This blog has been terribly neglected...

It's been a rough 6-8 weeks - first vacation, then travel for work, then being totally swamped with work has left me with virtually no time to keep up this site. While the majority of my focus has been on the pharma aspects of my life, I've managed to do the following food-related things:

1. Make my own gnocchi, for no apparent reason at all and even though I was exhausted.
2. Spend the weekend in NYC and surprisingly didn't eat nearly as much as we normally do. We made up our lack of eating by drinking - perhaps not the smartest of moves. The highlight of our trip was a visit to Eataly - more on that in another post.
3. Attend Harvard's Science & Cooking Public Lecture series: the talk I attended was given by the fabulous Jose Andreas (Washington, DC). The topic - gelation. I have no plans to gel anything in the kitchen, but the talk was fantastic thanks to a funny, charming, and genuinely nice chef. Tonight I'm attending "Meat Glue Mania!" given by NYC's Wylie Dufresne of wd-50 fame. For some reason glueing meat to more meat makes me terribly excited, but again I have no plans to do this myself.
4. Attended a wine tasting at Dave's Fresh Pasta in Davis Square (Somerville): the theme of the night was South of France wines.We came home with 4 new bottles of wine (like we didn't have enough already) and a yummy mild goat cheese from Maine.
5. Met a cheesemonger from a local fromagerie while having my monthly pedicure at Wet Paint Nail Spa. How random is that?
6. Found a new iPad app that changed my life. A bit dramatic, you might say, but the Paprika Recipe Manager deserves the hyperbole, in my opinion. We love to use the iPad in the kitchen while cooking, but it's been a major annoyance trying to keep track of all the recipes from different sources. Not anymore! This app is worth the $9.99 price tag when it can download and save recipes from just about any website. It's a little cranky reading blogs (guess they haven't worked out the algorithms yet), but it has a pretty good cut and paste option that does the trick. And no, the company is not paying me to wax poetic - I really like their product and think it's genius!
7. Ate at Craigie on Main twice in one week. I haven't been there in months (love the food, but it's often too busy to just "pop in") but managed to eat there on Wednesday night and Friday night last week. Had the mussels both times because they were awesome. Need I say more?
8. Finally, I knew I'd caught up on my rest this weekend when I started taking an interest in planning meals and cooking new recipes. Not sure what inspired me, but my first thought was to re-create a banh-mi sandwich. This is a pic of yesterday's lunch and what will be tonight's dinner. It was as tasty as it looks, if you like that kind of thing. More details to come...