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!