We could not, as in previous years, spend the day of our seventh anniversary at a museum or the harbor or even our traditional restaurant, so we arranged for dinner from Sarma on the grounds that in four years on this street we had walked past its tile-blue doors innumerable times and never actually eaten there together. Retrieving the dinner was not complicated but it was cold, since the afternoon's snow had given way to the falling slush known euphemistically in this country as wintry mix, and neither of us appreciated the passing car that funneled up a vast wave of icy sludge onto us out of the street, but for our troubles we received an assortment of delicious-smelling containers nicely labeled and even still warm by the time we got them home, thanks to the four reusable grocery bags we had used to insulate them. We dressed nicely. We put a runner and new placemats on the dining room table. We set out the pomegranate and the mead from my parents. We gently sequestered the cats.
And we had no traditions with this restaurant, so we experimented. The closest thing we had to a strikeout was the sweet potato spanakopita skins, but only because I would have pared the sweet potato even closer to its skin in favor of the spinach whose tart creaminess was bracingly cut with a sting of jalapeño and lime. We had no such quibbles about the harissa-red lamb meatballs which came over a bed of tomato-and-onion pilaf, or the octopus puttanesca where the tender tentacles curled up out of a near-stew of white beans and kale and long-stemmed caulilini all soaking savorily into fluffy polenta, or the smoked trout taramasalata garnished seasonally but not overpoweringly with feathery strands of dill. The Lebanese grilled chicken wings fall into the family of stupidly classy fast food, addictively tongue-lighting with tahini and dukkah and crushed peanuts which I picked off and scallions which![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch ignored. We forgot to order the falafel crackers that had piqued our attention on the menu, so Rob carefully divided the last of last night's biscuits (we had made them to accompany a pork chop with helljam) to give us something to mop up assorted sauces with. As far as we could tell there is sweet-salt roe in their tzatziki and I approve of it so much. Both of us thought the Meyer lemon bar would be a sort of shortbread, not a torched-meringue cousin of key lime pie; we ran out of room before the pumpkin cinnamon roll, but it was drizzled with pomegranate seeds. We have some very fancy leftovers in our refrigerator right now. I think we can put the zhoug on everything.
I gave Rob his anniversary book, Lillian Ross' Picture (1952); he gave me my anniversary IOU on account of the slowness of the mail. We dequestered the cats and watched Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue (2008), whose soundtrack has been on regular rotation in our household since 2012; it may bear only the most technical relationship to its source play by Noël Coward, but on its own merits it is a delightful and satisfying comedy of manners constantly nudging its toe across the line of farce, with a soundtrack of joyous anachronism and brilliantly reflective cinematography by Martin Kenzie.
We did not have the undersea neon of Waypoint, but we had ourselves to celebrate, and that's what counts.
And we had no traditions with this restaurant, so we experimented. The closest thing we had to a strikeout was the sweet potato spanakopita skins, but only because I would have pared the sweet potato even closer to its skin in favor of the spinach whose tart creaminess was bracingly cut with a sting of jalapeño and lime. We had no such quibbles about the harissa-red lamb meatballs which came over a bed of tomato-and-onion pilaf, or the octopus puttanesca where the tender tentacles curled up out of a near-stew of white beans and kale and long-stemmed caulilini all soaking savorily into fluffy polenta, or the smoked trout taramasalata garnished seasonally but not overpoweringly with feathery strands of dill. The Lebanese grilled chicken wings fall into the family of stupidly classy fast food, addictively tongue-lighting with tahini and dukkah and crushed peanuts which I picked off and scallions which
spatch ignored. We forgot to order the falafel crackers that had piqued our attention on the menu, so Rob carefully divided the last of last night's biscuits (we had made them to accompany a pork chop with helljam) to give us something to mop up assorted sauces with. As far as we could tell there is sweet-salt roe in their tzatziki and I approve of it so much. Both of us thought the Meyer lemon bar would be a sort of shortbread, not a torched-meringue cousin of key lime pie; we ran out of room before the pumpkin cinnamon roll, but it was drizzled with pomegranate seeds. We have some very fancy leftovers in our refrigerator right now. I think we can put the zhoug on everything.I gave Rob his anniversary book, Lillian Ross' Picture (1952); he gave me my anniversary IOU on account of the slowness of the mail. We dequestered the cats and watched Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue (2008), whose soundtrack has been on regular rotation in our household since 2012; it may bear only the most technical relationship to its source play by Noël Coward, but on its own merits it is a delightful and satisfying comedy of manners constantly nudging its toe across the line of farce, with a soundtrack of joyous anachronism and brilliantly reflective cinematography by Martin Kenzie.
We did not have the undersea neon of Waypoint, but we had ourselves to celebrate, and that's what counts.
