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

Moussaka

We love moussaka, that wonderful Greek casserole of eggplant, tomatoes, and ground lamb. But I do not recommend the recipe from Joy of Cooking. It does not taste particularly Greek — it just tastes like Joy. Gruyere as the only cheese? Currants?

Salad with beets, potatoes, eggs, shrimp, celery, carrots, and heirloom tomatoes

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.

Roast goat

Long-time readers of this blog know that a few years ago we were fairly committed vegetarians — I used to be the kitchen manager at a vegetarian/vegan co-op! But we have in the last few months started eating fish at every meal, and "lapsing" further: pork from our CSA, rabbit in Spain. I think we're currently not so much "vegetarians" as "Farmers' Marketarians".

To this end, for our second and final dinner with my dad in Eugene, we brought home two and a half pounds of leg-of-goat from the Eugene Saturday Market. We also bought potatoes, for mashing with garlic from my parents CSA; beets, onions, and carrots, for roasting with the goal; and green figs, for pickling. Yes, pickled figs: a week ago or so, B's uncle took us out to eat at Revival Bar and Kitchen (the new restaurant started by the owner of Venus), where I ordered the goat, and it was served with pickled figs. So, while I was out getting my hair cut, B began by bringing to a boil equal parts water and vinegar, with salt and whole cumin, and pouring the mixture over quartered figs packed into a jar.

Then he prepared the roast. (Did I mention that B did all the cooking, and made it all fantastic?) He chopped the root vegetables and layered them in a glass baking pan. We had some shallot-and-sage butter from the previous night, and he used it to stuff and tenderize the meat. The roast and a bouquet garni followed, and then red wine. He baked the roast for about an hour, basting it regularly. He added about half the figs near the end of cooking, and the acidity provided a nice counterpoint to the sugars in the root roasted root veggies.

Finally, B mashed some potatoes with the roasted garlic from the previous dinner. My dad broke out a particularly nice bottle of wine for the occasion, and we had a wonderful dinner.

Composed salad with beets, fingerling potatoes, shrimp, capers, heirloom tomatoes, and hard boiled egg

Salad with fingerling potatoes, beets, garden cherry tomatoes, shrimp, capers, and a soft-boiled egg

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.

Birthday dinner: Broiled salmon, steamed broccoli, parsley mashed potatoes, and avocado mousse

My birthday was Friday. We've been having camera problems today — largely an artifact of my running out of disk space because I've been keeping all my photos on my laptop (I've decided to buy a new computer just for photos and mp3s) — so I don't have pictures to show you. Suffice it to say, B cooked me a dinner that was both beautiful and delicious.

For the main course, B baked thick fillets of salmon, which he had topped with some minced garlic and parsley. He baked the fish for 22 minutes, and it came out divine: cooked all through, but only just, and still tender and moist. Meanwhile, he reduced red wine with some more parsley and garlic on the stovetop, and used used it as a topping for the fish. As sides, he steamed broccoli above the pot of boiling potatoes. The broccoli he served unadorned, and the potatoes he mashed with butter, parsley, and a little garlic.

We finished the meal with red wine and a salad dressed in a "vinaigrette" made with salt, olive oil, a clove of garlic, and a touch of the red wine we were drinking, not the cheap stuff that went into the reduction.

For dessert, which we ended up saving until the next day because we were full, but it would have paired wonderfully, B made a phenomenal avocado mousse. You might not think "avocado mousse" would be a good idea, but it is. We first had an avocado mousse at Red Agave, a Latin American and Spanish fusion joint in Eugene, where we went for B's birthday last January. It is, in fact, a very Spanish dish: it's a foam. In any case, B made the mousse with avocado and vanilla, and egg whites and cream and sugar. Mmm hmm.

Three days in Yosemite National Park

S joined us for a wonderful three-day camping trip to Yosemite National Park. It's very fun going to such a fantastic place with a geologist. Since this is a food blog, I'll illustrate the day-by-day just with food pictures — the 300-picture slideshow is at the end.

On Tuesday we left Berkeley after an early breakfast and drove the four hours to Yosemite. We stayed at the very nice Summerdale Campground, about a mile from Fish Camp and about a mile from the south entrance to the park. After pitching camp, we drove into the park. There are two seasons in Yosemite — winter and road construction — and we were stuck in traffic for a while. We took a lovely three-mile hike leaving from Tunnel View and climbing up to Inspiration Point. That evening we had grilled snapper and a potato salad that I had made the day before.


Wednesday morning we had toast with poached eggs and cherry jam.


We then drove into the Valley, and as we got down from Tunnel View, we realized that we didn't really have enough gas to get out. No matter. After a brief stop at Bridal Veil Falls, where we were completely soaked, we drove to El Portal, which is completely down-hill from the valley along the Merced River, and so required almost no gas. (Getting from the valley to our campsite requires climbing two thousand feet, twice.) So we didn't have time for a long day hike, but nevertheless got a five-mile walk: we saw the meadow, and climbed a mile (and one thousand feet) along the Upper Yosemite Falls trail to the first lookout.

Dinner that night was sweet potatoes, baked in the fire, and bean burgers with ketchup, mustard, red onion, gruyere, and home-made sweet pickles.



I normally do dinners on the fire but breakfasts on the camping stove, but at the end of breakfast Wednesday morning we ran out of propane, preventing only a second pot of coffee. Since the gas station store at El Portal didn't have the right kind of propane for my fancy little backpackers stove, on Thursday and Friday we did breakfast on the fire. Thursday's breakfast was blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and cherry jam.



Thursday was our big hiking day. We started in the Valley, at four thousand feet, and walked the "Four Mile Trail", which is actually almost five miles each direction, to Glacier Point, a thirty two hundred foot climb. I like to run — S says "scamper" — up mountains, and winded myself near the top. But the views were fantastic: Yosemite really is beautiful. For dinner that night we wolfed down penne with tomato sauce, made from onions, garlic, a red bell pepper, home-canned tomatoes, dried tomatoes, herbs from our garden, and a fresh bay leaf from the laurels that we found growing along the hike.



Friday was our last day, but we forgot to take any photos. For breakfast we had scrambled eggs, and then we tried to walk around Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, but got stymied by a lack of parking. Instead, we got on the road, took a short walk in the national forest that surrounds the park, and had a good time at the California Mining Museum in Mariposa. Then a long drive home.

All together, the trip was fantastic. And finally, the slide show of the hikes:


As always, click on the slide show to go to the Picasa web album.

Salade Niçoise

Composed salad with deviled eggs

Composed salad with beets and deviled eggs

In the fish salad are: spring red onions, capers, purple carrots. The potatoes are boiled and tossed with garlic and dill, as usual. There are two types of beets — golden and the usual deep red — and are prepared the way Alice Waters says: wash but do not peel, remove stems leaving about 1 inch, bake in a covered pan with a splash of water about an hour, plunge in ice water, remove skins and chop, and let sit in vinegar (no oil) and salt for at least half an hour. The deviled eggs are very simple: along with the yolks, the filling has some prepared mustard and some paprika, and that's about it.

Saag Paneer and Aloo Matar

Use lots of sour cream and lots of curry powder. If you cannot find Paneer, the Greek cheese Haloumi handles heat very well. But it is expensive, and kind of too yummy to coat with so much spice. In any case, the dinner was great.

Sturgeon, baked potato, and broccoli

If like us you do not each beef, a very close approximation is steaks of sturgeon from the Columbia river. B cooked these in the broiler with minced garlic, steamed the broccoli, and baked a potato for each of us. Very little is better than a baked potato with copious amounts of sour cream and fresh parsley.

Salade Niçoise

As you well know, I have been slow to post pictures of dinners. On the 21st of February, we had a traditional salade Niçoise, pictured above. The lettuce was dressed in a sherry vinaigrette with garlic. The potatoes were washed and halved, boiled ten minutes, and then dressed with olive oil and mashed garlic and dill seed. Butterfish was broiled unseasoned, and then made into a fish salad with red onion, carrot, celery, and olive oil. Hard boiled egg, niçoise olives and prepared anchovy fillet finishes the presentation.

Sturgeon with potatoes and broccoli

Seared tuna with asparagus and potatoes

Pan-fried snapper, mashed potatoes, and steamed kale

For the fish, we mixed flour, salt, and paprika in shallow bowl, and breaded the fish lightly on each side. Then we sauteed it in olive oil. The kale was steamed. We diced the potatoes and boiled them until soft; after draining, we mashed them with parsley butter. We plated in the kitchen, and served the meal with wedges of lemon and a pinot gris from Firefly.

Leftovers and a composed salad

We had enough leftovers to make half a meal, so the decision was a composed salad and squash soup.

The salad consisted of:

• A wonderful potato salad, made with tartar sauce that we pasturized and to which we added some dried dill.
• Some cold cooked slaw.
• A wonderful mixture of shredded raw beets and carrots, tossed with a wonderful white wine vinegar from Big Paw.
• A lettuce salad with a balsamic vinaigrette.