Three first-rate meals

 

Hill Court, Warranwoo, Victoria, September 29, 2014—

NORMALLY ONLY DINNER is recorded here, but today's exceptional, partly for the quality and variety of the meals, partly to reassure you that I do get three square meals a day. 

For breakfast I made three omelets, each with four eggs from John's friendly, prolific hens — just see how beautiful they are! The black iron skillet Mel had cooked last night,s duck breasts in had fortunately not been cleaned, and gave the omelets great flavor.

LUNCH ON THE PATIO was colorful and copious: a fine quiche, sliced ham, sausage, cheeses, green salad, curried egg sandwiches, blinis, sliced cucumbers and red peppers, dill pickles, beer and cider — a wonderful feast for three generations, hens clucking contentedly nearby, the cherry tree burning into bloom, the dogs lazing in the sun.

IN THE EVENING, to a neighboring town for a light supper — we're flying home tomorrow; I don't like doing that after too full a meal. It,s funny: I'd noticed some fine-looking packaged fettucine in a market in the morning, and that's what Elizabeth had chosen to serve. She made a sauce I'd never had or thought of, browning chopped onion and bacon, then throwing in chopped kale, binding the mixture with a little cream. Delicious.

Cabernet sauvignon, YerIng Station Reserve, 2008: deep, thoughtful, alive, mature, fine balance, good finish. 

Lamb and duck

Hill Court, Warranwood, Victoria, September 28, 2014—

WE ARE EATING WELL. That is how I prefer to eat. Today, for example, after a final cleanup of the debris from the tree we felled the other day, Mel set out a lunch on the patio table, now in full sunshine since the twiggy tree is gone. She had scrapped out the remains lf Thursday's leg of lamb, and made a delicious sauce for it: mint, a little parsley, a little vinegar -- gee, it was good. Some cheese, some pickles, tiny spinach leaves from the garden, a little tuna-cannellini salad from the other day. With this, a glass of beer.

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THEN TONIGHT Mel cooked four fine meaty duck breasts. I scored the fat side and she browned them quickly in a dry black iron skillet, then braised them, using pan juices to make the prune gravy you see in the white bowl to the left. The buttery spinach complemented the duck perfectly, as did the

MGV (Mourvedre, Grenache, Viogier), Preston of Dry Creek, 2009

Australo-French

Hill Court, Warranwood, Victoria, September 27, 2014—

HERE'S AN EARLY SHOT of tonight's first course, appetizers taken with, not a Martini this Saturday night, but a pastis, first of the spriing. A very nice paté de compagne; a delicious salmon mousse, some first-rate olives, stuffed little pimentos, and artichokes à la grecque. With them, after the photo was taken, bread and crackers and spicy potato chips, and then a little simple white wine.

Were dining downstairs, guests of my Australian niece and her Paris-born husband. Fred's French, John had explained, and misses the French-style dinners, and likes to put one on now and then; he'll))  have us down to a proper meal.

And he did, though Ana was clearly party to the affair. She'd been to the delicatessen, for example, and found these appetizers, and she's the one who chose the next item:

coquilles St..-Jaccques, local ((Melbourne Bay) sea scallops, beautifully cooked in butter with (I think) delicate leek leaves, accompanied by grilled asparagus with a perfect Hollandaise — Fred knows his sauces.

UNext, the plat principal: Barramundi, the locally popular cod-like fish, firm-textured and flaky and delicately flavored. Ana had grilled this over wood, taking advantage of branches from the dead tree we'd felled earlier, flavoiring it with herbs from the garden.  And with it, a delicous salad of lettuce and radicchio

and roasted vegetables: caramelized carrots and beetroot; puffy little potatoes

Dessert was pots de creme Fred had made, as expertly as his sauces, and I'm sorry that by then the iiPhone was enjoying company, conversation, and the dinner far too much to take a photo.

Sauvignon blanc, Queen Adelaide, 2013 (simple, clean, refreshing); Pinot grigio, Windy Peak, 2013 (nicely expressive, clean and crisp)

Roast lamb

Hill Court, Warranwood, September 26, 2014—

YES: AS NOTED HERE many times before, Virgil was right to sing

Of all the meat that we can eat
Chicken, beef, or ham
The one that tickles my palate the most
is lamb, lamb, lamb…

And that is what the blessed Mel, wonderful cook that she is, gave us tonight on what had been a special family day. 

First, since there seem to be no Martinis here in Australia, we had a Kir royale as an apéritif. It doesn't hurt to have a Frenchman — a Parisian, even— in the downstairs apartment: he arrived with a bottle of Cassis and did the mixing.

Then came the lamb, Spring lamb, roasted to just the right degree with rosemary and garlic, with steamed new potatoes and asparagus. There's nothing more to say. This is one of the Hundred Plates.

Shiraz, TarraWarra Estate, 2012: Complex and rich (thanks, Jim)

All'italiana

Hill Court, Warranwood, Victoria, September 25, 2014—

WE DROVE A COUPLE of hours today to the curious old mining town Bendigo, now a regional center with a thriving local-tourism economy — mainly for the purpose of visiting museums: but also for lunch.

Lunch we took at practically the first place we stumbled upon after parking on a fairly steep street in front of the art museum, a street given to cafés and restaurants, antique shops and gift shops, hair salons and the like. The sidewalk is roofed over in places, with tables and chairs outside the restaurant, a pleasant setting suggesting perhaps a decent enough lunch. And the place had an Italian theme.

I ordered a couple of baskets of garlic bread for the table -- there were five of us -- and then the fettucine carbonara for myself. A couple of months ago, I think, I posted comments here under the title "Carbonarish," and to tell the truth this dish was a little inauthentic, with its bright green parsley leaves. But the cream sauce was nicely made, the bacon was tasty, and the dish succeded perfectly. 

Frascati, Cantina Soc. di Monte Porzio Cateno, 2012, old-fashioned, mediocre, and very pleasant

• Borchelli Ristorante, 105 View Street, Bendigo, Victoria; +61.3.5441.4455

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ON THE WAY HOME we shopped for dinner, which was left up to me: two cans of cannellini, a can of good tuna, a basket of arugula. Other things were in Mel's capacious pantry. I chopped an onion to combine with the tuna and beans, and a couple of my charming nieces dressed the arugula with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. A bottle of cheap Sauvignon blanc, and Bob's your uncle.

Tasting wines

Tarrra Warra Winery, in the Yarra Valley

The Yarra Valley, Victoria, September 24, 2014—

WE TOOK A DRIVE under overcast skies up the broad Yarra Valley today, intent on lunch and an introduction to Victoria's best wines. The valley is reminiscent of Sonoma county, I'd say, though much more varied as to agriculture. Much of the land is too low and wet, in season, for grapevines, and is left to grazing and I suppose hay production. The architecture ranges from the simple utilitarian, not greatly in evidence, to the modern and ambitious — just as in California, the wealthier the house, the more ambitious the architectureWe started with lunch, at Yering Station, whose fine old 19th-century barn sat lonely, I thought, in an immaculate and pleasant landscape looking at a magnificent glassed-in restaurant whose white-tablecloth tables were generously and formally distributed in a large room whose ceiling must have been twenty feet high, above windows looking out over the valley.

Of the wines on offer the Marsanne=Viognier-Roussane jumped out at me and we ordered a bottle: smooth, a bit complex, subtly made. I ordered a duck egg salad, accompanied by polenta toasts and shavings of Parmesan cheese; and since there were four of us at table (not counting one-year-old Lola, who did a good job with the bread) we ordered side dishes: Brussels sprouts with pork cracklings, French-fried potatos, a barley-and-cauliflower terrine. I liked my egg and the sprouts and the "chips," but didn't try the terrine, whose cauliflower would have suited the wine even less, I thought, than did the Brussels sprouts and the egg — though in the event the wine had enough going for it to overcome the dubious pairing.

After lunch we walked through a pleasant grove of geometrically planted topiary elms, something I've never seen before, to the tasting room, where we went through eighteen or twenty wines: the Marsanne blend, Chardonnays, Pinot noirs, and Syrahs of various ages, drawn from various adjacent vineyard lots. I was struck with the quality of these wines, assembled with great care from plantings thoughtfully respectful of terroir and exposure. The wines were very good indeed and not extraordinarily expensive, I suppose, though well beyond my daily budget.

• Yering Station, 38 Melba Highway, Yarra Glen; +61.3.9730.0100

Next we drove to TarraWarra Estate, whose imposing art gallery you see in the photograph above. Alas we had by now no time for art: we proceeded directly to the tasting, going through a similar range of Marsanne blends, Chardonnays, Pinot noirs, and Shiraz. If Yering Station's wines made me think of the best of the Napa valley, the wines here took me to the best of Dry Creek: fully authentic, deep, complex, full-bodied but not overwhelming.

The Chardonnays and Pinot noirs were as close to Burgundy as the Australian terroir would permit, I thought, and the Marsannes and Shiraz approached the best of the Rhone. There wasn't a wine I wouldn't buy by the case if I had the money, and by California standards (not to mention Burgundy!) they weren't prohibitively expensive. Alas, there seems to be no American importer. The very engaging young man pouring the wines suggested there wasn't enough wine to capture an importer, and that the image of Australian wine we form in the States, based on Yellowtail and such, had hurt the Australian reputation, much as Gallo had slowed the acceptance of California wines fifty years ago.

•TarraWarra Estate, 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Victoria; +61.3.5957.3510

Waiters Restaurant

Warranwood, Victoria, Australia, September 23, 2014—

Photo: Jim Shere

INTO THE CITY today, a beautiful first day of Spring, for an urban stroll involving cafés and bookshops, and lunch at a place I very much like, one of my Hundred Restaurants.

Not so much for the kitchen, though its execution is quite acceptable and the menu -- written up each day on chalkboards -- is attractive and nourishing. Rather, I like this place for its old-fashioned ambiance. It re inds me how similar Melbourne and San Francisco are: this is old-fashioned and reassuring, full of bonhomie. You walk up a flight of steps to get in, and meet a big rectangular room seating perhaps forty, windows at the street end, the open kitchen at the other. Two cooks work in that kitchen; two saucy waitresses handle the floor.

The clientele at lunch is mostly regulars, mostly businessmen. I counted about two dozen men at tables, not counting me and my brothers; there were three women among them. Many of the tables seated five or six; there were no couples.

I began with grilled sardines on a bed of mixed salad drizzled with just a bit of balsamic vinaigrette. The sardines were butterflied, the bones removed, and they lacked salt, but that was easily remedied. The blackboard had promised lamb Roman style, but it turned out not to be Testaccio-style scraps but sliced roast leg of lamb that was served up in a tasty, meaty tomato sauce, with plenty of vegetables on the side -- carrots, green beans, a good-sized roast potato.

House Pinot grigio and Sangiovese

• The Waiters Restaurant, 20 Meyers Place, Melbourne; 0419 553 869

Afterward, a fine coffee at Pellegrini, an oldfashioned cafe on a city boulevard nearby, whose proprietor had a Roman air about him himself, and served up my macchiato in a glass too big but curiously appropriate and elegant.

• Pellegrini's, 66 Bourke Street, Melbourne; 9662 1885

THAT SUBSTANTIAL LUNCH did not prevent tucking into a fine dinner. Mel poached a small chicken with star anise, lemon grass, a little tarragon I think, and served it over rice noodles with a mixed salad to accompany it. Delicious.

Pinot grigio, Lindeman's "Bin 85", 2013

Another catchup

Warranwood, Victoria, Australia, September 22, 2014—

IN GENERAL I seem to have developed two modes of dining: at home, where our diet is relatively simple and certainly consistent, as you will have noticed; and away, where we visit an immoderate number of restaurants and eat, on the whole, very well. Even the restaurant dining is consistent, for the most part: we lean toward a Mediterranean cuisine, even when traveling in the Netherlands. 

Currrently, though, I'm in Australia, visiting and staying with my Australian brother and his family. He married a Melbourne girl decades ago; they have four grown daughters and a passel of grandchildren; they live in a relaxed country-style suburb; their lives center on family, community, and school — a Rudolf Steiner school, but that's another story. I raise the points of this last sentence simply because it pertains to my present diet.

I arrived with a system somewhat out of sorts: it's a long flight; airplane food is filling but I think not particularly nourishing; the time was out of joint. It's seven hours earlier here, and a day later: this puts my digestive apparatus into shock mode. So I was happy that we ate lightly that night, Thursday night: Fred, the French-born son-in-law, brought sushi he'd made; Mel, my sister-in-law, contributed a casserole of chorizo and garbanzos. That was a nice idea, as it recalled the trip Cook and I had made a year and a half ago, driving through Spain and Portugal for a month with this brother and his wife, a bonding trip I've savored often since, and regretted not writing about…

FRIDAY NIGHT Mel roasted a chicken, flavoring it with herbs from her garden and serving it with buttered spinach.

Saturday was soup day: for lunch, a thick minestrone Mel had begun the night before; for dinner, a delicious spring soup, clerar broth with leeks, carrot, and cubes of delicious local salmon. It was a daughter's birthday, so we ended with cake…

Which brings me to yesterday, another day of modest dining at home: a good thick lentil dal, garnished with tomato-cucumber concasée and yoghurt and taken with pappadums.

My breakfasts here have been exactly like those at home: coffee and bread. The coffee is taken mostly black, though; and I dress my toast with a little olive oil and salt -- bread, oil, and salt makes a good component of my lunches, too. Green salads now and then. A piece of fruit from time to time. Local wine, on the simple side. Lots of conversation.

Flight day

SFO, September 16, 2014—

The next day or so does not promise rewarding eating. Normally that would not be a problem, since it's Tuesday: I could simply fast. But it's not a normal day: I'm flying to Melbourne, and experience tells me I will be too hungry to fast. 

So we stopped at the Café for a quick lunch — only time for one course- and what should jump to my eye but good old chicken under a brick. What a fine way to deal with a boned chicken breast! 

As to the next twenty hours, forget it. Might as well have fasted. 

Last dinner

Eastside Road, September 15, 2014—

NOW THERE'S AN ALARMIST headline. What I mean is, simply, last dinner at home for a couple of weeks. I'm off to the antipodes tomorrow, and eating irregularly for me, I'm sure — but also eating well, because eating en famille. You'll see.

In the meantime, Cook regaled me with home pleasures: Franco's Toulouse sausage, liberated from the freezer and grilled in a black iron skillet; little potatoes quartered and cooked in olive oil with rosemary, garlic, and salt; and broccoli, first we've had in a long time.

Those potatoes: it's so simple. You just clean them, don't peel them, quarter them, put them in hot olive oil in a black iron skillet (fortunately we have a number of them) with rosemary branches and unpeeled garlic cloves, salting it liberally. Cook fast, until done.

Green salad after, and a little chocolate. Couldn't ask for a finer dinner. I'm going to miss this Cook!

Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, 2012

Bread and cheese

MORE THAN THAT, actually, as we'd gone to an afternoon book party where we delighted in canapés — onion confit, tapenade, paté, and yes, bread and cheese. Cookies too, and fruit, of course. 

Afterward, at another friend's nearby house,  bread and cheese, and a reinvigorating shot of tequila, ay caramba.   

Then, home, we closed out the night with — bread and cheese, and sliced tomatoes, and a little dry salami. 

A most unusual day…

Cheap Zinfandel

Tuna-bean salad

Eastside Road, September 13, 2013—

LET'S SEE HOW WELL I can blog from the iPhone, since I'm going to be away from the desktop for a couple of weeks. 

Tonight, after last night's feast, we went back to the icebox — excuse me : fridge, I think you youngsters call it — and finished up the tuna-cannellini salad, with sliced tomatoes and some delicious green beans from the neighboring farm. Green salad afterward, of course. 

Cheap Spanish white

Chalkboard

	Eastside Road, September 13, 2014—

BELIEVE IT or not, I rarely think about this blog while I'm at the table. I don't even remember that it exists. The blog, I mean: the table reasserts itself readily enough. I suppose I've been writing for so many years that I have learned to dissociate the act, as an isolated act, from the continuous activities of life. (For the first time, I contemplate the distinction between act and activity: writing, chez moi, is rarely dissociated from contemplation! But I stray from my purpose.)

When the blog does come to mind while at table it is generally because the iPhone has come out to take a photograph. But except for the occasional photo of a menu, taken not for the blog but as an aide-memoire (no idea why French threatens to take over this post) this rarely happens. I'm too involved with the pleasures of the table (which of course include conversation, gazing, and eavesdropping as well as tasting).

Last night we were with friends at a local restaurant; their first visit, our second. The iPhone came out twice: first in an attempt to read the tiny mark stamped into the very handsome fork aside my plate — I often resort to zoomed-in photos these days; why carry a lens? — then to record the menu.

And why record the menu, if not to recall later, at the writing-desk, what the devil we ate last night? Why, to order some more food, if we're so inclined, this being one of those small-plates "sharing menu" places. Or, I must admit, to remember just what it is we're eating, for composed dishes are getting subtle and complex enough (or my mind vague and blurry enough) that it sometimes requires verbal input to assist palatal information.

Of the menu seen here, then, the four of us managed to deal with

Pork belly biscuits
Crudo of the day (halibut cheeks)
Hamachi crudo
Beef tartare
Chopped salad
Kennebec fries
Squid ink Gigli
Cresta di gallo
Lamachine
Tagliatelle
Scallops
Calamari

and dessert, which is one of the places a return to the menu came in handy. (I regret the dessert menu was not photographed: it had remained, handily, at the table. I think the waitress had by then begun to think we were serious about this business.)

Last time we were here we ate not quite so gluttonously — it was lunch, after all, not dinner. (That was a couple of weeks ago; I wrote about it in a post called Late August.) I think it's a mistake to attack a menu like this voraciously: most of these "small plates" are so deep, complex, and pointed that, taken one after another, then returned to, they begin to overwhelm the analytical palate, to confuse.

I'm not fond of "tasting menus," either. A multi-course meal (by which I mean more than, say, four courses) has to be very well thought out indeed if its parts are not to overwhelm the whole.

Then there's the matter of wine. How can you possibly choose a wine to accompany a series of tastings like this? Even from an enterprising list, which is what you find here, and even profiting from the half-glasses on offer, a very good idea, you'd have to be far more focussed on the task at hand than I could have been last night — distracted as I was by company, preparations for travel, thoughts of jobs unfinished back at the ranch, and the like.

I want to return to this place a few times, just Cook and me, at midday, to deal with single plates. They're too good to throw together.

Ah: the dessert. We remembered that the ice creams and sorbets here were particularly nice, and shared three: Bourbon vanilla, Chocolate chip, Blackberry balsamic. All are quite wonderful; different in texture, deep with flavor. The bourbon vanilla was a creamy mousse-like thing, ingratiating; the chocolate-chip was more of a challenge but a delightful one. The Blackberry balsamic is, I think, quite overwhelmingly delicious, though Cook — who was, after all, a pastry chef in her day — thinks it just a bit too heavy on the Balsamic vinegar. The four of us began to speculate just what kind of plum was used: Santa Rosa? Hitachi? Certainly a Japanese plum, not European; and after all this is the land of Luther Burbank, who experimented so notably with hybrids…

And then Ina said But why are we talking about plums? Surely it's blackberry balsamic, no?

Martinis

• Chalkboard, 29 North Street, Healdsburg; 707-473-8030

More catch-up

Eastside Road, September 12, 2014—

PERHAPS AN EXPLANATION is in order: we've been busy, and we've been eating irregularly. The end of last week was spent at a hotel conference in Los Angeles, as cursorily noted in the last post here. We drove down on Friday, subsisting on bread, cheese, peanuts, and water; and we drove back on Sunday, on a similar diet. What, no green salads those days! No cheap Pinot grigio! Yes, but Martini rewards instead, and I guess we get enough green salad to let us skip a day or two, now and then…

Monday night we feasted on fusilli. Yes: it was the last of that fine pesto I'd made a week earlier, I think; and it had held up perfectly well in the icebox, hadn't darkened at all; if anything, the flavors even more blended and deepened.

Tuesday, of course, was fast day. Wednesday we feasted: our usual this-time-of-year lunch, as seen in the photo to the left: peanut butter on toast; fresh figs from our trees. The drought has been hard on the trees, but has intensified the fruit. Late pleasures are sharpest.

And Tuesday night Cook turned to an old favorite unaccountably otherwise neglect this year, surely one of the Hundred Plates, Tuna-Cannellini salad. Simplest thing in the world: a can of good tuna — we use Ortiz, which purports to be Mediterranean tuna, processed in Spain (I write "purports" because, well, one doesn't want to be cynical, but these days…)

Anyhow: a can of good tuna; a can or jar or two or three of cannellini, a chopped onion, what looks like some summer savory, a little olive oil if needed, ditto salt. Marvelous with a decent white. There it is, over there to the right:


We've been eating lots of fruit. The Bosc pears are particularly heavy this year; the Comice and Duchesse d'Angoulème are always heavy, and they all seem early. The Seckels were big and delicious, because I'd thinned them some, for a change. There's an embarrassing number of apples on the trees. Good dark fig crop, too, though there weren't any white figs far as I could tell.

It's hard to keep up with all this; we don't even try. I tell myself every year we need a cider mill, but they're so damned expensive…

Oh: and while my poor grapevines are really suffering from drought, they sure put on a lot of fruit this year!

Hotel food

Los Angeles, September 6, 2014—

This was probably the best part of the dinner at tonight's conference reception — a simple green salad, heavy on the cucumber, with red wine vinaigrette. After that, "Duo of cod & Garlic Chicken," with a sort of rice pilaf.

If we had stayed a little longer we could have had "Freshly Made Tiramisu," but we would have had to play charades.

Oh well. We'll be home tomorrow…

White and red, by the glass

Catchup with braised figs

Eastside Road, September 4, 2014—

THESE ARE REALLY gorgeous, don't you agree? They're the figs Cook braised night before last, when we had a couple of friends over for dinner — simply not-quite-dead-ripe black figs from one of our trees, cut in half, laid in a baking dish, drizzled with honey and a few drops of fig eau-de-vie (thanks, Elliott!), then baked in a hot oven and finished with a sprinkle of lemon juice and salt.

It is very nice to have a pastry chef in the kitchen.

Dinner had been fusilli with pesto, one of the nicest pestos I've made recently (even though with commercial pine nuts) because of the delicious Rose de Lautrec garlic that went into it: we get that from two local farmers, Nancy Skall and Yael Bernier:this variety of garlic is my favorite for many purposes, and while there are subtle differences between their produce, theirs is the best I know of.

Otherwise, Monday and last night we've been feasting on leftovers — paella, fusilli — and lots of fruit and tomatoes. The skies tell me the tomatoes won't be around all that much longer. Or, I suppose, the figs.

cheap rosé, in general…

Paella party

Eastside Road, August 31, 2014—

EVERY SUMMER WE TRY to have the pastry crew from the restaurant — by which I always mean Chez Panisse — up for a patio party. We don’t manage to get to it every year. We missed last year, for example. This year we were determined not to miss it — it’s just too much fun. So today we had eighteen at table, the big teak table out on the patio, not big enough in truth but I didn’t hear any complaints about crowding.

It’s a lot of work getting the place ready, so we generally farm out the actual cooking. It helps that one of the pastry chefs (there are two, just as there are two restaurant chefs, and two in the café) is married to a chef who specializes these days in catering. It also helps that Curt’s a dear friend, whose instinctive (and educated) palate and interests parallel our own…

He brought a lot of the marvelous toasted almonds he makes, and cherry tomatoes, and padrones, to nibble on while he cooked the main course.

A professional understands miss en place, the carefully organized setting out of all the "prepped" ingredients that will go into a course of any complexity. Here in our coffee bowls you see chopped parsley, flageolets, diced ham, minced onions, the rice, and those delicious little green beans that make his paella uniquely good.

Mary Jo decorated the table, using pine cones and bay leaves, rosemary, figs, pears, and grapes from the garden. And, thankfully, she took most of these photos, because I was too busy enjoying myself to give the matter any thought at all.

The paellas cooked over charcoal — a shrimp and mussel one for everyone but me; a delicious rabbit and clam one for me.

Lindsey made natillas for dessert — a soft custard flavored with cinnamon, very Spanish, just right after this meal. It was a great party. The pastry crew is impressive: chefs and cooks who have fascinating experience at the restaurant and in their own lives; they've travelled; they're artistic; they read interesting books; they live life fully, with great enthusiasm and discernment. Hard to imagine a more rewarding bunch of people to spend an afternoon and evening with, on a perfect late-summer day!


Curt and your blogger

White: Ressò, Garnacha blanca (Catalunya), 2011 (soft and pleasant); rosé: Côtes du Rhône, La Manarine, 2013