Live, Learn, Steal

I am deliriously annoyed by Ubuntu, the newish vegetarian restaurant in Napa run by serious cooks.
I love vegetables.
I love being oomphed into a new take on preparing vegetables in my own home by a hotshit restaurant.
Thanks to Ubuntu, I have now created two of my own spin-offs of their lovely, though often flawed, cooking.
(Please note: Not so flawed that I will never go back, no. Ubuntu is still on my list.)
Here's the history of yesterday's meal. I ordered a dish at Ubuntu of toasted pearl pasta in broth, topped with greens. It was beautiful, hella. Although some of the greens tasted skanky. Not rotten, just... unfamiliar (and I'm not talking about the pea greens, yum).
So I didn't love it, but...
Back home, we have a cauliflower development. The beautiful green romanescos are bolting into shootiness. That is, the cauliflowers have unwinded themselves and sent tender buds skyward. The tender buds are even turning purple! Some of them.
So, how about an Ubuntu rip-off?
I waltzed around the spring garden yesterday, collecting frayed onion greens and boisterous herbs, then I robbed the refrigerator of carrots and other tasties for a vegetable broth.
Within that now strained broth, I cooked the cauliflower buds, along with some fregola, aka toasted pearl pasta. This cute mess was then topped with fresh sorrel leaves from the garden, which I pushed down into the hot broth to get them cooked (as they turned that sad shade of khaki). Cranky's cool idea was to strew shaved radish over the top for color and excitement.
Verdict: Oh, you know! We loved it. It was stylish, filling, delicious. We are so happy to be pushed into experimentation, and to be so pleased with our results.
Now you try.

The Perpetual Pear

I had discovered in my reading that pear trees sometimes take a year off.
That the little tree in the backyard that gave us a thousand pounds of pears last summer might take it easy.
I kind of hoped it would.
But, no. It's covered in white blossoms. Impossibly thick blossoms, sometimes twenty of them clustered at the tip of one tiny twig.
So there will be pears again this year.
I have to assume some self-pruning will occur. The tree cannot sustain that much fertility, that much weight on its slender branches. Perhaps I will have to do the thinning myself.
But I'm no longer afraid of the pear tree.
At the peak of its fruitfulness last August, we were collecting baskets and baskets of pears, every day. I gave away bags and bags and bags of them. Of course, we ate many of them raw, embellished with other foods, added to salads, or just plain. And I pressed many more of them into juice, roasted them into pear butter, and stewed them into chutney.
For a few months there, it was total pear frenzy.
But it was nice to have preserved pears to last through the winter.
I still have a large tub of pear chutney in the refrigerator. I'm not sure we'll be able to eat it all up in the next four months, when the next harvest will begin.
But it's tasty, and it's nice to try.
This is a lamb sandwich.

On Your Answering Machine?

This could be a long story, so I'll tell you the punch line first:

She called me up and left a message saying, "Remember that smoked salmon pasta we used to make? Could you tell me how to make it? If I'm not home, just leave it on my answering machine."

Yeah, this was an old friend, but it had been years since we'd spoken.
In the old days, she and her beau (later husband, and then ex-husband) used to spend New Year's Eve with me and Cranky.
We would make homemade fettucine with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, chives, crunches of black pepper, and maybe green peas. (In the old days I didn't realize peas were out of season.) It was simultaneously an ambitious, naive and elegant meal, given the state of our skills back then.
It seemed as if all four of us were pitching in, mincing, turning the pasta handle, opening, boiling, stirring, whatever... And a lovely meal made it to the table just before the illuminated ball came down in Times Square.
It turned out years later that this friend couldn't cook. She faked everything. She wanted us to believe she was a natural in the kitchen, and would pound huge welts into her husband's frail frame if he accidentally blurted that a recipe had been consulted for a dish she theatrically trotted out of the kitchen. (Really, she couldn't cook, but she seriously lied about it. It's too weird and complicated; let's just say she had a negative relationship with truthiness in every respect.)
Once she and her bruised husband separated, she landed in the bronzed, overmuscled arms of a conceited blond plumber. Not the kind of guy she'd be hammering on much. But she wanted him to believe she could cook, pronto.
So she called me out of the blue.

"Remember that smoked salmon pasta we used to make? Could you tell me how to make it? If I'm not home, just leave it on my answering machine."

I mean, would you have called her back?

Pickled Eggs

No, really.
Pickled.
You know me. No sweet tooth.
The Easter Bunny brought us eggs that are hard-cooked and peeled, and have been marinating in separate brines for a few days.
The yellow egg will taste like curry and jalapeños; the pink egg borrowed a lot of its character from Anita's ethereal pickled beets, although I ratcheted up the color by adding a couple of radish slices (it'll be interesting — I've never had a sweet pickled egg); the white egg is supposed to be green (and green olive flavored) but I couldn't get that to happen without a big intervention. Any ideas on how to get a natural green vegetable tint?
I'm going back out in the yard; I'd hate to think I'm missing a coffee-chile egg, or a cinnamon-tea egg.

Springburst

Man, that got here fast.
Spring.
Petals are falling from the sky everywhere and I'm discovering plants I never knew I'd find growing in my yard. Yellow tulips! Planted decades ago, no doubt, and still eager to burst forth when the conditions are just right.
Fruit trees are bristling with blossoms you'd never have suspected were tucked inside those gnarly branches just a few days ago.
It's a good feeling.
The annual renewal, after months of harsh wet rains and winds, is such a thrill, it's almost worth going through winter each year, just so we can have spring every 12 months.
Am I already looking forward to next spring? Yow. No.
Today we brought home a crook-neck squash seedling, two pepper plants, some chives, and a dozen tiny plastic cells of mache. And that's just for starters.
Gotta get our winter-white thumbs into the soil and see if they will turn green.

Sigh...

My Feet Are Toast!

For the first time in memory, Cranky and I decided not to make a corned beef dinner to celebrate St. Pat's. Not even after the huge success of corning our own brisket last year.
We're just a little tired of meat.
Things like that happen when you dine on fresh, local rabbit for five meals in one month. When you take a casual, scenic trip with friends that just happens to end at the Fatted Calf at Oxbow's food gymnasium in Napa, because you ain't getting out of there without charcuterie. I have duck rillettes to tell you about, and of course, we always buy a little mortadella and some other dry sausage. Beef jerkey. (I skipped the quail this time.) Bacon, always bacon. Ham.
So, we were tired of meat.
I had been thinking of making an Irish Stew for supper, but I couldn't really imagine needing to go out and buy lamb.
Besides, there is so much vegetation in the garden, skidding perilously toward overripeness. Lunch would just be some broccoli soup. (Hey, it's green!)
Then I put my drinking socks on.
Cranky asked me if there was anything special I'd like to eat. I think one of my stockinged feet twitched alluringly.
"Why don't you just get takeout?" I suggested.
What he took out was some perfectly cooked, sliced corned beef, prepared at our wacky local store, surprisingly delicious, and still warm.
So, we had corned beef sandwiches today, and never even had to contemplate the 4-lb. salted beef slab in its entirety. We even saved a little corned beef to make a wee bit o' hash later.
For the socks: Thank You, Beccy!!!
(Yes, sometimes three exclamation points are required.)

Bigger than Bean Sprout's Head

I have never seen this kind of artichoke in person before. It showed up at our local anachronistic upscale market a few days ago, and today they're already gone.
Cranky was out doing the rounds and told me about this Mork from Ork sighting.
"And you didn't buy them?" I asked. "Remember when I saw that fresh local rabbit for sale, and I'd never seen one for sale before, and I had to have it, and it was so worth it?"
Anything that good-looking, that unusual: you have to buy it.
He remembered, and he liked the analogy. Enough to trot down to the market to grab a couple of orbs.
Mon dieu, they are large! (And I believe they are French, though I don't know the exact variety.) They are so compactly layered, they are nearly perfect spheres. With adorable roundy scalloped leaves.
We whisked up a wonderful dipping sauce of mayonnaise, yogurt and some leftover olive/anchovy/oil/lemon zest... a bit more tinkering with flavors, and we were totally there. Then we decided to nearly double the amount of the dipping sauce, because, jeepers, these artichokes were big.
For the first time in my life, I didn't finish eating an artichoke. The leaves were so fleshy, you'd have to call them meaty. Brontosaurus leaves. Some of them were nearly four inches across. I can't imagine what that heart's like down in there!
So we have leftovers. I'm thinking about scraping the leaves and making some sort of puree for an omelet, along with cubed artichoke hearts. And a splash of that really good dipping sauce.
Today at the store we snapped up two of the remaining huge green planets, which are safe in the fridge for now.
For now.

Onion + π = Opinion

It's Pi Day! You know, the 14th of March, or 3.14.
Of course, you'll want to bake a pie to celebrate.
I'm baking an onion pie, because I'm opinionated (and don't make me come up there and explain my post title to you).
The onions from the garden patch are still slender; just starting to develop their spherical bulge. So we'll use a few, both red and white, sliced and sauteed in flowery oil.
The crust will be half whole wheat and half white flour, made with leaf lard. Oh yeah, we got some Range Brothers leaf lard from the kind Prather folks, and I'm excited, because I thought that stuff was impossible for the little people to get. (I'm little! Leave me alone, or bring me a booster seat and a box of crayons.)
To pad out the filling, I'm thinking some new potatoes, gently sauteed just to get them softened, and a handful of crumbled dry jack cheese. Perhaps a drizzle of cream.
Seasonings: thyme, salt, pepper.
Utter simplicity, and I'm having to describe all this to you because I haven't baked the pi pie yet.
Oh. Hey, maybe I have. Look:

I Ate This

It's completely marvelous to lounge outside on the patio, admiring the vegetation, and then to eat it (the vegetation, not the patio) for lunch.
At some point it looks like Nature, pure and unsullied, and then you apply heat and liquid. And you get food.
It was actually an emergency meal, because the purple flowering broccoli is, ahem, flowering. The cauliflower was bursting apart into separate shoots, and now I know what they mean by cauliflower shoots: emergency.
The rest of the dish was backyard celery (I don't know how it has lasted so long, but we're almost on month 10 for it) and not-yet-mature onions, both sauteed in olive oil. We braised this natural, naive dish in a good splash of champagne with a squeeze of backyard Meyer lemon and several backyard seasonings (parsley, chive, sage, serrano pepper). Salt, of course.
The food part of my meal was a lot homelier than the precooked part.
Just right.

Not a Review of Ubuntu

pretty
I really don't want to think of this as a restaurant review, even though I've been to Ubuntu in Napa twice now. The new, upscale vegetable restaurant.
I find restaurant reviewing really hard. I wrote a couple of reviews for San Francisco restaurants when our major reviewer at the paper I worked for had to recuse herself, due to neighborhood dibsies. Yes, dibsies is a word. And restaurant reviewing is really hard.
Nonetheless. OK, Ubuntu again. First time, last November, with Sam and her mum. I didn't write about it then. We ate well, but there were problems. I was inclined to ascribe the problems to poor ordering from the menu. (But why should a menu inflict you with poor ordering options?)
This most recent time, with Anita and Cameron, we avoided our prior pitfall of two almost-identical (and over-peppered) pizzas. But we still got whammied. We ordered the famous cauliflower in an iron pot, and it was still good, if not actually better. A couple of other dishes were quite nice. Everything was beautiful.
But. NaCl!!!
Salt.
Salty food!
Gah.
One of the first things that came to the table was fried sunchokes with romesco sauce. My first bite, and I said, "salty." I felt like a ninny, only to discover that almost everything else that came out was oversalted.
Anita had to scrape away the greens from her dish of farm egg with robuchon potatoes and red wine Ubuntu spinach. Too salty.
I've heard a rumor/myth that chefs might be inclined to oversalt food if the temperature in the kitchen is too hot. Sweat out your own natural juices, and you just might find yourself craving salt. Hence, the food you're cooking doesn't taste salty enough, and you wreck it.
I don't know if that's true.
One of us at the table speculated that the kitchen is handicapped by having to serve only non-meat food, and may be jacking up the seasoning in order to come across as butch enough. Could be.
Anyway, in a nutshell, here's my opinion of Ubuntu. 1) Not enough customers in this good-looking restaurant on a sunny Sunday afternoon. 2) Beautiful presentations (and I haven't even told you about the other stuff we ate; the desserts were gorgeous). 3) Oversalted.
I just want to say that this is a restaurant receiving national acclaim. I will probably go back there, myself. But it's skidding off its tracks and somebody needs to say something.
"Oversalted."
a grain of salt

Suburban Harvest

Our crop of winter vegetables is slowly ripening. (It's still winter! For another week or so.)
I don't know why I've been reluctant to eat them. We had an amazing raw broccoli salad a while ago that I promise to blog about. And today the cauliflowers were so damn ready, we just sliced off three small heads and roasted them for lunch.
All vegetables are terrific roasted, with oil and salt. The objective is not to scorch them, the way I imagined you should when I first heard about roasted vegetables. (Hey. Roast beef gets a brown crust. Why not vegetables?) Be gentle.
After cooking in the oven (375º, about half an hour, with a little resting time, oven off), we slathered the cauliflower with chopped kalamata olives, garlic, squooshes of anchovy paste, lemon zest, chile pepper flakes and capers. Make up your own sinful mix.
One entire lunch of solid vegetal matter, fresh off the stem. So filling. So thrilling.
(Biggles, shut up.)

Lazy-Ass Lunch

I love artichokes. I often make a whole meal out of one, dragging the dragon-scale leaves through some savory potion based on fat.
But it's never really quite enough food. There's the satisfaction of dismantling a thistle, one petal at a time, and then the euphoria of scraping away the choke and devouring the heart. But. Still hungry. And all that fat.
Dagny has been suggesting that I try dipping artichoke leaves in hummus. Yeah, yeah. Nice idea, Dags, but I'll probably never do it.
Until the other day. We had two perfect, huge artichokes from the farmers market, a sudden hunger, and a reluctance to create a zesty fat bath. Hmm. Hummus, maybe? It would add a little filling protein to our meal, and if we bought a tub of it already made, it would be simple.
We set the cold hummus out to come to room temp while the artichokes cooked.
My first bite seemed all wrong: wrong texture, wrong smell, wrong taste. Clang! It was jarring... but not bad enough to quit.
Another bite. Better. Yes, I can see where this is going.
Another bite, and then another.
Yes.
This is a good thing to do. It occurred to me that artichokes and chickpeas have common Mediterranean roots, so pairing them is natural.
Next time I'm going to make my own hummus, though.

Code Yellow in My Backyard

Spring, not yet arrived, is crashing.
The Meyer lemons, once so robust and plump, are getting soft. One has rotted on the tree. Yeeps. Time to use them wisely.
And the daffodils, a "gift" from the previous owners of this ancient property, sprang up unannounced, and are now browning around the edges. They don't last well cut in a vase, so I'll let them meet their maker au naturel.
It's super sunny outside, another yellow gift, and very near time to get serious about planting.
We are *thisclose* to putting the artichokes in the front yard. All dug out and ready to go, tomorrow. Still plotting the sun patterns. Which will change, but as these are perennials, we want to give them the most UVs year-round.
Speaking of artichokes, we had a most amazing lunch. Details to come.

You Lose Some, You Win Some

Slim pickin's, folks.
I trashed my entire photo library the other day, by accident. I don't want to talk about it.
I know some images are retrievable from the hard drive but I'm not getting any hints of the whereabouts of the nearly 1,300 pictures that vanished. Only some.
I do, however, still have a very recent photo of a dish I experimented with the other day.
Whew, talk about experimenting. I'd never used puff pastry before. Ever. I didn't know you could (should) roll it out, so it doesn't puff up into a caricature of itself in the oven. Lyle Lovett does dessert.
This was so simple. I lined two small glass dishes with (too much) puff pastry and placed smaller squares of puff pastry for tops on the baking sheet. Cooked it until puffy and brown. Let it cool a bit, then slathered it with homemade applesauce (sprinkled with salt and cinnamon), topped it with the little pieces of puff pastry. Then I laid a couple of thin strips of good cheddar on the mattress-like top crusts, put 'em back in the oven for a good melting, and then: Eat.
Verdict: Chewy and puffy. Needed to have been rolled out, and now I know. But it's a killer quick method.
Elsewhere. I can hardly bear to go near the TV or Internet for news. Too much Hillabama anxiety. Of course, I'm dying to know the outcome of Tuesday's voting. But it's only Monday morning, so I'll just hibernate until then.
Or maybe try tinkering with my hard drive. Darn.