mistral Bistro

Where: Mistral Bistro, in Boston's South End
When: Saturday night, for Matt's birthday
What we ate:
tuna tartare
salmon tartare on a bed of avocado with mache,
grilled sirloin with mashed potatoes and chanterelles (Matt)
roasted striped bass with a salad of heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, and cousous (me)
home-made mint chocolate chip ice cream

The Consensus: excellent special-occasion restaurant, we give it a rating of four wine bottles. Mistral is a foodie's restaurant, one of those places where everything on the menu looks delicious...even things you may not normally eat. All of the food was incredibly fresh, and there was a wide variety on the menu. The restaurant is bright and casual, with a French rustic atmosphere. For awhile, we avoided eating here because I thought it might be one of those snooty, trendy places, but that's not the case at all. If you want to treat yourself to a nice meal and eat well, definitely give Mistral a try!

Tomato Salsa / Moosewood Cookbook

I made a very simple and tasty Tomato Salsa from the Moosewood Cookbook earlier this week. If you don't already own this cookbook, you should go out and get it; it has so many excellent recipes: gingery chickpeas, marinated mushrooms, and the best black bean soup I've ever had.

Anyway, I had a ton of fresh tomatoes on hand so I whipped this up in about 15 minutes. We like spicy food so I made liberal use of the red pepper flakes, and it was delicious. Great accompaniment to our dinner of black bean burritos and brown rice.

P.S. - thanks to my sister for picking up this cookbook for me!

Tomato Salsa (1 1/2 to 2 cups)

3 medium-size ripe tomatoes

2 scallions, finely minced

2 medium cloves garlic, minced

a handful of parsley, finely minced

a handful of cilantro, finely minced

1 tsp. lightly toasted cumin seeds

3/4 to 1 tsp. salt

1 tbsp. cider vinegar

1 tbsp. olive oil

1 tbsp. fresh lime juice

crushed red pepper, to taste

Drop the tomatoes into a potful of simmering water for 10 seconds. Take them out, pull off the skins, and squeeze out the seeds. Dice the remaining pulp. Combine everything in a small bowl. Cover tightly and chill. (Note: to toast the cumin seeds, use a small skillet over a low flame or toaster oven. With either method, watch them carefully so they won't scorch.)

And I begin my blog

I love food, I really do. I love to eat it, experiment in my kitchen with it, read about it, you name it. I also have a major cookbook & recipe obsession. Last week I was reading a review of Dorie Greenspan's cookbook, Baking From My Home to Yours, when I stumbled across Tuesdays with Dorrie. This is a book I'm very excited about, as I really liked Dorie's work on Baking with Julia. She also has a great blog devoted to all things food.

So back to Tuesdays with Dorrie - this is a community of people who bake their way through Baking From My Home to Yours, recipe by recipe. One of the rules for being part of this community is that you have to own the book (which I don't, yet) and you need to have your own blog - presumably for tracking all your successes and failures with the recipes.

This sounded like so much fun to me that I figured I'd give it a try. But I don't just want it to be about baking. I'm hoping to track all of my cooking adventures, as well as post about restaurants, food writing, favorite food products, etc. I promise I'll share the not-so-good with the good, lest this become one of those totally pretentious "look-what-I-did" kind of blogs.

And if you're a Food Nerd, too, hopefully you'll glean something useful and/or amusing out of this. Leave me a comment if you have the time, too!

Happy cooking and eating.