Not too much going on lately as I’m just getting back into the swing of things after the holidays. Still haven’t completely finished cleaning up the mess that Christmas created in my living room- wrapping paper, tape, an assortment of bags, packaging material and still a few Amazon.com boxes I have yet to haul over to the trash room for recycling.

Meanwhile, all of the pods in my AeroGarden are now showing signs of life, but I’ll wait until they grow a bit more before I post another pic. So far the two basils and dill are coming in the quickest. I should be adding the next nutrient tablet tonight.

Had another fun night of drinking and eating fries at Goblin Market. This time I dragged the Asian contingent out to harrass Vicky High Life becauase Chye and Dawg missed the last session because they were doing their post-wedding tour through the west coast. Rick and Kat joined us too and we monopolized the end of the bar. Of particular note was the off-the-menu foie gras special. While I usually prefer seared foie, this dish was a torchon but prepared so brilliantly that it was every bit as enjoyable as any seared version I’ve ever had. For the uninitiated, when you work with whole raw foie gras, the one thing you want to do is to de-vein it. Of course this ends up leaving you with broken up smaller pieces which wouldn’t look very good if you tried to cook it off just like that. Fortunately foie gras behaves kind of like clay or play-doh so you can just smush it back together. For the fancy shmancy French, they would take all the pieces of foie and place it into a cheesecloth and tie it up tightly in a roll or a ball to form it back into one coherent mass. Then you can cook it off in any sort of liquid you want (I’ve had a particularly good version cooked in port once). Not sure how Goblin’s torchon was cooked, but the real genius was in the presentation and saucing. A half inch slice of the torchon, about the diameter of a small coaster, was set atop an equal sized round of hearty bread, crust removed. Around it was a sauce featuring brandied cherries and kumquat slices. The sauce was killer, but the genius was in the use of the bread which soaked up some of the fat from the foie gras as well as being a carrier for any of the sauce you cared to dab it into. The perfect medium for bringing together the exact proportion of fat to sweetness you’d want in each bite, and giving each mouthful a little bit of substance to chew on so that the flavor could linger on your palate longer than if you just had a piece of foie gras and sauce alone. Simply fantastic. So good in fact, that I ordered a second one after dessert!