Fish and duck

Berkeley, October 16, 2012—

FISH AND DUCK AND panna cotto, as you see, what a truly fine lunch with a couple of friends in the café. I started with raw albacore with cucumbers, anise hyssop, ginger, and scallions, a very Japanese dish it seemed to me, light and pointed yet delicate, perfect for a warm Indian summer day; and then went on to another end of the scale, duck confit with crispy potatoes, sweet peppers, cabbage, and fried sage leaves, very much looking forward into the autumn. The potatoes were crisp indeed, very thin cut, like very thin fettuccine, salty and delicious, a perfect foil to the confit.

Dessert: this buttermilk panna cotta with huckleberry coulis and an almond cookie. Panna cotta is a favorite of mine and makes me think I've been lax about promoting desserts to the Hundred Plates. The confit belongs there too, of course.

a glass of white, a glass of red

• Café Chez Panisse, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley; 510.548.5525

The weekly salmon

Eastside Road, October 14, 2012—

YOU'VE SEEN IT BEFORE, of course, the weekly market menu. When I was a boy it was normal to have roughly the same menu each day of the week: Friday fish, Sunday chicken, Saturday roast pork, Monday macaroni and cheese — that sort of thing. Perhaps for that reason I not only don't mind the weekly repetition of what I've come to think of as The Market Menu: on the contrary, there's something reassuring about it.

The softboiled egg on Sunday; the Martinis on Friday and Saturday; the Tuesday fast (though this next week we'll advance the fast by a day, since we're eating out on Tuesday). The Market Menu: wild local salmon, tamed local lima beans, tomatoes from next door. The lemon from our dooryard. Afterward, figs and pears from our trees. Only the wine is imported:

Rosé, Domaine de Gaussac, 2011

Urban roadhouse

Eastside Road, October 13, 2012—

FOR A WHILE NOW — when did it start? A year ago? — we've had an irregular Roadhouse Survey going with a couple of old friends. And what constitutes a roadhouse, you may ask. Well, in general, it's in the country, by the side of a road that was an important through road in its day but has probably since given way to a parallel freeway.

It has a full bar that tends toward beer and bourbon, though vodka has begun to shoulder its way in as well. The menu runs to steak and chicken and overcooked pasts. In my opinion no true roadhouse is found in a town or city. In fact what distinguishes a hamlet or village from a town is the permitted presence — permitted by my definition; it's not a matter of organized licensing — of a roadhouse.

Our friends insisted that we had to experience an old standby they'd known of for years, though, even though it is within the city limits of perhaps the third largest city in the county, Petaluma, known in my boyhood as The Egg Capital of the World. And so there we went tonight, Saturday night in an urban roadhouse, and we had a good time.

Martini at the bar under the taxidermy: a careless Martini, no measuring involved unless the bartender was counting under her breath; and the Cinzano vermouth was the sweet white, not the dry; and it was barely shaken, and so not terribly cold. Oh well. Martinis are like baseball: a poor one is better than none at all.

After moving into the capacious dining room — there are two; the other is only slightly less capacious — we had "family style" dinners: tureens (well, serving bowls) of good house-made minestrone and clam chowder; a big bowl of mixed green salad; a platter of overcooked macaroni in a cream sauce heavily flavored with vinegar, I thought (or was this some kind of yoghurt sauce?)

Then I went on to lamb shank, a little dry but full of flavor, in a reduced sauce with plenty of garlic, with plenty of sautéed squash, pepper, and onion on the side as well as a nice creamy serving of white polenta, nicely seasoned. And dessert: Spumoni! This is not a gourmet destination; it's a roadhouse, in spite of being in the center of town. But it's comfortable and reassuring, and old-fashioned and picturesque as hell, and honest to a fault. I can imagine returning.

Primitivo, Layer Cake (Puglia), 2010: not bone dry, good fruit and varietal, generous.

• Volpi's Ristorante & Bar, 124 Washington Street, Petaluma;(707) 762-2371

Tarte alsacienne

Eastside Road, October 12, 2012—

WE DO, EVERY NOW and then, we do resort to readymade. We don't buy a lot of food in boxes or cans, but convenience has its place. Yesterday, for example, you'll have noticed, we ate hominy from a can. Well, not really: we poured it into a pan, and heated it up with a few other things, and served it out…

Oh never mind. We ate hominy from a can, and tonight we ate tarte from a box. I don't remember now who it was recommended Trader Joe's "Tarte Alsacienne" to us; it was someone with a big freezer, who buys a dozen at a time to have on hand when people drop in unexpectedly: you just throw them in the oven to finish them, and cut them into little pieces, and serve them as finger-food with cocktails or what have you.

For us, this cheese-and-bacon tarte serves as a main meal when we don't feel like spending time or thought on cooking. Lindsey sliced up a couple of green tomatoes; I made vinaigrette for the green salad. We may have the last of the apple pie a little later, or we may not: Ceres knows there's plenty of fruit in the pantry.

Cheap Pinot grigio

Offal

Eastside Road, October 11, 2012—

THAT INDISPENSABLE FELLOW the pig made his appearance today both at lunch and at dinner; on both occasions after trips to local salumieri. And we have wonderful salumeficii hereabouts — Healdsburg is soon likely to be as well known (and much visited) for its meat products, I venture to say, as for its wines.

Let's start with dinner, at home: Franco Dunn's "Chorizo Verde" combines pork, spinach, onion, salt, ground-up pumpkin seeds, serrano chilis and oregano to a sophisticated but spicy conclusion. Lindsey broiled four of them — we had a hungry winemaking grandson to dinner — and she cooked up some canned hominy with chopped onion and Habañera pepper to go with them. As you see, sliced local tomatoes on the side; afterward, green salad.

And apple pie. Lindsey's pie crust is the best there is, but she doesn't have to make it any more; we just get a couple of frozen ones from the bakery — after all, it's her recipe, more or less. The apples are ours, though, just now a combination of Calville blancs and Sierra Beauties. With a scoop of Twin Girls ice cream on the side, all you need afterward is a dram or two of slivovitz.

Cheap Pinot grigio; Tempranillo Barrica, Albero, 2009

---

WE'D GONE INTO TOWN for lunch, taken there by an old friend we hadn't seen in years until Lindsey ran into him a couple of weeks ago. We were happy to show him a newish restaurant in town, where we've only been once before — a restaurant that knows how to make a sandwich.

I had this "Il Nonno," being a nonno* myself: delicious soppressata, headcheese, with salsa verde, chopped hardboiled egg, arugula, Calabrian chili peppers, and pickled zucchini on ciabatta, a favorite bread of mine. Very spicy; quite delicious.

Il Nonno, garnished with pickle, caper, and arugula, at Campo Fina

Vermentino, Seghesio (Healdsburg), 2011: crisp, sound, refreshing

*nonno: Italian for "grandfather"

• Campo Fina, 330 Healdsburg Avenue, Healdsburg; 707-395-4640

Faemina

Coffee central: the Faemina, with (beyond it) the coffee roaster and grinder

Eastside Road, October 10, 2012—

TODAY IS FAST DAY, typically Tuesday, when we have our usual Spartan breakfast, then nothing until a handful of almonds and cashews with tea in the evening.

But breakfast this morning, ah, breakfast! The Faemina is back from the shop!

Lindsey found the Faemina in the middle 1960s in a second-hand shop — remember those? — on Grove Street in Berkeley. We borrowed twelve bucks from Mom, put thirteen of our own with it, and bought the machine, which was brand new, still sporting its European plug. Our old friend George Craig replaced the plug, and we've used it ever since. Over the years it's needed gaskets from time to time, and once it needed something more: on that occasion I actually shipped it to New York for refurbishment, and it returned lacking some of its parts and, while working, not really working quite the same.

Last month it stopped working, and I suspected the heating elements had given out. I'd had to replace switches on it twice — you see one on the base; there's another, similar, on the other side — and my wiring was largely guesswork. The switches had been arcing, and now and then you smelled hot insulation on the wires. Time to take it to the shop.

I took it to my old friend Mr Espresso in Oakland. Soon came discouraging news: the elements were burned out and needed replacing. Much research on line. Then, just when I'd found someone back east who'd supply brand-new handmade replacements, at a hefty though honest price, happier news from Oakland: after removal, clean-up, and reinstallation, and complete rewiring, Faemina was as good as new.

Well, not quite, of course. There's some play in the lever: in fifty years, moving metal parts inevitably wear down a bit. Some of the chrome plating is showing its age, too.

But the machine works. We have our caffelattes again, after weeks of substitutes from our daughter's Atomic, and one or another Moka from the top shelf, and even a cheap plastic Krups fake espresso maker we bought years ago for use in a rented vacation house.

Ah, Faemina, how fond we are of you! How grateful for these long years of devotion! I promise to take good care of you…

Bakers Dozen at Foreign Cinema

San Francisco, October 9, 2012—

EVERY NOW AND THEN, maybe
twice a year, we get to a meeting of Bakers Dozen, a group of professional and dedicated amateur bakers founded a number of years ago by Flo Braker, the late Amy Pressman, and — at that time — eleven other bakers, among whom Lindsey was included. Over the years the membership has grown tremendously, and there are now satellite Bakers Dozens in other parts of the country: here in the Bay Area the membership must certainly be over a hundred.

This is not the place to comment much further on the Dozen, other than to note that I always come away from the meetings with a renewed faith in the essential goodness and generosity of humanity. Bakers are an interesting lot: dedicated, disciplined, methodical, somewhat fatalistic, and as a whole generous, dedicating their lives to their essentially small, local, repetitive work, providing daily or festive fare of humble or frivolous nature.

The meetings generally consist of a coffee-and-conversation half hour, a presentation of some kind, and lunch. Today there were two presentations: by Rita Held and Rosemary Mark, co-bloggers who produce Get Cooking Simply — a fascinating discussion of food blogs in general, which perhaps one of these days I'll comment on over at The Eastside View — and then a mini-lecture on how to write and publish a cookbook, with a very useful handout, by Flo Braker, who knows a thing or two about that subject.

But what concerns us here is lunch. We all sat down to the same three courses: a fine variation on the classic Caesar salad with tender chiffonaded Russian kale in place of romaine, Piave in place of Parmesan, and a first-rate dressing discreetly murmuring Anchovy and Lemon and subtle vinegar. Next, fried chicken — a fine meaty chicken, juicy but not watery, in a very delicate batter, crusted with sesame seeds, accopanied by broccoli rabe seasoned with chili and a subtle North African spice blend and softened with yogurt sauce.

Dessert: Crème brûlée — eggy and creamy, deeply flavored with rose water, perfectly glazed — and a curious cookie.

still water

• Foreign Cinema, 2534 Mission Street, San Francisco; (415) 648-7600