Under the influence...Nancy's influence

Last weekend I went to Boston to visit my best friend from college. As per usual, many of our activities were planned around food, and the highlight of the weekend, for me, was the delicious meal we prepared for a mutual friend on Sunday night. It seemed innocuous enough, but if you look closely at the following storyboard you may sense that my tastebuds had fun at my stomach's expense...

We went shopping at Formaggio Kitchen, "a unique gourmet foods shop specializing in small production artisan cheeses & charcuterie "...hmmm, pity cheeses and charcuterie aren't so much my thing. Luckily, Nancy found these root vegetables to keep me occupied...


...But I couldn't be kept far from the cheese counter. There were actually a few cheese counters, but this was the most photogenic. There were also many samples, which I was too busy eating to photograph...


...Not that such samples satiated my lactose-deprived palate. We served this Vacherin Mont D'Or (a raw cow's milk cheese from the Pyrenees) as we were preparing the meal--with honey, crackers, and pears. But Nan was busy cooking and our guest didn't like stinky cheese, so I polished off just about all of that by myself. Luckily the drinking had already commenced, and after finishing off a couple bottles of riesling I was sure I was invincible, even against the most lactosey of foes.


Here she is, hard at work in the kitchen, slaving away over a wild mushroom risotto that we agreed really needed some parmesan. So Nan ran to Trader Joe's for cheese and beaujolais as I ate stinky cheese and peeled beets for...


...Our roasted beet salad! Complete with a hunk of goat cheese and toasted pine nuts, on a bed of pea shoots tossed in a truffle-vinaigrette. Yummm. Doesn't that goat cheese look...lethal? It was actually quite tasty...


Next came the risotto, which turned out quite well with the liberal addition of parmesan, and the salt addicts's favorite secret ingredient: soy sauce!


Finally, more cheese. Yeah, oops...but it was so good! A crisp tart of puff pastry, sweetened mascarpone with just the right amount of vanilla, oranges "supreme" (without the skins--I learned a new word for an old favorite :), and a drizzle of honey. Delicious--the citrus cut through the creaminess of the cheese in all the right ways. Oh cheese, why are you so right, but so wrong?


And here's what remained of all those lactose products:


Not a vegan meal by any stretch of the imagination. Yum!