Sweet Stuff at the Moosewood

This past weekend, Pilot and I had the pleasure of visiting the famous Moosewood Cafe in Ithaca, New York. This was quite a far cry from our last adventure to NYC and Club 21. Ithaca reminded me so much of Iowa, what with the freezing cold air, the snow on the ground and the college kids in their ragged clothing. When I was going to school at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, questioners would often say, "Oh, you go to Cornell? Great school!" No, not Cornell. Grinnell. Really, now that I've been to Ithaca, I can safely say there isn't much of a difference, but I digress.

Initial excitement about getting to visit the Moosewood was mixed.

"Oh, hey! I want to go to the Moosewood while we're up there."

"Sure, baby, whatever you want to do. Sounds great!"

"It's famous. It's a vegetarian menu."

"Ohhhhhhh. Hm."


Pilot was able to find a bit of vegetarian Nirvana, nevertheless. It's the Moosewood, so you pretty much have to have a salad. (We dined at the tail end of the lunch hour, and watched as the servers all sat down to a big green salad after their shifts.) I tried the house creamy spinach-basil dressing, alarmingly green, but mild. His feta-garlic was better, if you love garlic. I love garlic.

For lunch, he had the Creme Andaluz, a creamy tomato and onion soup. I had the asparagus torta, a generous slice of filo dough stuffed with asparagus and feta cheese. Both were tasty, but also both strangely a bit sugary. We love our sugar, but not especially in our entrees. I would have taken that soup farther with a handful of cracked black pepper, and I would have given the torta either the cayenne treatment or maybe paprika.

The desserts made me wish I lived closer to the Moosewood. I'll definitely be using my cookbook from the restaurant a lot more often. It goes to the head of the list. I was only allowed a couple of small tastes of his "Chocolate Moose." It was light in color, but tasted of dark chocolate and not too much sugar (go figure). That was fine because I was lost in my slice of carrot cake. I got worried when it arrived, because it wasn't covered with enough cream cheese frosting, in my humble opinion. But the flavor was so rich, it didn't need that extra half inch.

Viva Vegetables.