Various veggies and couscous pilaf

For a "what's in the fridge" dinner, had: sauteed green beans; steamed spinach; a saute of sweet peppers, onions, and Tokyo turnips; and couscous cooked with raisins and a little red wine.

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.

Picnic before Much Ado About Nothing

Dinner picnics are a wonderful treat, and live theater is another. The California Shakespeare Theater encourages you to do both, by surrounding the outdoor stage with beautiful hills and a lovely picnic ground. We have seen two shows with CalShakes, and were unimpressed with their Twelfth Night last year, but this summer's Much Ado About Nothing was wonderful.

For dinner, B made a seeded baguette, which we had with Fromager d'Affinois and radishes. I made a light entre salad: blanched green beans, carrots, Oregonzola, fantastic heirloom tomatoes, and a shallot dressing.

Almost always, you should serve red wine at a picnic, even if you are serving food you might pair with white at home — the temperature starts to drop as you are finishing your meal. The CalShakes theater is happy to let you bring drinks in (they sell wine, coffee, and hot chocolate), so bring a half-bottle of something sweet for the show.

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.

Niçoise salad with homemade bread

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.

Second dinner at Indian Lake: cod baked with onion, mashed sweet potato, and garlic green beans

Nicoise salad with grilled tuna

Salade Niçoise

In early Spring, the farms around here start selling tiny artichokes. The best are chokeless and tender enough to eat raw. Trim off all the outer parts and submerge immediately in lemon juice to prevent discoloration. The raw artichokes end up tasting a bit like apples.

Also in our salad we had beets, defrosted frozen green beans, broiled butterfish, canned anchovy fillets, and olives. The lettuce was tossed with a garlic vinaigrette, and we paired the meal with a rosé and a ciabatta.

Butterfish, poached fennel, and bread

We began by mixing and baking the bread, letting it cool a bit before cutting it open. Then we baked the butterfish in leftover rouille, topped with fennel greens. Meanwhile, we sautéed leeks and then added trimmed green beans and quartered fennel bulbs, and simmered the veggies ten minutes in broth.

The last hurrah of summer

Our vegetable box last week surprised us: it was the final Tuesday of October, and yet the box came full of corn, green beans, sweet peppers, and basil (well, cilantro, actually, but we asked to trade). Our bean vines are still heavy with fruit, so we added some fresh shelled white beans, grabbed some thyme from the garden, and made a wonderful succotash.

Shell white beans and simmer at least ten minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, sauté diced white onion in lots of butter. When onion is translucent, add minced garlic, fresh thyme leaves, and fresh corn cut off the cob. Cook a few minutes while you dice sweet red peppers and add it in; also add in green beans, cut into one-inch pieces. Finally, mix in the drained white beans and some fresh basil leaves. Serve with a well-chilled white or rosé.

Leek tart and Autumn salad

We've made this leek tart, from Chez Panisse Vegetables, before, but I don't think I've posted the recipe here. Make a galette dough with 2 cups white flour, 1 tsp sugar, 1/4 tsp salt, 6 oz room-temperature butter, and 1/3 cup cold water. (Combine dry ingredients, then cut in half the butter, then add the rest of the butter in small pieces and add the water; at best, let everything relax at least an hour, or in the fridge all day, or frozen for as long as you want.) Sauté the whites of three leeks in olive oil with some salt and fresh thyme. Roll out the dough, transfer to a cookie sheet, top with the leeks, and fold over the edges. Brush the crust with an egg wash, and bake 400 degrees F for 45 minutes.

The second dish tonight was a luxurious salad. In the bottom of a large salad bowl, crush three small cloves garlic, and combine with salt, plenty of olive oil, and a splash of sherry vinegar. Then assemble the salad out of:

• One bulb fennel, washed and shaved (the trick is to cut off the stems and then use a vegetable peeler, holding the base of the bulb and shaving from the top down).
• Four heads baby gem lettuce, carefully washed and dried.
• 1/2 pound green beans, tips removed and cut into 1-inch pieces; boil a few minutes, then plunge into ice water a few minutes before drying.
• Four small asian pears, cut into thin slices.
• 1/4 pound shelled walnuts.
• 2 oz shaved romano (or parmesan; use the vegetable peeler).
• Croutons, made by chopping old bread into small cubes, tossing with oil, salt, and dried basil, and baking 10-30 minutes.

Gardening; Bean burgers; Bay leaf ice cream

After sleeping in and eating breakfast around noon, we spent most of the afternoon in the garden. The beans and sunflowers are doing well, as you can see above. We had walked to the nursery, and came back with a Jasmine and a Thornless Blackberry; hopefully these two will fill in the otherwise somewhat ugly corners of our narrow back yard.






Dinner is always better after a few hours outdoors. This dinner was particularly fun. The night before, soak a mix of black and pinto beans in four times as much water, and boil all day until the beans are falling apart. In the morning or early afternoon, prepare a well-kneaded medium-stiff bread dough with honey, and one part whole wheat per two parts white flour.

When you are ready to begin cooking, preheat the oven, and roll out the bread dough with sesame seeds. Make the rolls reasonably small: they will expand in the oven. Back on an ungreased cookie sheet, 25-30 minutes at 375 degrees.

With the standing mixer fitted with the paddle, mash the beans along with 1/3 of a red onion, minced, some salt, a little each clove and paprika, and a healthy helping of nutritional yeast. With the mixer running, slowly add two serving-spoon-fulls of wheat gluten, so that the dough comes together and dries out a little. Roll the dough out into patties. Heat a little oil in a non-stick pan, and cook the patties to brown well on each side.

Harvest a large bowl of beans from out back, trim and de-string, and cut into pieces. Cook over medium-low heat in the wok with salt, olive oil, and two closed garlic, minced.

Serve burgers with tomatoes, red onion, Gruyere chese (the only non-vegan part of dinner), and sweet pickles from last summer.








After a post-dinner walk, we finished the evening with homemade bay leaf ice cream (not pictured).

Heat 1 cup milk in the double boiler with three or four dried bay leaves, and let steep ten minutes or so. In a separate bowl, whisk together 1 cup sugar with the yolks of 2 eggs (save the whites for scrambling in the morning), until the sugar has dissolved and the eggs are paler. Remove the bay leaves from the milk, and spoon a little of the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking immediately. Continue to pour milk into the eggs, slowly at first, whisking, until you've added about half; then put everything into the double boiler, and heat, whisking constantly, to pasteurize the eggs. When the mixture has achieved its beautiful very pale yellow color, and the sugar has dissolved completely into the warm milk, move the mixture to a medium bowl, cover, and allow to cool in the fridge. When the milk-and-egg mixture has cooled completely, add 2 cups cream, and process in an ice cream maker.