About that green salad…

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, October 1, 2009—

LEFTOVERS TONIGHT, and every time they come around I'm surprised all over again at how different each day is. We began with that amaranth-and-wheat-flour flatbread Lindsey made a few days back, from a cookbook that's due to be published soon. (Not hers, I hasten to add: someone else's, that she was reading in page proofs.) I'm not a fan of amaranth, or indeed of almost anything that I hadn't tasted by the time I was twenty, but I have to say this flatbread was nice — she sprinkled it with marjoram and baked it in oil in the black iron skillet, and we had it as an appetizer.
Then fusilli pasta with pesto, yesterday's pesto with its walnut base; and then the green salad de rigeur.

Even the salad dressing was left over, the fine-chopped shallot vinaigrette I'd made yesterday, when we ran short of lettuce. But with the salad, a few slices of tomato from the garden: the tomatoes are peak form just now. And, as you see, a slice of Artisan nine-grain bread to sop things up with. There's a Crane melon lurking in the pantry for later…

Nero d'Avola