Friends to dinner…

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, September 30, 2009—

…ONE OF WHOM does not eat wheat products. Not a problem. I torched three pasillas and three hungarian long peppers, skinned them, and cooked them long, slow, in olive oil. I made a nice big batch of pesto.

Lindsey sliced some tomatoes from the garden and cooked pasta, one portion of it rice pasta. Green salad, of course; and then, for dessert,

Lindsey made a crisp with apples from the garden, substituting chopped almonds for the more usual wheat-based streusel. Excellent. I do love it when people come to dinner.

Albariño, Sete Cepas, 2008; Rosé, Moulin de Gassac, "Guilhem," 2008

Grilled Tuna Sandwich

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, September 29, 2009—

I HAD A HAMBURGER the other day, as was noted, and, yes, a good hamburger's a fine thing, no question about it. And your BLT is also a fine thing, when made with good bacon, good tomato, good lettuce. And decent mayonnaise, don't forget.
What else. I love a good baloney sandwich, and for years, when I was building our house on various weekends, I'd lunch on a nearly perfect sandwich: two slices mortadella, one slice galantina, a leaf of lettuce, on buttered white bread. (Old Mrs. Bertoli, who lived behind us on Curtis Street back in the 1970s, had a lettuce she called pan di zucchero in her kitchen garden, big oval liver-spotted leaves; it was perfect with baloney.)
But if were to restrict myself to only one sandwich it would certainly be Grilled Tuna.

Yesterday we found a can of albacore tuna, Alcatraz brand, in the local going-out-of-business store; tonight Lindsey mixed it with finely chopped shallot, a little chopped dill pickle, and some mayonnaise she'd bought in a tube in Amsterdam last spring and never opened. She spread the tuna between slices of Pugliese and grilled them in the black iron skillet. Delicious: this must be one of the Hundred Plates.
We had them, as you see, with broad beans and haricots and lima beans, all leftovers from the refrigerator, and a green salad afterward; and there'll be cookies later on. What a wonderful life.

Rosé: Château la Canorgue (Luberon), 2007; cheap Nero d'Avola

Dinner downstairs

Berkeley, Sept. 28, 2009—

DOWNSTAIRS AT CHEZ PANISSE, that is, and a particularly delicious dinner it was: minestrone soup with shell beans, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, pesto, and little “cresta di gallo” pastas, made in house. And then grilled beef rib eye roasts, served in slices in a delicious jus, with peppers, chanterelles, and arugula, making a particularly flavorful combination. Dessert: strawberry ice cream profiteroles with candied almonds. Memorable.

Pigato (Ligura), Bisson, 2006; Merlot (Alto Adige), Fihl, 2004

Focaccia

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, September 27, 2009—

LINDSEY'S BEEN READING her way through the page proofs of a new cookbook, Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours, by Kim Boyce, testing a few recipes here and there. Tonight we had a flatbread made amaranth as an appetizer, and this focaccia, made with spelt flour, afterward.

With it, sautéed chopped kale and chard from the garden, and a couple of little eggplants, halved and sprinkled with olive oil, then roasted half an hour in the oven. Afterward, apple crisp — also from our garden. No meat for dinner tonight: I had a juicy hamburger and fries for lunch, at Parkside! I'd better get to the gym tomorrow.

Rosé: Château la Canorgue (Luberon), 2007

Parkside Cafe, 404 Santa Rosa Ave, Santa Rosa, CA; tel. (707) 573-5955

Saturday salmon

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, September 26, 2009—

I KNOW WE SHOULD eat locally, and we try to do just that. But Saturday is farm market day in Healdsburg, and The Fish Guy is always there, but the local salmon isn't. Hasn't been any for two years now, a function of drought and misplaced social priorities (don't get me started). And we have to have salmon; it's very good for us, and the hunger for it is in our genes. (As far as I know, salmon was local to virtually every sea-going stream in the temperate zone, worldwide, until fairly recent historic times.)
For quite a while now we've been making do with frozen wild salmon from Alaska, and it's quite good. But today The Fish Guy had coho salmon. I didn't ask him where he got it, not because it's none of my business, because it is, but because I just didn't want to. It was delicious with the "willow" lima beans from Nancy Skall, and I look forward to a chocolate chip cookie for dessert.

Cheap Pinot grigio

One more night…

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, September 25, 2009—

YOU WILL THINK we're in a rut. Maybe so. But tonight's edition of aïoli will be treated differently here, for two reasons: one, a photo:

two, a little more thoughtfulness while strolling through this plate. Everything on it, except for the olives and the olive oil in the aïoli, are local, from the farm market in Healdsburg. You can just barely see the eggs at the top of the plate: Lindsey knows how to boil eggs, never a trace of green on the yolk, which is just set. It helps that they're fresh, from a neighbor. I noticed tonight the different textures of the different tomatoes — red, orange, green — and their different balances of acid and sugar. Similarly, two kinds of bean: Nancy Skall's musica broad beans, Love Farms' haricots verts. Each its own color, texture, flavor. Ditto the peppers: red and orange, two different flavors.
The aïoli itself is holding up beautifully, though there's hardly any left. Lindsey whisked a bit more oil into it yesterday, as it was firming up. But the color and the crisp flavor hasn't changed since Sunday.
Boiled potatoes: I save them for last, mashing them down with the fork to get every bit of the aïoli. It's a delicious dinner, and lacks only some tuna to be one of the Hundred Plates.

Cheap pinot grigio

Aïoli, again

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, September 24, 2009—

SO: AS EVERYONE seems to begin every statement these days, So: Lindsey charred more bell peppers today, and sweated them soft; and cut up more tomatoes, and boiled more potatoes; and we had a couple of friends over, and made yet another onslaught on the aïoli I'd made Sunday for the Pastry Party. We didn't quite finish the aïoli, and that's fine with me. I could eat it every day of the week. We did have a delicious apple crisp for dessert, three different kinds of apples from our trees.

Roussanne, Truchard, Carneros, 2006; "Old Vine Red," Marietta Cellars, Geyserville, nv