Meaning “two friends”, this simple Italian eatery is a surprisingly tasty find in Cotati. Run by, you guessed it, two friends (Gary Tarantino and Hector Quiroga who worked together in the restaurant biz in SF), the menu isn’t overly fussy, but focuses on the classics. Best bets include their “00” flour pizzas with San Marzano tomatoes, house made rosemary foccacia and linguine with pesto cream. Check out Italian salumi antipasti and homemade tiramisu as well.
8492 Gravenstein Hwy., Cotati, 792-2665.
The Costco Report
The Costco Report: A recurring, if episodic, column devoted to ferreting out the more promising offerings, as well as to warding off the worst of the hazards.
This Week’s Pick: Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil (about $21 for two 2-liter bottles)
Alas, our fair county’s Autumn weather – more than a few scattered showers and increasingly chilly evenings – hasn’t been conducive to margaritas, so I’m still sitting on a healthy stockpile of the agave nectar I secured during my previous tactical assault on the Big C. On the other hand, as despondent as I may be over the faltering flow of tequila into my limeade, I do love the change of seasons and the cooking that comes with it, so that’s what I tried to keep in mind as I struggled to maneuver my Titanic shopping cart across an arctic sea of dubious pre-fab meals and food-sample ice floes. Autumn cooking, at least in my kitchen, means several things – lots of slow braises, smoke detector-hot pizza stones, and richly sauced pastas – but above all it means soups. And soups, at least in my kitchen, always get a garnish.
One of the very easiest ways to add a splash of color and spice to everything from salad to soup is with a flavored oil. Flavored oils – typically a handful of something colorful and tasty and a pinch of salt, blended with oil and then strained – are trivially easy to make, store well, and make your plates look cool. Granted, you run some risk that either Bobby Flay cites you for copyright infringement or the 80s ask for their plates back, but as a rule, flavored oils are a pretty good crutch for the home cook. And they’re almost impossible to screw up.
Flavored Oil
The possibilities really are limitless, but I generally try to use flavors that go with a wide variety of dishes, that have good color, and that I’ve already got to hand, including staple herbs, such as parsley, basil, and chives, and almost any brightly colored and sharply flavored chili peppers. Simply start with a quarter cup or so of good quality olive oil; add a handful of whichever flavoring ingredient you’re keen on; and blend or run through a food processor until smooth. I will usually, but by no means always, pass the oil through a fine-mesh strainer in order to remove the big particulates.
In terms of the base oil itself, and the subject of this Report, the olive oil in question – labeled “Organic Extra Virgin” under the “Kirkland Signature” house brand – is seriously good stuff. It’s not just cheaper (by a wide margin) than the similar product at Safeway, TJ’s, or – heaven forbid – Whole Paycheck, it’s considerably better: Bright, grassy, slightly peppery, with a nice, round mouth feel, pretty much everything you’d want in an every-day olive oil. If you really want to think about the oil you buy, check out the good review here, as well as the UC Davis study, in which the vast majority of imported olive oils fail to pass accepted quality standards (oils produced in California fared considerably better – chalk one more up for local food sourcing).
Dude Food: Cookbooks for Guys
Want to encourage your man to take spend a little more time in the kitchen? Here are some top picks to get his spatula fired up. Now that’s hot.
Recipes Every Man Should Know
Susan Russo and Brett Cohen (Quirk Books, $9.95)
This little black book should find its way into every man’s holiday stocking. Or perhaps left under a pillow, on the tool bench or atop the toilet (hey, he spends a lot of time in there). The fact is: Cooking is sexy, and men who can do it with confidence are even sexier. This pocket-sized guide to good eats is studly enough to stash away in the kitchen drawer while whipping up poker-night buffalo wings, lady-killing strawberries zabaglione, dinner-at-my-house shrimp fettucine and parent-impressing bacon-wrapped meatloaf. Plus, a handy guide to man-tastic turkey carving. It’s the best cookbook your guy will ever completely disavow that he ever needed in the first place (but secretly love).
Cooking for Geeks
Jeff Potter (O’Reilly, $34.99)
Real men cook with goggles and liquid nitrogen! Making cheffy molecular gastronomists look rather twee, O’Reilly’s Cooking for Geeks is a densely packed collection of hard-core food science, cooking nerdery, inspiring interviews and clever recipes for the industrial-tool and beaker-set. Marrying cookery, chemistry, biology and physics, author Jeff Potter takes readers on fantastic edible explorations both of his own inspiration and luminaries including chemist Herve This, web luminary Xeni Jardin and Twitter recipe-writer Maureen Evans. Consider this the culinary love child of Harold McGee and Adam Savage where you can calculate gluten percentages of different flours before making a pie dough or the physiology of tasting before whipping up a batch of Michael Chu’s (Cooking for Engineers) Bar-Charted Tiramisu. Then suit up and play with nitrous oxide creamers and the denaturing of animal collagen. Brilliant! Now, you’ll excuse us while we perfect our bacon-infused bourbon with 30-second chocolate cake.
Mosh Potatoes: Recipes, Anecdotes, and Mayhem from the Heavyweights of Heavy Metal
Steve Seabury (Simon and Schuster, $15)
Finally, a cookbook worthy of the metal militia. In this kick-ass compendium of horn-throwing eats, the baddest boys (and girls) of heavy metal dish up their up their favorite recipes. Stop laughing. Because glass shards, bat’s blood and Cheetos get old after a while. Metal head Steve “Buckshot” Seabury has collected recipes from silly (Weeping Brown Eye Chili, Hangover Pie, Trailerpark Shepherd’s pie) to serious (seared tuna with wasabi-butter sauce, Linguine and Clams Castellamare), along with uncensored anecdotes from the metal gods of Dokken, Coheed and Cambria, Queensryche, Lamb of God, Guns N Roses, Alice Cooper and dozens of others you’ll no doubt recognize from hours in front of That Metal Show and Dinner with the Band. There’s no shortage of head-bangin’ dude food here, pasta, chili, burritos, pizza and lots of meat –though we can’t help but be intrigued by the mini cheesecake tarts by the figure-conscious Ronny Munroe of Metal Church. Rockin.
Secrets of the Sommeliers: How to Think and Drink Like the World’s Top Wine Professionals
Rjat Parr and Jordan Mackay (Ten Speed Press, $32.50)
No one likes a wine snob. Likewise, no one likes a jack wagon who doesn’t know his Pinot from Cabernet Sauvignon. Consider this gentleman’s guide to the wine world — a sort of best friend in the business who’ll walk you through the basics of everything from tasting to buying without treating you like an idiot. More than just a primer, Secrets is filled with insider insights, especially when it comes to Parr’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of French wines. Less endearing is Parr’s sniffy disdain for most Californian wines, though a prevalent attitude with many sommeliers who fault them with being over-extracted and over-alcoholic. What stings is that Napa and Sonoma collectively get short shrift, with only cursory (and rather snippy) inclusions, mostly categorized as over-rated. Then again, soms are known for their strong opinions — even when they’re wrong. Armed with your newfound understanding of body, structure, tannins and nose, however, you’ll be able to decide for yourself what tastes good.
Eat Your Black and Orange
As usual, my keyboard is running several days back of my knife and fork, but at least you know where my priorities lie: Worry first about the cooking and the eating. Having spent two months watching the Giants’ thrillingly improbable championship run like a little boy in the bleachers – all black and orange dervish, mitt held high for the fly ball that might – I can now say that Bruce Bochy would back me on this: Pitch and make plays first, worry about talking after you win the game. So, a week and change after the fact, here’s what I served when the Giants brought home the Commissioner’s Trophy on Halloween, a plate of black and orange food that didn’t require an above-ground nuclear weapon test in order to occur in nature, and still tasted good.
The challenge, for me, lay in the colors themselves, because neither black nor orange (excepting the mysterious lifeforms evolving in my wife’s Tupperware laboratory at the back of the fridge) appear with much frequency in my kitchen, and Halloween colors, as cute as they may be for decorative baking and jelly beans, just didn’t strike me as being obviously affiliated with the list of things I want to put in my mouth. Luckily, I live with several strange and wonderful kids who simply love fish eggs – they really go for the briny pop of day-glo-orange, sushi-bar ikura – and so off I went, with caviar in mind (that it would provide a good dance partner for champagne didn’t exactly detract). Still, while I’ve got nothing against snarfing down a plate of black and orange fish eggs, the strictly-caviar approach seemed somehow too easy, too dependent on expensive ingredients, and ultimately lacking real food-think. Moreover, while I don’t mind ikura as a garnish – I often use them with smoked salmon, as I did for my wife’s most recent Hot Mamas Night – I’m not a big fan of the stuff by the mouthful; maybe my palate has been too Westernized for too long, or maybe I just spent too many summers learning how to thread identical-looking little red balls of nastiness onto fish hooks with my grandfather, leaving me with Coast Guard orange-stained fingertips and the unmistakable smell of warm bait…
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I bought some inexpensive lumpfish caviar (definitively not my favorite – too crunchy, no richness to balance its saline tang, but at less than $10 for a 1oz jar, inky black in color, and easy to secure at the local market…), and started thinking about orange foods other than salmon roe. Carrots seemed an obvious choice in isolation but less convincing in combination, so I did a little digging and unearthed Heston Blumenthal’s description of how he came to serve scallops with caviar and white chocolate at the Fat Duck, which then led me to the food pairing website that he inspired. Happily, I discovered that white chocolate – technically, not ‘chocolate’ at all, which is partly why it works – not only does great things for certain seafoods (lobster, scallops, cod, bottarga…), but also mates enthusiastically with the flavor of raw carrots. As Mr Blumenthal points out, molecular bases for food pairings are not wholly to be trusted, but the idea of carrots and white chocolate, with its echo of Thanksgiving yams baked under a blanket of toasted marshmallow, seemed solid enough to run with, and became the unifying thread for the dish.
Caviar with White Chocolate and Carrot Puree (4-8 servings)
- Ingredients: 1oz jar of black or nearly-black caviar, a small block of white chocolate (check the ingredients – it should be made from real cocoa butter and flavored with real vanilla), and a small bunch of really fresh, really sweet carrots. [Note: You could turn this upside down by using ikura for the caviar, and white carrots for the puree.] Keep the chocolate and caviar in the fridge.
- Roughly chop the carrots and gently simmer until soft in chicken stock, 10-15 minutes (you could use water, it just taste better with stock). Reserve the stock and briefly shock the carrots.
- Puree the carrots in a food processor, adding stock as needed to achieve the desired consistency. Season with salt, white pepper and, when finished, blend in a small knob of room-temperature butter.
- Use a truffle-shaver or microplane to shave the chocolate into thin flakes.
- Plate by coating the bottom of a shallow bowl with the puree, carefully spoon a portion of caviar into the middle. Garnish the puree with the chocolate shavings.
- Serve with a rich champagne and toast the World Series Champion SF Giants!
Downing reinstated as Santa Rosa Farmer’s Market manager?
A mysterious comment on one of BiteClub’s posts this morning tipped me off that Paula Downing had been reinstated to her position as market manager of the Santa Rosa Certified Farmer’s Market last night. Later this afternoon, food writer Michele Jordan posted in her blog that Downing had in fact, been voted back to work by members of the market — overturning the original decision of the market’s board members to remove her from her post on Sept. 30.
There’s clearly a lot more to the story than meets the eye, but here’s the official story that I wrote for the Press Democrat…
Paula Downing will return as market manager of the Santa Rosa Certified Farmer’s Market, less than six weeks after she was removed from the position.
In a surprise vote, a group of market members overturned the board’s decision to terminate Downing Monday night during a meeting at the Santa Rosa Veteran’s Hall, next to the parking lot where the popular market is held. The board was slated to discuss hiring a new manager, but invoking the market’s own bylaws, several members in attendance asked that a vote be held to reinstate Downing instead.
According to Elli Hilmer of Wild Rose Ranch, the vote was 53 to 11 to bring Downing back. A committee of four market members and three board members, however, will convene next week to determine exactly what the terms Downing’s employment will be.
The decision to remove Downing by the six-member market board of directors was made because of her salary demands, according to board member Nicky Rutkowski. “She was not willing to negotiate with us, so we decided not to renew her contract. We’re a board elected by the membership and we presented her with a contract. This is not personal, this was in the best interest of the farmer’s market,” Rutkowski said.
Downing, when reached for comment last month, said she was “asked to leave”. Her departure has fractioned many of the 111 members — mostly producers and farmers who sell at the Wednesday and Saturday market, and emotions have run high since Downing’s departure on Sept. 30.
“There’s been a lot of turmoil around the market and I think that a lot of people have been turned off by it. The community and the market have been active in trying to bring the market back its vibrancy. We’re entering into a season that the community and vendors all thrive when we’re working together,” said Hilmer.
They eat what?!
Consider this a drive-by post: I’m not sure where it’s going, but it happened really fast, and I may have hit something. Or not, and I’ve swerved into a ditch. In either case, although – or, perhaps, because – I spend so much of my time thinking about, preparing, and consuming local foodstuffs, I often get curious about what the rest of the world is doing, and some of the data on who-eats-what is fascinating:
Highest Per Capita Consumption of…
Wine… Vatican City
Meat… Denmark
Chocolate… Germany
Sugar… Brazil
Eggs… Mexico
Cigarettes… Greece
Energy (total BTU)… Gibraltar
Food (total calories)… United States
Clearly, some of these data points are a bit misleading (e.g., due to the tiny population of Gibraltar, or the role of cane-based ethanol in Brazilian automotive fuels), and others are probably profound (e.g., total caloric consumption in the US), so take it all with a gain of salt (for which, despite several forays, I couldn’t find any good data on per-capital consumption…).
Your Picks: Top 25 SoCo Restaurants 2010
There are hundreds of restaurants in Sonoma County, but only 25 that can be named each year to BiteClub’s Top 25 Restaurants of Sonoma County.
Last year, I asked for your top picks for Sonoma County’s favorite restaurants. And in the end, there were more than 22,000 votes. The biggest vote-getter? “Other” — meaning many of you have a soft spot in your heart for some of the less-usual suspects on the list. This year, I’m asking for your opinions again (although the final picks for BiteClub’s Top 25 will be mine). I love to find out what restaurants you love, who can rally the most votes (yes, I know there are some who rally) and who we’ve forgotten.
I’ve started a list of restaurants that are among my favorite “destination-worthy” spots. It doesn’t necessarily include my favorite burger joints, pizzerias or hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese eateries, no matter how much I love them. Instead, these are restaurants that really define Sonoma County’s culinary scene: A combination of a great chef/kitchen, service, food and ambiance.
So, if you’re inclined to add a restaurant (and no doubt I’ve forgotten some good ones) please keep in mind that they should capture the essence of SoCo’s culinary sensibilities. Think about the kinds of restaurants you’d send someone from out of town that really showcases what we’re all about.
Vote for as many as you’d like, but you’ll only be able to vote once per day. Rally your friends to vote as well. The results will be posted in early December.
[polldaddy poll=”4056180″]
(PS: The list will change order each time you reload the page, so no one gets an “unfair advantage”. I’m not a programmer, so yes, there are probably ways to cheat the poll, but I have set it to recognize cookies, you can vote once per day. Other than that, this isn’t a scientific poll, so don’t get your panties in a wad. Just have fun.)
Applewood Inn | Guerneville
Closed
Chef Bruce Frieseke of the quiet Applewood Inn is one of the best Wine Country chefs you may not know. In his brief tenure at the helm of this quiet Guerneville bed and breakfast, he’s elevated the cuisine from ho-hum to haute.
Trained in Paris and San Francisco, with stints at the Farmhouse Inn and as Exec chef at Healdsburg’s Manzanita, Freiseke has put his energy toward a locally-inspired dinner menu with dishes like fresh chilled English Pea soup with mint; a tartare of beef, potato chips, pickled mustard seeds, quail’s egg and house-cured anchovies; and cacao nib crusted rack of lamb with brown butter parsnips, house made chorizo and mini chimichurri.
The five-course tasting menu at $70 is still a value, with impressive wine or beer-pairings for $105. 13555 Highway 116, Guerneville, 869-9093.
My Daughter’s Love Soup
Respect for ingredients. Appreciation of taste. Legalized child labor. I can think of any number of reasons to engage your kids in the kitchen, but chief amongst them must surely be the joy of creating the food itself, of working side by side with your littles, of watching small hands learn to cut, whisk, and measure. (Here is where I’m probably meant to disclaim the use of knives by small children, along with feeding them steak tartar and raw egg yolks and letting them taste the wine. I’m sure it’s all a terribly risky and soon-to-be-Federally-regulated activity, so please consider yourself duly cautioned.)
What kids lack in technique – which is to say, nearly everything – they tend to compensate for with an undiluted enthusiasm that the rest of us lost somewhere around the time we decided that we had to be paid to go to work, so the key is to temper their excitement with just enough discipline to yield an edible final product. I generally impose this discipline with simple rules, like “mix wet into dry” or “cut the pieces in uniform sizes”, and I try always to work with concepts, rather then recipes, so you can imagine my pride when my daughter, barely buckled-in and basking in the buzz of her elected role of class cook, told me how she had her little team of sous chefs to add vegetables to a soup they were making in relation to each vegetable’s cooking time. That she wanted to go home and replicate her piece de resistance – a loose riff on the French peasant soup potage garbure, consisting of little more than fresh wintry vegetables and chives – well… let’s just say that we went shopping on the way home and very nearly forgot about homework.
I try always to make shopping an integral part of our kids’ experience with food, so we immediately drove to Love Farms, one of my favorite local farm stands, and started grabbing whatever sounded good: Pungent purple onions, sweet corn, bright green zebra tomatoes, multi-colored carrots, and a bunch of leeks that you could almost smell from the car; we measured nothing. Walking from the car to the kitchen, we grabbed handfuls of parsley and thyme from the garden (another silver lining, along with peppers and tomatoes, of an otherwise diabolical grape-growing season here on the North Coast). As we prepped the veggies, tasting as we cut, we decided to use water in lieu of stock and to forgo meat in the base altogether – partly because my wife doesn’t really eat meat, but mainly because we wanted the bright, clean flavors of our freshly-dug vegetables to take stand center stage, with neither crutch nor bling for support or adornment.
MacKenzie’s Love Soup (Version 1.0)
- Go to a roadside farm stand and buy a big bag of vegetables, preferably including leeks, onions and carrots for the base and some tomatoes for acidity. (Our proportions, shown at right, yield an almost-corn chowder.)
- Roughly chop the vegetables into approximately uniform chunks and, if using tomatoes, concasse them and reserve the juice.
- Sweat the onions and carrots until soft, add 2-3 quarts of water and any tomatoes, corn, potatoes, and aromatics that you’ve chosen, and in the approximate order of their expected time to cook; total cooking time, once the water is in, should be 20-30 minutes. Simmer gently, skimming occasionally, until the vegetables are all cooked through and the tastes begin to meld. Season to taste with salt and pepper (if you’re using corn, try a little dried or fresh hot chili – not to make it spicy, just to add a subtle note of heat underneath all the sugar in the corn).
- Use a slotted spoon or spider to reserve 1-2 cups of the chunky vegetables and puree the rest; return the reserved chunks to the puree and adjust seasoning.
- Serve with crusty sourdough bread from your favorite local baker and garnish with pistou.
Win Cake Boss Tix
THE WINNER IS ….ROSE.
I wish I could give away tickets to all of you. Thanks so much for your wonderful stories. Stay tuned for more contests and giveaways. Some of my favorite stories will appear this Friday in the Press Democrat.
Want to spend an evening with Buddy Valastro? Well, who wouldn’t?
The Cake Boss star will be at the Wells Fargo Center on Nov. 19, 2010 doing a LIVE show featuring anecdotes, decorating tips and general amusement from his buttercream-frosted TLC show of the same name. He’ll also be giving some sneak peeks from his new cookbook.
Hey, yo! It’s almost like being at Carlo’s Bakery. Except not in New Jersey (phew).
To win two tickets to this family-friendly show, tell BiteClub your most crumb-tastic (that means memorable) cake story. Maybe it was your brother pushing your head into your own birthday cake when you were 5. Maybe it was the Pyramids of Giza cakes you made from scratch for your two year old (ahem, yes, that was me and they were dusted surrounded with brown sugar “sand”). Maybe it was simply a memory of eating your grandmother’s fluffy vanilla cake after school or baking your very first cake.
Submit your most awesome cake story in the comments below. One lucky winner will receive TWO tickets to see “An Evening with Buddy Valastro” on Nov. 19 AND get a meet and greet with Buddy after the show, courtesy of BiteClub.
I‘ll pick the winner based on MY favorite story, so feel free to pull my heartstrings. Good LUCK! (Full rules here.) UPDATE 11/11/10: Oh my gosh people, these are so great. I’m like crying at some of them. Amazing stuff. Wish I could give you ALL tickets. I’m going to see if we can get Buddy to read the winner at the event.
Just want to buy tickets? Get ’em here.