K & L Bistro K&L Bistro is a cozy French cafe in the heart of Sebastopol that’s long been a Michelin and Zagat favorite.
Lunch and dinner menus are similar, featuring well-loved comfort food standards like French onion soup, lemon-butter sole and steak frites as well as crab cakes, charcuterie and a cheese course. Seasonal specials add color, and desserts are simple, can’t-miss affairs that frequently incorporate local fruit. Burgers are a surprise stand-out at this Main St. gem, but you can rarely misstep at this Paris-meets-Wine Country classic. Solid wine list featuring many locals. Exposed brick walls and original art work painted in Paris brings a bit of France to the dining room.
Tight quarters can make for awkward moments if you need to hit the powder room, but such is the price of getting a chance to rub elbows with friends, neighbors and Sebastopol locals.
Lunch: Monday – Saturday: 11:30am – 3:00pm
Dinner: Monday – Thursday: 5:00pm – 9:00pm
Friday & Saturday: 5:00pm – 10:00pm
Strawberries, Tomatoes, & Balsamic Reduction
Cruising the Tuesday market with my youngest daughter, under strict orders to return home with the makings of a salad but little other guidance, we walked by Lou Preston’s stall, and were stopped in our tracks by Lou’s strawberries. As a rule, I’m not a big fan of strawberries, finding them a poster child for the over-engineered style of supermarket fruit: Big, firm, nice to look at, but overly dry and unpleasantly chalky to the tooth and so often devoid of any real taste. On Tuesday, however, with the oblique angle of the late day sun glancing off their perfectly ripe, almost impossibly red skins, Lou’s teeming baskets of rubescent little berries were like traffic lights designed to halt our egress down the aisle.
Farmer’s markets are all about quality over quantity, and the rest of Lou’s stall was a case study: Small, compact, efficient, and I wanted to eat everything in it, the rainbow-in-a-box of plump tomatoes, the short and squat sweet peppers and the long, lean, twisting, and vaguely sinister fiery ones, the progressive shading of green into crimson and yellow tracking the late-season maturation of the fruit. On the corner of the table, a wicker basket full of crusty sourdough loaves, labeled “country white”, but, to my taste, more closely resembling a dense, chewy version of the classic French miches, with its distinctive tang of rye flour. (Etymological specificity notwithstanding, I took a loaf home. It barely lasted through breakfast the next day.) Lou Preston's Miche
Anyway, back to dinner, and our latest installment of “Three”. Armed with strawberries of such high sugar content, I wanted something with a bit of bite to provide ballast to the dish: Green Zebra heirloom tomatoes, with higher acidity and more tartness than most of their heirloom cousins, would balance the flavor profile and a splash of color at the same time. Now, strawberries and tomatoes may or may not sound odd to you – they are both fruits, after all – but the what makes the match particularly interesting is that the tomato is a berry, while the strawberry is not: A botanist will insist that most of what we instinctively classify as berries (with the notable exception of the blueberry, which is a true berry) actually comprises a peripherally related cousin-class called aggregate fruit (many little fruits grouped together), while tomatoes (and bananas, which always surprises me)with their fruit, comprised of flesh from a single ovary, are true berries. Lest you think that’s the end of the story, the strawberry is, in fact, neither berry nor aggregate fruit, but is instead an accessory fruit, in which the edible portion has not been produced from the ovary (apparently, the little bunches of seeds are the true “fruit” of the strawberry, but I don’t really get that).
The rest, as they say, is history, because I was now short one, and only one, ingredient, and there is no more classic accompaniment to either strawberries or tomatoes than balsamic vinegar. You could make a reasonable case that balsamic vinegars, ubiquitous throughout professional and home kitchens alike, have developed into something of a crutch, and I’d likely agree. Certainly, when encountered in excess (and in increasingly suspect applications, such as a heavy-handed drizzle on the cloyingly sweet, sticky pizza I recently had the misfortune to order), their oaky sweetness has a tendency to become monolithic and wearing on the palate. Still and all, for my money, you’ll not often go wrong if you drizzle balsamic vinegar on your strawberries or tomatoes (I would almost always add olive oil and certainly salt and pepper to the latter, although not to the former, and not in combination, as in this “salad”).
I served this as a dessert, to rave reviews from a 10- and an 8-year old with particularly finicky, and not wholly adventurous tastes, so I’m thinking it’s pretty solid. Strawberry-Tomato ‘Salad’ with Balsamic Syrup
Pour a quarter cup (this is for about 4 plates) of good balsamic vinegar into a small sauce pan and reduce to a syrupy consistency. Watch the heat carefully – balsamic vinegar scorches easily, and even before then, with all the sugar, it will turn into caramel, which you can’t work with (if it starts to foam, start over, because by the time it cools, it’ll be a hard, sticky mess).
While the vinegar is reducing, wash the fruit and cut the stems off the strawberries perpendicular to their long axis (i.e., so that they will stand straight up when plated on the cut side). Cut the Green Zebra into uniform small or medium dice (I cut them small and plated them in piles, but it turned out they were a little tricky to eat; I think I’d cut them larger next time, and keep the fingers out of the sticky vinegar drizzle).
Once the vinegar syrup starts to cool and thicken, drizzle or splatter the plate and arrange the fruit on top (do it in that order, it’ll look cleaner).
Looks good, smells good, makes a mean mixer
It’s Friday afternoon, the sun has won its daily battle with the fog, and I’m making cocktails. Never let it be said that the Proximal Kitchen does not count booze as a food group.
We have lavender planted all over the property (wine country residents alternate between delusions of Tuscany and ones of Provence) and I often wonder what to do with all the precious stuff: We occasionally dry it and bundle it for gifts, we often use large quantities as our house-brand air freshener, and my wife has a great eye for incorporating it into our homegrown floral arrangements. However, as a cook, I always feel a bit guilty about not doing more with it – I mean, here we have this beautiful plant that we have paid to plant and water, that commands what strikes us as an absurd price in the marketplace, and that often gets cut and dumped into the green waste recycle bin at the end of the summer. Somehow, that just seems wrong.
My gut reaction is, unsurprisingly, to think of more ways to eat it. Lavender is, after all, a culinary herb: It does wonders for certain salads, I’ve seen all sorts of interesting lavender desserts (I’m not really a sweets person, but I’ll take it on faith that they didn’t all suck), and it provides a great touch of color and aroma as a garnish on the plate. But what I’ve come to learn is, the easiest and arguably best use of lavender is in cocktails: Try it in mojitos, margaritas, or – as I’m planning on doing as soon as I finish this post – just simply mixed with vodka and lots of fresh lime. And it’s outstanding in (non-alcoholic, if you must) lemonade. The way to do it is to make a lavender simple syrup, and then use that in lieu of whatever sweet syrup your drink would have otherwise called for. It takes no time at all and can be stored for long periods in the fridge. Lavender Simple Syrup
Combine 2 cups of sugar with 1 cup of water and bring to a low boil (watch it, you don’t want to scorch it).
Throw in a large handful of lavender blossoms. It doesn’t really matter which kind; we grow several, I just grab them all and strip the blossoms from the stems. Simmer gently until the flavor is extracted – maybe 15 minutes, there’s plenty of slack here.
Pour through a fine-mesh strainer, pressing gently on the blossoms to get all the goodness out.
Use in place of simple syrup in any cocktail or sweetened juice drink.
3 outstanding local Pinot Noirs at Costco
We’ve talked about Costco before, a conversation in which I argued that monolithic, small-business-destroying category killers still have a place in the kitchen, even proximal kitchens, if for no other reason than because saving money on staples allows us to allocate a larger share of our budget to the locally produced goods of premium quality (and, let’s be honest, at a premium price), that we like to cook with. But what about buying locally produced goods at the Big C?
If the identical local product is offered at the farmer’s market, the local health food store, and Costco, and I choose to buy more of it, at a lower price, at Costco, should I pat myself on the back for being such a savvy, sustainably-minded locavore and supporting the production of good, local food, all while saving my family money? Or, should I offer myself up as whipping boy du jour for the inevitable and copious tongue lashing and politically correct cacophony emanating from the barbarous hordes of checkbook liberals and self-described apostles of some quasi Pollan-esque faith lying in wait?
Let’s consider the case of wine: The wine industry is Sonoma County’s largest single employer (directly accounting for some 19% of all jobs county-wide, excluding all the ancillary but clearly material employment in restaurants, hotels and gift shops generated by wine country tourism), and total wine-related revenues account for 40% of the County’s entire contribution to the nation’s GDP. So one thing is clear: Where and how I spend my wine dollars matters to Sonoma County.
Or does it? If I buy Bordeaux in-bond from a broker in London, then you might argue that I’m not doing much to support artisanal winemakers (not that that should stop anyone from drinking the occasional Bordeaux, mind you – the road to deprivation is littered with the carcasses of overzealous locavores, and I, for one, have little interest in dinner-table asceticism), but it’s far from obvious that I’m doing harm to our local economy. Suppose I take the total number of dollars that I would have otherwise spent on Sonoma County wines, at tasting rooms and specialty retailers in my neighborhood, and instead spend those same dollars, on the same wines, at Costco? Who wins, who loses, how much is at stake, and should I care? The answer is not as obvious as you may think. (Unfortunately, this post is about to run quite a bit longer than usual; call it the curse of the two-handed economist. I promise to get back on-thread tomorrow.)
Costco, the nation’s largest (although I’m never sure if this statistic refers to volume, revenue, or both) wine retailer, is the elephant in the cellar, and their fine-wine pricing can be very competitive, provided you can separate wheat from chaff, because their selection, and the price/quality ratio thereof, can be inconsistent; the prices are never bad, but some of the wines are distinctly mediocre, and at prices no better than you’ll find in about 5 minutes on Google. That being said, here is what I picked up the other day on a completely random visit, 3 outstanding examples of Sonoma County Pinot Noir (out of at least a half-dozen options), each from a premium local winery that I could easily drive to, and collectively a representative sample of just what is at stake, from my wallet’s perspective:
Thus confronting the data, we find an average savings of 43% of retail, or better than $200/case, and moves a few of what I would otherwise consider “luxury” wines back into the “maybe not for every day, but plausible and guilt-free” category. Still, while total dollars spent remain constant, who gets those dollars does not. I’m a trained economist with a weak suit in micro, so I enlisted the help of former classmate and top-shelf game theory wonk, Mad Dog, and we came up with the following economic implications:
My wallet, and my palate (although perhaps not my liver) win, because I get to consume more and/or better wine for the same outlay.
The County coffers are indifferent, because my total taxable consumption, as well as overall wine industry receipts, remain constant.
The wineries are a slightly trickier story: Definitively, some of what they would have made now goes to Costco, and their gross margins suffer; their cost-of-goods-sold likely falls (e.g., less labor, no tasting room lease), but I think it’s safe to assume that, on balance, winery profits decline on a per-bottle basis. But there is a price and volume story here: It’s entirely possible that the winery sells so many additional bottles, by virtue of the Costco distribution channel, that the absolute level of winery profits actually increases.
Even if total profits in the economy may remain unchanged (it’s hard to see them falling, or else the business model wouldn’t persist), the reallocation of profits from the winery to Costco would shift some income out of the County, inasmuch as winery capital is locally owned and Costco capital is not. Still, that does not necessarily imply a net loss to the County, because of what we gain in return: If Sonoma has a competitive advantage in making wine but not in selling it, then we, collectively, will be better off if we “pay” Costco to sell it for us, thereby reallocating our resources to more productive ends. (This is, essentially, the “gains from trade” argument. Don’t let the “anti-globalization” whack jobs bamboozle you, they have no idea what they’re talking about, a world without trade would be a far darker, colder, and generally poorer place for nearly everyone.)
Employment at Costco gains, but at the expense of jobs at the wineries. I’d rather work in a tasting room than Costco, but that’s a purely personal preference, it’s not my place to say which job is “better”. I do, however, think it’s fair to assume that Costco labor is more productive (in the economic sense, i.e., it takes less person-hours to sell the same dollar volume of wine), which would imply fewer total jobs for the County. However, one has to be careful, because that does not necessarily imply a net loss of income, but rather a reallocation of the share of total profits away from labor and toward capital, which is unequivocally bad only if you’re still reading that threadbare copy of Marx from your freshman year.
All the preceding is an inherently partial equilibrium analysis, and there may be more complex, general equilibrium considerations, particularly along the temporal dimension: It is possible, for instance, that the winery will eventually go out of business by selling via Costco, even if doing so maximizes its short-run profitability (or minimizes its losses, as the case may be). The Keller wine is a case in point: I don’t know what Keller’s cost structure looks like, but I seriously doubt they are making money by selling a $44 Pinot for well under $19 (remember, Costco has a margin in there too, of that we can be certain). More likely, they lose less, which is a perfectly rational thing to do, but hardly a sustainable business model. It is at least possible, therefore, that I will contribute to the demise of the local wine industry by consuming its wines exclusively through Costco. (General equilibrium analysis can get very complicated: One could argue that the failure of an otherwise unsustainable business leads to a more overall economic efficiency in the long-run, in which employment, consumption, and tax receipts could all actually be higher in the absence of the business than they were in its presence.)
You could argue that one should “shop locally” in order to “support” the local economy, which is all fine and dandy, but starts to get awfully close to subsidization, if not outright charity. While I’ve got no axe to grind with charity, it’s not at all clear what that should have to do with my consumption decision: If I want to subsidize a winery, I don’t need to overpay for their wine, I should just write them a check and save everyone the trouble. A useful test: Would you mind buying the wine for less at Costco and sending the price difference, in cash, back to the winery? That (to a close approximation) is the economic equivalent of a subsidy, so if that doesn’t make sense to you, then you probably didn’t want to subsidize them by paying more than you had to in the first place.
This is hardly an exhaustive analysis, but the lesson is simple enough: First and foremost, you should buy the wine you like to drink at the best possible price. If knowing that the wine is local confers other, non-pecuniary benefits (e.g., it makes you feel better about yourself), then by all means, buy locally – heck, I like our local wines on their merits, and purchasing them makes me feel good about our community. Similarly, if tasting rooms have value to you – as they do for me – then, again, buy some wine directly from the winery (especially the stuff that you’ll never see at Costco). And if you can only afford to drink local wines from Costco, or you just want to spend as little as possible, then don’t sweat it – you may be doing a lot more for the local economy than you think.
From 2009's Primal Event
It’s that painful time of year when there are just too many amazing events and not enough time. Here are some of BiteClub’s Top Picks. Sept. 25: PRIMAL: Celebrating Fire Cooking, Meat and the Art of Butchering
Top meatheads meet up in Napa for a protein showdown while guests eat and drink to the clamor of cleavers. This isn’t for the squeamish, but rather a celebration of old school meat love. Nose-to-tail headliners include Ryan Farr of 4505 Meats, John Stewart of Black Pig Meat and Duskie Estes of zazu and bovolo; Sheamus Feeley from Farmstead; Michael Sullivan from Blackberry Farm and a whole host of other chefs and butchers. $75 per person, VIP tix $125. Chase Cellars’ Hayne Vineyard, St. Helena, 2-7pm. artofthebutcher.com. Sept. 25: Guerrilla Cuisine, a wandering supper club experiment is doing a West Coast storytelling series and it kicks off Saturday September 25th in Healdsburg. If you’re a fan of The Moth, you’ll get this: 5 course dinner + storytelling (live, no notes). Guerrilla Cuisine is a culinary and artistic experiment that’s secret and delicious.Tickets are $50 plus BYOB. Location given out 24 hours in advance of the event. http://gcwest.eventbrite.com/
Sept. 25: Taste of Petaluma
So many restaurants, so many bites. So little time to stuff it all in. In its fifth year, the annual Taste of Petaluma is a tasty jaunt where local stores and chefs and winemakers pair up deliciously. More than 60 participants this year will tempt you on this tasty treasure hunt. A benefit for the Cinnabar Theater. $50 in advance, $60 day-of. More details: http://www.cinnabartheater.org/taste/index.htm Sept. 25: Harvest Fair Awards Night Gala. Drink, eat and be very merry at this county-wide harvest party honoring winners of the Sonoma County wine competition (1,000+ wines submitted) and professional food awards. Admission includes Unlimited Tasting of Medal-Winning Wines from 150+ Wineries. 7-9:30pm at Grace Pavilion, $65 per person. harvestfair.org. Sept. 26: Handcar Regatta. Check out the BiteClub Food Circus, with live butchery and demos on radical pickling, exotic spices, sausagery, a flaming pepper party, paneer-making and more. Details at handcar-regatta.com. FREE. Sept. 26: New Coddingtown Whole Foods “Big Time Barbecue Bash” 11am-3pm. Whole Foods at Coddingtown, Santa Rosa. FREE.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
An old friend of mine and nascent PK supporter, a certain Ms T (you know who you are), recently put in a request in for my best take on mac-n-cheese. Not just any mac-n-cheese, mind you, but a “rich, rich, rich, very adult mac-n-cheese”. This, T must have intuited, sits squarely in our wheelhouse because, here at the Proximal Kitchen, we love cheese, we love pasta, and we’re not scared of butter. But for me, and I suspect for T and probably most of you, it’s also about much more than that: A deeply satisfying mac-n-cheese is the very epitome of comfort food, and the right bite at the right time can transport us, in Proustian fashion, to a happy, child-like place. In short, I’m working on this recipe for T because mac-n-cheese makes me smile.
While I’ve tried any number of variations, I haven’t ever felt like I quite “got it”; maybe it’s just that I’ve not yet made a mac-n-cheese that is my mac-n-cheese, that expresses everything I associate with mac-n-cheese in one piping hot, gooey, luxuriant mouthful of sclerotic wonderfulness. So I’m starting with primary research (aka, my favorite cookbooks), after which will come some experimental work on the cook top, and what I hope will end with my own personal favorite take on this definitive nectar of the home-cooking gods, the one that casts a Platonic shadow on my kitchen wall.
I say “my own personal favorite” because this particular little exercise – developing a recipe for a hugely nostalgic dish, on request, for a friend – is a microcosm of why I cook: I truly love preparing good food for, and enjoying it with, other people, but I also prefer to do so exclusively with foods that ilike to eat, prepared how I think they ought to be prepared. Self-centered? Probably, but that misses the point: Cooking is at least as much about process as it is about product, and we should all like what we engage in, because when we choose an activity – any activity, excepting perhaps sleep – we are, by definition, choosing not to do all sorts of other, and otherwise wonderful, things with that particular piece of our life. Returning to the kitchen, it takes a considerable investment of time and money in order to construct a quality dish; the proper preparation of even the most humble and simply-dressed salad of leaves or box of dried pasta comes at the expense of the multitude of other things you could have done with that time or eaten instead. This may seem trivially obvious when the topic is food, but I really believe that it applies equally to the choices we make in our education, our career, the time we spend with our kids, the time I spend writing this blog.
I suspect I’ll be on this thread for a little while, as long as it takes to build a recipe that makes me smile, and while I’m at it, I’m going to try to remind myself what Thoreau, who died at 45, had to say about the cost of a thing.
Beets with goat cheese Hyatt Vineyard Creek Inn’s Brasserie, has had it’s ups and downs. Starting life as the chef-inspired Brasserie de la Mer with Liz Ozanich in the kitchen, it was managed until 2007 as Seafood Brasserie by Portland-based McCormick & Schmick’s. There were some heady days, but for the most part, the restaurant has struggled to find a consistent local audience. To be honest, there wasn’t always a lot to get jazzed about.
Which isn’t terribly surprising when you consider that corporate hotel restaurants aren’t known for inviting their chefs to put a strong personal point-of-view on their cuisine. There are just too many competing demands: The weekend eggs Benedict and Mimosa crowd, harried corporate lunchers, mandatory Happy Hours, budget vacationers, families and luxury expense accounters — not to mention banquet catering and various corporate bigwigs nitpicking the menu. It’s not the easiest gig. So I’m giving big props to Brasserie’s Exec Chef Richard Whipple who recently simplified things up at the Brasserie with a refreshing, accessible all-day menu that brings together all those demands while maintaining some solid gastronomic cred and his own farm-to-table philosophy.
Still in it’s early days, the menu is an easy-going combination of small plates (earthy roasted beets with truffle oil and goat cheese mousse, chicken satay, addictive crispy green beans with chipotle aoili); $10-$13 sandwiches (sweet and savory slow-roasted pulled Kurobuta pork on a ciabatta bun, burgers with applewood bacon); salads (goat cheese tomato galette, seafood Louie); and larger plates (roasted local halibut with lemon-dill potatoes and caper butter, fish and chips, grilled pork chop, ). Smaller portions are available for most entrees (and half portions for kiddos), and a number of the small plates are available during the restaurant’s popular Happy Hour. Regulars will recognize many of Whipple’s signature dishes (the galette, halibut). The French-trained chef (Whipple worked at Domaine Chandon with Philippe Jeanty for nine years, as well as at Mustard’s and Deuce Restaurant in Sonoma) has a solid Wine Country background and makes a mean Swedish cream cannoli that took big awards at the 2010 Harvest Fair.
After tasting through a good part of the menu, call me jazzed.
Brasserie at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek,170 Railroad Street, Santa Rosa, 636.7388. Lunch daily from 11:30 to 2:30pm; dinner from 5pm to 10pm Sunday through Thursday, and Friday and Saturday until 11pm.
S'mores from P/30 Smart diners leave room for dessert. Brilliant ones just eat it first.
And really, why shouldn’t we? Dessert is all to often an afterthought. Or worse, an unpleasant struggle of will after gorging ourselves through four courses (and a bread basket). So it’s no wonder that some restaurants simply farm out their confections rather than putting serious energy behind their sweets. Not to mention that most chefs get nervous when you start forcing them to use things like measuring cups and recipes — critical to good pastry.
But dessert decadence is again on the rise (could economic recovery be far behind?). Kitchens are getting more creative with their last courses, retiring tired molten lava chocolate bombs and dry-as-dust cheesecake for a rainbow of cupcakes and childhood confections, fire and ice show stoppers, seasonal sensations and sweet-savory dishes that defy the category altogether.
Tummy rumbling? Here are some local favorites…
Of The Moment: With ripe apples threatening to bash our noggins at every turn, Starlight Cafe and Wine Bar take revenge on the crispy critters by serving up Gravenstein apple fritters with cinnamon ice cream and caramel. Take that. 6761 Sebastopol Ave., Sebastopol, 823-1943. Childhood Confections:
– Triple Threat: Warm milk and cookies at Jackson’s Bar & Oven are exactly that, because who can improve perfection? Jackson’s Cupcake does Hostess one better with a dark chocolate mini cake filled with white chocolate cream and a signature swirl on top. And beignets are just a fancy word for doughnuts, right? “I have to say one of the best desserts I had recently was at Jackson’s Bar and Oven. Their beignets are to die for. Instead of the tradional fried balls of dough, they make them into long sticks of deliciousness that are fried perfectly and soft and warm on the inside. They are served with a raspberry coulis, creme anglaise, and hot fudge to dip them in. It’s worth the trip just to have this for dessert,” said Clara Black.135 Fourth St., Santa Rosa, (707) 545-6900.
– S’mores: Campfire-inspired, these melted chocolate, gooey marshmallow and homemade graham crackers for two have been on the menu since Restaurant P/30’s opening. And getting better every time. 9890 Bodega Hwy, Sebastopol, (707) 861-9030.
– Butterscotch pudding: “It’s just an old-fashioned recipe that proves classics are classics,” said Bryan Bousquet of Bistro M. Made with brown sugar, cream, eggs and other diet-smashing goodness, this nursery favorite has permanently taken up residence at the Bousquet’s casual Windsor eatery, Bistro M (610 McClelland Ave., Windsor, 838-3118).
– You’ll want to get your peanut butter in this chocolate: Homemade “Nutter Butters” (you remember the peanut butter cookies, right?) with dark chocolate fondue for dipping at Zazu Restaurant & Farm. (3535 Guerneville Rd., Santa Rosa, 523-4814) Show-stoppers
Ice: Liquid nitrogen and vanilla custard make for a spectacular ice cream dessert made tableside. Part science experiment, part haute molecular gastronomy, it’s all good when warm chocolate and French cherries complete this avant sundae at Madrona Manor (1001 Westside Rd, Healdsburg, 433-4231. Baked Blackberry Alaska is “beyond delectable, the whole dessert is homemade from scratch…including the blackberry ice cream!” according to Stacy Chamberlain, a fan of Viola Pastry Boutique and Cafe, 709 Village Ct. Santa Rosa, 544-8830. Mixing up hot and cold is Stark’s Steakhouse’s Frozen Hot Chocolate with Whopper Foam and Chocolate Crackle Cookies (521 Adams St., Santa Rosa, 546-5100).
Fire: Cherries jubilee, the oldest of the old school desserts, flambeed tableside with a flair at La Gare (208 Wilson Street, Santa Rosa, 528-4355). Out of the Ordinary
Leave it to a pastry chef to mix sweet and savory flavors in a single dessert. Roy Schvartzapel is the pastry chef at Cyrus (29 North St., Healdsburg, 433-3311). On his current menu: Passion fruit gelato with miso custard, white peach miso soup, olive oil and sesame sable. Love red velvet? Schvartzapel’s updated version is topped with vanilla bean cream cheese frosting, candied baby yellow beets, pickled chiyoga beets, a yogurt sphere, carbonated raspberry and red beet consomme and verjus sorbet. Whew.
Ice Cream & Cake
Cheesecake: Autumn Barber of Aioli Delicatessen (6536 Front St # 7, Forestville, 887-2476) is a big fan of Autumn Merkel’s small batch Sinful Delights cheesecakes available at Aoili and at Graziano’s in Petaluma . “They make amazing cheesecakes!! Caramel macchiato is my personal favorite,” she said.
Willi’s Wine Bar’s (4404 Old Redwood Highway, Santa Rosa, 526-3096) warm Scharffen Berger Flourless Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter Caramel, Vanilla Bean Ice Cream & Sea Salt Peanuts is my favorite dessert in the county,” said Megan Feldman. But it’s panna cotta and pot de creme that get big thumbs up at Cucina Paradiso (114 Petaluma Blvd N. Petaluma, 782-1130), Rustic’s Chocolate Mousse al “Francis Francis” served with a dollop of cream in a teacup (300 Via Archimedes, Geyserville, 857-1400) and Creme brulee at Mosaic restaurant in Forestville (6675 Front St, Forestville, 887-7503)
Tomato-Tomato Salad
As I’ve already confessed elsewhere and at length, I’m a pretty lousy gardener, but – as with most things in life – luck trumps skill, and Lady Luck planted a big, wet snog on my tomatoes this year. Seriously, to judge by my Green Zebras, she might even have slipped them some tongue. If you’re lucky enough to live here in the 707, you already understand that tomato season can acquire near-mystical qualities, spoken about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for yield, brix, and how badly hosed the wine industry may or may not be in the latest rags, so I take this bit of fortune seriously: What can I do to flatter all this sexy fruit?
Yesterday’s project: Construct a complete tomato dish that even my kids would eat, using only three ingredients, all of which we grew. To hand: Tomatoes (Lemon Boys, not technically an heirloom, with their lower acidity and mildly tangy sweetness; and the aforementioned Green Zebras, their distinctive, racy zing a great match to the Lemons), chili peppers (Serranos, a great go-to chili for heat and flavor, and particularly good raw), and a bed full of herbs (a whole Simon-Garfunkle reunion of parsley, sage, rosemary, and culinary thyme, alongside basil, lavender, and chives), from which – basis the chili – I could have plucked basil, but thought the flat-leaf parsley a bit more interesting and marginally less obvious pairing. The clever if likely unoriginal (296,000 Google hits in 0.21 seconds) insight: A vinaigrette, described (as far as I know) by none other than Thomas Keller as “the perfect sauce”, consists of nothing but acid, oil, and seasoning. So, why not use tomatoes as the acid, for a tomato vinaigrette? (A truly excellent discussion of vinaigrettes, citing all my favorite cook-book sources and getting it right, can be found here.) Tomato Salad with Green Zebra Vinaigrette and a Fresh Parsley and Chili Garnish Faster plating version
Concasse a few Green Zebra tomatoes, maybe 1/2 to 1 tomato per salad (click the Foodista widget below for an explanation of the proper concasse technique) and, while slightly annoying, can be done in bulk, stored, and used later in any number of preparations). Seed, rib, and finely mince a fresh Serrano (or other red, say Arbol) chili pepper. Pick a handful of small leaves off the parsley. Tomato Concasse
Push the tomatoes concasse through sieve or ricer or whatever to get a smooth texture and ensure that all the seeds have been removed (tomato seeds tend to add an unpleasantly bitter flavor and odd texture to smooth sauces) into a small mixing bowl. Season with a dash of white wine vinegar, finely milled salt and fresh white pepper (you don’t want black flecks in it).
Whisk olive oil into the tomato base, in roughly equal proportions (a typical vinaigrette requires a 3:1 ratio of oil to acid, which would be fine here as well, but I prefer to let the tomato remain center stage, and its textural weight seemed to hold the oil just fine in this ratio), and adjust seasoning as required.
Spoon the dressing to cover the bottom of shallow pasta bowls.
Cut the Lemon Boys, remaining Green Zebras, and/or whatever other tomatoes you have to hand (Tangerines, Cherokee Purples, and Early Girls would all look and taste phenomenal; you can’t go wrong, just try to balance the zesty acidity and color of the greens with sweeter, and yellow-red colored, cousins) into roughly uniform medium-dice.
Sprinkle a little of the minced chili on the sauce and judiciously place the tomato cubes (skin-side up or not, depending on their look) on the sauce, adding a leaf of parsley to the top of a few of the not-green cubes.
As a speedier alternative, simply give the parsley and the whole tomatoes a rough chop, toss the tomatoes with the sauce, and then sprinkle the chili and parsley over the top.
I may live in the Russian River Valley – indisputably, home court to any number of world-class Chardonnay winemakers – but I’m here to tell you that, if well-made, sexpot Chards are your thing, then you need to get your Chard-guzzling booty over to the Alexander Valley, and stat. You won’t find nearly the selection (the simple math is fewer wineries making less wine), you’ll drive a few extra miles between tasting rooms (it’s a sparsely populated region), but for quality, value, and stylistic consistency, nobody is producing better hooch than the cellar rats of the Alexander Valley.
If you were to think of RRV Chardonnays as the all-grown-up beauty queens of today’s Hollywood (think Nicole Kidman or Michelle Pfeiffer), and Sonoma Coast as the edgy up-and-comers of tomorrow’s (say, an Emma Watson or Kristen Stewart), then AV Chards would have to be the voluptuous blonde bombshells of the classic silver screen, all Mae West and Marylin Monroe, with their graceful curves, inimitable class, and breathy sex appeal. What I find so special about the best of these wines, however, is that what’s in the bottle consists of much more than just a metaphorical pretty face. Like Mae and Marylin, the better Alexander Valley offerings all maintain their own fierce individuality, one might even say attitude, while at the same time sharing an unmistakable common thread, a sense of place, or terroir, that even the most die-hard ABCer would begrudgingly concede, and that sets them apart from many of their more westerly cousins.
All of which lines me up for The World’s Best Unpaid Job: I’m going to spend the next few days soaking up the postcard-perfect scenery of the Alexander Valley, bar-hopping my favorite tasting rooms in and around Highway 128 (yes, I’ll spit), and talking to the men and women that grow these special wines. Check back in for Part 3, coming soon to a liver near you.
Tomato Concasse