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McGill University, 1970: The women's residence was Royal Victoria College, and you had to apply to get in. The food was standard meat and veg, but the setting was incomparable. Sunday breakfast(and maybe breakfast in general, which I usually skipped) was served in a cafeteria, but lunch and dinner were served in a large, high ceilinged dining room. There was a head table, at which the Warden and Assistant Wardens dined, in their red blazers. You had to wait until they sat down before you sat down. Seating was eight to a dark wood varnished table, and you were served family style at each table by servers in white aprons. There was one seating, and if you were late, you had to take whatever was still on a table. There were different china settings for lunch and dinner, and I think there were tablecloths at dinner. If something was really good, the trick was to sit at a table near the kitchen door and snag platters/bowls with anything leftover as they were being carried back to the kitchen from other tables. After a semester, several of us moved out and into the first co-ed dorm in the province. The next year, RVC went entirely to cafeteria food. Food up at Bishop Mountain Hall was industrial, and the food service manager was regularly excoriated by the residents through evening shouting matches between the dorms. Pizza orders went through the roof on steak and kidney pie nights.

Bove's used to be the only "ethnic" restaurant in the Burlington area - in the 60's, I don't think there was even a Chinese restaurant in town. Having shrimp cocktail at the Lincoln Inn on New Year's Eve was a big deal when I was a kid. The current menu doesn't look so good, though. The UVM dairy bar was into premium ice cream a decade before Ben and Jerry. When the IBM folks moved into the area in the mid-60's, they started wanting all these exotic foods like bagels....and things took off from there.

This may be too late for your trip, and if so, you may have found out already that the Falmouth Hearth and Kettle has just closed - dropping business over time. Nothing new has emerged in the past year, that I can tell, except for a raw bar down on the Harbor, which I have yet to patronize although it opened this summer. Looks more like a summer watering hole, with a huge bar, TV screens etc. In the DIY department, the local Stop and Shop was running an instore chicken lobster special for $5.99/lb last week. Falmouth Fish Market and Cataumet Fish Market are open year-round, and seem to be able to get local cod.

The North American Dover sole Microstomus pacificus inhabits the outer shelf/upper shelf break, concentrated off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and northern California but extending further north and south. This species belongs to the family Pleuronectidae, while the European species Solea solea belongs to the suborder or family of "true soles" (Soleidae).

How far in advance do you need to make these? I've had some luck placing each pasta sheet on a layer of plastic wrap, and wrapping each one individually, which has kept things flexible for at least a couple of hours. You might be able to do this the night before and store in a cool moist place (like between two pretty damp towels).

My dinner party guests are almost always my friends and family, who come with exuberant senses of humor. Thus, we all share the perspective that experimentation and any attendant risk of "failure" represents potential entertainment. The best memories have come from howling with laughter at what it took to melt the smoked gouda on top of the eggplant tart (not the recommended oven setting, not 450, not the broiler, hey, what happens with a blow torch and what is this gouda made of, anyhow? ). Another course at the same party, a mirin-marinated glazed mahi-mahi with tomato coulis and Chinese greens was a much more tasty experimental success, but is fading much faster from memory. I generally try to avoid "affairs of state" dinners with potentially stodgy invitees I don't know very well, but if I have to, then I guess I'd go with the boring and reliable (and ply them with wine in hopes of de-stodgifying them.... ).

Cleaning tip from someone who would rather cook than clean: get some big plastic Rubbermaid "junk bunkers", throw all clutter into them, and stash them in closets, in the basement or in a room where noone's going to go.... And if this is a new house, and you have bottled propane gas running your stove, check the gauge sometime this week. Edited to add: I second the "cooking wine" approach.....

Related gas range blooper: Brined a turkey overnight, got up and made the stuffing and popped the bird into the oven. Headed out with family and dog for long walk along beach in balmy sunshine. Got back and found that the turkey was already at 174. Rushed around assembling mashed potatoes, squash, turnip, braised Brussel sprouts w/pancetta, cranberry sauce and gravy. Fortunately, I had speedy help. Went to light the burner under cranberry sauce, and got confused: flame which was supposed to be on "high" looked low. All flames on "high" looked low. Checked propane tank outside: absolutely zero. Shook our heads in jovial disbelief. Broke out the microwave and the Coleman camp stove, and saved the apps, green bean dish and sweet potatoes for another day. Turkey was juicy moist, and everything was delicious. Picture of cooking on camp stove and accompanying story will last for the rest of our lives.

It wouldn't meet your seafood focus, but Osteria Civetta [spelling?] just opened on Main Street down towards the bank. So far, so good. The menu is relatively small, the young proprietress is from Bologna, and the vibe is informal bistro cozy. Homemade tagliatelle with ragu was light and well-spiced. There are about three or four appetizers, about four pasta dishes, four meats, and four or so sides (rosemary potatoes, cauliflower gratin, mixed salad). There's also a couple of cheese plates, one appetizer and one main. Portions are not the ridiculous five pounds of food on a plate. I didn't inspect the wine list or dessert list too closely, unfortunately. Out of the three Italian places on Main Street now, I'd definitely rank it tops, and probably tops for the immediate area.

In Falmouth, MA, a new place called Pie a la Mode had baked beans during the winter and offers them frozen during the summer. They're a bit on the sweet side. The "bean gravy" is a bit thin for my taste, but has onions and is tasty.

Unless you're from Maine. In that case, you have to eat B&M Baked Beans. Or they'd have to kill you. ← Exactly. Every Saturday night. With ham or franks, and brown bread sometimes. Home-baked beans require monitoring the water level while they bake. One upstanding church member would always bring a pot of beans to church potluck suppers, and they'd always be dry. Canned beans (B&M!) doctored with a little molasses, chopped onion, and mustard were preferable to hers. Maybe this guy had a similar experience.... Hmm - church supper items already mentioned here: chicken pie, yes! How about a lovely jello fruit salad? Spanish rice? Stuffed roasted chicken/turkey? Ham with green beans? Winter squashes, baked. Cross common crackers - with cheddar or chowder..... Cross common crackers

Oooh, the shoe thing. I hate that. I have an aversion to walking around in my socks or stockings. If I'm first-time guest, I have an special aversion to being surprised by this policy at the front door - now I'm sentenced to an evening of cold feet and potentially snagged stockings. If I know it's a no-shoe house ahead of time, at least I have a chance to bring an indoor alternative of my own choosing. Shoes are part of adult attire and behavior, however. I suppose that one advantage to not wearing shoes in the house is that you can put your feet up on the coffee table, too? I've seen a hostess with a no-shoes policy in a gorgeous silk skirt and sweater set, accessorized with a pair of ugly grey felt bedroom slippers. Nice. Have your guests wipe their feet at the door. Get decent doormats. Put more than one in a row in front of the door and down the hall - folks should get the idea, and their soles should be fairly grit free by the time they hit the bare floor. Alternatively, at least warn your guests ahead of time. Generally, my dinner guests are friends who are adventurous eaters with good senses of humor. I feel fine experimenting on them with new recipes, and if it turns out that I get behind, they are happy to come up with creative ways to wrap shrimp wontons as they help out. I too believe that if folks want a restaurant experience, they should go to a restaurant. If someone brings wine, I'll generally start with what I've planned. As the evening progresses, if the gifters indicated that the wine can be drunk now, and the wine looks like it'll fit in, I'll break it out. Cleaning up is one of my favorite things. In the quiet afterwards, I think about the evening, load the dishwasher, wash the wineglasses, and only leave hard-core pots requiring overnight soaking. I like to come downstairs the next morning to some semblance of order, rather than facing the wreckage in the cold light of day.

The operative concept being proper refrigeration unit throughout the process....The local Stop and Shop in Falmouth, MA had Maine shrimp for $4.95 a lb recently, and although I usually never buy fish there, I figured I'd give it a try. Big mistake. Got it home and took one whiff of the bag - ammonia. Rinsed them off well, cooked them, shelled them and still got the ammonia. (Although I usually go to a local fish market instead of a supermarket, I naively thought that they'd be a little more aware of product handling, especially since their prices are almost the same as the fish market's.) This isn't helping the market for this product.

I guess I'd put Bellinis in the same category as mimosas as a breakfast drink. (Or for an alternative approach, my sister, in a comparison of Orkney malts, described Scapa thusly: "It's a good breakfast Scotch.")

Where on Monkland? Monkland Tavern? Or, there was a high-end trattoria on Monkland for a while (Tratt 48 or something?), which now has re-opened as a bistro with little Italian emphasis? Or...?

Moxie. If you're a northern New Englander, especially Mainiac, it's the soda equivalent of Campari. Otherwise, it would taste like something you'd use to take the rust out of your car radiator. Mmmm....

Last week for a trip from Boston to SFO I put together a little container with smoked salmon, cream cheese and capers; a second one with a nice egg salad with more capers, garlic, chives and parsley; and a third with sage Cheddar cheese and grapes. I stuck all the little plastic containers into a bag with a freezer pack, some cocktail rye adn crackers, and a party paper plate and napkins. Alas, the plane was completely packed, cramped, and poorly ventilated, so I didn't have the heart to open the smoked salmon or the egg salad, and I was reduced to the cheese and grapes and wishful thinking. Drat. On the way home, since I was already lugging two jumbo Dungeness crabs on another freezer pack, I got the turkey/cranberry/something else wrap AA was peddling for in-flight food. It exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations.

Crescent Dragonwagon's cookbook has a recipe for a salad that includes sliced roasted beet, sliced orange, and sliced red onion, with mixed field greens and a mango vinagrette with small banana dice included at the end. As Dragonwagon notes, she was sceptical of banana and onion, but it goes well.

We made a beet/orange/red onion salad from the Crescent Dragonwagon cookbook as part of a vegetarian dinner last weekend. The beet was roasted and sliced, the orange and red onion sliced, and arranged on a red lettuce leaf and augmented with mesclun. The dressing was a mango vinaigrette with fine-chopped banana (!) added at the last minute. Sounded strange but looked and tasted great.

There's one time a year that I really crave a stand mixer, and that's a couple of weeks before Christmas. Although I usually don't bake a lot during the rest of the year, I try to cram it all in making all sorts of Christmas cookies. A hand mixer just isn't fun to cream butter and sugar for nights on end... If you have the space to store it, go for the stand.

Late one college summer, out of sympathy with a friend who was was looking for company, I got a job at Howard Johnson's. (This was back when the earth's crust was warm.) We both worked the fountain/counter. I'd previously worked as a waitress in a restaurant with white tablecloth pretentions, so it was a hoot to wear a hairnet, wipe down counters and build monstrous ice cream cones and sundaes for friends who happened in. I loved making ice cream sodas, trying to get the foam on the top just right, and then adding a scoop of ice cream with the right amount of "lip" on the edge to stick on the top of the glass. The management was a joke, and the working atmosphere was pretty dreadful. Helen, a hardboiled old career waitress, was alleged to be involved in an affair with the manager, and so got preferential treatment in terms of shifts and lorded it over the rest of us. There was a perennial and inexplicable shortage of silverware. Billy, one of the cooks, would periodically have a tantrum attack and go into the walk-in, open up a case of canned whipped cream, and snort the nitrous off. When we needed more whipped cream, we'd have to test each can in the walk-in to make sure it had propellent in it - some nights he'd go through an entire case. The delivery truck would slide piles of frozen food through a chute into the freezer. I was amazed to learn that all the food on the menu was frozen. If the kitchen was short-staffed, the food would just sit there in the freezer in a huge heap - we'd have to walk on top of packages of those blueberry muffin things or breaded cutlets to get more ice cream. I can't remember the meal policy, but aside from the ice cream, there wasn't much you'd want to eat after that. I had a soft spot in my heart for the old folks. One dignified old man would come in and just order a dish of strawberry ice cream. One woman would come in once in a while and order a cup of clam chowder. I always tried to give them the best service, because they were alone and this seemed to be a special treat for them. I learned one reason why they had pictures of the food on the menu when a carnival set up in a nearby parking lot. The midway workers would come in after they closed down for the night and one guy would order by pointing to the pictures. Before that, I'd never run across an adult who couldn't read. My friend and I went back to school in the fall. The next year, the place was closed and then morphed into a Friendly's. I never checked to see if Helen was still working there.

We went to T. J. Buckley's the Saturday before Memorial Day to celebrate my brother's 50th - dscot might have even been there with us! It was a truly memorable meal. We ordered one of each appetizer to share around the table - a smoked trout tartlet, a Stilton and artichoke tartlet, and a pate. The pate was garnished with some razor-fine fans of small apple and pear slices and was accompanied by a grainy mustard and a fruit chutney with some real zing (plus crackers etc. ) I'd vote the pate plate the most interesting in terms of variety of flavors and textures, although the smoked trout tartlet was a very close second, light and creamy with whisps of smoke. Salad was arranged almost leaf by leaf, with a watermelon daikon thin petalled "rose" , a random cherry tomato or so, random small bits of cheese, and perfect greens with vinaigrette. We ordered three of the four entrees - we had three duplicates on the beef where folks were hooked by the accompanying wild mushrooms. The beef was very tender and tasty and came with mashed potatoes (my taste wasn't big enough to figure out the flavoring). My vote would go for the seared diver scallops with carrot-sage oil, served over thin wedges of polenta, in turn over some thin slices of very large sweet beets, a sweet-ish surprise at the very bottom of the plate. The scallops were topped with sauteed green and were large, meaty, tender and sweet. The birthday boy had guinea hen over a white bean and something (lentil?) - can't remember the veg garnish, and said it was juicy and tasty. Desserts were mixed berry shortcake with buttermilk ice cream, a molten chocolate thingy, a fruit tart I think with ginger ice cream, and a burnt sugar ice cream with a carmelized tuille-ish (?) cookie with a couple of raspberries. The burnt sugar ice cream was surprisingly unsweet - the cookie was an integral part. I'd go for the shortcake again. The place is amazingly small, and the kitchen is open. The "ballet" description is absolutely right on and especially fitted the woman making the cold plates - artistically thin, she would deliberately and steadily put together these artistic salads, fine slices, and garnishes that were works of art. It was one of the calmest, most measured kitchens I have ever seen. The operation has two sittings a night, 6:30 and 8:30. Our reservations were for the the early sitting. If/when I were to go again, I'd go for the second sitting - I'd rather wait a bit if necessary rather than feel that at 8:30 someone was waiting for my table. The chef had never seen us before but gave us a cheerful greeting on our way out the door. Yes, definitely the higher end of the local price scale, but off the end of the local cuisine scale.

I agree 100% that naked lobster is always better either at home or at a shoreside picnic table. Table gets covered with newspapers, extra napkins are set out, butter is melted, chips poured out of a bag into a bowl, dill pickles quartered, beer bottle lids popped (or sometimes wine, for the diehard winos), and bugs get steamed (in salt water with sea weed, if available) just until done. Simple and excellent. After a couple of over-cooked baked stuffed lobsters that tasted more like stuffing than lobster, I'm afraid I gave up on those. Lobster in cream/sherry sauces I find too often loses that delicate sea-fresh sweetness that you get in the fresh-steamed variety. Melted butter is really too much. (Sounds like I'm looking at getting the big pot out of the basement this weekend....)

While staying in a small hotel in Tasmania early in my career, I noticed spaghetti on toast on the breakfast room service menu. This was the first time I'd heard of this, and figured it was some local unique dish prepared as a treat for the guests. A couple of Japanese colleagues down the hall apparently must have thought so as well, but acted on their curiosity before I did. I know because I saw an untouched plate of plain old canned spaghetti in tomato sauce on toast out in the hall on the tray late the second morning, along with the usual breakfast wreckage. (I can't imagine what sort of shock this might have been, especially if one's English wasn't that good.....) I gave it a miss myself and saved the adventure for the seafood.

Re: fish on planes. I used to subscribe to the fish option when there was a choice of specifying ahead of time. That turned out well enough on one flight when they'd neglected to pack a fish meal for coach, and the flight attendant filched me a business class meal of salmon with the fixings. The next time, however, I was served a lump of completely overcooked fish. The fish itself wasn't off-flavored, just absolutely overdone. According to the flight attendant, the temperature of the heating ovens varies from plane to plane, and rarely is a poorly-calibrated oven reported to mainentance. When it is, it is often at the bottom of the priority list for repair before the plane is turned around. Her recommendation was to specify a fruit plate, because that was the toughest thing for anyone to screw up.