Two days

Eastside Road, September 29, 2013—

YESTERDAY WE WERE back in the city again, after a pleasant lunch of bread and cheese in the Healdsburg plaza. We dropped a friend off at a dinner-party he'd been invited to, only to find we'd been added to the guest list. It was hard to decline the invitation, but we'd have brought the table up to thirteen, and at my age I'm not about to flout that superstition.

It was doubly hard after tasting this little appetizer, sent around on little plates before actually taking seats. Corona beans are among our favorites: these had been brought back recently from Greece, the homeland of the party host. They'd been cooked, then added to a sauté of kale, tomatoes, peppers, and who knows what else: a very tasty mix.

TODAY, FOR THE FIRST time in a week, we stayed close to home, after driving to Sebastopol for the Sunday market. There we met Dave Legros, the fish guy, who told us — a little regretfully, I thought — that this was the last salmon day of the year. We hadn't planned on getting any; it's been less than perfect recently; but what are you going to do?

So tonight, the last weekend in September, the first in Autumn, with a definite change in the weather in the air, we had our last summer market dinner: salmon simply broiled, with lemon juice; Nancy Skall's superb lima beans; a few late-season tomatoes. Afterward, green salad; then figs and pears from our trees…

Cheap Nero d'Avola