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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Happy Birthday, Bro

We went to Ingredient to celebrate my kid brother's 38th birthday.

As my brother pointed out, they should put an 's' on the end, there aren't very many ingredients a restaurant could have that aren't on the menu at Ingredient. They have a few stock items, my Mom got the Tuscan Chicken sandwich, but in terms of custom pizzas and salads, their checklist style menu has more possible combinations than the human genome.

I got a pizza with Alfredo sauce, balsamic onions, portobello mushrooms, bacon and Gorgonzola. But my sister in law got what amounted to a caesar salad on a pizza crust, and you could just as easily get roasted garlic oil, artichoke, broccoli and kalamata olives.

Their crusts are exactly what I aim for at home, thin with a bit of a handle, I don't know if they hand stretch/toss or not but I do know they cook them on stone in a wood fired oven, which probably yields the kind of heat I wish I could get in my home oven with its paltry 550ºF high end.

After, we went across the way for some gelato. The nice thing about gelato is they serve smaller portions than the frozen custard joints. Don't get me wrong, I love doing in a pint concrete at Foo's, but at my age I'd have to ride up Mill Street Hill a dozen times to work it off, plus there's that beached whale feeling after you put that kind of jolt on top of a meal.

The tiny spoon they give you helps, because it keeps you from shoveling, allowing you to really taste the smallish samples of three flavors I had them pack into my small gelato.

The Sea Salt Caramel was amazing. As was the Chocolate Turtle. As was the Italian Trifle. All this in a wee cup, what a delight.

And fingers crossed, my Bro and his wife have been in the process of trying to adopt a kid and it looks like they found a match. Nothing's certain until it's certain, but I know they'd make awesome parents and they've been working toward this for a long time.

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