brunswick and boston aren't exactly next door to each other, but when all ideas of happiness align on tuesday nights in september, you really have to make an effort to unite these two new england cities. so it came to pass that the "ideas of happiness" found themselves in line on the 26th.
do you ever wake up and know that if you can only get out the door, the day will be an amazing one? when i woke up (at the semi-un-godly hour of 6:30) i knew that it would be one of those days. forever the kid with too much to do and too little time to do it, i'd left the final bits of an econ problem set for the morning, while also truly believing that i could gather books, clothes, etc. to make the early bus to boston. i did, somehow... but none of this yet has been about food. i believe that to do justice to the discussion of dinner, i have to begin with lunch, and lunch was a journey of sorts itself.
in high school, my sister introduced me to pho (pronouced fuh, for those non-vietnamese among us), a noodly soup consisting of well, noodles and soup. some more adventurous folk eat it with oodles of submerged meat, vegetables, tofu, etc. but i'm a purist - just noodles and soup. on the bus down to boston, i realized that it was 10:30 and all i'd had for breakfast was coffee. i thought for a while about how i'd be making dinner with gravling... but that seemed mighty far off, so i decided to go on an adventure. finding good pho in a city you're not familiar with may be challenging, but i feel that if you approach it with the same reckless abandon as say, jumping in puddles, your feet are bound to find their way. not 20 minutes into my wanderings in boston's china town, i stumbled (very literally) into a curb. apparently i'm not too mindful a wanderer, but i found myself in front of a little vietnamese noodle house with clean windows plastered with boston restaurant reviews. these are (if they praise the restaurant, anyway) helpful hints, but not sufficient enough a basis to justify eating there. my true criteria for restaurant selection is that there must be more than three people (preferably all happy-looking) eating. and it must be clean. this little place (whose name i can't for the life of me remember, but to where i'm sure i could re-wander-to if pushed in the general direction) was PERFECT. i hadn't had pho since last january (the day alex dragged me along at uw to get a new id card, i believe) and it was everything i had dreamed of on the bus down. anywho, noodly mission completed i spent the rest of the day doing work and people watching at a little coffee shop near bu. ps i guess i'm not quite a purist, basil is vital to good pho as well. good basil.
i feel odd simply hopping on to dinner, but as this is supposed to be a food blog (gravling may well kill me for making this so damn long) i think i should get to dinner... i would describe the process of cooking our dinner as space-centric. hmm. there was gravity involved, but i mean space-centric as a combination of spacey and eccentric. neither of us had an idea of what to cook (until gravling *miraculously* found a recipe in his pocket. questionable. hehe.) and gathering the ingredients was an exercise in motivation. scallion apparently doesn't come in scallion-sized portions anymore. in fact, family-sized scallion (in other words four normal bunches) is the only way to go now. so our stirfy (as that is what we had decided to cook) became de-scallionized. garlic, broccoli, chili paste (mmm!), olive oil, soy sauce, red onion... oh, and chicken. i nearly forgot to get chicken when we were at the store. it figures that the conscientious-omnivore would be un-conscious in the market. anywho.
cooking with gravling always makes me happy (quite honestly, i've never cooked with this nut and NOT been happy. haha now i sound like i'm auctioning him off for dinner). conversations usually revolve around chopsticks, palindromes, and the like. tuesday's conversation was a bit more... spacey, i think. tupperware, balsamic vinegar, maids (or megan's dear "domestics"). gravling made the rice & the csirke while i chopped the broccoli, onions, GARLIC (my favorite). we both agree that one of the happiest smells in the world is that of sauteed onion/garlic. it just smells like home!
eating our dinner with little bamboo chopsticks on beautiful black plates was (for fear of overusing my favorite word "happy") glorious. the wine was, we agreed, nondescript, but that was fine. the garlic though... hehe. i won't ruin my (and your) joyful picture of the dinner by recounting the fate of my glass, but it may be truthful to say that gravity acted in favor of entropy that night, the result of flying tupperware. c'est la vie. i felt a wee bit like shouting "mazel tov!"

i think i'll conclude with a quote i read recently. it's by the first tv cook ever. he was from the bbc, a man named marcel boulestin. anyway, till gravling writes, be conscientious of what you eat but more importantly (in my mind) be happy!!! :-)

"it is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, where garlic is used in cooking."