In which we eat out with Irene

The beauty of the holidays is that you can go out for lunch to places that aren't the place next to your office.  I mean, that panini place is awesome, but I've had enough chicken-and-goat-cheese sandwiches.  

The other awesome thing about the holidays is that I actually get to see Irene in person instead of over dodgy cellphone connections.  

My parents had the day off and offered to take care of The Toddler while my Spousal Unit and I did some last-minute Xmas shopping and went out for lunch.  The last minute shopping went very badly:  there was a line-up in the bookstore that made us despair and leave; the liquor store was so packed, we couldn't find anything; and we totally forgot what we went into the fancy soap store for.  But we had a nice lunch at Gordon Ramsey's rotisserie!

On the table, there were pickles.  Instead of bread, you get pickles.  I didn't have any, but Spousal Unit said they were really good: crunchy, not too salty, not too vinegary.

Then we had our mains.  Spousal Unit had a 1/4 white meat rotisserie chicken with fries and coleslaw and I had tourtière.  Spousal Unit ate the salad that came with my tourtière and I had his fries.  They were damned good fries and it was a damned good tourtière.  It had cherries in it!

Throughout the meal, we kept seeing these slices of lemon meringue pie passing us, so we ordered lemon meringue pie for dessert.  Damned that was good!  The lemon part was a thick, creamy lemon curd.  I don't think I've ever had such a good lemon meringue pie.  This is like the time I was in Florida and had key lime pie at this upscale restaurant and then I could never have key lime pie ever again.  

The End of The Meal

After our lunch, we went next door to meet Irene for a coffee at Juliette et Chocolat.  We had a cappuccinos and a brownie ("Le Balsamico").  Again:  Damned that was good!  

Irene and I both took pictures of the cups.  Guess whose picture is whose.

Cappucino Study

I took a picture of cups.

Endangered Dessert: Chocolate Ravioli

When I was a little kid, Christmas meant two things: cannoli and chocolate ravioli.   Everyone knows what cannolis are thanks to a bunch of pop culture references to them.  Of course, the TV-and-movie versions of cannoli are the (inauthentic) Sicilian cannoli, with their sugarry ricotta filling with chocolate chips, and greyish, bubbly shell.  (Authentic Sicilian cannoli have candied fruit in the filling rather than chocolate chips.  But people hate candied fruit, so over the past 30 or so years all North American Sicilian cannoli have become candied-fruit-free.)

Anyways.  

My family makes cannoli, but not Sicilian cannoli because we aren't Sicilian.  I know:  shocker!  How dare there be variations in Italian food!  It needs to be homogeneously monolithic just like Indian and Chinese foods! (Yes, I am being sarcastic.) Our cannoli are made with a light, crisp shell and stuffed with chocolate custard on one side and vanilla-lemon custard on the other.   Does that sound good?  Are you wondering why you can't find these in pastry shops?  Yeah, me too.

Unlike the cannoli, I'm pretty sure no one outside of my mother's town has ever heard of chocolate ravioli.  There may have been some chef on Top Chef or Iron Chef who made a chocolate ravioli.  Of course, no chocolate ravioli made on a Foody Show would ever resemble what my family makes.  In fact, my family's chocolate raviolis would probably make you lose Top/Iron Chef.  The filling is cocoa, ricotta and sugar in a lumpy, inhomogeneous, somewhat revolting mass.  The filling is stuffed into a light sweet dough and deep fried. 

The result is...fantastic!  But very unsophisticated.  You would have thought that some enterprising pastry shop would have tried to make a nice, tasty chocolate ravioli, but no.  Instead they just keep making what white folks expect.

The only people making these desserts are old Italian ladies from my mom's town.  And people like me don't even know what the recipe is for the sweet dough.  And so, the chocolate ravioli is an endangered dessert.