Barbecue

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 16, 2009 —

OVER TO A FRIEND'S for a barbecue dinner party. An opera singer married to a theater director, between jobs he lives and gardens-or-farms west of Sebastopol, tending an impressive market garden of vegetables and herbs, most of which end up in a local restaurant.
We arrived to find him presiding over a smoker, slow-cooking, Texas-style, chicken breasts, pork ribs, veggie-burger-type potato pancakes (latkes of a sort: grated potato, onion, carrot, roasted garlic); with hummus and red-pepper-yoghurt sauces, and raw carrots, and bread and olives and chips, and and and.

Mojitos; cheap Pinot grigio; Hook and Ladder Sirah; Heitz Cabernet Sauvignon 1998 in magnum