Peas. Pasta. Salad.

Eastside Road, August 31, 2010—

THE PEAS WERE WARMED — "cooked" seems too strong a word — with butter, salt, and pepper. English peas from the Marin Farmers Market, still tasting remarkably fresh two days after purchase.

The pasta was Lindsey's favorite whole-wheat penne. I made pesto, picking the basil leaves from our garden this afternoon, pounding up the leaves with good red garlic, sea salt, and pine nuts. Alas, we're out of Parmesan: make a note to pick some up soon.

The usual green salad, but afterward a couple of fat slices of yellow heirloom tomato, also from Marin county. I hear that our local newspaper tells us today that fall is two months early, after a summer that arrived at least two weeks late: not much of a tomato season. Still, we're grateful for what we get.

Cheap Nero d'Avola

Catchup

Eastside Road, August 30, 2010—

A BUSY WEEKEND, on the road, in general without Internet connectivity, but hardly a fast. Saturday (August 28) we drove down to Los Gatos, 120 miles south, there to help install some material in an art museum. Lunch was at the macaronically named Fleur de Cocoa, where — recalling my wish for Nizzese food on seeing Cezanne paintings a couple of days earlier — we took advantage of a pan bagnat that was really quite nice — tuna, hardboiled egg, tomato, washed down with peachleaf-flavored iced tea. Afterward, rather nice ice cream, also made on premises: Tahitian vanilla, pistachio (beautifully flavored, lots of nuts), salt-caramel.

Fleur de Cocoa, 39 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos; tel. (408) 354-3574

Farmer's omelet

Eastside Road, August 27, 2010—

I DON'T KNOW WHY this isn't one of the Hundred Plates; it just isn't. In spite of the many variations, not the least the Spanish tortilla I mentioned a month ago. Tonight's version was heavy on the potatoes, light on the eggs, and distinguished by its pungent, evocative bacon — Mangalitsa, the last of it I'm sure, from the back corner of the freezer. With it, a few of those delicious Padron peppers; afterward, green salad.

Cheap Pinot grigio

---

I forgot to mention, day before yesterday, the superb little appetizer we had at Locanda de Eva: Lardo not quite Colonnata, because made in the restaurant kitchen rather than imported from Italy. It too was from Mangalitsa pork, raised nearby — the rancher, in fact, was dining at the restaurant that night. This lardo was a little looser in texture than those I've had in Italy, and rather heavily flavored with juniper — but it was very good indeed, a fine first course to accompany a good Martini.

Dinner at the museum

San Francisco, August 26, 2010 —

TO THE CITY, as all Berkeleyans used to call San Francisco, to see the vaunted Impressionist show of paintings on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, and to have the special three-course prix-fixe dinner offered in a Parisian spirit, I suppose, by the cafeteria at the De Young Museum. I won't discuss the paintings, other than to note that it was a pleasure to see so many old friends in a nicely hung, decently lit, evocatively presented installation.
What interested me nearly as much was the prospect of dinner. The cafeteria must serve nearly a thousand of these dinners each Thursday night during the run of the exhibition, which closes September 6. First and third courses were fixed on this menu, but we had a choice of three plats principaux: L. and our guest Linda had salmon, I had beef. (We passed on the tortellini, whose description was however attractive.)

This was billed as a Paris Bistro menu, and while both salmon and tortellini seem a little foreign to that theme, my own supper wasn't far off the mark. First course was a small salad with frisée among the greens, a bowl of mushroom soup ornamented with a drizzle of good green olive oil, and a tiny but very nice grilled mushroom sandwich — a fine balance of textures, colors, and flavors.

The beef was cut off the short ribs, I think, nicely braised, and served in its sauce, flavored with tomato, carrot, onion, celery, thyme, and beef stock, garnished with gently cooked peas — not your tiny petits poix, but good big honest English peas. And dessert was a small square of strawberry mousse on a thin pastry base, garnished with pistachios, and accompanied by a puff-paste cookie.

I asked the cashier if the food were trucked in from some huge commercial kitchen in South San Francisco, and was met with surprise. No: we've been working all day on this right here in our kitchen, the young woman assured me. I asked a waiter — yes, we were served at table — how such a huge operation was managed. Waiters, bussers, runners, floor managers, he said, knowledgeably and with a smile. Everyone knew what he was doing; everyone seemed competent and enthusiastic. The crowd was lively and in a good mood.

I don't think our standards have slipped, Lindsey's and mine I mean; I think we're still pretty discerning. But I've been delighted in the past few years by the improvements we've seen in public dining, whether on the road or in venues like this. Things used to be much worse. And lest you think there's something elitist about eating at an Impressionist exhibition, dinner was fifteen bucks, plus seven for a 25cl carafe of decent

Pinot noir, 2008 (France)

Strozzapreti

Berkeley, August 25, 2010—

Martini, Locanda da Eva

DINNER WITH A FRIEND in a restaurant open for barely a month, hence quite new to us — a trattoria, I'd say, with an exceptionally interesting wine list and a good bar, sourcing its ingredients with an eye to local and sustainable items, and preparing its offerings knowingly and modestly. What I mean by "modestly" is with more concern for the tradition of the item, its provenance and history and innate qualites, than its possibility as an expression of the cook. It's like the difference between playing the Brahms violin concerto, say, for its intrinsic qualities, those the composer put there, rather than for its usefulness as a display of the performer's possibly too flashy technique.

I started with a Martini, nicely balanced, cold, not watery, garnished with Castelvetrano olives; the others had Mojitos. Two of us went on to strozzapreti with tomatoes, roasted eggplant, chiles, lamb sausage, herbs, and ricotta salata, that last cut into strips and laid over the dish. I was perfectly satisfied with this dish. It didn't knock me out; it didn't intend to. It was like something eaten in a perfectly ordinary but very very good neighborhood trattoria in Sicily or Calabria.
   
Dessert was polenta torte with nectarines, blackberries, and citrus mascarpone. The cake had been sprinkled — baptized, you might say, irreverently — with chamomile-infused grappa. This was a complex affair and a delicious one, with mutually complementary textures and flavors all put to the service of the fresh fruit. L. had a plate of cookies, three squares of shortbread glazed with a thin layer of caramel and chopped nuts. To isolate them from the cool plate they came on a "doily," a small rectangle of clean paper cut from one of the daily menus. Sustainable, recyclable, ingenious. It's that kind of place, I think.

Grillo, Concilio Feudo d'Elimi (Sicily)

Locanda da Eva, 2826 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley; tel. (510) 665-9601

Ribs

Eastside Road, August 24, 2010—

DINNER CHEZ FRIENDS tonight; they'd asked us to dinner to meet their son, who has a coffee roasting company up in Washington State. (It looks interesting; I have to look into it.) This isn't just any friend, it's Mac, who walked across the Alps with me two summers ago. When you spend five weeks in intimate contact with someone, every waking hour, day after day, you develop a special relationship. In so many ways our backgrounds are so different, yet there's that bond.

One of the differences: He's basically midwestern (Iowa); I'm completely West Coast (Bay Area). This gets reflected in our meals, of course; I'd never have thought of preparing the spread set before me tonight — but I was happy to confront it. He'd grilled marinated pork ribs on his patio; a dozen or so ears of corn had been boiled. After canapés — olives, crackers, and three cheeses — that and Peach Melba was enough for a warm summer evening.

It was 104° when we turned onto his street, at 6:30 in the evening. Shoot, I said to myself, I brought a wine completely wrong for this weather — but in fact it was delicious:

Barbera, Louis Preston Vineyards (Dry Creek Valley), 2005

Pasta, tomato sauce

Eastside Road, August 23, 2010—

ONE OF THE OLD STAND-BYS tonight: whole-wheat penne. Lindsey chopped up a few fresh tomatoes to soften in olive oil with garlic and anchovies, then tossed the penne in the sauce. Afterward, the usual green salad.

Cheap Pinot grigio

Picnic; soup

Eastside Road, August 22, 2010—

HISTORICAL SOCIETY PICNIC today at a beautiful 150-year-old stone house down in the Valley of the Moon, near Glen Ellen. We went with a couple of friends; they provided sandwiches — tuna, turkey, ham and cheese, salami — and we provided guacamole (which Lindsey has promoted to the Hundred Plates) and chocolate-chip cookies.

Cheap Pinot grigio

We ate and drank far too much for a hot midday, so tonight we were content with a bowl of broad green beans and another of clean-out-the-icebox soup: chicken broth, frozen peas, string beans, some diced boiled potato. Nice soup.

Lunch chez Panisse

Berkeley, August 21, 2010—

PORTLAND FAMILY WAS VISITING Berkeley for the weekend, so we drove down to meet them for lunch in the café, where I had escarole and green bean salad with anchovy, garlic, and soft-boiled egg; then

rib-eye roast beef with shell beans and roasted peppers — Padrones, I was happy to discover — with a little chimichurri dressing the beef, and a nice jus to mash the last of the beans into.

Did we have dessert; yes we had dessert: pluots and figs, and a bowl of raspberry ice cream with sliced nectarines. Memorable, all of it.

Roussette de Savoie, Château Bergin, 2008; Zinfandel, "Chez Panisse" (Green and Red Vineyards, Napa Valley), 2008

Birthday

Eastside Road, —

MY SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, spent exactly as I chose: talked to an old friend for an hour; harvested most of the rest of the crabapples; spent an hour at the gym; picked up the violin from the repair shop; watched the news; went to dinner with friends.
But first, an unusual breakfast: a Crane melon, grown not on the Crane ranch but just up the road from us, and brought to us by our daughter from down the hill. My mother was a Crane, though the families diverged five generations before me; the melon branch is descended from my great-great-grandfather's brother's line. Still, they're local, and I'm a little loathe to eat one not actually grown on the Crane ranch, in spite of my liberal attitudes to intellectual property, not to mention the legitimacy of "owning" strains of living organisms.

The Crane melon is, as far as I'm concerned, the most delicious grown in our country. It's California's answer to the Charentais. This morning's was the best Crane melon I've tasted grown elsewhere than on the Crane ranch itself.

Dinner was a delicious Cobb salad with the Ashlanders, the three other couples with whom we spend a week every year in Ashland, seeing plays, eating and drinking and talking, and generally acting like retired and semi-retired intelligent adults. As you see: hardboiled eggs, tomatoes, avocado, ham, turkey, lettuce, salad dressing. A perfect party food, prefaced by cheese and crackers, followed by a very rich chocolate cake engineered for someone's birthday.

"Madame Preston", Louis Preston Vineyards, 2007  
Sauvignon blanc, Gryphus (Chile), 2008  
Rosé, Cabernet de Saumur "La Bretannieère", 2008  

Smashed potatoes

Eastside Road, August 19, 2010—

TO ME, "MASHED" POTATOES always seem like special fare — reserved for Christmas and Thanksgiving and such occasions. They have to be white as snow, beaten soft soft soft, and enriched with butter at the least, perhaps cream as well. In my childhood of course it was milk and margarine, but those days are long gone.

We don't have mashed potatoes that often. Instead we have what I think of as smashed potatoes: Lindsey boils potatoes in as little water as possible, first having cut them into reasonably small pieces, and then roughly smashes them, with a fork I suspect (since no potato masher or whisk appeared in the nightly dishwashing routine), adding perhaps a little olive oil. Salt and pepper, of course; maybe a bit of crushed garlic. Today she added a good bit of marjoram from the garden.

Marjoram is always associated with peas in my mind; when we were first married frozen peas and Schillings dried marjoram flakes were a special treat, maybe with a dot of butter. But it goes well with potatoes, too. Marjoram, sage, oregano, thyme, and tarragon all grow in the garden, though we probably still have dozens of boxes of Schilling's spices left from decades ago…

After all the flavorings are blended in Lindsey cooks the potatoes a bit further, dry, allowing a tiny bit of browning. With the potatoes tonight, another Tuscan sausage of Franco's, and green beans; before them, guacamole my way; afterward, green salad; later, fruit, of course…

Rouge du pays de l'Hérault, Moulin de Gassac, "Guilhem", 2008

Encore

Eastside Road, August 18, 2010—

LINDSEY SAYS the stuffed pepper recipe came from Gourmet, not Sunset. And she knows what she's talking about, because she looked it up just yesterday: it was in an issue from 1969. And she elaborates on the ingredients: the bread crumbs — cubes, really — are soaked in a little broth, and into them go parsley, capers, chopped olives (green by preference), crushed garlic, a little olive oil, and the tuna. And it was as delicious tonight as last night, though I must say I prefer chard to zucchini. Green salad, of course — storebought mâche, lettuces from the garden.

Cheap Pinot grigio

Stuffed Peppers

Eastside Road, August 17, 2010—

I DON'T REALLY KNOW what goes into them — obviously bread crumbs, capers, and tuna: but I'm sure there's something else too. I know they've been a staple in our household for forty years at least. Perhaps it's one of those recipes clipped from a newspaper, or from Sunset, which we've taken for many many years.

In any case the result is delicious. Lindsey parboils the bell peppers, whose interiors have been gutted of membranes and seeds, and then stuffs them with the tuna-breadcrumb mixture, and bakes them in the oven. Tonight we had them with chard from the garden, so the usual green salad is not on the menu. Dessert is: Straus vanilla ice cream with mulberries from the tree.

Cheap Pinot grigio  

Sausage

Eastside Road, August 16, 2010 —

I WROTE HERE last year about Franco Dunn, who makes fabulous sausage, and converses about it knowledgeably and enthusiastically, bringing up names and places we're equally reminiscent about — Pig by the Tail and Victoria Wise (whose most recent book I'm going to have to get); Il Vipore and Cesare Casella. We eat sausage fairly often, as you'll have noticed; perhaps without Franco we'd eat it less frequently. Anyhow tonight we had a couple of his Toscanas.

How to explain the goodness of these products? They're, well, savory, the spices and herbs perfectly balanced and pointed, the ratio of fat to flesh beautifully calculated. Lindsey pokes them with a fork and broils them in the oven (since I'm too lazy or preoccupied to build a fire outside and supervise the cooking myself). With them tonight, more of those fabulous Padron peppers, and jasmine rice flavored with the olive oil from the peppers and the tortilla I cooked a while back. Green salad after, of course, and nectarines, and pluots…

Rouge du pays de l'Hérault, Moulin de Gassac, "Guilhem", 2008

Grilled salmon

Eastside Road, August 15, 2010—

SALMON, IT BEING Sunday; and tonight, after our Martini — displaced from Friday night, when we were on the road and Martini was inaccessible — I set fire to some grapevine cuttings and four or five little chunks of charcoal and grilled the fish, salted and peppered, very quickly, while Lindsey cooked some Musica broad-beans and finished the Padron peppers I'd started in olive oil and salt in a black iron skillet. Green salad after; and then raspberries. Life is good.

Rosé, Syrah, Lucchesi Vineyards (Nevada County), 2009

Home again

Eastside Road, August 14, 2010 —

THREE DAYS AND TWO NIGHTS on the road, even in California, even in an area that's generally hip and all that, reminds you that this country is abysmally deficient in the matter of coffee. This morning's breakfast was taken at a place recommended as perhaps the best in Grass Valley: Lindsey's latte was bitter and unpleasant, and my "normal" coffee was hardly any better. The cappuccino I'd had the day before was even worse. These indy cafés are enough to drive you to Starbuck's, where the machines, at least, are generally kept fairly clean. There's nothing worse than the rancid coffee-and-machine-oil stink-flavor imparted to even a decent blend and roast by these espresso machines (and their grinders) which, however expensive and technologically up-to-date they may be, seem never to be cleaned: it's as if splendid wines were to be poured from decanters never rinsed, from year to year, introducing the deadliest of vinegars to the rarest of vintages.

Lindsey and I ordered the simplest of breakfasts: an English muffin and one egg, over easy, for her; exactly the same for me, except two eggs. What could go wrong? Well, he brought me only one egg. In fact, he was doing me a favor.

We stopped for a lunch of sorts in Auburn, where Lindsey's iPhone promised an organic, sustainable, thoughtful bakery-cum-café. And here in fact I had a decent albacore tuna sandwich on rye bread, with a hint of horseradish in the mayonnaise; and we washed our sandwiches down — in truth they were a little dry — with a tasty Meyer lemon lemonade. (We had miles still to drive.)

What did we feel like doing for dinner, once home? You won't be surprised: toast rubbed with garlic, drizzled with olive oil, salted a bit; and a nice green salad. A handful or two of cherry tomatoes. Some of our nectarines afterward.

Rosé, Syrah, Lucchesi Vineyards (Nevada County), 2009

Flour Garden Bakery, 340 C Elm Avenue, Auburn, California; tel. 530.888.1011; www.flourgarden.com
The bad coffee: Carolines Coffee Roasters, Grass Valley; South Pine Café, Grass Valley

Country supper

Chicago Park (California), August 13, 2010—

MIDDAY SUPPER in the country home of a friend who retired from professional cooking a few years back to take up farming. He has not lost his chops.There were seven of us at table: another farm couple from Southern California with their teen-aged son; Alan and his cousin Danny; Lindsey and me. Alan had made an aïoli: I think you might justifiably call it a grand aïoli: green beans, artichokes, boiled potatoes; a salad of carrots, beets, and peppers; and a delicious salted halibut with deviled eggs and anchovies. For dessert, delicious raspberries and blackberries on a fine vanilla ice cream. A beautifully executed grand aïoli is clearly one of the Hundred Plates.

Erbaluce di Caluso, La Torrazza, 2008; Petit Chablis, Roland Lavantureux, 2008; Rosé, Domaine Tempier (Bandol), 2009; Reuilly, Denis Jamain (oeuil de perdrix), 2009

Spain again

Sacramento, August 12, 2010—

CABIN FEVER STRUCK again; time for a short road trip. Our first day took us through the state capital, not because we have business with the government, but because we'd heard about a tapas restaurant that's been getting some favorable notice. There were plenty of specials on the menu, but we arrived so late — just a few minutes before closing time (for lunch) — that we didn't want to put the kitchen to any trouble: we ordered off the regular tapas menu. I had judias blancas, white beans with nicely rare-poached tuna, heightened not with the usual white onions but with dark olives and mint: I liked the dish. My tortilla wasn't as good as the one I cooked a few weeks ago: it seemed a little tired; too long in the cold box. But Lindsey's patatas bravas were right on the mark, and her warm salt-cod salad, seen here on my plate with aioli-streaked tortilla, was a very nice dish.

Albariño, Paco y Lola, Rias Baixas, 2009

Aioli Bodega Espanola, 1800 L Street, Sacramento; tel. 916.447.9440