Food, food and more food.....

The holidays manage to up the ante on the social calendar, which has allowed us to check out some restaurants in downtown Seattle and Kirkland with some friends over the past few weeks:

• Boat Street Cafe, with Ian and Maura, which was pretty good except they don't have a bar where you can grab a drink beforehand.
• Restaurant Zoe (no relation to the one in NYC), which had a great wine list (lots of half bottles), and an excellent menu. Service was spot on.
• Dahlia Lounge, with JoAnna and Mary, which was a really fun time. Especially because we decided to spring for the magnum - it ends up being the same as a couple of bottles anyway so it looks bad :-). It was a nice bottle though.
• Purple Cafe, with Chris and Shelly, which is always a reliably good place to eat and drink. Their excellent wine list, combined with their lobster mac and cheese, makes it one of my favorite places outside of Seattle.
• Waterfront Seafood Grill, with Lesley, Mathias and Stephanie, which did a proper Baked Alaska (known as an Emerald City Volcano). Lots of laughs and it was fun to make Lesley's run the next day a little more difficult given all of the tough runs she schedules for me.

Continuing on the food angle, I was reading the most recent issue of Food and Wine and noticed a dessert that my friends Ian and Sue would enjoy. :-) Ok, some background.

Ian and Sue happen to be friends of mine who are English, but know each other only through me. Other than the fact they are English, know me, and both worked at Merrill Lynch at the same time, they pretty much have nothing in common. Still when Sue decided to visit me over a long weekend and we booked a table at Babbo, I invited Ian, aka partner-in-crime, along.

So we're having the dinner, some laughs, excellent food, wine, as is the usual deal at Babbo, and then the server starts to talk dessert. They start describing the special, which is a lemony semolina cake with fruit, jam, etc. The look of anticipation and excitement on both Ian and Sue immediately changed to dread and horror. And it happened simultaneously. Clearly there was something that I was missing here because it looked like they were bonding something related to the semolina.

Turns out that as youngsters in the English school systen, kids were served semolina which sounded like it was some nasty porridge that Cindarella was forced to eat by her evil stepmother, or something. The things you learn about other cultures. Anyway, the server really decides to sell the semolina to Ian and Sue. Ian takes the bait, Sue passes because she is having too many flashbacks. Ian ends up loving the cake and wants to get the recipe. Can't find it anywhere - none of the Babbo cookbooks, not online. Nowhere.

And then it magically appeared in F&W this month. Ian, I expect a full report when you make it. Maybe something for you to try with your Mom when you head back to the UK?

Speaking of food and Babbo, Happy Birthday Sal!