Zucchini frittata

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 7, 2009—

SO MANY VEGETABLES. Fruit too, of course: it's feast or famine around here when it comes to fresh. This is the peak of the season.
Lindsey used Deborah Madison's recipe, grating the zucchini, combining it with the eggs and grated Parmesan and chopped garlic, flavoring it with marjoram, and frying it in olive oil. I always think of The Big Night when I taste eggs cooked in olive oil, and hear that marvelous whisk-whisk-whisk of the, what else, whisk, in the moody silece that heals that marvelous story.

Cheap Pinot grigio

Fettuccine with clams and mussels

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 6, 2009—

I DIDN'T COOK IT, so I can't really tell you how it was done. I think Lindsey steamed the mussels and clams with water, white wine, and onions, and then tossed them in the cooked fettuccine with chopped parsley. She was inspired by our friend Ann, who served us that dish ten days ago or so.
With them, or rather after, crudités: red pepper, radishes, cucumbers; and then the green salad, new little lettuces coming in just now in the garden.

Cheap Pinot grigio

OH: and this is as good a place as any to mention that my friend John Whiting has just reported on a week of Paris bistros. It's good to hear Pharamond is as pleasurable as ever.

Lunch chez Panisse

Berkeley, August 5, 2009—

GARDEN LETTUCE SALAD and then, since it's rare we get the chance to eat good fish, grilled California sea bass with Indian spices, eggplant, watercress, and mint raita, Odd to have so Indian-tasting a thing in the café, but reassuring, too: it's nice to see this kind of accommodation, a form of cultural generosity. It's precisely this kind of interest, inspired by food but going beyond it, that lends dignity to this obsessive contemplation of the table. (Ah there, Curtis, I'm beginning a response to your challenge.)

The fish was dusted with those spices: they lay on the surface, in a way, rather than infiltrating the meat itself, just as the ethnicity of the cuisine they represent entered but did not merge with the kitchen that prepared this dish.

Dessert: chocolate pavé, chocolate sauce, and espresso cream. J'adore le chocolat.

Txakolina Bizkaiko, Uriondo, 2008

Not Niçoise

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 4, 2009—

THOUGH THE REASON eludes me: it looks and tastes like a salade Niçoise to me. When I asked Lindsey why it wasn't, I got the answer you so often get: Because.
Let's see: tuna, peppers, tomatoes, green beans, cucumber, onion, hardboiled eggs, boiled potatoes, lettuces, olive oil, vinegar, salt. Oh: cucumbers. They certainly don't belong in a Niçoise. And where are the olives? I know: not everyone agrees about the potatoes. But olives; surely they're definitive when it comes to Niçoise.

Whatever: it was truly delicious, with all that point, to use a French word, that fine focus, that means so much to a savory dish. Really good olive oil, and salt, and nice Jerez vinegar, and recently-picked vegetables, either from the garden or from the Farmer's market. You can't beat this.

Pinot grigio, Sonoma county, "Forestville," 2007

Grilled cheese sandwich

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 3, 2009—

MOSTERDKAAS WAS A surprise. When we visit the Netherlands, nearly annually, we always come back with cheese. (Well, ditto when we visit Italy, of course.) You can bring hard cheese in, all you want, if it's vacuum-packed; we've found this works fine for Parmagiano and for various boerenkaasen, those delicious hard aged Dutch cheeses that often go by the generic names Gouda and Amsterdammer, though those are in fact quite specific cheeses, typed by terroir, or at least point of origin.
This last time was the first time we'd run into mosterdkaas, aged cow's-milk cheese flavored with mustard seeds. Cumin's common; nagelkaas, studded with cloves, less so though one of our favorites. We like netelkaas too, flavored with nettles.
Tonight we ate the last of it — clearly we didn't bring enough home. Lindsey made grilled cheese sandwiches, on Como bread from the Downtown Bakery. Well, not exactly grilled: she toasted them dry in the toaster-oven. With them, boiled potatoes and blanched green beans with the last of yesterday's pesto; afterward, green salad.

Rosé, Var, "La Ferme Julien," 2007

Trenette al pesto

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 2, 2009—

THEY WERE A NEW kind of pasta to me: trenette, short batons, say two inches long, of a hollow thick-shelled triangular cross-section no more than a quarter inch on a side. Rustichella brand, a brand I trust. Organic. They looked to me as if they'd hold pesto nicely, and they reminded me a bit of strozzapreti, another thick short pasta that I particularly like, so I brought them home.
Today's pesto was particularly nice: two bunches of Genovese basil from the Kiff farm, a couple of cloves of that strong flavorful French rose-violet garlic that Yael Bernier sells, also at the Healdsburg farmer's market; pine nuts not from China but from New Mexico — piñons, in fact. The Parmesan we bought last fall in Milan, getting better and nuttier as time goes by. Good Turkish olive oil from Portland. So much travel, so many friends and acquaintances, all ground up together in the marble mortar.
Sliced tomatoes; radishes; nuts. A "petit Marcel" from Pugs Leap. That was lunch, with friends, on the patio; tonight we finished it all off for supper, with a green salad from the garden.

Rosé, Var, "La Ferme Julien"; cheap Pinot grigio.

Salmon

Healdsburg, August 1—
SALMON, COHO SALMON, bought from the Fish Guy at the farmers market, who makes life here even more delightful than it already is. Lindsey sauteed it and garnished it with lemon; there were delicious green beans and potatoes from the market, and tomatos…

Rosé, Var, La Ferme Julien, 2007