Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Fast day

chicken breast, asparagus, potatoes and cipolline
Eastside Road, April 5, 2016—

TUESDAY: FAST DAY: a good day to catch up. Last night we feasted on the plate you see here: chicken breasts, cooked under the broiler with a curious and delicious sauce: chopped rosemary, raisins, shallots, and white wine; you can find the recipe in the current (April 2016) issue of Sunset Magazine.

I must say this was a delicious dinner. The slow-cooked shallots combined with chopped rosemary and raisins to a very medieval Italian effect; there's something Venetian about this dish. With it, as you see, nice fresh green asparagus; Cook shaved the stalks with her trusty potato peeler and I simply steamed them, salted, in water.

I was responsible for the potatoes and cipolline. These flat pearl-type onions are a bit of a nuisance to peel, but they sure are worth it; I don't know a tastier onion for this kind of treatment. I peeled them and simply cooked them in olive oil along with the little creamer potatoes, hardly bigger than the cipolline. Salt, of course. Delicious.

Green salad after, and a tangerine…

R.G.M.V. (Roussane, Grenache blanc, Mourvedre, Viognier), Central Coast, 2013: a very inexpensive wine that is really quite nice when good and cold.

Sausage, carrots and onionsSUNDAY NIGHT Cook grilled a couple of Franco's marvelous sausages — they'd been waiting for us in the freezer. With them, a marvelous blend of sliced carrots, onions, and fennel, cooked in butter. Sweet! Green salad afterward.
Cheap Pinot noir

AND THE DAY before, Saturday, a day that had begun in Monterey and much of which had been spent at the Aquarium there, we had a simple supper of leftover penne in red sauce. We'd lunched at the Aquarium: Cindy Pawlcyn runs the cafe there, apparently, and the Caesary salad was Caesarier than others we've had lately: not bad.

RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating:  2016   2015

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