Sausage; strawberries

Eastside Road, June 26, 2016—

I MENTIONED STRAWBERRIES the other day. Yesterday, at the Healdsburg Farm Market, Cook bought them from two different farmers: Renee Kiff, whose radishes, lettuces, and melons are among our favorites (and who is a warm and witty columnist in the local newspaper, the Healdsburg Tribune, Enterprise and Scimitar), and Lou Preston, whose wines are also among our favorites, and who bakes bread as good as anyone's, and then he makes pickles, and sauerkraut, and grows all sorts of vegetables…

Enough. Cook turned those berries into a shortcake today, but complained that they were too dry. Well, it was one hundred degrees today, and not a trace of moisture in the air; you can forgive strawberries drying out a bit in this weather.

Renee's strawberries were a variety new to us, Tribute, nice-looking but tasting, I thought, like the commercial strawberries I never really appreciated — they taste like mostly citric acid to me, though better palates than mine respond much more positively. Lou had some Mara des bois, the go-to strawberry these days, but Cook had bought another variety whose name I don't recall.

I noticed we all managed to eat our shortcake. Earlier, we'd enjoyed Franco Dunn's sweet Italian sausages, grilled over rosemary and grape and rose wood on the patio, and green beans cooked with onions and shallots, and the obligatory green salad.

Cheap Pinot grigio; Garnacha/Monastrell, Laya (Almansa), 2014

☛RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating:  2016   2015