Summer supper: salmon

Eastside Road, August 22, 2012—

CAN ANYTHING SAY IT better than this photograph, I wonder: summer supper. The tomatoes are from our neighbors up Eastside Road, the young Hopkins — I talked to the older generation earlier today; they're going to Torino in late October, in , to participate Terra Madre, the Slow Food farm-marketing conference, and were curious about our hotel choices in previous years.

These tomatoes grow on a bit of land carved out of the vineyards on the shelf of alluvial soil next to the river. In other places these soils have been bulldozed aside so that sixty or seventy feet of gravel underneath can be dug up, washed, trucked away, and turned into concrete. I shake my head at this; have been shaking it for thirty years and more. Give this stretch of valley, say ten miles by one, to three or families of Hmong, and they could feed half the state. But you can't stop progress.

Fortunately there are some landowners hereabouts who won't participate in that kind of progress: they'd rather progress in slow food. So we have these delicious tomatoes, whose names elude me at the moment but whose flavors — and there are more than one of them — linger on the tongue.

After the tomatoes, salmon from Dave, and lima beans from Nancy. One of these days I'll post photos from the Healdsburg Farmers Market here; meanwhile you can just look at the website.

After the main course, as usual, the green salad. And tonight we have dessert — what the hell, we fasted yesterday. Ice cream with dried fruit in brandy, because Lindsey's been cleaning up, and has found lots of little jars of things put down against our old age…

Vinho verde, Gazela (Portugal), 2009 (is that possible?), spritzy, fresh — heck, I can't do better by describing it than this wineblogger, a funny guy (and thanks, Gaye and John);
cheap Côtes du Rhône, "Caves du Fournalet," 2011: nice flavor, good balance.