Eating...TOO Well?

Before my next house guests get into town, I better hurry up and put up this posting, showing off some of the good food we made when Hil was in town.  I was actually able to stave off my ravenous gobbling long enough to take photos of these dishes, so I figured I might as well display them here, they're so beautiful.  I'll refrain from posting recipes, but everything, sauces included, was made from scratch.  Need a recipe?  Email me!

1.  Shrimp tacos.  Oh boy, every time Taylor, of berry-gallette fame, comes to town he graces us with his Chipotle-Cilantro taco sauce.  While he's busy putting that together, Hil gets some shrimp marinating.  This time was extra special because we had a campfire to cook the shrimp on (we got creative with little foil trays).  Flour tortilla, shrimp, chopped tomatoes and cabbage, as much sauce as the thing will hold.

2.  Summer Salmon dinner.  First night after camping we went a little over the top with our return to society.  Salmon baked with soy sauce and brown sugar in foil packets, roasted summer corn, roasted summer squash, and this fabulous Columbian rice recipe where you cook the rice in butter, onions, garlic and veg broth instead of water (hello?!  Why did I not think of this before?)

3.  Mole Enchiladas.  Mole sauce has always struck me as an exotic mystery when I get it at restaurants.  Well, I found a terrific recipe in Vegetarian Magazine, and I'll never be afraid of this sauce again.  It's creamy, chocolatey, spicy, earthy.  Cheese enchiladas with our homemade cows milk cheese, boiled and salted to resemble crumbly Mexican cheese, and mole sauce; Calabacitas with squash foisted on us (it's that time of year) and corn; yogurt and cilantro for garnish.  

4.  Stuffed eggplant.  We found some huge, gorgeous eggplants at a country farm on our way home from camping, so we stuffed them with (you guessed it) more zucchini, bread crumbs, onion, garlic, pine nuts, parmesan, herbs, and laid them on a bed of Hil's tomato sauce.  Garnished with crostini, a dollop of homemade goat cheese, and chopped basil.

If you can believe it, none of these dinners took longer than an hour to prepare, and much of the stuff you can do in advance.  If you're looking for dinner ideas, think of this posting...

Home Sweet Dinner

I just got back from San Francisco, and had so many foodily orgasmic experiences that I want to describe them all.  In the interest of producing one of those sound-byte blogs that are the only kind that people actually read, I will devote only one sentence each to my best meals or tastings.

(Friday the 13th.  Around 2 in the afternoon.)  After visiting Papa in Santa Rosa Mom and I wound our way through baking hills on our way to downtown Calistoga, and while we mused about Papa and mortality and the heartbreaking beauty of the countryside, we came upon a cherry stand where a young man-- just a kid, really-- sat with his part-Husky, part-wolf dog named Snow, selling fat, sweet, dark red cherries from Lodi and we bought several pounds of them.

(Still Friday, probably around 4).  I had been to Domaine Chandon before, and so had Mom, only many years earlier, and under much more interesting circumstances, and we told our stories on the patio while sipping two flights of sparkling white wine, the seven of which kinds I wouldn't be able to recollect, but I can tell you that Mom was right when she said the Blanc de Noirs was the best, and I suppose she also must have been telling true when she said that "dry" means "sweet" when it comes to sparkling wine, and "brut" means "dry," though as far as regular white wine is concerned, "dry" means "dry" and "sweet" means "sweet" and I'm not sure I can explain the logic behind this. 

(Friday, 6-ish.)  Thanks to the thinly disguised laughter from the host at Thomas Keller's other restaurant (as in, other than French Laundry) when we tried to get a table without a reservation, Mom and I walked down the street in Yountville to a place called Hurley's and I'm so glad we did, because it was there that I tasted my first squash blossoms stuffed with herb-y goat cheese and I vowed then and there to reproduce the dish or at least something like it with the blooms from the zucchini plant in my own garden, but there were also many dishes besides that we noshed with deep, great pleasure, like asparagus salad, and heady Sauvignon Blanc, and crab cakes with corn relish, and warm chocolate cake to seal the deal.

(Saturday, nearly ten p.m.)  Puerto Allegre is my all-time favorite Mexican restaurant in San Francisco, and my best friend Hilary proves her friendship to me by accompanying me there every time I visit; there's always a wait, and this time we definitely broke the one hour mark, no doubt because there were six of us and it was Saturday and lovely out, but it's ok because as soon as you finally sit there are bowls of chips and salsa flowing as fast as you can scoop them, and thanks to Taylor, Hil's pleasure-loving boyfriend, margarita pitchers being passed with frequency, so that by the time your mole enchiladas arrive, you're probably already more than satiated, but the company is so entertaining, and by now you've had enough drinks that you are happy to sit another hour, even if it means cleaning your plate as the time approaches midnight.

(Sunday, Father's Day brunch.)  I think it's called simply, La Boulangerie, and it's on Union St. where all the people who are around my age but earning several times my income gather of a weekend noontime, but anyway it's food we're talking about here not money, so though the place has savory stuff like the open-faced goat cheese, pesto, roasted peppers and mushroom sandwich that I would call very good, it is truly the pastries that deserve all my attention, and it would be  apt for me to even focus solely on the french toast my dad had the wisdom to order, because it's made from day-old brioche, saturated in some egg-y mixture and then I want to say it's fried in a pan like any french toast, but it arrives so custard-y, so fluffy and delicately angelic, that I can't imagine it would survive such a harsh application of heat, but either way Dad groaned over it, and I had a similarly happy reaction to my berry tart.

(Sunday, 1 p.m.)  This wasn't a meal, but definitely deserves to be the epilogue: when we swung by the house to fetch my bag and then head to the airport, Jan had left for me as a parting gift a big ziplock bag brimming with her homemade granola, still warm from the oven, and this time she even added dried mango slivers, turning the crispy, flaky, cinnamon-y, muesli from heaven into an even greater feat of baking, and in the process solidifying her family-wide reputation as the world's best maker of granola.

Ok, well so much for succinctness and sound-bytes.  I can't help it: if you know where to look, the food available in the Bay Area is worth a thousand words and more.