Rosh Hashannah Cooking

I'm back in the UK! My last week in the US was really busy, and I'll fill you in on some more US restaurants next week. But this weekend is Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, and here are our menus for the weekend.

Tonight, for the start of the festival, there are 13 of us for dinner at our house. We are doing starters & mains, and our friends are doing dessert.

We have made our favourite roast butternut squash, sweet potato and ginger soup to start with, and we will have homous, chopped liver, challah and various other dippy things to go with it.

Main course will be roast chicken, roast sweet and normal potatoes, roast cauliflower and broccoli, and green beans.

There seem to be an excessive number of desserts - chocolate brownies, lockshen pudding (a traditional Jewish dessert made of noodles, sultanas, raisins and things. I don't like it), lemon meringue pie, ice cream, and something called apple snow.

Tomorrow there are 25 of us for lunch and dinner - we expect the party to go on all afternoon. It will be my family, cousins and grandparents, and my grandpa's sister's children and grandchildren, although my great-aunt died last month. We are all contributing different things. Lunch will be meatballs and a chicken casserole type thing, dinner is cheese and smoked salmony things.

We are making: sausage rolls, a corn salad, chopped liver, egg mayonaise and egg and onion for lunch, brownies, caramel shortbread and crumble for both desserts, and then a baked bri for later.

Sunday will just be my immediate family, plus my sister's boyfriend, although sadly not mine, as he has family things. We will have bagels for lunch, then pesto salmon for dinner.

My weekend in DC

Three of my best friends came to DC this weekend - we all interned out here a couple of years ago and it was great to have a catch up. I hadn't seen two of them for a whole year, since they visited London last summer, and the third I hadn't seen for two years! My travel blog details what we did and saw: http://lostjules.livejournal.com/

In terms of eating, it was definitely a bit all over the place. Thursday, when the girls arrived, we had nachos for a late lunch, tortilla chips with our drinks and then take-away food after drinking.

Friday was better mainly because we had sushi for lunch. For less than $10 I got miso soup, 4 different fish nigiri and 6 spicy tuna maki. It was very good - I may return before I leave the US. We then shared some pizza for dinner, and made quaesadillas when we got home after a lot more drinking!

Saturday we had actual meals! We went to a place called Tunnicliffe's Tavern down by Eastern Market. It's an old favourite of ours, and their brunch is very good. I had poached eggs with spinach and hollandaise, along with home fries, which I'd never had before my previous DC visit. I think they are pretty good, particularly when they have some pepper and onion in them, but french fries are better! We wanted to go somewhere nice for dinner so we picked Cabanas, a Mexican place by the waterfront in Georgetown. We shared tortilla chips with guacamole and mango salsa to start which were great, and two of my friends thought their food was good, but mine and my other friend's fish tacos were very disappointing!

On Sunday we went to Chadwicks for brunch. Their Georgetown branch does all you can drink champagne with brunch for $20, which we were hoping for, but instead their bottles of champagne were $9, which is actually still pretty good. We managed 5 bottles - although I really sat the last one out, I can't drink that much! For dinner we went to Chipotle, which is a US chain of Mexican restaurants that I really like. I actually think their $7 tacos were better than the ones I had for twice the price the day before!

Our weekend of eating ended Monday at a place called Pho 75 which serves big bowls of Vietnamese soup for $7. They were lovely and very filling!

Boston Eating

There will be photos to add to this post once I'm back home. Annoyingly, I left the cable for my camera in the UK, so I cant upload any photos yet.

Boston was a couple of days of mainly disjointed eating, and lots of rushing around, as I was interviewing Professors at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard.

On Monday, after my first interview, I went to Au Bon Pan for lunch, which was not bad - it's a chain, and I had a decent goats cheese and mushroom sandwich. It was after 3pm by the time I had lunch, so I wasn't that hungry in the evening and I went to one the little Japanese places by my hostel for some Tom Yum soup, before meeting a friend from Oxford for a couple of drinks.

The hostel provided bagels for breakfast - and all day free coffee which is one of the best things about it! I went to another Japanese place for lunch, and got their lunch special: Japanese aubergine with brown rice, plus a couple of different types of spring roll and a salad all for less than $10 which is pretty good!

I was travelling all evening (for 9 hours in the end!) and I bought a salad from Whole Foods to eat on the way. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up any kind of fork, so then had to attempt to eat my lovely, not cheap, salad with my fingers! Not easy!

Now I'm in DC and need to explore food options around here.