Fusili with sausage, fennel, and red wine

1 pound (5oo g) bulk sausage meat, broken into small pieces

1 teaspoon fennel seeds 

3 tablespoons tomato paste 

2 cups (50 cl) dry red wine, such as Chianti 

2 eggs, at room temperature 

1/4 cup (1 ounce; 30 g) freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese 

Freshly ground black pepper to taste 

Sea salt 

I pound (5oo g) dried Italian pasta, such as fusili or penne 

About 1 cup (25 cl) pasta cooking water 

IN LIEU OF PHOTO, I set here the ingredients for another delicious pasta dinner, served last night to a charming young couple of our acquaintance. The recipe is from Patricia Wells's book Patricia Wells at Home in Provence (New York: Scriber, 1996), and it is indeed, as shewrites, a "hearty cold-weather pasta." I won't give you detailed directions on how to make it: you should have her book.

Barbera d'Asti, Rocca dell'Olmo, 2011

Soup and sandwich

Eastside Road, February 9, 2014—

IT'S A CLASSIC, of course, especially when you're too rushed for something complicated. Or you just don't feel like anything complicated. Soup and sandwich. When I was a kid it would have been canned soup of some kind, probably Canpbell's, probably tomato. We have more variety now, and organic…

That's a commercial ted-pepper soup from a box, dressed up with a little arugula. But the star tonight was the sandwich: sardines, sliced onion, arugula, and mayonnaise on a local country-style bread. Delicious. Raw carrots and pickled peppers on the side, and an apple afterward. 

Gascogne blanc, "Globerati," nv

Lamb shanks

Eastside Road, February 8, 2014— 

SOURIS AUX AULX, Richard Olney calls this magnificent recipe in his book Simple French  Food (New York: Atheneum, 1985); I don't know why. It is surely one of the Hundred Plates. It is the simplest thing in the world to make.

I ask the butcher to "crack" two lamb shanks — that is, cut them into halves, crosswise of course. I trim them of external fat and fell (the thin membrane that covers the flesh) and I salt them.

Heat a little olive oil in a heavy pot, then brown the lamb in it, turning the pieces so all sides are browned. Then stand them up, throw in fifteen or twenty unpeeled cloves of garlic, cover tight, and let cook as slow as possible for an hour and a half. The important thing here is to use a heavy pot, just big enough to contain the shanks, and to cover it tightly.

Throw in some dried herbes de Provence and continue cooking, adding a few drops of water if necessary. The meat will provide its own liquid. When tender, remove the meat to a hot plate, deglaze the pot with white wine, and put the resulting liquid and the garlic cloves through a food mill to make a succulent, unctuous, heavenly sauce.

Serve with noodles —we used tagliatelle tonight — dressing them and the meat with that sauce. Green beans on the side; green salad afterward.

Cheap Pinot grigio

Leftover loin; Jeff's pasta

Eastside Road, February 7, 2014—

THE THREE P's: Pasta; Peas; Prosciutto. That was dinner last night, the recipe courtesy of our friend Jeff, who was in a previous life a cook at Chez Panisse, and has since gone into quite another career. I like him and I like his recipes, which you can find (and subscribe to) here.

This is a simple dish with a vaguely Roman feel to it — probably the cream-and-prosciutto combination makes me think of spaghetti carbonara. There's just enough cream-and-cheese to give the dish a smooth, almost unctuous quality. I thought I tasted quite a bit of nutmeg, but Cook assured me there was none at all — must have been in the prosciutto; don't know where she got it. Green salad afterward, of course, and an apple.

The day before, Wednesday, we had a simple supper of cold sliced pork tenderloin — I see I forgot to tell you about that tenderloin Lindsey cooked the other day: well, you may not believe it, but I don't tell you everything here!

Cheap Pinot grigio

Bœuf daube

Eastside Road, February 3, 2014—

ANY BEEF STEW is fine with me, especially in winter. But my favorite beef stew is what's called bœuf daube in the south of France, where it's made in a special ceramic vessel, called, of course, a daubière. The daubière is shaped perfectly to its purpose: it's vertical, narrowing toward the top, with a good lid that slips inside the opening to minimize the loss of liquid through evaporation.

Alas, our own daubière is a little too small, just the right size for dinner for one, particularly because when you make stew you want to make double rations, because it only improves in the days after cooking. So I used a heavy copper pot with a close-fitting lid. Further alas: I couldn't find the book I generally cook my daube from, so settled on another: Michel Barberousse's Cuisine provençale (Editions chez l'auteur, Seguret (Vaucluse), n.d.), a curious book we picked up years ago. I simplified the recipe a bit, leaving out lard and substituting pancetta for French pork-belly, and adding a couple of turnips to the mix, probably inauthentic.

Otherwise I stuck to the page: I cooked the chopped pancetta in olive oil without browning it, added a couple of small carrots and a stick or two of celery, then a pound of cubed lean beef, a small onion studded with a half dozen cloves, a couple of little branches of thyme and savory, a bay leaf, and a fair-sized Roma tomato, quartered. After the meat had browned a bit I added half a bottle of red wine and the zest of an orange, and let the whole thing simmer four or five hours.

On the side I cooked another dozen or so cipollini onions and about that many white Paris mushrooms in a little olive oil, and Lindsey cooked up some potatoes. With a daube, pasta would have been more authentic: but, damn it, we like our praties. Green salad afterward, of course, and then an apple…

The stew before adding the wine	Cipollini and mushrooms cooking

Cheap Nero d'Avola (for lack of a good Vaucluse red)

Spanish omelet

Eastside Road, February 2, 2014—

THIS WAS A FAMILIAR dish when I was a kid: "Spanish omelet." Lindsey mentioned planning an omelet when we got home today, after a couple of days on the road, and I knew guacamole was in the works, so why not try to keep some kind of thematic unity?

I chopped an onion rather coarsely and softened it in olive oil, then added three Roma tomatoes, also chopped. They cooked slowly while I made the guacamole in the usual way. 

After we'd eaten the guacamole, with Friday's Martini postponed to tonight, I beat half a dozen eggs. I poured the cooked tomato-and-onion sauce out onto a dinner plate, added a little more olive oil, and poured in the eggs, cooking them the way I usually do for an omelet. When the bottom was done, I put the reserved sauce on top, folded the egg back over it, cut it in half, and that was it.

With it, as you see, broccoli steamed with garlic and salt, and a couple of bagels the 20th Century Café gave us the other day. Afterward, green salad.

Cheap Barbera d'Asti

Crêpe Carlotta

Salinas, California, February 1, 2014—

WHAT YOU HAVE HERE is a crêpe Carlotta; I don't know why. It is a filled crêpe, involving a good deal of some kind if cheese; also peppers and tomato, and herbs, and such. On the side, a rice pilaf with savories, and a mixed sauté of zucchini, carrot, and onion. 

I had a mixed greens salad before and a very nice, quite eggy crème brulée afterward. Lindsey had a chocolate Charlotte, and I thought about it, but decided Charlotte after Carlotta was just too eponymous. The place was fun, the volunteer staff pleasant, the food acceptable 

Pinot grigio

•Steinbeck House, 132 Central Avenue, Salinas; 831-424-2735