TRADE secrets

Food lovers (and Food Network fans) all know that Jody Adams has long had a very popular little place in Cambridge called Rialto... one of my favorite places for small plates, a glass of Sancerre and a platter of oysters on a Monday night. Well, now she's got a new spot, right in my neighborhood and just off the Greenway, called Trade.

Lucky me, I was invited by a friend to join him at a tasting lunch there just last week for a very delicious preview. We tried a trio of small plates and love-loved the curried carrots with yogurt cheese and the chicken livers on sesame crackers (with kumquat jam!). I also tried one of the flatbreads, fired up right there in front of you in the brick oven behind the bar, a lamb sausage with eggplant puree, Manchego, peppers and garlic yogurt combo that was a perfect balance of sweet and savory. But my hands-down favorite thing was the dessert: a Taza chocolate budino with sea salt, rosemary and hazelnut wafer... nothing short of fantastic!

It gets even better: the space is lovely, too. Designed by (my master's thesis adviser) Maryann Thompson, the interiors are crisp & clean, with a warmed up relax-and-settle-in feeling and storefront windows looking out onto the Greenway. I'm looking forward to plenty of after work meet-ups there this winter with friends for drinks, a bite to eat, and that budino for dessert!

Curious? They opened this week... you can make a reservation here.
Have a delicious weekend!

Words, to live by...

Some friends and I recently had a conversation about writing, the internet and, more specifically, thoughtful content. With all of the blogs and online news outlets that we're reading daily we have found ourselves craving carefully edited writing that isn't just sent out into the world willy-nilly to be quickly digested, words that are thoroughly considered and, occasionally, painstakingly chosen. As wonderful as the all-info-all-the-time world wide web is, it can tend to be short on the well-chosen word. To balance all of that free flowing information out, I've felt a gravitational pull toward poetry. It began, innocently enough, by listening to Garrison Keillor's daily podcast The Writer's Almanac, a lovely full five minutes a day to consider a writer's life and to listen to Keillor read a single poem. But wait, there's more...

If you're feeling a similar pull toward a bit of old-school word play, turns out there's an app for that. The Poetry Foundation has it's own iPhone app that is a perfect marriage of technology and text. You can select a hybrid of subjects manually or via a roulette wheel-like spin, bringing together such classic combos as passion & love or the less expected optimism & aging. And so, after scanning through an endless stream of new posts and status updates and tweets, via the very same gadget, you can enjoy a few quiet moments of good, old-fashioned written words. Ain't modern life grand?

Happy Valentine's Day ♡