Home again

Eastside Road, June 8, 2015—

AFTER A MONTH in Italy, we're nearly back to normal. We spent Thursday in flight, eating airplane meals; I won't say anything more about that. And we arrived in San Francisco too late and too tired for dinner. Friday morning we had our first coffee in nearly forty hours, and it was much needed and appreciated: a couple of cappuccinos at Emporio Rulli, in the San Francisco airport. With them, as you see, a bastone, millefeuille pastry with nuts and dried fruits — a touch of Italy, recalling our first breakfast in Naples, a month ago…

Friday, our first day back, Cook made a beautiful composed salad, just the kind of dish we had missed so often in the last month. Lettuces, cherry tomatoes, an avocado, delicious little fingerling potatoes, a handful of green beans, dressed with olive oil and sherry vinegar. Summer is on the way.

Saturday — well, it's already receded from memory. We'd been back to the Healdsburg farmer's market, our first visit to it this year (it only reopened the beginning of last month), and were glad to see the traditions and quality the late Nancy Skall had developed at her Middleton Gardens (with the tremendous help of her gardener who was wisely retained by the new owners) were still evident. But by dinner-time I was apparently eating in my jet-lagged sleep, and I can't report any further.

Yesterday, though — Cook's real birthday — I began to come back to life. Lunch was Franco's marvelously flavored chicken-liver mousse on good old Downtown Bakery Como bread, toasted, with a glass of Cheap Pinot Grigio.

And then dinner, down the hill at the neighbor's, with the close family gathered around, four generations of us, and some delicious broiled trout and, again, the freshest, sweetest, yet still suggestively earthy fingerling potatoes, and salad, and a birthday cake… Thanks, all!

Whites and rosés

☛Restaurants visited in 2015 are listed at Eatingday's Restaurants