Lunch at Montmartre and pease porridge...

A few slips and slides down the icy sidewalk from Eastern Market (the building) is a little French restaurant called Montmartre. How we managed to find ourselves in there for lunch yesterday is anybody's guess...we were on our way to either Marvelous Market on the near corner or Bread & Chocolate on the far corner on Pennsylvania Ave. My illustrious coworker (ICW) wanted a salad, and I wanted soup. We were going to take our lunch back to the office and eat at our desks (BAD!), but....we were cold, and the word Montmartre pulled us in (see earlier birthday in Paris post). Once inside we discovered the place was warm and cozy and filled with Hill workers (we both thought "Republicans" due to the number of thin young blondes wearing fur coats, but there are plenty of both in DC...it doesn't have to mean "reactionary" when fur coat and skinny young blonde converge). So we asked for a table and wound up by the big tall windows at the end of the room.

Le garcon was cute as a bug's ear, and he asked us what we wanted to drink. ICW asked for a glass of pinot, and I said "Water for me, please." Then as he took my wine glass away, I said, "No, I'll have a glass of red wine, too, but NOT pinot." The restaurant looked very like another of our favorite watering holes, Bistrot au Coin on Connecticut Ave near Dupont Circle, and they have a great Cotes du Rhone red for their house wine. Besides, this was a French restaurant. Children drink wine at lunch in France. "Cotes du Rhone, please" I said, thinking one glass won't hurt--that is, make my breath smell noticeably if I encountered Madge/Margot/Marguerita the Boss. The waiter hustled over with the wine, and we toasted the afternoon--FRIDAY afternoon, our favorite one of the week, especially since there were no meetings.

Then we tackled the menu. There were three kinds of soup available: #1 was pureed cauliflower with mussels (hanh?), #2 was pureed zucchini with Boursin cheese, and #3 was I forget...NOT French onion, which was nowhere in sight. ICW wound up getting the zucchini soup and a salad (slices of asparagus, red and yellow peppers, and parmesan cheese stacked up on the plate and drizzled with red wine vinaigrette. She loved the salad but said the zucchini soup was nowhere near as flavorful as my version, which has lots of salt & pepper, garlic, and green peas in it and is cooked in chicken broth with a tablespoon or so of dill weed, then pureed. I add a bit of cream at the end instead of cheese, but we both liked the little glob of cheese, so I'll try it next time I make it.

I kept waffling and wavering (my typical restaurant behavior) between this (mussels?) and that (hangar steak?), but what finally came out of my mouth was pot au feu (beef cheeks, carrots, turnips, and leeks). Mario Batali is always cooking beef cheeks on Iron Chef America, so I had to try this. I liked the broth, dark and rich, and the carrots. There was even a little grit of sand in there, probably from the leeks, and I liked that, too. The beef cheeks? Well....I think beef short ribs would be better, but they're about the same. Cheeks have far less fat, which might be why the meat is not as flavorful as short ribs.

Well, it was all delicious, and we each wound up having 2 and a half glasses of wine. Plus dessert, plus coffee. ICW's dessert (raspberry&blackberry tart) was great. Mine (chocolate mousse)...well, you can get lots better at Las Placitas, the Salvadoran restaurant a couple of blocks down 8th St.

Pease Porridge

I mentioned this past week to NDB that I was not having good luck cooking pea soup from one of those cellophane packets that look so appealing and easy (Just add water!!). I poured the lot into a deep skillet yesterday a.m., added the bacon grease from breakfast (I know, I know), and boiled it for an hour before I left for work. Last night I was going to throw it out, but I boiled it some more...for maybe another hour and a half. This morning I turned on the heat again, and let it burble away...Finally I could smell scorched peas, so I went out to the kitchen and turned it all off. It wasn't badly burnt...just a few around the edge of the pan had turned a nice toasty brown. I scraped it all up and thought, well, it's a shame to throw this out. So I ate it for breakfast. It was about the texture of oatmeal. "Pease porridge hot!" came to mind. Also, "9 days old!" It won't be 9 days old till tmw, and there's still plenty left. But I dunno. It's still not very good. The scorching added the most flavor, but the beans are still very chewy. Hmmm.