Restaurant De Kas: Amsterdam

V and I decided to cheap out on the hotel so we could afford the 50 EUR 5-course prix fixe at De Kas. Housed in the former municipal greenhouse of Amsterdam, the restaurant prides itself on serving farm-fresh, seasonal ingredients harvested from their own growing spaces. The restaurant is a good hour's walk from the city center and is located in a beautiful park with many varieties of water fowl. I was particularly taken with the loons. We arrived early enough to walk around the park (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!) and took the tram (#9, 1.60 EUR) back to the center after dinner.

You will not find rich sauces here: the ingredients are the stars. Everything was perfectly seasoned to bring out simple essences. Beets came drizzled with olive oil, sea salt and dill. They were earthy, nutty and perfectly cooked (I obviously have a thing for beets). If you do not like vegetables, this is not the place for you. The perfectly cooked scholle (a flat whitefish) filet was served with tiny camomile flowers, shaved fennel, succulent tomatoes, and basil leaves. A side of couscous mixed with various lettuces and spiked with a buttermilk dressing was light and airy. In terms of drinks, we decided to drink by the glass. We started with their elegant house aperitif - a glass of champagne and two fragrant lemon balm leaves. Looking around, we realized almost every table ordered it and we understand why. For wine, we opted for glasses of the Primitivo. Dessert was a dream: creme fraiche ice cream and strawberry cheesecake. We wanted seconds.










Kamerlingh Onneslaan 3, 1097 DE, Amsterdam.
+31 (0)20 462 45 62.

Eating in London: Giaconda Dining Room

The Giaconda Dining Room: a reasonably priced restaurant in one of the most expensive cities in the world that serves simple, delicious food with a focus on high quality ingredients. Unless you were in the market for a guitar (the area surrounding the resto is filled with guitar shops), it's the kind of unassuming place that you would walk by without noticing.

I almost had a mental breakdown at dinner trying to decide what to order. And this despite the fact that I had been studying the menu online for over a week. To start with, I had the deceptively simple beet and goat cheese mousse salad. For the main course, V and I ordered the rack of lamb for two served with an amazing veggie tian and gnocchi that was surprisingly light, fluffy and accented with just enough nutmeg to give it some kick. Everybody got the clean plate award and sadly, no room was saved for dessert.




Giaconda Dining Room
9 Denmark St
London, WC2H 8LS, United Kingdom
+44 20 72403334

Eating in Paris: La Panfoulia

Because sometimes you just want a plate of veggies, nice service and bread procured by the best waiter in Paris.


La Panfoulia (Great location in the Marais!!)
7, Rue Ste Croix la Bretonnerie
75004 Paris, France
+33 1 42 74 61 68

Eating in Paris: Bistro Paul Bert

I was lucky to discover Bistro Paul Bert in 2002 because a friend of mine lived right above it. Since then, it has received a ton of press which has put the place on the map of obligatory Parisian bistros for Americans visiting Paris. But the good news is that despite all the attention it has gotten, it's still delicious and perhaps even better than it was when I first ate there. An added bonus to getting so many American patrons is that they renovated the bathroom and took out the dreaded turkish toilet!

It's a solid bistro menu with a very reasonably priced wine list; the desserts are to die for. The last two times I've eaten there, I bypassed the regular menu and ordered whatever delicious beef was available. One time, this was the 'cote de boeuf' for 2 people along with fries and a perfect green salad. On my most recent trip, the 'cote de boeuf' was gone, replaced by a 'filet de boeuf, sauce au poive,' accompanied by the fries and the green salad for 32 euros: a bargain. The only way they will cook the filet for you is "saignant" (rare) or "bleu." They will give you unending shit if you try to order it "a point" (medium) or, god forbid, "bien cuit" (well done, or as they would say "mal cuit"). The beef is exceptionally flavorful and the silky sauce contained just enough black pepper to bring out the nuttiness of the meat. The fries were unspeakably delicious, probably fried in some kind of animal-fat infused oil. There is no photo available of them because we ate them too fast. The panna cotta with coulis of red fruits was wonderful as was the Ile flottante.



Bistro Paul Bert
18, rue Paul Bert, 11e, Paris, 75011
01-43-72-24-01

best cat ever

the greatest thing about living in new jersey has been, without a doubt, the cat. she is a new jersey native and if we had never moved here, she would have never found us.

New Museum Generational: Younger than Jesus

I was expecting to be underwhelmed by this show but it was fantastic, in particular the videos and photographs. My favorite video was by Frenchman Cyprien Gaillard. Titled Desniansky Raion, the video features a soundtrack by French musician Koudlam and merges footage of rival fight club gangs in the suburbs of St. Petersburg meeting in a desolate public housing parking lot to pummel each other to bloody messes with video of another disquieting spectacle: that of the destruction of a failed Parisian housing block complete with disney-style light show cheeze. Finally we see illegal aerial footage of a housing project in the suburbs of Kiev. I am still thinking about the video three days later.

brownie ice cream

what to do with a half a tray of super dark chocolate brownies? brownie ice cream! i used a half n' half + 6 egg yolk base and folded in the brownies after i strained the mixture. unbelievably good. you really do need to go all the way with fat in order to achieve that sexy ice cream texture. pictures to come!

dissertation constipation

the last chapter is absolutely destroying me. but after five months of battle, i am finally gaining the upper hand. i thought it would never come. writing a dissertation is like running a marathon.

Google books is a game changer

I am seriously thinking about including google books in my acknowledgments section...once I finish the dissertation...which WILL happen. I digress. I started using google books for dissertation research in Fall 2007 when I was researching my first chapter which deals with battle painting during the First Empire. The amount of sources for the first part of the nineteenth-century was already impressive. But as I moved forward in time (Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Empire), I have been overwhelmed with the amount of sources available. Sometimes it's a curse to have so many sources, but ultimately my work has benefitted tremendously from google books.

I wonder how many other PhD students are out there using google books and how many of them are having experiences similar to mine. We are likely the first generation of researchers who will be able to integrate it into our research methods: when I told my advisor about the resources on google books, she could not believe it.

The fact is that the archive available on google books is unparalleled. The research libraries of Michigan, Berkeley, Oxford, NYPL, Havard and others are available. For scholars of the nineteenth century, we are lucky enough to be well beyond the copyright restrictions in terms of the amount of primary sources available. I have lost count of the number of sources discovered using the advanced search in google books. By limiting the dates and putting any term in quotations (to search that exact term: for example "tableaux de bataille" will search uniquely for that combination of words), I have been able to locate texts that I never would have found while combing over the microfilm at the Bibliotheque national.

Plugging in search terms and dates into google is a completely different mode of conducting research and not necessarily the most complete. For one thing, you are limited to the books digitized by google and more problematically, some of the nineteenth-century periodicals that I have encountered are so damaged that the googlebot has trouble recognizing one word from another. So sometimes google books completely misses a term because the text itself has not scanned clearly. This is something that will probably improve with time. In any case, I remain grateful to google books for making all of these nineteenth-century sources available online. My work simply would not have the amount of contextual richness it does without it.