Salad with red onion, cubed celery root, the last garden tomatoes, and seared tuna

Some food from the weekend

I'm not going to regale you with recipes for every Thanksgiving dish — everything was delicious, and almost everything is a favorite standard — but I thought it best to at least check in with a quick rundown of the weekend. On Wednesday we made pizza for the family (four cookie-sheet-sized pizzas, two with tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella and two with pears, walnuts, blue cheese, and mozzarella). Tomorrow night's plan is for stew with chickpeas, clams, and sausage. Tonight we had skate, very yummy baked fifteen to twenty minutes in a buttered pan at 400°, and then topped with browned butter and capers. We served the skate with brown rice and chard: bring a few inches of water to a boil in a large pot, and add a good handful of baking soda, and then stir in two bunches rainbow chard, cut into one-inch-thick ribbons; peel a couple cloves of garlic, mince them, and then add a large handful of salt to the garlic in a small pile on a cutting board and work the salt into the garlic with a knife until you have a nice paste; after about two minutes, drain the greens in a colander, dry them off a bit in a clean dish towel, and toss the greens with the garlic in a serving bowl.

On Friday, as we do every year, we made soup. My brother invited a friend from school to join us for the Thanksgiving weekend, and said friend is quite strictly vegetarian, so in addition to our usually turkey soup, we also made a vegan option. (The friend left today, hence the meaty dinners tonight and tomorrow.) Coarsely chop four onions, half a dozen celery sticks, and about as many carrots, and divide them roughly evenly between two pots. Add a few bay leaves, a few peppercorns, and a large handful of salt to each pot. In the larger pot, also add the saved turkey neck and giblets as well as the bones (break them up if you can with a cleaver to let the marrow out), but discard the skin and use the fat for some other project. Save any savable meat, of course. Cover the contents of each pot with water (but not more than enough to cover), place the lids on, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook about an hour.

Dice another three onions. Place two of them in a large pot and one in a medium pot, and saute in a splash of olive oil with some salt. Also add diced carrot and celery to each to make two mirepoix. To the smaller pot, add three quarter pound sliced crimini mushrooms. Once the mushrooms start to release their liquid, add between half and a third of a cup of pearled barley to the smaller pot, and between half a cup and two thirds to the larger pot. Stir the barley in to coat, and then place a colander or sieve over the smaller part and pour in the finished vegetable broth, rescuing the cooked veggies to give to the backyard chickens (it was raining all weekend — that soup was from October). Then move the colander to the larger pot and pour in the turkey broth.

Bring both soups to a boil. After about ten minutes, add frozen edamame to each pot. Bring back to a boil, cook another ten minutes, and stir in a fair amount of saved turkey meat into the turkey-broth (non-mushroom) soup. Adjust the salt and serve with good bread and good wine.

Four days in Honolulu, four and a half nights of Japanese food

B had a conference in Honolulu this weekend, and so we flew here on Thursday (I'm starting this post from the Honolulu airport on Monday, as we wait for our flight, not really wanting to leave). We stayed in Waikiki, which is not known for great food. In fact, we enjoyed all of our meals, which I will detail blow. In brief: what you can be sure to find prepared well in Honolulu is Japanese food.

Thursday: overpriced, but tasty, sushi in Waikiki

We arrived at San Francisco airport Thursday with just barely enough time to catch our flight (they had started boarding by the time we were through security) — since we didn't have time to find take-out lunch for the plane, we were forced to go with the "snack boxes" that United sells. We've had better cheese and crackers. But our flight here went smoothly, and in spite of arriving on a national holiday, we managed to catch a bus to Waikiki.

After checking in to the hotel, we asked the receptionist for sushi recommendations, and he sent us to Doraku Sushi (warning: link makes sound, a nice place in an upscale shopping mall between our hotel and the beach (he also recommended Sansei Sushi, which Lonely Planet also liked, an probably we should have gone there). The dinner was tasty, but a bit more expensive than it should have been. B ordered a tuna-and-avocado tartar, and I had something with thinly sliced snapper. We were still hungry, so we had uni nigiri (I thought the waiter had said that the urchin was served in the shell, but, alas!), and then a fish-and-greens salad to close. With the wine and tip, the dinner was more than we had hoped, but not a terrible welcome-to-Hawaii dinner.

Friday: picnic lunch on Diamond Head, and menchankoin Waikiki

We had stopped into a corner market (every street corner in Waikiki has an ABC Store) after dinner to pick up some milk for our hotel-room coffee, but they didn't have acceptable food for breakfast. So Friday morning we walked to Lonely Planet's favorite diner, only to find them with an hour-long line, and so we found ourselves at Starbucks making do with their arm-and-leg yogurt-and-granola and a microwaved "spinach, feta, and egg white wrap". The iced coffee, though, was welcome.

Afterwards, we did find the one actual grocery store in Waikiki, Food Pantry (prices are about the same as at Andronico's), where we bought crackers, brie, and grapes for a picnic. From there, we walked to Diamond Head Crater. Well, actually, we walked all the way around Diamond Head, because we wanted to see the beaches. The crater is quite a sight, and has a fantastic one-mile mostly-stairs climb to an old military outpost, which I highly recommend. Unbeknownst to us until we got to the park, they have started repairs on the trail, and were closing the hike every weekday afternoon, so we were some of the last hikers in. In any case, we had a fun picnic at the top of the mountain, until the workers came to kick us off. Along with the walk back to Waikiki (the short way), we did about ten miles of walking and 800 feet of elevation gain.

After a brief swim, we consulted lonely planet and went to Menchanko-Tei, a fantastically good cheep Japanese joint. Menchanko is some kind of Japanese meal-in-a-bowl, like the ramens and udons that we're used to on the mainland. (It's a good thing that we've stopped being so strict about vegetarianism: every dish had pork and chicken in it.) All told, the food was delicious, and not at all expensive. However, the only wine on the menu (a serviceable Beringer) was $36. I would have been much happier paying the same total but with food priced higher and the drink lower: as it was, the wine felt like a rip-off. (Corkage is $18, so if you are in Waikiki, go for lunch or order sake.)

Saturday: Berkeley lunch and fantastic sushi

Having found the grocery store, we were set for breakfasts for the rest of our trip: english muffins with cream cheese, yogurt, orange juice, coffee, on the balcony of our tenth-floor hotel room.

After breakfast, we headed towards Chaminade University, where B had his conference. We had been planning on getting poke at a shop along the way that Lonely Planet recommended, but found the building razed (our Lonely Planet is two years old). So instead, after checking in to our conference, we headed up the street to Town, a local-organic restaurant where we felt very at home. B had an entree salad, and I had a tasty sandwich with beets, mozzarella, and arugula, and it came with very good french fries that were served with fried sage on top.

After B's talk, we walked through the campus of the much bigger University of Hawaii at Manoa, cooled off at Lonely Planet's favorite coffee shop (Glazers), and then went to Imanas Tei for dinner. The dinner was fantastic — not too expensive and absolutely our best quality-to-price ratio. We each ordered the "Nigiri A": after miso and salad, we were treated to a platter of two kinds of tuna, salmon, various white fish, and roe and sea urchin (the waiter says that if we want it served in its shell, we're better off looking near the urchin farms in California).

Sunday: Museums, dim sum, and take-out

For our last full day in Honolulu, we took the bus to Bishop Museum (an ok anthropology museum, but at $15 for students, not worth admissions), and then walked to China Town, where we had absolutely fantastic dim sum at Legend Vegetarian. If you go to Honolulu, you simply must go to Legend (they also have a seafood restaurant next door). Don't order from the menu (we started with a broccoli and mushroom stir fry and lemon chicken, which were good but not "best ever") — simply eat everything in the dim sum cart.

From there, we walked to Honolulu Academy of Arts, which is a nice art museum. The elegant building is laid out into thirty numbered "galleries", each of which tries to collapse a humongous amount of art history ("Italian Renaissance", "Korea") into one room. If you, like us, have been to many European and Euro-American museums, feel free to skip the first ten rooms: they're nice, but the museum has the requisite one Picasso, one Cezanne, one Goya, one Matisse, and you won't find anything you haven't seen (or seen better than). But if you, like us, have confined most of your art museums to Europe, then I highly recommend you check out the second two thirds of the museum. The style of one-room-per-topic is continued, so this is not a complete exposure to, say, Chinese art history. But there are pieces and styles that we'd never seen, from countries that aren't usually featured: nineteenth-century cartoon/comic style art from Japan, a wall of Indonesian masks, country-by-country exploration of southeast Asia (organized by pre-European-colonial nation, rather than post-), O'Keeffes from when she tour Hawaii.

Our original plan had been to walk back to China Town, or to find sushi near the Honolulu Academy. But we weren't excited by either prospect, and we weren't hungry enough to eat before it got too dark to walk back to Waikiki. So we returned to the hotel, stopping by a Safeway along the way, and looked up take-out sushi joints, eventually finding Sushi 2 Go. For take-out sushi, it was very good, and we had a lovely dinner just the two of us in our hotel room, with a bottle of Oregon pinot noir (compared to restaurant wine, even the expensive stuff at Safeway is great) and pineapple for dessert. We were pretty tired of eating out, and happy to have a meal just the two of us.

Monday: Flying

I'm finishing this post on the airplane, although I won't be able to post it until I get home tonight. For lunch, we had more takeout sushi, this time from the very serviceable Samurai Sushi and Bento in the Honolulu airport. Dinner will be crackers, brie, and fruit on the airplane, with the airplane quarter-bottle wine. There are worse meals. Here's to cooking at home tomorrow!

Mashed celery root, brussels sprouts, and broiled seabass with onion

Leek pie with seared ahi

We found some pie dough that we had stuck away at the back of the freezer, and defrosted it overnight in the fridge. For a leek pie, clean and slice a few leeks and saute them in some butter, salt, and thyme. Heap the leeks onto a pie or pastry crust, fold up the sides, and bake until the crust is golden. Leek pie goes well with almost anything; we paired it with seared ahi tuna and a pinot gris.

Composed salad with homemade bread

Rather than making our usual salad, we followed a recipe from Chez Panisse Vegetables, which asked for us to stew onions with wine, oil, slices of lemon, and fresh herbs/spices (whole garlic cloves, bay leaves, pepper corns), and then to add cauliflower florets. The cauliflower is cooked on heat only until it's just starting to turn tender, but then the stew is allowed to cool and refrigerated overnight before serving. We served the cooked lemon slices as garnish on the salad, and for the rest of the salad we included stewed beets, canned whole sardines, and green beans blanched in the onion stewing liquid.

We also made a whole wheat baguette, and set out butter and a wonderful Italian goat cheese that our friend M had given us.

Seared ahi tuna, steamed broccoli, and mashed potatoes with celery root

Grilled dinner: corn, tuna, and summer squash

Picnic near Coit Tower: grilled sea bass with potato salad and dill pickles

Mayonnaise, it turns out, is as easy as anything. We followed the recipe from Julia Child and Company (1978): "Using the metal blade (I never use the plastic one for anything), process [1 whole] egg, [2 egg] yolkds, [1 teaspoon Dijon] mustard, and ½ teaspoon salt for 30 seconds. Then add 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar and process half a minute more. Finally, in a very thin stream, pour in [2 cups olive and/or peanut] oil. When all has gone in, remove cover, check consistency, and taste for seasoning."

So make your own mayonnaise. Also halve a pound of fingerling potatoes and boil them in salted water until cooked but still al dente. Dice a stick or two of celery and about a third of a large red onion. Combine the potatoes, celery, and red onion with some mayonnaise, and maybe some salt and some sherry vinegar. Transfer to a large tuperware container.

Check two half-pound pieces of seabass for scales, and then coat them in a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise. Heat up the grill and cook the bass evenly on all sides, adding some fresh tarragon near the end of the cooking. Let the fish cool slightly and then move to a tuperware.

Finally, prepare a final salad (not pictured) with heirloom tomatoes, garden basil, and a little salt, olive oil, and just a touch of balsamic vinegar.

Pack a cooler with the dishes, and add also a jar of homemade dill pickles (use a recent batch that still has some bite). Find a beautiful picnic spot, and enjoy an early dinner with a nice bottle of red wine.

In particular, find a spot just below Coit Tower by cutting off the trail up a little early. Start dinner around 3:30pm and eat for an hour, and then discover that you don't have time to climb the tower. Instead, head down to Pier 33 for the ferry to Alcatraz Island. Watch Hamlet on Alcatraz, arguably the best Shakespeare production you've seen (and you've seen shows at Ashland — it helps that Hamlet is such a good script). Encourage all your friends to go too, although it looks like they might have sold out.

Seared ahi tuna with fennel and radishes

My dad loves fish, and particularly barely cooked tuna. For our first of a mere two dinners in Eugene, we made one of our favorite fancy dinners. Press fennel seeds into boneless sashimi grade ahi tuna. Heat a cast-iron pan until it is very hot, and then sear just the outer half-centimeter or less of the fish, leaving the middles that wonderful tuna purple. Slice very thin a bulb of fennel and some radishes, and slice the fish into quarter-inch-thick (or less) strips. Layer the fennel, the fish, and the radishes in the kitchen, and cover with a very strongly shallot-y sherry vinaigrette. Serve with sourdough bread, sage-and-shallot butter, roasted garlic, and an Oregon pinot noir.

Pan-fried snapper, sauteed peppers, and Israeli couscous pilaf

Baked snapper with onions, tomatoes, and herb chiffonade; corn on the cob

Pasta with green beans, fennel, and smoked tuna

Pasta with tuna confit and beans

We followed the recipe for tuna confit from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook. We began by slicing a one-pound piece of tuna into four pieces and liberally salting everything. We placed it in a medium mixing bowl with about half a head of garlic (crushed but not peeled), one or two fresh bay leaves, a small hot red pepper, some whole pepper corns, a handful of fennel seed, and a few sprigs of thyme. We covered everything in olive oil (about 2.5 cups — Alice says 3), covered the bowl with saran wrap, and refrigerated the fish overnight.

The next day, we transferred everything to a pot, and warmed it on medium-low. The fish should cook ten to fifteen minutes, until it is don't on the outside but still a little pink in the middle. (Actually, we cooked it through, but Alice prefers it pink in the middle, and so do we.)

Meanwhile, we prepared a pound each of green beans and fresh cranberry beans. Following the instructions, we simmered the shelled cranberry beans for half an hour in lightly salted water with a sprig of thyme. This got the beans mushier than we like — next time we'll do twenty minutes. Alice likes her green beans parboiled two minutes, but we like them softer: between six and eight. We also boiled a pot of water for pasta: whole wheat penne from Barilla.

After draining everything, and reserving the oil (passing it through a sieve), we minced a few scallions (Alice wants shallots) and whisked in a liberal dose of the flavored oil, and then mixed this with the beans and pasta. We should at this point have flaked the tuna into the pasta as well, but instead we decided to serve the tuna in steaks. It was very good, although a bit too salty for steaks, and had a taste of the very best canned tuna you've ever had. Grated cheese for the pasta, of course, and white wine.

Of course, it was enough food for at least four as the main course.

Pan-fried perch with couscous and fresh tomatoes

Sometimes, we find ourselves with ingredients but absolutely no plan. Sometimes these are the very best dinners, especially when they also come together within a matter of minutes.

Mince a lot of garlic. Put half of it in a medium bowl, and the other half in a small pot with a well-fitting lid. To the small pot, add curry powder, cumin, raisins, and almonds. Add also a cup and a half of water, and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and whisk in one cup couscous. Let the couscous steam itself, covered, off the heat for at least five minutes. Fluff right before serving.

Heat a little oil in a wide pan, and cook some thin fillets of perch, about two minutes to a side.

To the bowl with the garlic, add a sliced ripe tomato and a liberal handful of capers. Mix the tomatoes, garlic, and capers together.

Plate everything in the kitchen: fish, couscous on the side, and the salsa over the fish so that the juices run into the couscous.

Seared tuna with steamed corn

It's been hot out here, so we've been looking for dishes that don't require a lot of cooking. Seared tuna and corn each take all of about ten minutes on the stove. Marinate the tuna in a mix of olive oil, minced garlic, minced rosemary, salt, and white wine. Place the corn in a steamer, and cook six to ten minutes. Heat a little oil in a pan, and when it starts to shimmer add the tuna. Cook a few minutes to a side. Plate the fish and corn, and continue to heat the oil remaining in the tuna pan. Pour in more of the marinade and reduce. Pour the reduction over the fish and corn.

Barely seared tuna, sliced thin, with fennel, radishes, and onion vinnaigrette

Camping: Grilled zucchini and tuna with tomato-onion salsa

Salmon baked with honey-mustard glaze; scallion mashed potatoes

Whenever we visit Ashland, we like to stay at the cute Columbia Hotel. Most of the rooms do not have private bathrooms — there are showers off the halls — but the room we stay in does have a kitchen (although it is small, with only a minifridge, and minimally equipped). Having a kitchen is a huge benefit when traveling: between dinner and breakfast, we save $40 or $50 per night, and we get to enjoy the cooking and the better food. Columbia Hotel also offers free wireless.

In previous visits to Ashland we've shopped at the Safeway. This time, we looked online, and found the excellent Ashland Food Coop. Organic almost-everything, decent wine selection, good produce and cheese — definitely the supermarket for us. We bought some Alaskan salmon and red potatoes; we baked the salmon with a glaze of mustard, honey, garlic, and olive oil, and we boiled the potatoes and mashed them with olive oil and minced scallions. To pair with the dinner we had a Pinot Gris from Montinore Estate, a Willamette Valley vineyard. It's amazing how much better Willamette Valley pinots (gris and noir) are than similar wines from almost anywhere else.

Composed salad with soft-boiled eggs, cooked shrimp, beets, orange cherry tomatoes, fava beans, yellow haricots verts, niçoise olives, and anchovies

The haricots verts, favas, and cherry tomatoes are from the garden. The baguette is homemade.

A fantastic way to cook eggs for salad is to bring water to a boil and simmer the eggs for only five to six minutes, depending on the size. Plunge the eggs into ice water to help the protein retract from the shell. Carefully crack and peel the eggs without blemishing the white, and serve them whole. The idea is that the yellow is still completely runny, so that it mixes with the lettuce when the you begin to eat the egg during the meal. (This is particularly nice for composed salads in which the lettuce is very strongly dressed — since I don't dress the rest of the veggies much, I tend to mash a clove of garlic per person into the lettuce's dressing.) For a yellow that's completely cooked through, I like to simmer my extra-large eggs twelve minutes (less time for smaller eggs).

The best way to cook beets for a salad is to remove all but half an inch of stem, wash well, and wrap the beets unpeeled and still wet in foil. Bake for at least an hour (you'll need the oven hot for the bread anyway), and then plunge in ice water. The skin should slough off easily.

We've tried various tins of anchovy fillets, and been somewhat unhappy with all of them. Part of the problem is that each tin has about twelve fillets, whereas even three fillets per person is generous. Our only really good anchovies have been from the cafe at Berkeley Bowl, but they only seem to come wholesale in tins of many hundred. In any case, this tin of anchovies-rolled-around-capers was OK, but very meaty-fishy tasting, and too overpowering for our tastes. If you have a favorite inexpensive anchovy fillet, please let me know.