Full Belly Dinner

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, March 3, 2009

THAT'S WHAT LINDSEY called it, Full Belly Dinner, and she meant it on two levels. Last time we were in Berkeley, last week, it was farm market day. That's one of the few things we miss about moving away from Berkeley -- the farm market, Monterey Market, and Monterey Fish. (Well, and easier access to Chez Panisse, of course, and Moe's, and a couple of other things.)

Lindsey bought some cranberry beans and a package of flour. Flour! From wheat grown in Yolo County at Full Belly Farms! Milled into flour! So tonight, after a first course of little Brussels sprouts cooked with a little mustard and chopped garlic, we had beans and biscuits, and they were good.

Could be there's some atavism there: my mother's father, though born in Geyserville, moved with his parents (and brothers) to a Yolo county farm where their principal cash crop, as I recall it, was wheat. They didn't stay long -- from there they went up to Crane Mountain country in southeast Oregon, then to Berkeley for the boys to go to college. But there's a little Yolo in me, along with a lot of Sonoma.

Cheap Pinot grigio; Petite Sirah, Louis Preston, 2006