Nobody's Fool: What's for Dinner? November 2001

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Dinner tonight was at the Boat Street Cafe and it was even better than last night. Very cute, small restaurant. What we ate:

Catherine had the pickle plate, which had pickled pears, prunes, roasted red peppers and golden raisins, cornichons, and caper berries. They were all very very yummy. She then had housemade pasta with lemon cream sauce - nice and light.

Linda had a blue cheese, pear, and watercress salad. I don't know what kind of cheese it was, but it was soft and round-flavored and went very nicely with our Barolo. Then she had a sweet corn flan with tarragon that looked very nice.

I had Umbrian-style white beans that were drizzled with balsamic vinegar and then I had a chicken breast that was served with port-soaked prunes and a cream sauce that was NOT light but was very very indulgent and very very delicious.

One thing that I've noticed about Seattle restaurants is that they are not expensive compared to Santa Cruz or San Francisco restaurants. We've been going to the places that are considered by most Seattle residents to be the expensive ones, according to Linda. But prices just don't compare. A couple of weeks ago we went to Oswald's in Santa Cruz - four people for $380. Boat Street, on the other hand, only cost $160 for three people. Entrées on coastal California menus (SF to LA) range from $17 for the token vegetarian entrée to $36 for a fancy steak. Here in Seattle, menus with a similar quality and style have entrées that range from $14 to $19. The difference in price really adds up when you have more than one person, and when you order appetizers or salads.

It makes California restaurants (along with real estate) look incredibly overpriced. Also makes me wonder why we ever go out to dinner at home - Tacos Morenos doesn't count, of course - and then I remember about the dishes!

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Had dinner tonight at the Flying Fish restaurant and it was good. I had a great first impression when I walked in the door - I liked the paintings, it wasn't too noisy - and then the menu looked so good that it made me happy. We had smelt and pompom mushroom tempura to start, then I had crispy monkfish served with green papaya salad, a black rice cake and Thai curry sauce, and Catherine had lobster that was stir-fried with hoisin-chili glaze and served with sesame noodles and jicama-carrot slaw. Hers was REALLY good, although she said that the salt and pepper Dungeness crab that she had last time she was there was even better.

We are lucky, lucky people. Lucky that we can eat at restaurants like that, lucky that we can travel, lucky to be self--employed, just lucky in general. Catherine would say that it comes from hard work, which is also true, but I think that luck has a lot to do with where we are right now.

You know who else is lucky? Spec. How many other dogs have you heard of that are as spoiled as she is? Staying in hotels, sleeping under the covers, spending every minute of every day (practically) with her people - she has quite a life, that dog.

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Sorry for the long delay, but here I am again. Although "here" doesn't mean Santa Cruz, for the moment, it means Seattle. A competely unplanned, spur-of-the-moment trip.

Yesterday, Catherine was leaving to go on a press check in Seattle. (Although I dearly love publishing Nobody's Fool, as of yet it doesn't pay the rent. (SUBSCRIBE, for gosh sakes, yes that means you!) Catherine and I have another business, which is almost as much fun and actually profitable. I wasn't planning on going with her - I had work in SC to do, I was going to visit my grandmother for her birthday - but I was so sad that she was leaving, when she said just come with me I said OK.

I have never packed so quickly in my entire life. Consequently, I have underwear but no socks, only one pair of pants, no jacket, and a swimsuit bottom but no top. There is enormous freedom in being able to leave at the drop of a hat. Thank goodness for our friend Monika, who is a completely flexible emergency cat-sitter!

I love a road trip. Last night I got to have one of my favorite nostalgic experiences: eating KFC in a Motel 6 and then drinking wine in bed while watching TV. My family traveled in the car a lot, and that was the only time we ate things like Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, sugared cereal - I favored Fruity Pebbles. The other road trip food that I love, although now that I'm more healthy I don't buy, are Planters Cheez Balls. The junkiest of junk food. What are your favorite road trip treats?

Not that my travel food is usually this junky. I'm also very adept at packing a cooler so that I'm not trapped into eating fast food. But this time I was in such a rush that the cooler ended up unpacked. Wine and a wine opener made it into the car, of course!

We arrived in Seattle this afternoon and I took Spec walking around Pike Place Market. Dogs aren't allowed in food stores, so I'll have to go back without her tomorrow. She received a warm welcome at the Gap, though, and I remedied my lacking wardrobe.

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I'm cooking again after my time off. Started back in by reading an old Gourmet cookbook while I was drinking my morning coffee, and decided to make a cheese soufflé. I didn't know that Catherine doesn't like soufflé, but when I found out that I was just cooking for myself, instead of making a big one (can you think of anything that sounds more disgusting than leftover soufflé?), I decided to do what restaurants do to make individual servings one at a time.

All soufflés have 2 parts: the base and the egg whites. (The base for cheese soufflé is basically a bechamel sauce with cheese melted into it; the base for a chocolate soufflé is a chocolate custard.) This part can be made and then stored in the fridge. The egg whites - unwhipped - can be stored in a jar in the fridge. When you want to make a one-person soufflé, you just scoop out a 1/4 of the base into a bowl, put 1/4 of the egg whites into another bowl. Whip the whites, fold into the base, and then use a 1 1/2 cup soufflé dish (indtead of the 5-cup dish that the recipe calls for). You can use smaller or larger dishes, and adjust the amount of base & whites that you use.

So I had cheese soufflé for dinner last night, and breakfast this morning. One of the problems about cooking just for yourself (when you're making a recipe that serves 4 or 6) is that you have to eat the same thing several days in a row. Luckily this doesn't bother me. I'm happy to eat the same thing over and over again.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself that soufflés are difficult, or snooty, or too fancy, but really they're none of those things. They're just eggs, really, and they're not difficult to make. The only thing about them is that you have to eat them right when they come out of the oven if you want them to be nice and puffy.

Once you know how to make a basic recipe, you can pretty much make them up as you go along. It's an easy way to use up leftover cooked vegetables, or lots of ends of cheeses, or a little bit of ham, or even leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

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My friend just got back from the Dominican Republic, where she was visiting her family, and had me over for dinner tonight. Plantain chips, both sweet and not, "Chupy" chicken, barbequed, which comes from a street stand near her sister's house, and then a stew called sancocho (sp?) that her sister's housekeeper made. The stew had chicken, pork, plantains, patata (a kind of potato, not too sweet, very dense), and was flavored with cilantro. Not spicy at all, served over rice with avocado on top, plain but delicious home cooking.

The plane crash in Queens happened the day after she arrived in the D.R. On her way back, every single bag of every passenger getting on the plane was hand-searched - the Domincans were understandably very nervous. My friend's bag was very suspicious, heavy and full of unidentifiable bumps.

"What's this lump?" "Oranges."
"And this one?" "Pollo al carbón."
"What's in here?" "A sack of avocados."

She was let go with a wink and a piece of advice: "Don't tell anyone else what you've got in here."

I love a good smuggler. (But since I know not everyone agrees, I decided not to refer to my friend by name!) And I love having friends that know that the best thing to bring home from a trip is food. Is there a better way to get to know another country, another people, than by sharing the food that they eat?

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I'm having a great day OFF from cooking. Except for hardboiled eggs, which don't really count, I haven't cooked anything. Besides the eggs, had some leftover mu shu pork, some leftover chicken salad, stuff like that... And Catherine has volunteered to cook dinner tonight. Hooray!

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I nearly reached the end of my rope this week. Of course most of the time cooking is fun, but sometimes I get to the point where my entire life seems to be an endless cycle of dish-washing. Which it is, actually. Usually I don't mind, or notice, and then suddenly I can't stand it one more minute.

My strategies for dealing with this include:
• Getting up before Catherine, drinking my coffee first, and then re-using my cup to bring her coffee. One less cup to wash!
• Not making breakfast. Catherine can eat a Balance Bar, I'll eat something like refried beans out of the can, or cottage cheese out of the container. No bowls to wash, and no pots - I eat my beans cold!
• Storing leftovers (like soup or chicken salad) in the containers that I made them in. The soup pot goes directly into the fridge, the chicken salad bowl just gets covered in a piece of plastic wrap. Why bother trasferring leftovers into smaller containers? So what if the fridge is a little crowded? I don't have to wash two sets of dishes...
• Going out to dinner, or ordering in. This is dependent on budget, of course, but sometimes shelling out $25 for chinese food (delivered!) and not having a huge pile of dishes in the sink is totally worth it.

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It's raining and Catherine's sick, and I'm trying once again to recreate the most healing soup I've ever eaten.

I was twenty and travelling when I got a terrible cold. It was raining then, too. We were in Prague at the time, staying in a student dormitory. (Communist-era buildings are not warm and comforting places to be when you're sick!) But we found a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner and ordered chicken soup. It was amazing - a little spicy, but not too much. Citrus-y and bright with cilantro. The heat from the soup and from the chilies made my nose run and let me breathe. The ginger helped my throat and after eating a giant bowl I felt about a thousand times better. It's such a good memory - coming in out of the rain, picking the place at random, and having it turn out to be so wonderful.

So that's what I'm trying to make today. The windows are steamy and the house smells like garlic and lemongrass and ginger.

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I was so tired this afternoon - had a two-hour meeting that just wiped me out. It wasn't stressful, but just the effort of being alert and talking to people for two hours (I'm quite an introvert, probably why I spend so much time on the computer) exhausts me. I am very busy with work these days, but all I wanted to do was to take a nap.

But witness the power of a snack: Came home and put a pot of water on for tea. I got out one of the pretty plates that I usually save for the holidays, and put on it some sliced turkey, a little blue cheese, and some oaten biscuits. By the time I'd had two cups of hot sweet tea and eaten half my food, I was feeling so much better that I got off the couch and went back to work. It's good to remember how restorative caffeine, calories, and a break can be.

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I'm having a delicious breakfast this morning that my mom would love - homemade turkey stock. I bought half a turkey breast yesterday to cure and roast (I can't stand paying $9/lb for deli turkey when I could make my own for $3.59/lb). The bone was so small that I almost threw it away, but since I had the oven on anyway, I roasted it with half a piece of celery, a couple slices of carrot and half an onion. When the scraps on the bone were nice and brown and the vegetables were soft, I put them in a small pot, deglazed the roasting pan, and added a bay leaf. I simmered the stock for an hour last night, and finished it this morning. The whole house smelled like Thanksgiving, in a good way. I only ended up with about a cup and a half of stock, but it was dark brown and rich-looking. I tasted a little, and then decided I'd just drink it all.

It's very satisfying to drink warm broth on a cold morning. We don't have our pilot light on yet - PG&E is coming tomorrow, thank goodness! - so I've been drinking lots of warm things. Unfortunately, this means that my caffeine consumption has gone through the roof. By late afternoon, after two cups of coffee and two (or even three) cups of black tea, I'm a bit of a wreck. Drinking broth is a much better way to keep warm!

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Had a really amazing (and very expensive) dinner on Sunday. Spent the night and ate at Manka's Inverness Lodge. We sat at the chef's table, which meant that not only did we have a view into the kitchen, but we also got extra dishes not included in the regular prix fixe menu for that night. Here's what we ate (and drank):

(Argyle Brut Sparkling Wine)

Fresh tomato soup with cod and stinging nettle cream.

Salad of white & chioggia beets, radicchio, and baked fresh ricotta with herbs.

(Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé)

Rabbit sausage in a broth with cannellini beans.

Risotto with sweetbreads.

Gravenstein apple ice.

(Navarro Pinot Noir)

Cured pork loin, roasted in front of a wood fire, served with garlic mashed potatoes and super-skinny haricot verts.

(Beaumes de Venise dessert wine)

Croissant bread pudding with currants.

It was really incredible. I was a bit intimidated to sit at the chef's table - talking to strangers is not my favorite thing - but it turned out to be really fun and we met some very nice people.

The lodge is really great, too. We had a fireplace in our room and breakfast was brought to our door - Hobbs' bacon and duck eggs over easy, cream biscuits and local blackberry jam. All in all, a self-indulgent trip that was worth every one of the very many pennies that it cost.

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I made dinner for some friends last night - turkey scalloppini with green chilies & cheese, roasted vegetables, salad. And since one person is a vegetarian, I made a tofu-stuffed winter squash. Now, I thought it was pretty good, he thought it was pretty good, but when his wife took a bite, the first words out of her mouth were, "It tastes like horse."

Now, what kind of a comment is that? At first I was amazed that she had eaten horse and remembered what it tasted like. Then, I was pretty proud that I had made tofu taste like meat, although I'm not sure that horse would be on the top of my list of meats to emulate. When she qualified her comment by saying, "It tastes like a horse smells - have you ever been to a horse show?," I just didn't know what to think. I do know that that's one comment on my cooking that I will never forget!

It was lovely to roast those chiles. I love that smell - it made me long for fall in New Mexico, when every third parking lot has a person roasting & selling green chilies. That smell outside in the crisp air is even better than the smell in your own kitchen. Two more months, and I get to visit...

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