Did you all have a fun Halloween? I can hardly believe that it is November 1st. It is quite warm here in Boston today, and I was grateful for that extra hour of sleep after a very late night out. Normally Sundays kind of bring me down, but not this week. I can not even believe that in a few short days I will be on my way to San Francisco to eat, drink, and meet new people at the Foodbuzz Festival. It seems like we have been waiting for this forever! A 4 day work week means crunching a lot of work in, but the thought of being in wine country this time next week will definitely keep my spirits up! I had a really fun Saturday night. After spending the day cleaning and TRYING to become a self-hosted blogger, I had a little glass of wine and some Trader Joe’s arancini with my friend Raija. The arancini were good, a little bland, but perfect when paired with some spicy tomato sauce. 
We each had a glass of Rejadorada, a big, fruit forward Spanish red from one of our Bin Ends wine flea market purchases. I love this wine, it is super dark red with an explosion of flavor of dark berries and cherries. Yum. We had 7:30 reservations at Les Zygomates, and when we arrived it was pretty empty. We were immediately served warm, crust French bread. 
The birthday girl ordered a bottle of 2006 Château Nuits des Dames, Côtes du Rhône, Southern Rhône, France, and we all toasted to her last year of her twenties, and the official start of our thirtieth birthday yearlong celebration.
I kind of like candlelit photos even if they aren’t super crisp. They’re so warm and cozy looking. The rest of my photos for the dinner came out really blurry, so my descriptions will have to be enough 🙂 We started with the mussels in white wine with dijon mustard, shallots, and tarragon. I absolutely love tarragon, and my favorite part of mussels usually ends up being the bread and sauce part. For my entree, I ordered two appetizers, a frisee salad with a poached egg and bacon vinaigrette and the citrus cure salmon with Yukon gold blini, crème fraiche. I always order this salmon dish because it is absolutely delicious. The potato blini especially, soft, warm potatoe-y heaven. I skipped dessert and instead had a beautiful glass of Moet. After dinner, we walked across the Fort Point bridge and headed over to Barbara Lynch’s Drink, the subterranean creative cocktail hotspot. 
I love many things about Drink including its more adult crowd, as opposed to the many college-student thronged bars in Boston. They also have an amazing spread of fresh ingredients like herbs, fruits, and spices.
We had a really fun time requesting drinks with different flavor profiles. My favorite of the night was a “bone” which is made of rye whiskey, lime, simple syrup, and tabasco sauce. I had asked for something spicy, and I got it. My mouth was burning, but I love hot food, so why not hot drinks?! We had planned on going to the South End, but an absolute downpour started and we decided to stay at Drink. So many combinations to try, so little time. At a VERY late hour, my wonderful husband picked us up and dropped everyone home safely. He is the best. I spent part of today having lunch with a lovely group of Boston bloggers, and I will be posting about that later today or tomorrow. Stay tuned. . . 🙂 BTW. . . as you know I am obsessed with checking the search terms used to find my blog, and almost ALL of them today were for Trader Joe’s Super Red Drink Powder! It must be very popular!
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Happy Halloween everyone! It is a beautiful day here in Boston, and I am excited for a fun weekend ahead. I apologize for the lack of a day post and short post last night. I have been writing a lot of work-related stuff but also spending a lot of time brainstorming on how to move my life in the direction that I think I want it to go. Or to discover directions I never knew about, something that seems to be happening a lot since I started blogging!
Yesterday was a looong day that started with a great walk to work through the South End. Walking to work this time of year is the best, no more hot sticky arrivals. Instead, I start out a bit chilly and after walking a few minutes am perfectly warm, comfortable, and awake from breathing the crisp air.
My walk to work looks quite different than it did last summer when I wrote a post about my daily journey. Its so lovely! Depending on the route I take, I pass a different variety of stores and restaurants, and I LOVE Foodies Urban Market. It has a great cheese selection, all sorts of gourmet items, and is the only place so far that I have found Nasoya Creations chocolate tofu deliciousness.
Once again, I will leave the work day out of my recap and skip right to dinner. After work I drove (which I rarely ever do, and remembered why last night!) out to Waltham for dinner at The Chateau, a family Italian restaurant with decor circa 1970 and good old American Italian food. It was JUST what I wanted.
I met up with four of my former co-workers from the best job I have had so far in my life. My second job out of college was close to four years working in a variety of different roles for a non profit professional association that developed all sorts of member resources and events. Our team was the best. We had a ton of fun, worked extremely hard, laughed until it hurt and really built the organization. Through that job, I got to travel to lots of fun places like Scottsdale, AZ, London, Brussels, and Santa Fe, NM. It was the complete springboard of my career into marketing communications, public relations,and events because I had such supportive co-workers who really cared about each other’s happiness. It was great until a new figure entered the picture. This individual quickly changed the entire culture of the organization for the worst, and things quickly fell apart. Despite the fact that I left that job over two years ago, I have stayed in touch with my friends and it was great to see them at dinner last night!
Today was spent cleaning, a completely necessary evil. We have been big time slackers on the housework front, and I really wanted to get it done before I start traveling next week.
I love a clean kitchen.
When we finished cleaning, we had massive salads out on the deck. It was so warm!
The salads had butter lettuce, grape tomatoes, pinto beans, beets, and pickled vegetables with a Good Seasons dressing mix on top. On the side I had pint glass full of TJ’s Super Red Drink. I would like to bring a zip loc bag full of the drink powder with me to San Francisco, but I am wondering if it will cause a big security problem? Maybe I will just buy the packets of Emergen-C for the trip.
My friend Raija is arriving in about an hour, and we are going to get ready for dinner and drinks out tonight. Dinner is at Les Zygomates, and then we are heading to the South End, maybe to Stella or The Beehive.
Before I go. . .
The random integer generator winner of the Healthy Halloween giveaway is Abbynormally! Please send me an email at traveleatlove2009@hotmail.com with your contact details, and I will have Angela send your order directly to you! Congrats and thanks to everyone for sharing their favorite Halloween movies! I love The Great Pumpkin, Rear Window, Vertigo, The Excorcist, Blair Witch Project, and so many others, but I actually have had to stop watching things before I travel for work. Otherwise I find myself in a hotel room terrified and unable to sleep with visions of scary-ness dancing in my head.
Have a great, safe night everyone! I will have a full recap of tonight plus a recap of our Boston blogger lunch tomorrow!
Did you know that 1 in 4 women will be the victim of a sex crime in her life? Did you know that only 1,000 of 18,000 sex offenders are actually registered? I am running the 2010 Boston Marathon for The ALLY Foundation’s Team ALLY in memory of Alexandra Nicole Zapp who was brutally murdered by a sex offender with 24 convictions. Despite his history and the high potential of a repeat offense, he was walking the streets freely, unbeknownst to the people in his community. My goal is to raise $3500 for The ALLY Foundation and to finish the Boston Marathon while also having fun training and meeting new people who share the same passion for community as I do. You can visit my fundraising page at firstgiving.com/meghanmalloyteamally. Every penny counts toward keeping all of us safer.
You can read more about this story here: http://www.theallyfoundation.org/PDF/LastExit_Nov2002.pdf I will warn you that this is a very graphic and quite disturbing account. Thank you for reading and for any support you can provide between now and April 19, 2010!
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