Pasta down the hill

Ham, snow peas, asparagus, mushrooms, arugula, olive oil, cream, salt, pepper, pasta

TO THE NEIGHBORS TONIGHT for dinner and a bit of a cooking lesson. Eric sliced some bits off the ham — it certainly didn't hurt that it was a Smithfield — and Thérèse sliced snow peas, mushrooms, and asparagus to sauté with them, adding a few leaves of arugula and just a splash or two of cream toward the end. Fettucini. Black pepper and Parmagiano. A green salad.

Pinot grigio

Salmon again

Foreign Cinema, 2534 Mission St., San Francisco, tel. 415.648.7600
mixed baby lettuces, Delta asparagus, baby beets, Champagne vinaigrette
Roasted salmon, new potatoes, fig-hazelnut aillade, green olive toast, radishes, lemon mayonnaise
small dessert "tastes"

THE BAKER'S DOZEN, an organization of professional bakers and associated paraprofessionals, meets at one of our favorite restaurants every few months, with a presentation or panel of some kind, a question-and-answer session, lots of conversation, and a fine lunch.
Today the subject was cupcakes, and four bakers were on hand to compare notes and describe their commitment to the genre — three of them having gone into the business of cupcake specialization. That was very interesting, and the samples they and other members had brought were delicious. But so was the lunch.

We started with a tender spring salad: soft, flavorful lettuces and crisp sturdy asparagus under a floral vinaigrette. There were those beets, but they were small and as subtle as their nature would permit: I think farmers have finally figured out how to grow edible beets.

Then came the dish you see up at the top, in the big photo. As you know we had salmon and new potatoes for dinner last night: but as you may also know, we don't mind repeating foods in consecutive meals. Last night's sockeye was grilled, smoky with grapevine wood, assertive; today's salmon was supple and tender. The fig-hazelnut aillade formed a sort of tangy chutney to set off this subtle fish, and the tapenade toast and lemon mayonnaise continued the theme.



Then there were the desserts, hardly needed you'd think after the cupcake samples we'd had before lunch, but cleansing and wholesome: a perfect strawberry wearing a discreet white-chocolate robe; a chewy little cookie whose texture recalled that fig-hazelnut compote; and strip of candied citron dipped in dark chocolate. Nothing more, nothing less.

Salmon on the grill

Lunch: green salad with poached eggs
Dinner: salmon, olive oil, lemon, salt, pepper; potatoes, garlic; arugula; green salad

LUNCH WAS GOOD ENOUGH: Green salad with poached eggs and a glass of white wine at Parkside Café (404 Santa Rosa Avenue, Santa Rosa, California, 95404; tel. 707-573-5955), an unpretentious but very good eatery. The lettuce was superb: fresh, tender, full of flavor, organic of course, from a Yolo county farm.

Dinner was just as good, if I do say it myself. The sockeye salmon, frozen, came from good old Trader Joe. I marinated it in olive oil and lemon juice for half an hour, with salt and pepper; meanwhile building a fire of grapevine cuttings and rose-canes (I always save them when I prune).

Halved, then sliced thick the potatoes; fried 'em in olive oil with unpeeled garlic cloves, salt, and rosemary.

Grilled the salmon by leaning it up in a clamp-basket affair over the coals, say six minutes, then flip for a minute or two. I plated it out on beds of tender fresh arugula just cut in the garden.

Pinot grigio

Sunday afternoon in the country

Canapés, pizzas, roast pork with potatos, desserts

TO THE DRY CREEK VALLEY west of Geyserville this afternoon, there to graze and converse and relax among two of the kids, three of the grandchildren, and a couple dozen others, most of them met for the first time.

The house is on a hilltop facing west out across the valley and its vineyards. An elegant, curiously anthropomorphic pizza oven stands near the pool, and there Niko presided with his associate Amelia, who had squeezed out some fresh mozzarella from buffalo milk found who knows where.

The first pizzas were topped with sliced leeks and spring onions, the crust thin and brittle, nicely singed around the edges. Nearby Tatsuo looked in occasionally at a rack of pork turning slowly over a grill. Potatoes and garlic and rosemary were part of the menu as well.

Guests had brought a number of appetizers: smoked salmon, salmon rillettes, hardboiled egg canapés and the like. The wines ranged from a remarkably austere local Chardonnay — you might have thought it was Chablis — to a $3.99 sparkler from Trader Joe: there were no snobs among this company!

And since it was a visiting chef's birthday there was a cake, and rhubarb pie, and polenta cookies, and many other goodies…

 

A fine hot Sunday afternoon in the wine country.

Backyard grill

Composed salad: Tuna, lettuce, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, capers…
Grilled steak and sausage

THE FIRE BEGAN WITH CHARCOAL briquets but went on to green fig wood, pieces from the recent pruning of several fig trees. I don't think the meat was particularly marinated; probably just salted a bit and laid on over the fire. Lindsey had made this delicious faux-niçoise salad; I especially noticed the grains of sea-salt in it.



The afternoon had been fairly strenuous, with a short hike in new shoes and new back-pack with twelve or fifteen pounds in it; and the Martini had left us thirsty and hungry and ready for a fine evening. Bats overhead eating the mosquitos; big owl flying silently overhead to roost in a nearby oak.

Lou Preston Sirah-syrah; côtes de Rhone Guignal

home again

pasta, olive oil, anchovies, garlic

Healdsburg, April 25—

HOME AGAIN, AND HAPPY to be so. And after the Friday Martini, we clipped a few leaves from the wild arugula plants, miraculously grown during our absence; and washed some lettuce, and made the usual vinaigrette.

And Lindsey cooked up a batch of pasta, and smashed some anchovies into a pan with a little oil and some crushed garlic.

Nero d'Avila

New Sammy's

New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro, 2210 South Pacific Highway, Talent, Oregon

tel. 541-535-2779

DINNER TONIGHT, OH YES, at New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro up here in Ashland. Years ago I used to amuse myself constructing lists: among them, the Five Great Restaurants. The first time, it included Chez Panisse, Il Vipore, Obelisk, Stephanie's, and Het Pomphuis. They've changed since then, since three of five are out of business.

Today the list would clearly include New Sammy's. In fact that has been true for ten years now. New Sammy's is the kind of place whose genius evolves from a single person in the kitchen, in this case Charlene Rollins. There are very few such geniuses in my experience. Others would be Alice Waters, Amaryll Schwertner, the late Catherine Brandel — are they all female? Why wouldn't they be?

New Sammy's is something between a three-star restaurant and a roadhouse, halfway between Ashland and Talent on old Highway 99 in southwest Oregon. They've recently enlarged, hiding the original cute little restaurant behind a new vaguely Southwest-style stucco-and-recycled-timbers facade incorporating a fine comfortable wine bar; and they're serving lunch at the end of the week — do you hear that, Ashland playgoers? — but the kitchen is as brilliant as ever.

You see the first course above. (Well, the first principal course: earlier
amuses-gueles involved sorrel-fish-stock-based soup with roe, and such.): broccoli rabe, asparagus, artichoke, nearly hard-cooked quail eggs (or perhaps pullet, or bantam hen), with bits of chive and basil and a curious black oval-leafed mint, all from the garden.

Then the main course, local lamb chops on the best risotto I've ever had, soft, fragrant, perfectly cooked. The lamb tasted of the pasture, a clean, nutty, subtle taste, but muscular and meaty. (Just right of center in the photo you see one of those little mint leaves, turned upside-down as it happens and so not dark at all.)



With this a fine red Loire, Tête de lard Saumur 2004, fragrant of bacon, of all things, a Cabernet franc with lots of structure and tannin and aroma. And afterwards a perfect panforte. An amazing dinner. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything better.