The Surgeon

Graduate student austerity means no smoked salmon, an inhumane bit of belt-tightening for a New Yorker. Thankfully, my folks were in town recently, and so we're suddenly swimming in Nova, and I've been doing up lox-onions-and-eggs scrambles for breakfast whenever I have no bus to catch in the morning.

Pregnant cousin, oven roasted tomatoes

I've never really considered making sun-dried tomatoes, and I'm still not sure I will, given how time-consuming the process appears. But it's apparently not a particularly complicated operation. The caterer at a baby shower for my wife's cousin let me in on the recipe for her "oven-roasted" tomatoes. It seems she just halves tomatoes, adds some olive oil and seasoning and roasts them at super low heat for a few hours, flipping them once. Even without any marinating, they were delicious, topped with crumbled feta. (For the record, I wasn't invited to the actual shower, but I sneaked some leftovers the next day.)




Summer Hill Catering, in Madison, CT, also served up lox with dill sauce as a passed hors d'oeuvre. For dessert: intricately constructed, absurdly sugary, double frosted cup cakes from a local pastry chef.