Petrale again

Petrale sole; baked potato; favas; green salad; Black Tartarian cherries

SATURDAY IS MARKET DAY in Healdsburg, as I probably mentioned a week ago, and we eat from the market that day. The sole was cooked much as it was last week, and was as delicious, subtle, actually fragrant (I write of the cooked dish, not the raw fish) as it was then. I like my baked potato with olive oil, not butter, and good sea salt and Tellicherry black pepper. The favas were cooked in a little butter and salt, with chopped sweet onion and a little mint from the steps to the garden — we don't know what kind of mint it is, but we like it.

Black Tartarians. When I was a boy they were the first to ripen, and I'd spend two or three afternoons in the trees, eating cherries. They're still my favorite sweet cherry.

Cheap pinot grigio: and, afterward,
some gnole I made a few years ago by steeping sour-cherry pits in Everclear.

Pilaf

Lentils, olive oil, onions, garlic, rice, salt, cumin, pepper; lettuces, vinaigrette; raspberries

IT WAS THELONIOUS MONK, I think, who suddenly asked, while riding in the back seat of a car to some job or other, What make the car go? And someone who I imagine was riding in the front passenger seat started explaining all about carburetors and spark plugs and crankshafts and transmissions and all that, and then Monk interrupted, and said

I know all that, Monk said, What I want to know is, what make the car go?

Which is how I feel about chopped onions sweated in olive oil. It's perfectly simple: you put a little olive oil in a frying pan or a skillet, you heat it, you chop the onions (I have my way, Lindsey has hers) and put them in, maybe a little salt. Then something happens.

Of course onions are loaded with sugars: they darken the onion as it cooks, and convey sweetness. The oils carry the flavors. The whole thing marries, integrates. We say of love — of sexual attraction — that it's a matter of chemistry. Same is true of sweating onions in olive oil.

In any case, that's what Lindsey did, until the onions were crisp; and scattered them atop the pilaf:

Boil the lentils in water; simmer until tender; drain. Brown (gild, actually) the onions with a little minced garlic in olive oil, stirring often; add the rice, salt, cumin, and pepper, stir until the rice turns color (and this is hard to describe: it's like making risotto: it doesn't really color, it changes its degree of translucency).

Stir in the lentils and add water; bring to a boil; cover and simmer until done.

They were our own raspberries, the first of the season. The cherries are beginning to color, too: I set the toy rattlesnake out on one of the branches today to discourage the birds; tomorrow we have to flash-tape it. I had to prop the nectarine, too. Ça commence.

Cheap Nero d'Avila

Roodsaus

Fusilli; [canned] tomato, onion, olive oil, black pepper, bay leaves, Parmesan cheese; green salad

THAT'S REALLY ABOUT ALL you need to say about it, just the ingredients. Lindsey likes to sweat the chopped onion in olive oil at a high enough temperature to make them crisp and quite dark, some of them, around the edges; then she squeezes in canned whole tomatos from between her fingers, adds a couple of leaves from the bay tree on the patio, and a few grinds of black pepper.

The pasta cooks in salted water, is then drained, and the sauce added. The Parmesan is grated on top of each serving.

Red and Green: the green salad follows, with a slice of bread for me. (I always think of Lindsey's father, who turned to me one day, when I served the salad, with the simple query: Got any bread? He was quite right: salad sans bread is unthinkable.

Preston Vineyards Carignane 2005

Meat and Potatoes

Skirt steak; potatoes; corn, green and red peppers, onion, sour cream; green salad

TO HEALDSBURG TONIGHT for dinner with friends. How delicious! Skirt steak from the grill, with nicely roasted little potatoes also from the grill. Meat and potatoes: I grew up on them, and crave them these days, now that I'm training for the long walk next month...
Protein. Protein.

With them, an interesting variation on creamed corn, another memory from childhood: but made with sour cream, not the clabbery milk Mom used to mix with Jolly Green Giant canned Mexicorn...

Green salad; strawberries and vanilla ice cream. Delicious; absolutely delicious.

Private issue Syrah; Ravenwood Zinfandel 2006

Hot dog

Frankfurter, bun, onion, dill pickle, mustard

ONE OF THE IDEAS of this blog is that after a year the Hundred Great Dishes will have emerged, the hundred items, whether entrées (plats principaux) or hors d'oeuvres or even desserts will turn out to be the things without which civilized dining will not be thinkable. Well, maybe it'll take more than a year.

Surely the Hot Dog will be among them. It is perhaps the one quintessential American main course, drawing, of course, as do all things American, on sources behind and beyond and beneath our national consciousness.

In any case the Cubs were on television tonight, playing the hapless Dodgers, and one doesn't like to watch a ball game, even on television, without the appropriate meal. So: Frankfurter from Niman-Schell (beef, sustainable one assumes); bun from Healdsburg's Downtown Bakery & Creamery (soft, made with milk in the dough, tasting of milk, wheat, and yeast); a sweet onion from the Farm Market; dill pickle from a delicatessen; Maille old style Dijon mustard.

Broil; toast; spread; eat.

Preston Vineyards Carignane 2005

Oh: Cubs, 3-1.

Kale and ceci

Kale, ceci, garlic, cumin, coriander, red pepper

WHEN I WAS A KID they were always canned, and we called them garbanzos. The correct English word is chick pea, of course, but somehow I can never call them that. In Italian, ceci. Tonight's were canned, too; canned organic garbanzos; I don't know where Lindsey got them. She'd chopped the kale pretty fine and steamed it, I imagine, in chicken stock, until done, with the garbanzos and spices. It's amazing how meaty a dish like that can be: even after a day's work, well, not that hard, two servings, with some nice toasted walnut bread, was enough for dinner.

Barbera d'Alba "La Loggia" 2005

From the market

favas; potatoes with green garlic; petrale sole in black butter; garden salad with spring onions

WE'RE LUCKY HERE IN HEALDSBURG to have a fine local farm market. Saturday morning we bought favas, spring onions, and green garlic from farms close enough almost to walk to, and Petrale sole caught the day before out in the local Pacific. No salmon this year, and that's a pity: the season's been shut down the entire year, in hopes the salmon will recover. But halibut and sole are running, and they're delicious.

Lindsey cooked the favas in water with a little butter (and salt, of course), and smashed up the potatoes with the green garlic and a little olive oil. The fish was pan-fried in the black iron skillet in butter that she'd let go dark, then dressed with a Meyer lemon from the tree out the kitchen door. An absolutely delicious dinner.

Bianco di Custoso Corte Gardoni 2006