Family dinner.

My parents came into town on Sunday so that my sister and I could wrap up our visa applications for India. I had the rare opportunity to time my mother, and as it turns out it takes less than thirty seconds from the time she walks in the door to begin cleaning. Unfortunately, the type of cleaning she does at our house is of the huge-project variety rather than the superficial, make-the-house-look-tidy brand. This means that rather than wipe off counters or arrange flowers, my mother pulls all the covers off the sofa and puts them in the washing machine. She also likes to set up a sewing machine on the kitchen table and embark on large clothing-making projects. She feels good because she leaves the house cleaner, technically, than she found it, but it always looks like a huge bomb has gone off when they walk out the door. This may have something to do with their three dogs - when they visit, the people population goes up 66% but the dog population quadruples. It's all very exciting, but this kind of activity makes us very hungry. Where did we want to eat?

We left the sofa cushions to themselves and went out to eat at Soif. Yes, I work there, and have cooked there, but very rarely do I get to eat there. This is a shame, because Soif is one of best, if not THE best, place to get a bite in Santa Cruz. It was one of the best meals we've had as a foursome in recent memory, making up for the La Posta debacle over Thanksgiving (this had nothing to do with the food and everything to do with a healthy dose of sisterly drama. Like a volcano, our relationship has to erupt every so often, wiping out villagers but creating a lovely clean slate). I ordered a flight of riesling in my attempt to like varietal that all wine snobs adore. I must admit, it's growing on me. I've started to crave that mix of shimmering acidity and residual sugar - it's so good! I also had a great glass of Muller-Catoir Scheurebe, a cross between riesling and silvaner. It was a little big for my scallops, but I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about wine to care about something like that. My scallops were cooked perfectly - seared to a caramelized crust on the outside but rare and silky in the middle - although I'm a little bored of the Brussels sprouts/Dijon mustard sauce combination (but perhaps that's just a product of bopping around Soif too long, because it was actually quite delicious).

Aside from my collection of rieslings, which I gathered around me in a wine fortress, we had a bottle of chardonnay and another of Flowers Pinot Noir, which I think is the finest California pinot I've ever had. It blew my mind, and my dad's too. My sister and my mom both had the gnocchi, and the wine was great with its butter-soaked Chanterelle mushrooms and golden potato-ness. It was also delicious with my dad's steak, although I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the sunchokes that came with it. Criticisms aside, great food and wine is just one part of a great meal. The rest - atmosphere, service, company, conversation - all combine to make something memorable.

I'd say that was one hell of a memorable meal. But we had to sober up before we could get the covers back on those damn couch cushions.

The Silence of the Yams.

Thanks to a last-minute ticket offer from Tom, I got to see Michael Pollan speak last week at the Capitola Book Cafe. I came toting my copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma (In its pristine, uncracked condition it looked shameful next to Tom's dog-eared copy complete with phone number and "Please Return This Book!!!!" inside the front cover. I hope someday someone brings a copy of one of my books to a signing and it is one half as destroyed.) and picked up a copy of his new book, In Defense of Food. Pollan is a charismatic, engaging speaker, and a funny one to boot. This post's title comes from one of the pun-nier moments of the night when he talked about the deafening assertions of labeled food ("Omega-3s!!!" "Fat free!!!!" "Lowers cholesterol!!!") drowning out the natural goodness of the produce aisle.

Pollan's career straddles the academic world and the "real" one; his books are brilliant and accessible; he teaches at Berkeley but steps outside academia to write about things like the Farm Bill. He has an intellectually challenging career that makes an impact, and I'd say that's exactly what I want. Food writing is all well and good - there's a part of me that wants to bicker over porcinis and portobellas and debate the merits of salted versus unsalted butter - but Pollan proves that food writing goes beyond truffles and saffron, that it can and should try to change the way our world looks.

Come back and marry me, Michael Pollan.

Foie Gras Limerick.

There was an old gourmand of Crediton
Who ate pâté de foie gras having spread it on
A chocolate biscuit
He boomed 'Hell, I'll risk it!'
His tomb bears the date that he said it on.

From Schott's Food & Drink Miscellany

When it's worth the wait.

The best place for coffee in Santa Cruz, if you can get beyond the reverential, museum-like atmosphere and slightly sour staff, is Lulu's at the Octagon. (Oooh, and look, Christina Waters agrees with me.) Want a cup of coffee? Select a bean from their menu of over twenty, and they weigh, grind, and brew your selection to order. It's a bit of a change to wait longer for a cup of coffee than an espresso drink, but it's worth it. My cup of Guatemala this morning, brewed in a French press because the electronic press was down, had a pleasing weight and viscosity, a near-chewiness, that I haven't encountered before. I know it's a little strange to talk about coffee in wine-snob terms, but the coffee from Lulu's demands it. It also demands a healthy glug of half-and-half, the only addition to coffee that elevates it beyond its natural state (excluding, perhaps, whipped cream). Black is fine, but you skim milk-ers, you two-cube-ers, you Splenda addicts, you soy aficionados, you are all lovely people I am sure, but you are bad at drinking coffee. Throw your fears of fat and dairy out the window and do a side-by-side, blind tasting. So good, right?

Right.

A note about the food writing in Santa Cruz: so bland! One writer describes the staff at Lulu's as "nice and knowledgeable," and calls the atmosphere "casual and sophisticated." Bah.

On Hemingway, hunger.

I have always thought of Hemingway as a food writer, so today I pulled out my copy of A Moveable Feast to find the parts that made me hungry when I read them in high school. They abound. Eating runs through the book like a baseline of pleasure, each story tethered by the fundamental ritual of hunger and its satisfaction. And what hunger! The book reinforces the old stereotype that an empty stomach fuels genius. Feast is a memoir of Hemingway's time spent in Paris as a young, struggling, and sometimes starving writer:

"By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the Luxembourg gardens and coming back to describe the marvelous lunch to my wife. When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink"(101).

And what does Hemingway eat when his hunger finally gets the best of him? A beer and some potato salad, but he writes it like no other beer and potato salad I've ever read:

"The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of been I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce"(73).

He does not shy away from the verb "to be," simply stating how things are, delivering their taste with the sparing use of adjectives like "wonderful" and "delicious." From Hemingway, these sound both effusive and special. Most importantly, he describes what it is like to eat after being very hungry, the effort of holding oneself back, of eating slowly to make it last. Taste and flavor are not, as many food writers would have it, constants. They are the most variable of variables, as much a product of a specific moment in time, a single eating experience, as they are of the ingredients used. This is why I remember spectacular meals at mediocre restaurants, and why a three-star meal can be spoiled by a sour dining companion.

I can't decide whether to eat lunch or skip it, and write one instead.

Blackout!

Power outages are inconvenient and scary, especially when the wind whips around the eaves like a banshee and slams sheets of rain against the windows. Fortunately, there is a cure for winter storms and their attendant stresses: the hot toddy. Variations on the drink abound; here's the one that put my waterlogged woes to bed:

In each glass mix the following:

the juice of 1/2 Meyer lemon
a healthy dose of Meyer's Dark Rum (serving size depends on severity of the storm)
1 t. agave syrup (honey is a good substitute)

Fill with hot water. Sprinkle over the top:
pinch cinnamon
pinch freshly grated nutmeg

Stir and enjoy in front of the robust flames of a Duraflame Firelog.

On resolutions.

Some people make lists of resolutions that resemble the following:
1. Lose weight
2. Quit smoking
3. Quit drinking
4. Join a gym
5. Get a boyfriend
6. Give up [enter any number of things here, including: ice cream, chocolate, one night stands, men who are bad for me, bread, fat, coffee, talking on cell phones in restaurants/while driving/in public (I would like to give my full support to this last {note the many layers of parenthetical remarks})].

Without judging any of these noble projects, my own list of resolutions looks something like this:

1. Make my own butter
2. Cure my own meat
3. Learn to brew beer
4. Finish reading The Wine Bible and finally stop confusing Bordeaux and Burgundy (really embarrassing when you work in a wine shop, but easier to do than you might think).
5. Make kasespaetzle
6. Write every day
7. Make more ice cream
8. Develop a refined palate for riesling
9. Become rich and famous beyond my wildest dreams

Doable, right?

Fleischgeist = genius.

My sister, cultural lightning rod that she is, delivered into my hands the other day a little slice of brilliance, otherwise known as the Premiere Issue of Meatpaper, "your journal of meat culture." The magazine is guided by "fleischgeist," thus defined by the editors: From the German, Fleisch "meat" + "spirit." Spirit of the meat. From Zeitgeist, "spirit of the times." Ahem.

A little over the top, you say? Intellectual snobbery meets hipster meets slaughterhouse, you think? Perhaps, but after some consideration I decided that's one neologism I can get behind. The world does not need another food magazine with recipes for the busy housewife, but a slim, artsy volume with two pages devoted entirely to a closeup picture of mortadella? How do I subscribe?

I'm a little less enthusiastic about the meat poetry ("Meat marinated in sweat. / Meat stewed in own bile" reminded me a little too much of that wretched pig's tail. Blech.) but the self-portrait in hamburger and the flank steak dress are right up my (slightly creepy) alley. Best of all is the article about the old-school butcher shop in San Francisco started up by three female butchers. Bad ass. The anti-supermarket butchers, they specialize in humanely and locally raised meats and rare, specialty cuts you can't find everywhere else. I sense a pilgrimage to the city in my future.

One small digression before I leave off - caught Anthony Bourdain on the tube eating lungs and goat brains on the street in India. I am SO EXCITED for our upcoming trip there. I can't wait to make myself sick on organ meats and strange curries.

Excess indeed.

Oh lord.

There was much revelry last night. At 5 pm I realized people would be descending upon the house in a few mere hours and we had nothing to feed them. So off I dashed to Shopper's Corner with decadence as my guiding principle instead of a shopping list. What could I make quickly that would still taste fabulous and celebratory? Into my cart went champagne, smoked salmon, prosciutto, crème fraiche, dill, capers, hummus, olives and olive tapenade, cashews, rosemary, salmon roe, goat cheese, a wedge of Petit Basque, truffle pate, and several loaves of francese bread. Not the cheapest shopping expedition I've ever made, and certainly not the healthiest, but I had the makings for a whole array of delicious crostini. Just slice up the baguette, drizzle a little olive oil, let the toasts crisp up in a hot oven, and then top them with whatever you please. My favorites were goat cheese with olive tapenade, prosciutto and Manchego with a kalamata olive, and smoked salmon, crème fraiche, a little salmon roe, and some dill. Hil picked up some guacamole from El Palomar, and I doctored up the store-bought hummus with lemon juice, salt, cayenne, and cumin, and drizzled some top notch olive oil over the top. It ended up tasting homemade, a new little trick I'm glad I have up my sleeve.

I also got a wild hair and decided that I had to, positively had to, make a batch of lemon bars. I was sick of those Meyer lemons staring balefully up at me from their bowl on the counter, daring me to make something of them. The lemon bars are delicious but turns out people don't really want to eat dessert when there's a night of drinking ahead of them. Let's just say I still have about 95% of them. Now the lemon bars stare at me balefully from their pan, daring me to eat them. I'm not sure if this is an improvement.

My first meal of the new year? A breakfast burrito from Chill Out about the size and weight of my head and 20 oz of the hottest coffee I've ever had in a restaurant. My tongue is still recovering. The burrito was also about 500 degrees and had a curious way of retaining heat. When it came to me, it was too hot to even pick up, and it simply did not cool down. Perhaps its surprising mass had something to do with heat retention - less surface area relative to volume or something like that. I would have been able to explain it better in high school when physics was something I understood. In any event, that sucker refused to cool down, boggling my still-drunken mind and burning my poor long-suffering tongue.

Tomorrow? Carrot sticks and herbal tea, preferably lukewarm. Sheesh.