This photo is another that I took while I was out for a run. I was in Cuba with my dad, I went for a run along Havana’s ocean front walkway and seawall called El Malecón. The image I saw before taking this photo is one of those that I could completely imagine as a great photo. I initially ran right on by before it clicked in that I had to go back, it was only about 20 yards before I turned back to capture this moment. The fisherman in the forefront in complete shadow with the waves breaking onto him, the bright sun and the Havana skyline behind him, I had to have it.
The link below is a blog post that I published soon after returning from Cuba. The post will tell you all about our trip, why and where we went, it also has a number of other photos that you may enjoy.
I showed this photo to my slightly older and immensely wiser brother, Steve, when he referred to the building as Motif #1, I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. I thought what the f*#k is a Motif #1. Now that I am writing this post I thought that it might be prudent to find out the origin of it’s moniker. So I googled it…
This Boston Magazine article has all the information that you will need-
To me this iconic red fishing shack is synonymous with Rockport, it brings back memories of summer visits on my father’s boat(s), as well as on my own sailboat, where we would just tie up to the pier and head into Rockport, usually for ice cream. I have even docked at the pier overnight on a couple of occasions. No one ever said we couldn’t and we never gave it a second thought. Now, I’m sure you would be asked to leave or you would have to pay some outlandish fee to tie up to this or any other pier in Rockport.
I took this photo in June of 2021. It was a hot day and we were still dealing with the effects of COVID 19. Colleen and I were off from work, EVOO was still closed and the kids classes were all online. We decided to take advantage of the beautiful day and have some quality family time. We headed up to Rockport, do a little sightseeing, a possible plunge into the frigid North Atlantic at Front Beach, followed by local seafood at The Lobster Pool.
Taking the photo wasn’t as easy as it should have been. We parked in a public lot near the Motif, not a hundred yards from where I took the photo. It was a picturesque day, I saw the little red building that I always associated with Rockport and I started directly to the end of an apposing pier, where it looked like I would be able to take advantage of what looked to be great photo opportunity. I didn’t get 10 yards before a professional looking woman holding a clipboard said that I couldn’t go any further along the pier. I shrugged and kept going, I wanted this photo. By the time I got to the end of the pier and quickly took my photos, the woman was right behind with the back-up of a couple more officious looking people, still yapping that I wasn’t supposed be there. She was saying something about having rented the space for the afternoon. I recall saying something about it being a public space and for her to have a nice day. After we backed away we noticed that there was a film crew there. I have no idea what they were filming, however I do know that they didn’t want to film me.
Anyway, I took the photos and they came out great. Now when I see the photo on Za’s wall, with that one shot, I have 3 generations of memories, my childhood with my parents and siblings, being there on my own sailboat, as well as being shooed away by some film people with my kids.
Recently a longtime guest of ours asked if they could buy the photo; they also claim to have some family memories of Rockport. Being a businessman, who am I to say no, we sold them the photo. Don’t worry, I have the original and have already ordered another enlargement to made, it will soon adorn the wall of Za once again.
In April of 2015, Me, Colleen and our kids Shane,10 at the time and Caitlin then 7, did a family vacation during the kids school April break. We first drove to Washington D.C. where we did all the usual touristy things. We visited the Lincoln monument, walked through and discussed the Viet Nam War Memorial. We got up at some ungodly hour for the opportunity to go in and up the Washington Monument. We also went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, as well as the Museum of American History. We strolled by the White House and waved to “Uncle Barry and Auntie Shelly”. It was a great few days, as usual I took many photos, none of which made it to the heralded walls of Za.
From D. C. we drove to NYC, well Hoboken, NJ, where My sister had a condo and was kind enough to let us squat for a few days. The location was great, very convenient. To get into Manhattan, from the condo it was a 3 minute walk, followed by a 15 minute ferry ride and boom there you are right downtown. As with D.C. we did all of the touristy things. Strolled through Time Square, did the Empire State Building thing, walked the Hi-Line, Had dinner at Jonathan Waxman’s (one of my favorite chefs) restaurant, Barbuto, in the Meat Packing District.
The next day the weather was perfect, not a cloud in the sky, a slight breeze and temps in the low 70’s, we took a ferry out to see the Statue of Liberty. The statue was open and we were able to climb the stairs up to the observation deck in Lady Liberty’s crown. We had a great day, as I mentioned the weather was perfect, I was with my family and I got to go on a boat ride; not much could be better.
With the perfect conditions I was able to get some great shots of the statue, including this one. I had the photo enlarged and placed on the wall when we did our most recent renovations in 2021. This photo gets a lot of comments, including, surprising to me, “what is it”?. Since I took the photo I know exactly what it is and with a quick glance I can almost understand the question. Most people do figure it out quickly though.
I am an avid photo taker, not a photographer. I take lots of photos, some of them have come out pretty good; with the amount of photos I take, I’m bound to get a few good ones. Over the years and throughout our travels I have always made it a point to take photos. Since cellphones have had decent cameras they have been my go to and only camera.
All of the photos on the walls of Za, with the exception of 2 photos of windjammer sailboats hung in the men’s room, are photos that I took with whatever cellphone I had at the time. The 2 windjammer photos were taken from an old 35mil camera of mine, back in the 90’s, before the prevalence of cellphone cameras.
My plan is to share some of these images on this blog, telling you a bit about each photo along the way.
Under the Zakim.
While working at EVOO and Za in Kendall Square I would fit some exercise into my schedule by either going to the gym located upstairs from the restaurants or weather permitting I would go for a run. One of my favorite running routes was to head out from EVOO through east Cambridge, Cambridge Crossing, under the Zakim Bridge, across the Charles River locks, through the North End, Faneuil Hall, City Hall, down Cambridge Street and over the Longfellow Bridge back to EVOO.
It’s a great route, Past an awesome skate park, along the Charles, next to the Gahden, looking out on Boston Harbor, past the old Houlihan’s space, where Colleen and I met in 1984. Past the Bostonian Hotel where I worked from ’87 to 97′. There’s a lot of things to look throughout this route including a bunch of American and personal history.
Taking photos during a run was not a one-off thing, you will see in future blog posts about Za photos. I would often stop mid-run to take a photo, there are several other running photos that have made the cut to be hung on the walls of Za. If I saw something that caught my eye, thinking it was cool or that I thought would make a nice photo, I stopped took a quick photo an moved on.
This photo of the Zakim Bridge was taken in August of 2019 and is one of those that I thought, hey this looks cool, so I stopped and took a picture. This photo has also made the rounds. I first had a canvas enlargement made for Za Arlington. we need something on the wall in the men’s room. I also had a copy made for home, to hang in one of our guest bedrooms. I then had a very large canvas made 30×48 and hung it at Za Cambridge for about 5 years until we closed that location. Now the very large canvas hangs in Za Arlington.
Bluefish… “blecchkk”, “it’s too fishy”, It’s too strong”, “it’s oily”.
Ahhhm, no, no, no and no!
Bluefish in the hands of someone who knows how to cook it, is an amazing versatile fish. Canned tuna and smoked salmon are perennial favorites to most and are way fishier, stronger and oilier than bluefish. Treat her right and you will end up with some great results.
Enter our end of summer bluefish:
cobb smoked Bluefish Fillet with corn risotto, grilled zucchini, tomato-basil relish and spiced popcorn
This dish is a hyper-local ode to New England. The fish is from the Cape, The corn and basil are from Verrill Farm in Concord, the zucchini is from Wards Berry Farm in Sharon, the tomatoes are from Kimball Fruit Farm in Pepperrell and the popping corn is from Hurricane Flats, in S. Royalton, VT. You can’t get much more local than this. We have been making this dish for many years. Some years, unlike this one, local peaches are available and we substitute peaches for the tomatoes in the relish.
To prepare this dish, first we fillet, portion and then brine the fish in a salt, brown sugar, water solution in the refrigerator overnight. The next day we give it a quick hot-ish smoke, over corn cobbs, (that have been dehydrated and are left over from making the risotto), being careful to not cook the fish through. At this point we’re looking to just add some smoke flavor and not cook the fish. The cobb smoke really shines with bluefish, it’s offers a sweet and not too pungent smoke flavor.
bluefish fillets in our smokerdehydrated corn cobbs, ready for the smoker
When an order comes into the kitchen we take a portion, give it a healthy dusting of our not so secret spice mix and pop it in a pan with a mixture of white wine, garlic and vegetable stock and into a hot, 450 degree oven. Then we bake it until it’s just cooked through. This could be anywhere from 3 to 9 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fillet. The best way to test the doneness of fish is with a cake tester, after a few minutes of cooking poke the thickest part of the fillet with the cake tester, if there is a change in resistance, it needs to cook longer, if it slides right through, it’s done.
I know this is a great dish, customers have been raving about it since it first hit our menu. However it was validated by the Great American Seafood Cook-off, an annual cooking contest held in New Orleans. In 2016 I was asked to represent Massachusetts. Of course, I was happy to do it; a weekend in The Big Easy, yes please. I went with Mark Dieffenbach, one of EVOO’s longtime sous chefs. I chose to cook this dish because, to me, it really does represent summer in Massachusetts and that was what I was asked to do. We had a blast, eating great food, a bit of drinking and I kind of remember some late night bowling with shots of whisky, and, oh yeah a cooking contest… We placed third, I wanted to win and if I said I was happy with third, I’d be lying.
not first placeMark digging the New Orleans vibes
Now let me digress, I have a family bluefish memory. It’s from when I was probably 8 or 10 years old. Some weekends my father would hook up with some of his buddies, head out on his boat in the Boston area or go to the cape on one of his friend’s boats to go fishing. Their goal was to to catch striped bass, but, inevitably the catch was bluefish, which my dad would bring home. My mom, a woman who’s lips, very rarely, if at all, allowed fish or any seafood what-so-ever to pass, would dutifully put the catch into the freezer and ultimately into the trash. However, one time, I’m thinking she wasn’t too happy with dad going fishing again, so she decided to cook it. She took the whole fish, guts, scales and all, covered it with mayonnaise, don’t ask me why, because I don’t know, and into the oven it went. About 2 hours later, which is at least an hour too long. Sunday dinner was served. The whole dried out stinking mess right in the middle of the dining room table. To my young eyes, it was scary. When mom served us fish, it was in the form of frozen fish sticks, never mind this big whole fish with sunken cooked out eyes and jutting teeth. I don’t think that anyone, including my father actually did anything more than poke at it. The stink of overcooked fish and guts remained for days. That was the only time that I can remember bluefish being cooked at home. On top of that my dad’s fishing trips with his buddy’s were scaled way back; I think he wanted Sunday dinner to remain as the usual- roasted meat and potatoes. This experience embedded lasting scars, it was a good 15 years until I tried bluefish again, not that I really tried it the first time. Which is another degression for a future blog post about fishing while sailing and cooking our catch.
grilled roasted garlic studded pastured MA Beef Tenderloin with sour cream whipped potatoes and orange bearnaise.
This dish has been on our menu since we opened in June of ’98. Yeah, that’s 25 years of making the same dish over and over again. We have perfected it.
I came up with this dish while I was still the chef of The Bostonian Hotel and it’s since closed, highly acclaimed restaurant Seasons. I was roasting lamb legs for a sandwich we had on the lunch menu, for extra flavor we would poke holes in the meat and stuff them with garlic before popping them into the oven. While the legs roasted the garlic would also cook seeping mellow sweet slightly caramelized garlic flavor into the meat. This process got me thinking about doing the same thing with individual beef tenderloin steaks. Since the beef would cook much faster than the lamb, I thought that using garlic that was already roasted would work with similar results. I was right, this dish is fantastic. The dish never made on to the Seasons menu, it came close though. I was planning on adding it to the fall menu when I decided that after almost 10 years at the hotel it was time for me to move on and open my own place. I knew then that this dish was coming with me and would be the star of EVOO’s menu for the foreseeable future, I was right.
The pastured beef we use is almost exclusively from Carne Locale, a Waltham, MA, based company, run by Andy Carbone. Andy works directly with Massachusetts livestock farms distributing their products to some of the areas finest restaurants.
The vegetable accompaniments change with as the local growing seasons change. Depending on the time of year you can get it served with carrots, mushrooms, broccoli, asparagus or as we are now serving it with green beans.
An testament to the love that this dish receives, my wife has often commented, hopefully jokingly, that she would “dump my ass” if I ever took it off the menu. So it remains…
Continuing with the lamb we received from Feather Brook Farm- A sandwich on our lunch menu.
Slices of Roast Lamb Leg with Smoked Cloumage, Pickled Green Tomatoes, Lettuce, Red Onion and Carolina White Barbecue Sauce on Mark’s Cumin Focaccia
lamb leg in the immersion circulator
We marinated the legs in a mixture of garlic and spices and then sous vide’ the legs at 137 degrees for 3 hours. We then chilled them in an ice bath, finally put a nice sear on them before slicing them.
The cloumage is an artisanal fresh, creamy cheese from Shy Brothers Farm in Westport MA, which we smoked in our backroom smoker. The Lettuce was grown in The Food Project’s greenhouse in Roxbury, MA. We pickled the Kimball Fruit Farm’s green tomatoes last September. Mark our excellent lunch sous chef made the Focaccia.
Sous vide, which means “under vacuum” in French, refers to the process of vacuum-sealing food in a bag, then cooking it to a very precise temperature in a water bath. This technique produces results that are impossible to achieve through any other cooking method. – Anovaculinary
Our sous vide station.
I have been cooking for a long time, starting in the late 1970’s. First as a prep cook in a neighborhood restaurant, while in high school, making beer money. I had no passion for food at the time. I was still feeling my way through life, not sure what I was going to do. Slowly, and I mean really slowly, I found that I not only was pretty good at cooking, I was actually enjoying it. Looking back I don’t think it was the food that I was falling for. Rather, I was an impressionable young man who enjoyed the camaraderie, the manual work and the fact that a free beer was never far from reach. However, the more I cooked and discovered new foods my passion finally blossomed…I digress.
This post is supposed to be about sous vide, my digression stems from- In those many years of cooking there have been a few techniques or processes that I have learned which have changed the way I cook and think about food. Cooking sous vide is probably the biggest one for me, with whole animal butchery / charcuterie being a close second (see my 10 part “Death of a Pig” blog post).
When I first encountered cooking sous vide I remember thinking- cooking something in a pot of water in a plastic bag…how lame; what skill does that take? Well, I was quite wrong.
About 14 years ago we started experimenting using a big pot of water, Ziplock Bags and an instant read thermometer on a burner where we would constantly check the temp and adjust the heat. I quickly realized that this was a great cooking method. We could perfectly cook a piece of meat ahead of time, taking the guess work and timing with a lot more possibilities of screwing something up out of the equation. Once the meat was cooked ahead of time, perfectly, all we had to do is once the customer ordered and it was time to pick-up the meat all you had to do give a quick sear to the meat and serve it. No more inexperienced cook fucking-up an expensive piece of meat.
lamb leg in the immersion circulator
lamb loin going into an ice bath after being immersed
duck confit, made sous vide
Our experiments started with meats using the ziplock method, now we have several immersion circulators and a restaurant size vacuum sealer that are in constant use cooking all sorts of different things; red meats, burgers, chicken, vegetables, eggs, fish and even an occasional pudding for part of a dessert. Gone are the days of over cooked chicken breast (sorry, Trisha), every chicken breast we serve is moist and tender.
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My initial trepidation was replaced with “why wouldn’t we cook this way”…a little bit more forethought (prep before service) equals serving a better, more consistent product, it only makes sense.
Sous vide cooking is not just for the professional kitchen, My Anovaimmersion circulator and FoodSaver vacuum sealer have been an integral parts of my home kitchen for the past 10 years.
I highly recommend all cooks- pros, wanna-be pros and amateurs to get into sous vide cooking.
The below link is to an informative article in Bon Appetit Magazine.
Just like I said in the previous post- ” the chops will sell out quickly”, they did. We’re on to the loins, which also will be gone fast.
I marinated the loins with a lot of herbs, shallots, garlic, mustard and EVOO
Next I vacuum sealed them and sous vide them for 2 hours at 137 degrees.
lamb loin going into an ice bath after being immersed
At pick-up I seasoned the loins with kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper and then seared the loins.
After letting the it sit for a few minutes I put a few thick slices on the plate with the rest of the ingredients. The final result is perfectly cooked and absolutely delicious!
Farmer Tad from Featherbrook Farm in Raynham, MA brought us a lamb. It’s our first lamb in a long while, unfortunately our long-time supplier of local lamb bought-the-farm and we had been looking for a new supplier.
Tad, who already brings us chickens, rabbits and eggs mentioned to me that he was growing a few lamb and wanted to know if we were interested in one of them. I jumped right on it, telling him we would happily take one of them off his hands.
Tad’s lamb awaiting processing
We have a long history of serving locally produced lamb. I have been butchering and cooking them since long before we opened EVOO. I became quite proficient at it; I would time myself to see how long it would take to butcher the lamb into the desired pieces for roasting and braising. I can easily break-down a lamb in less than 7 minutes; my record is 2 lambs in 11 minutes. Keep in mind butchering is my least favorite job to do in the kitchen, I’m a closest wanna-be vegetarian and I just want to get it done as quickly as I can. The below video of me breaking-down a lamb is a couple of years old.
We have already started serving the chops with some braised meat:
Herb Marinated Grilled LambChops and BraisedLamb with Roasted Fingerling Potatoes, Crushed Olives, Pickled Cauliflower, Parsley, Marcona Almonds, Goat’s Milk Feta and Mint Salsa Verde
Being just one lamb there are not a lot of chops, even paired with braised lamb meat we will only have 7 orders before we switch the chops out with roasted loin which will only make an additional 5-6 orders. Later this week or perhaps the beginning of next we will have a roasted lamb leg sandwich on the lunch menu and a braised lamb dish, possibly a pasta dish. Then it will be gone…
loins to be sous vide
legs waiting to be marinated, roasted and sliced for sandwiches
