Bobby Flay, Deborah Madison

These two accomplished cookbook authors are helping us with our diet. Bobby Flay's Boy Gets Grill guided us through two great meals this weekend, while Deborah Madison's Local Flavors delivered a tasty side dish.

What appealed to me about the Tandoori Cornish hens recipe was the idea of these two little hens together on the rotisserie spit. The Tandoori marinade consisted of yogurt, ginger, and the usual curry spices, and the hens sat in that overnight. They were roasted to an internal temperature of 175 degrees and served on white onion slices chilled in ice water and cilantro sprigs. We had a tomato-avocado salad with them (summer is great!). Either you take the temperature differently for these little birds than you do for a chicken, or having them breast to breast on the spit kept the breast meat from getting done, so I had to put them back in the grill for a while -- but no harm done.

The other Flay recipe was for grilled chicken breasts with a delightful toasted chile sauce. I toasted the New Mexico chiles in a cast iron frying pan, removed the stem and seeds and chopped coarsely. The chile gets cooked in a concoction of canola oil, chopped red onion and garlic cloves, coconut milk and coconut cream, then mixed in a blender till smooth, with some honey and lime juice blended in at the end. The sauce, which has a lovely red color, gets strained and served over the grilled breasts topped with chopped cilantro. Neither too hot from the chiles nor too sweet from the coconut, the dish has a nice balanced flavor.

We paired it with waxed beans cooked in salt water and then mixed in with a peeled, seeded and chopped yellow tomato and shallots sauteed in butter and oil with chopped lemon thyme (so few recipes for this herb we grow in the garden). You are supposed to drizzle a little champagne vinegar over the vegetables, which I'm sure is nice, but which I forgot to do.

Pig roast

I generally refrain from writing about meals prepared by friends because an invitation to dinner is not really about the food -- it's a generous act of hospitality and "reviewing" the actual meal would be ungracious.

But this 60th birthday party thrown by friends in central New York state was more of a public feast than a private dinner and can be an exception to the rule. The idea of roasting a whole pig has something innately festive about it and our hosts' locavore approach to the whole party made it a celebration of a lifestyle in this area.

The pig, they wrote in the invitation, was growing in a field next door and was to be expertly cooked by a neighbor. A mushroom farmer just over the hill was to supply the vegetarian option in the form of mushroom burgers. A local cheesemaker, a native of the Netherlands, was providing a whole wheel of cheese. The beer was from a local craft brewery. The corn was picked the same day at a local farm and shucked just before cooking. Flowers were harvested at another local farm.

The pig was roasted in a large rusty smoker specially designed for the purpose over dried applewood logs and kept moist with a carefully tended drip pan full of water. It roasted from 5 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon, when it was removed and expertly carved by an enthusiastic crew. The buffet table had several salads along with the carved pork and corn and cheese, the beer was excellent, the weather was perfect, the music was great and it was a real feast! Who ever thought 60th birthday parties could be this much fun?

Thai X-ing

Now that Thai is considered the hottest cuisine among foodies, according to Bon Appetit, we decided to eat at the DC Thai restaurant that gets consistently rave reviews on Yelp. It is another example of how you can run a restaurant any number of ways -- their way is decidedly quirky.

First, it is BYOB, a rarity in DC. Second, it is prix fixe with a different formula each night -- all veggie, veggie with fish option, meat-fish-veggie nights, etc. Prices are higher on the weekend and higher again for parties of 5 or more. Third, it is housed in a small row house on Florida and dining rooms are on two separate floors with service managed by walkie-talkie (have no idea where the kitchen is, maybe basement). Fourth, there are no written menus.

The food is great -- very fresh and authentic and super-plentiful. For the amount and quality of food served, it is a bargain at $40 per person (Friday nights). One thing we learned is that you should not eat every dish that is served but have at least one packed up to take home.

Our three appetizers included a soup with a cucumber stuffed with sausage meat. The broth was tangy with scallions and cilantro (as were most dishes) and probably some chiles, too. A second starter was a type of slaw that we understood to be papaya, but it was crunchy and not sweet so maybe it was something else. The third was a cold marinated beef with greens. The main courses included chicken with green beans and pork spareribs with a vegetable. The piece de resistance, however, was the salmon with pumpkin curry, an incredibly tasty dish where the spicy curry, the tender braised salmon and the soft pumpkin all harmonized to make a perfectly delectable dish. All the sauces in fact were great.

I'm sure we will go back at some point because the food is so good, and it will be interesting to see how much the menu varies with the seasons. However, we will not rush back because some of the sturm and drang that accompanies the service does distract from the experience. The walkie-talkies -- even the busboy has one -- blare more or less incessantly and are unpleasant. The service itself was very amateurish -- the food runners and busboys acted as if it was the first time they had done this (maybe it was vacation replacements?). We got all our food in a timely fashion, but it seemed touch and go the whole time. Also, the service on two floors via a stairwell that gives on to the street was a bit intrusive. You bring your own wine or beer, but if you want a wine glass, you have to bring that, too -- otherwise you just get a second water glass. Finally, there's no reason really not to have a written menu, even if it is a prix fixe at the chef's discretion with no substitutions. It would be nice to know what you're eating.

Olives & Oranges

I've often praised this cookbook by Sara Jenkins and Mindy Fox and thought it would be a good resource for our effort to eat more healthily. It has not disappointed and I used three recipes from it when we had guests over for dinner.

The roast chicken zata'ar was straightforward -- just smear a mix of butter, garlic and zata'ar spice mix under the skin of chicken, stuff onion, thyme and lemon peel into the cavity and roast at 425 for 15 minutes and then another hour or so at 350. The recipe says to roast to 165 internal temperature, but I would probably prefer to leave it in a while longer.

We accompanies with the pan-roasted asparagus that entailed frying some bacon and then roasting the asparagus in the bacon grease and topping with a hard-boiled egg pressed through a sieve and the butter-enriched grease from the pan. The third dish was yellow and red tomatoes cut into sections and topped with cilantro (or fresh coriander seeds if available) and feta and drizzled with oil and sherry vinegar.

Very Mediterranean, very tasty and a great little menu.

Dieting

I've succumbed to the inevitable and embarked on a weight-loss program. We decided to jump-start it with the Cabbage Soup diet, a quirky 7-day program that promises a loss of up to 10 lbs. In our case, it was about 9-1/2 pounds each. It is a cleansing diet based on the eponymous cabbage soup and is essentially a low-cal, high-fiber diet.

Now we are embarking on a Salad Week to keep the weight-loss momentum going. The plan going forward is to reduce portion size and to severely reduce carbohydrate and particularly gluten consumption to change our eating habits in favor of foods with a lower glycemic index.