Huevos mexicanos

Eastside Road, December 3, 2010—

LINDSEY CONTINUES TO MINE magazines and newspapers for recipes, as women have for generations now. She has a critical eye, though: of the thousands of recipes published annually, she chooses only a few. Tonight it was "Mexican Eggs," from the current issue of Sunset: from Toledo, Ohio, in fact, contributed by Ned Plummer, to whom thanks.

It involved bacon, refried beans, green ciles, eggs, cheese, scallions, tomato, cilantro, and avocado; and you eat it of course with tortillas. What's not to like?

The rest of yesterday's Chablis

Squash and Bitter Greens Soup

Eastside Road, December 2, 2010—

I'VE NEVER BEEN FOND of squash of any kind, though I've reluctantly learned to tolerate zucchini. I have to admit that winter squashes, though, including pumpkin, can be useful and even pleasurable when used as ingredients. As stand-alone vegetables their combination of pungent flavor and aroma and their grainy-slippery texture continue to repel me: but cook up some pumpkin with a few other things and fill ravioli with it, or, as tonight, include winter squash in a soup, and I'm a happy camper.

Birthday prime rib

Eastside Road, December 1, 2010—

TO SAN FRANCISCO TODAY for another birthday party: a friend has reached my own age:

Andrew at seventy-five

Proud December Orion,
High and clear, like Arion
Thanks to the gods still alive

I send sevens on your day
Knowing they edge toward your work
While making little mark.

You, dear Andrew, odd at play
And pressed, must still smile today.
Let these numbers have their say,

Proud December Arion,
Riding on your dolphin’s back,
Three fourths the circuit well run,

May we enjoy, prosper, thrive
Through another twenty-five!*

The party was a festive affair, black-tie, Martinis before dinner, then, six eight to a table, six or eight tables, we enjoyed:

Salad with Green Goddess Dressing
Roasted New York beefsteak
Mashed Potatoes and Parsnips
Green beans

Birthday cake

and a fine time was had by all.

Riesling; Ridge Zinfandel

   *Andrew's own poem was of course much better than this: but then, unlike me, Andrew's a poet.

Omelet

Eastside Road, November 30, 2010—

I ALWAYS USED TO cook omelets in butter, but seeing The Big Night a few years ago changed all that. The closing scene of that movie is a protracted lesson in omelet-making, Italian style; and the lubricant in question is olive oil, not butter.

Tonight, though, I cut a tiny bit of butter into the heated olive oil, and I think I'll stay with this technique. An omelet as I like it, nature as the French say, just egg, seems more French than Italian, and the slightly nutty flavor of the browned butter complements the egg better, I think, than oil alone.

Nor do I salt the eggs, so the butter adds just a bit of salt too. I break the eggs, two for L., three for me, into a bowl; rinse my hands; let a few drops of water run off my hands into the eggs; whisk them up with a dinner fork; swirl them in the hot oil/butter over a naked flame; throw a little grated Parmesan into the center; turn it into the classic oval; flip it to brown the other side; then turn it out onto the plate, sprinkling a bit more Parmesan on top. That's all.

With it, tonight, a baked potato and a serving of romanesco quickly cooked in oil and water with some crushed garlic and salt. Green salad, of course.

Cheap Pinot grigio

Grilled cheese sandwich

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, Nov. 29—

HOME AT LAST, and to stay for a few months. Breakfast was at the motel, an English muffin and bad coffee: but second breakfast: now that was a real treat. Mix is one of those unexpected, undeserved gifts that fall like a miracle from the gods on high. It has the best coffee between Portland and San Francisco, and the best bread and pastry too, and probably the best ice cream, though nine o'clock on a frigid morning is not the time to put that matter to the test.

I was content with a plain croissant, as they called it, though there was nothing plain about it. The surface was crisp and buttery; the interior that curious merging of flaky pastry and real substance that only a perfectly proofed croissant can give you. There's nothing better than a really good croissant, and few things rarer: but you can count on Mix to provide one, every time. And the coffee…

Oh: and their echt Parisian sandwiches, nothing but sweet boiled ham on buttered baguette, the butter infused with just a touch of thyme. We got one of those for the road.

Dinner at home: grilled cheese sandwich, broccoli, green salad. The sandwich was simple: layers of Abondance cheese that we'd bought a few weeks ago at the Kaasplank in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, because we saw it when we went there for nagelkaas, and ever since walking through Haute Savoie among the bespectacled Abondance cows I've loved that cheese, a floral and subtle French take on Fontina or Bel Paese; layers of Abondance, I say, between slices of Ken's version of levain, bought in a three-pound boule in Portland yesterday, and toasted in the black iron frying pan on the wood stove…

The cheese had been vacuum-packed for its flight. When I cut the package open tonight I found inside, nestled against the cheese, a minutely folded, colorful, apparently very special plastic bag to put the cheese in for its storage. Kaasspecialezak, the bag gaily trumpeted in orange script: cheese special sack. We'll see how it works.

Cheap Pinot grigio

On the road again

Medford, Oregon, November 28, 2010—

TRAVEL DAY TODAY, with predictably mixed and unforseen dining implications. We breakfasted as we generally do on a last morning in Portland: at Ken's Artisan Bakery, where the coffee isn't bad, and the pastries and bread are spectacular — I do believe Ken's is my favorite bakery in the world, and bakeries are in my family. Then for my second coffee we stopped in at Sterling Coffee, which operates a stand just a block away. It was so good I bought a pound to take home with me.

Lunch was at another bakery, Le Patissier, oddly placed in a shopping center in Corvallis, a hundred-odd miles south. Here Didier Tholognat presides over a patisserie right out of the Paris of thirty years ago. The glazed fruit-filled pastries, the millefeuille layers of puff-paste, the display cases, the uniforms on the serving girls (and here a dated locution, probably politically incorrect these days, seems both appropriate and inevitable) — it's almost a parody of a Parisian bakery, except that the skill and the focus clearly reveal Tholognat's seriousness of purpose.

We had quiche and salad for our lunch, and then split a crèpe, very beautifully cooked, filled with a first-rate plum conserve with a few apple slices right out of a tarte Tatin, garnished with the inescapable crème Chantilly. Perfect.

The day ended in Medford, near the southern border with California. It was freezing cold and we didn't feel like driving more miles for dinner, so we stopped in at the nearby Regency Inn. I thought I'd have a Caesar salad or something like that. Their description of a Caesar salad was not promising, so I ordered my fall-back, pasta. The ravioli that came were loaded with gluey ricotta-like substance and covered with guar-gum sauce, with bits of unripe tomatoes added for color. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

Pinot grigio, "Cavit," 2009

Ken's Artisan Bakery, 330 NW 21st Street, Portland, Oregon

Sterling Coffee Roaster, 2120 NW Glisan Ave., Portland, Oregon

Le Patissier, 956 NW Circle Blvd., Corvallis, Oregon; tel. 541.752.1785

Regency Grill, 2300 Biddle Road, Medford, Oregon

Flatiron Piemontese

Portland, November 27, 2010—

THE GIRLS PERFORMED so splendidly, and worked so hard, on the Thanksgiving feast, it seemed only right that I take the initiative today. Though to be truthful, it was a last-minute inspiration.

And it was owing to the splendid series of tasting experiences earlier in the day. Breakfast was our usual: buttered toast, the bread from Ken's Bakery; perhaps the best bread you can get in this country. And cappuccinos, of course; today's coffee being Black Cat Espresso from Intelligentsia, bought last Sunday in Pasadena.

Then a walk across the Broadway Bridge to the Pearl district, there to buy gibassiers at the Pearl Bakery; and then a walk down 9th Avenue a couple of blocks to Caffe Allora for another cappuccino, this one corretto with a drop or two of grappa, against the biting cold.

Then, after a light lunch on leftovers from Thanksgiving, to another great Portland institution, Alma Chocolate, where I had a bicerin and a huge slab of delicious chocolate cake. A bicerin is essentially a mocha — half espresso, half hot chocolate — flavored with a hint of hazelnut and bound with thick cream. We had them a few weeks ago at the eponymous Caffe Bicerin in Torino: this one today was twice as good and half as expensive, made with deep deep cocoa, beautifully roasted coffee, and tiny nibs of Oregon hazelnuts.

Italy is famously dedicated to coffee — importing, blending, roasting, grinding, and finally preparing the beverage with imagination, dedication, passion, and subtle discrimination. Two Italian houses, Caffè del Doge in the Veneto and Tazza d'Oro in Rome, are particularly fine; I never pass up an opportunity to enjoy them. But I have to say that Portland is shouldering Italy aside in this department. Every neighborhood seems to have its own coffee roaster, and many are on the level of the best Italy has to offer. Alma Chocolate uses Spella coffee: I haven't had Spella in any other context, but I can say that judging by the bicerin, Spella has to be an extraordinary coffee: pungent, vivacious, serious.

The bicerin so excited me that I determined to shop for and cook dinner, and nothing would do but a simple grilled steak, smothered with wilted arugula. I popped into the nearby Laurelhurst Market for three pounds of flatiron steak cut from local naturally raised Piemontese cattle, then a local Whole Foods for two bunches of arugula, five or six cipollini, and a nice firm head of radicchio.

Back home I fetched up the potatoes I'd dug from my own garden a week ago, not quite enough for the eight of us but they would have to do. The cipollini were sliced thin on the mandolin; some were sweated with the potatoes, in oil and water and salt; the others were cooked with the shredded radicchio. The arugula turned out to be spinach — I'd been so excited I bought them by the shelf-label and hadn't even looked at them closely. So I steamed it, while Pavel grilled the steaks which we'd salted and oiled. I sliced the steak and set it on a platter over the vegetables, garnished with the potatoes and triangles of Ken's bread. We all thought it delicious.

Coteaux du Languedoc, Bergerie l'Hortus, Pic Saint Loup, 2007

Ken's Artisan Bakery, 330 NW 21st Street, Portland
Laurelhurst Market, 2188 E. Burnside, Portland; tel. 503-206-3099
Caffe Allora, 504 NW 9th Avenue, Portland; tel. 503-445-4612
Alma Chocolate, 140 NE 28th Avenue, Portland