ErstwhileEditor

Real Name:

Jean B.

Location:

Massachusetts

Best meal I ever ate:

How can I possibly pick one? Maybe the tasting menu at a long-defunct French restaurant in Boston. Or a meal in Japan (not necessarily, but possibly, Japanese). Or the meal where I first discovered shrimp paste (I happened to cook that one). Or ???

My current drink of choice:

Heh. Again, hard to choose one. raspberry-limeade? A rose-flavored beverage? A combo of jasmine tea and limeade? Oh! Mocha. Swoon.

I really wish I could:

Eat everything I wanted without gaining weight.

My "Go-to" dinner party dish:

I'm not a party person....

My favorite comfort food:

Something carby, no doubt.

My top 5 favorite restaurants:

Sichuan Gourmet, Billerica, Mass. (haven’t gotten to Framingham); Bollywood, Lexington, Mass. (they calibrate their spice levels better than Khushboo does, but BRING BACK THE UTTAPAMS!); Dok Bua, Brookline, Mass.; Khao Sarn, Brookline, Mass.; Penang, Chinatown? I really need to get farther afield to explore more. :-)

My most tattered cookbooks:

Gee, I collect cookbooks, and I don't tend to tatter them. After much thought, the one that comes to mind is Charmaine Solomon's original tome on Asian cooking, which was one of the first clues about cooking SE Asian food. Well, Rosemary Brissenden''s book came out before Solomon's did, and I guess that was much-used too.