My Kitchen My Table

The Dude

Guenther, The Dude, was a stud. He will be missed. We will forever cherish the memories we have of our guy who gave so much love every day.

Lights On Little Circus Animals!!

Who didn’t love Mother’s Cookies growing up? I know in my house they were always a staple – especially the Animal Cookies. What’s not to love about their pink and white frosting covered in sprinkles in elephant, camel, lion and other circus animal shapes.

And then, last October, after 92 years in business, they disappeared – poof! like a circus act gone wrong. Actually more like bankruptcy… so the little lady with the bun could bake but apparently she grew tired of cooking the books…

Today marks their return, gracing the cookie aisle at your favorite grocery store once again! I know what I’m serving for dessert tonight!

Lights on Little Circus Animals!!

Orchid

My Mom gave me this orchid for Valentine’s Day. At the time, it was heavy with blooms; only one or two flowers were actually open. Within the first week a couple of buds shriveled and fell off. I was afraid she wasn’t adapting to my environment. Slowly she settled in and what a difference two months makes! Look at her now, full of blooms and going strong! I admire her before I leave for work in the morning and when I return at night. Each time I look at her I smile. Thanks Mom!

Bardessono – No?

Yountville is the perfect place in the Napa Valley. It is more precious than Napa and not as far as Saint Helena so the heinous traffic doesn’t apply, and hands down, per block is home to many of the best restaurants in the wine country. In fact with so many great places to eat – including the new Michael Chiarello restaurant, Bottega, deciding where to eat is overwhelming. The eating is one vote to stay for the weekend vs. the day, but either way, Yountville is the perfect day trip or weekend escape.

Part of the reason for this visit was to check out Bardessono, the new luxury resort and spa. Touting itself as the “most anticipated opening in years” and open since February, Bardessono also claims to be the greenest hotel in America. Hats off to that! But starting at six-bills a night for the spa-suite (entry level room) in low-season, I had to wonder… if these are recessionary times, has the recession not come to the wine country? Can the Napa Valley support yet another resort with these price points?

After walking around the property I was underwhelmed. There was a lot of stone and wood (or as Paul said “they used the Home Depot bricks to make the walls”… I’m sure they were something other than that, but they did look a little Home Depot). I felt that any type of lush landscaping in the form of trees and plants was missing; perhaps it is still going in.

Unlike other resorts in the area, I didn’t get that feeling that I was in a special place. Granted, I didn’t stay overnight so can’t comment on the service and guest experience, but the walk through didn’t fire me up to convince Paul that I’d found the most fabulous place and we needed to return to spend a weekend.

I love the fact that it is green and sustainable by design and can’t deny that the pool cabanas looked like an inviting place to spend a hot summer day but I left feeling that something was missing and I can’t place what that something is. Did it feel empty, during my look around, I saw only three people – all in the pool. Or maybe it was the sparseness. I am upset. I wanted to love it; I wanted it to be my weekend retreat from the foggy city in the summertime. I wanted to feel compelled to sign up for their email list to receive exclusive offers, but I’m not.

So for now, I wish the Bardessono well. Who knows, maybe they’re close to fully booked for the summer and I have it all wrong. The next time I’m in Yountville, I’ll check it out again and maybe then I’ll get that special feeling.

Seven Years of Waiting

After seven years of waiting, I finally have a plot in a community garden where I can dig in the dirt and grow things. There are several community gardens in San Francisco and seven years ago I entered my name on a wait list for the one in Fort Mason. Located in the heart of Fort Mason with gorgeous bay views, she is the Queen of all community gardens, coveted by many and it also happened to be walking distance from home. My neighbor had a plot there and would let me live vicariously through her as a volunteer to tend it when she was on holiday.

When I signed up I was deep on the second column of the wait list, number 64 I believe, and told that it would likely be upwards of five years until my name was called. Would you believe that five years later and 3 weeks after moving out of the city I got the phone call…?

Flash forward 3 years; I move back to the city to a different neighborhood with it’s own community garden. One of the first things I do upon my return is put my name on the wait list. I was number FIVE! Certainly, the wait would be mere weeks. Oh no, at this garden, it takes 18 months to 2 years to turn over five people. Last week, about 22 months later, I got the call. So there it is, seven years of waiting to be called to claim a small patch of dirt… my time had come.

The plot is located in one of the sunniest areas of the garden and the part of the city where I live is one of the warmest and least foggy. I have high hopes that I’ll be able to yield enough vegetables to feed me and Paul this summer. The plot is small, about 4’x10’ so I need to be strategic about what and where to plant. I plan to grow a combo of flowers and vegetables, mostly vegetables, and today the first went in.

In the row that boarders my neighbor to the north, I planted Cosmos. They’ll grow tall so I won’t have to see the dozens of marigolds that she is planting. In the next row is a Red Bell Pepper, and two types of Sweet Cherry Tomatoes. The third row has Arugula and Butter Lettuce which I planted from seed – we’ll see how that goes. The fourth row is flanked on one side with a Japanese Cucumber and Chives on the other with Little Gem Lettuce seeds in the middle. The south end has two types of Lavender and a Fuchsia.

There is a gap in the middle where strawberries, fingerling potatoes, thyme, tarragon and basil will go next week. Several people are growing strawberries including my neighbor to the west (he has an irrigation system too; I may need friend him). They seem to be hearty and thriving so I’m going to give them a go. Yum – fresh strawberries!!

Once the rest is in, I will nurture the garden and let nature take its course and see what she yields!

Wine Country Cooking

The next book we are reading and cooking from for the MKMT Cookbook Club is Joanne Weir’s Wine Country Cooking. I’ve already read most of it and can’t wait to dig in and start cooking! This weekend I plan to make the Winter White Salad With a Hint of Green and the Pork Tenderloin with Onion, Orange, and Raisin Marmalade. How does that sound for the backbone of a rainy winter dinner with the parents? I’ll be sure to report back on how the meal turns out.

“A Latitude and an Attitude” is the title of the forward which begins with a lesson in the geography of the thirty-eight parallel which runs through the regions in Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Turkey that are responsible for the Mediterranean food, wine and lifestyle influence that we enjoy in our fabulous Northern California wine country. I toast the 38th with a big thank you… we are lucky to be aligned.

This appears to be one of those books that will grow worn with wear and quickly become a kitchen staple. I’ll be cooking from it for the next month and after we gather to sample many of the recipes look forward to posting the feedback and sharing the highlights.

Mac Gourmet and Etoufette; replacing the recipe box.

by Louie DuMonde

My good friend Leon in New Orleans is a fourth generation Y’at of the crescent city who loves to cook. A few winters ago, over fabulous gin martinis, I brought up the discussion of the importance of familial recipes that get handed down through the generations. He got very excited and hoisted his portly frame across the kitchen to grab a black plastic index card box.

With all the reverence of a priest handling a chalice, he produced card after card of recipes. The cards were worn and splattered with sauces, a perfect testament to an active kitchen. There was, however, a few cards that were a little worse for wear and in need of rewrite to avoid total obliteration. He admitted that he needed to get around to the task, but as with all things like this, it just never gets done. I suggested that he should put them in a recipe database that he could keep on his computer. To use his words; “I thought I’d never see the day that I would need a user manual to keep track of the ingredients of my Etoufette.”

He had a point. The cross roads between computer and kitchen have always been narrow almost to the point of non-existence. That is until this year when Mariner Software released Mac Gourmet Deluxe, Recipe and Wine management software.

Going into this review, I was already jaded. There is a romance that is inherent to a recipe box like Leon’s, how could that ever be replaced by software? I think the designers of Mac Gourmet had the same notion. The software is not competing a with the recipe box as much as it is offering a viable alternative.

Most important in luring chefs away from the their boxes and notebooks is that the conversion to the computer needs to be easy. Mac Gourmet is just that. This convinced me in the first few minutes that it would be worth the time to enter all my recipe’s into the application. Having done that it wasn’t long until I discovered some of the other fabulous features of Mac Gourmet. Like the ability to email a recipe right from the software. This has been brilliant as requests come in for seasonal holiday recipes.

Another feature that I was surprisingly attracted to is the meal planner. Simply drag various recipes onto specific days of the week and press a button to create your shopping list. Mac Gourmet Deluxe will print out all the necessary ingredients for more organized and money efficient trips to the store and farmers market. But above all my favorite feature has to be the Chef’s View, a greatly enlarged screen view of your recipe, that allows you to keep your laptop on your kitchen table, out of harms way, but still close enough glance at with dirty hands. If you need a picture to remind you what your concoction is supposed to look like, Mac Gourmet Deluxe has room for images, either shot by you or found on the web.

Mac Gourmet Deluxe also lets you keep track of your favorite wines. If you are like me, always intending to write down those fabulous wine discoveries while galavanting around town, you now have a central place to store the details.

Mac Gourmet Deluxe has a more sophisticated features that you can delve into. Some may or may not be useful to you. But the folks at Mariner Software have cleverly integrated them out of the way of the core functionality of software leaving you the freedom to go shopping and get cooking.

The Mac Gourmet Deluxe interface if clean and intuitive, much like Apple’s Mail software program, making it easy to find or browse your recipes. Mariner software, the company that created Mac Gourmet Deluxe, is a veteran software company for whom databases are old hat. You can trust that your recipes will be safe to hand down to future generations. I’m giving Mac Gourmet Deluxe four and half out five shakes of the Cayenne for stability, ease of use, and keeping a focus on the core purpose of the product.

Halloween Costume

The big SF Halloween party has moved from the Castro to my neighborhood this year…. So, what’s a girl to do but find a FAB costume and go to the party…. Let me hear from you – who should I be?

Would it be inappropriate to be one of the FLDS ladies for Halloween? A friend told me “the higher the hair, the closer to God.”

If that’s the case, maybe I’ll be Marie Antoinette…

or Amy Winehouse…

The Frozen Chocolate Malt

Why does eating a frozen chocolate malt on a wooden spoon taste so good?

I found myself contemplating this question after I bought one early in the 4th quarter of the USC v. Ohio State game. The Trojans had impressively put the game away so I was no longer nervous about the outcome when the malt guy came up the stairs bellowing “Malts, get your frozen chocolate malts here.” My mouth watered, I had to have one, and all of a sudden I was transported to a time that I was a kid sitting with my Dad at another Trojan game or was it a baseball game long ago eating a frozen chocolate malt.

I peeled the paper off the wooden spoon, lifted the tab on the lid, pulled it back, and dug in. The malt was rock hard. I would need to be patient. Damn those über-efficient over the neck freezer contraptions the vendors wear. They do too good of a job keeping things frozen!

Fearful of breaking my wooden spoon, I let the malt melt for a while and when I couldn’t wait any longer, had my first bite. By that time it was perfectly melted around the sides. I finished within minutes. Sitting next to me, Ed shook his head in disbelief and gave me grief that I didn’t save a bite for Dad!

Do You Blackle?

Blackle.com – Saving energy one search at a time.

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of Google would save a fair bit of energy. The smart people at Heap Media decided to address the challenge and Blackle was born.

There’s been a lot of skepticism about how relevant the energy savings really is but the people behind Blackle believe that there is value in the concept – hey, if the 128 million Google users (as reported in June 2008 by Neilson Online) doing upwards of 1300 million searches per day converted, the savings in megawatt hours would add up to big numbers.

And more importantly, a constant reminder of how taking small steps in energy conservation adds up isn’t such a bad thing, is it? I’ll bet The McCain/Palin ticket aren’t Blackle users….