Gastronomie

Dungeness is back in town!

Every season, I await Dungeness crabs with baited breath. While the first crabs of the year aren't necessarily the best, I savor the entire experience: choosing the seasonings for the water; laying out the newspaper; cracking and dipping and sucking all that delicious meat out of the shell. It's a primal gustatory experience, and I love, love, love it.

This past Sunday, I made my way to 99 Ranch Market where the gorgeous specimens were on offer for $2.69/lb. I stood patiently in line until it was my turn, and I ordered up two large crabs. They were cracked, cleaned, and the shells separately bagged for later stock-making.

$9.71 later (!!!!), C and I had a feast to prepare.

First, I seasoned the pot of water liberally with several bay leaves, cayenne, allspice, sea salt, pepper, marjoram, thyme and garlic powder. After bringing to a boil, the crabs went in just until done (7-10 minutes depending on size). Note: I normally would bring the crabs home live; last night it just worked out b/c I bought the crabs literally 15 minutes before bringing home to cook.

Meanwhile, I clarified a mix of 75% sweet to 25% salted butter, and cut up some lemons. C toasted some sweet white bread to sop up the goodness with, and we cracked open a bottle of Viognier.

I set the table (forks, nutcracker, butter, lemons and wine glasses on the Sports and Business sections of the Chronicle), and set the crabs onto the "serving platter" (ahem, the Real Estate section).

An hour later, we had picked every last claw clean, polished off a bottle of wine. The best part of this meal has to be clean-up. Just roll up the newspapers and chuck it all!

Watercress

C & I rarely make it to the city for dinner during the week - by the time we get home to let the dogs out & get them fed, it's too late to JUST be heading out. And on the weekends, well... we've just gotten a bit lazy, is all.

As my flight got in around 7pm this past Saturday, I called C and asked if he wanted to go to dinner after picking me up. Dinner in the city, that is. So I made a reservation at Watercress in the Mission, and off we went.

Watercress is housed in the old location for Watergate, on Valencia between 22nd & 23rs. The premise is that any 3-course meal is $19.95 - a few items on the menu (foie gras, ribeye, lamb shank) carry a supplement of $5-7. Corkage is $18 - we had brought a bottle after hearing that their wine selection wasn't great. In fact, it was fine, and since they didn't have any cocktails for us to order, and only Cristallino Cava by the glass, we decided to forego our bottle of Ravenswood '01 Dickerson Zin for a bottle of Seghesio Zin at $34.

I started with the moules mariniere, while C started with 5 oysters on the half shell. The mussels were very good, and the sauce was bright and fresh tasting (especially after a little squeeze of the lime on C's plate). His oysters were as good as any I've had locally - light, briny, fresh.

After reading about the steak on Sam's site, we knew we had to order it. I had eaten a small bite on my flight home, so wasn't particularly famished, but C really wanted to try the duck confit a l'orange, and being a good dining partner, I obliged.

The ribeye was AMAZING - a thin cut, buttery soft, extremely flavorful with a simple but delicious rub. The fries it was served with were the type I love - skins on, a little "limp", totally tender inside. The duck was also very good, but really too rich for me to enjoy. The flavors in the duck leg were delicious, while the lentils and braised spinach on the side were fresh but too simple in flavor. I would have like a bit of the orange spice in those, as well. We switched plates halfway through dinner, which was perfect.

By this time, we were both pretty full, but we could see that desserts were pretty diminutive - and at $19.95, it's almost as if they are paying you to eat dessert.

I ordered the chocolate genoise, two small disks of dark, dark chocolate cake with a small scoop of bittersweet chocolate ice cream, a bit of caramelized banana and whipped cream. This was fine, but the cake was just... dry.

C, on the other hand, ordered the cheesecake, which he NEVER orders. This, I have to say, was one of the top 5 desserts of the year. Seriously. It was a small disk of cheesecake "filling" with a lightly bruleed top, no crust, and sitting atop a few glazed walnuts. It was simply amazing, and I need to try to replicate it for a dinner party.

Oh, as a side note, they were out of the first 2 bottles of wine we ordered. We settled on the Seghesio after being assured that they did, in fact have it in stock. But it was the '03 as opposed to the '02 which was listed on the menu.

Overall, Watercress represents a great value

Celebration at Luka's Taproom

This past Tuesday afternoon, after getting sworn in, I found myself really wanting to celebrate - which, frankly, I hadn't expected. So at 4pm, I dispatched an email to some friends, inviting them to meet C & I for cocktails at the newly opened Luka's Taproom in Oakland. Amazingly, 8 of my friends showed up to help me celebrate.

I ordered a perfect (and I mean perfect) Maker's Mark manhattan and an order of frites to get us started. After drinks arrived (and our table had grown from 4 to 8 people), we placed our dinner orders and I'm sorry to say that we were so busy chatting that we didn't order very "strategically".

M and I both ordered the gratineed mac & cheese with leeks & chanterelles. C, W & O all ordered a cheeseburger while K just ordered a mixed baby greens salad. M & W also shared half a dozen oysters to start.

I thought everything was wonderful, if slightly undersalted. But really, I don't mind that much at all - it's easy to salt to one's own taste. I loved my mac & cheese. It was rich and creamy, flavorful yet delicate. Perfect American comfort food. C's hamburger was AWESOME - lightly charred, juicy, great bun. And it was cooked perfectly medium-rare, as he'd asked for it. K's salad looked very nice, and the oysters were all really fresh.

I should note that we were all really looking forward to try the moules mariniere, but they had apparently run out of them, which frankly is a good sign. It's nice that they don't keep extra shellfish "on-hand".

Service was fine - at first, we thought our waitress was a bit "ditzy" b/c of a miscommunication about cocktails, and a weird lag in service. But she TOTALLY redeemed herself when she took orders from 6 people without a single error - not even with the doneness of the burgers!

We are really excited to have Luka's near our place - it's going to become a regular addition to our evening stops. They have a Monday happy hour with $2 or $3 oysters and half price beers (did I mention they have 16 of them on tap?), they've got a lounge with some live and DJ acts (check the Events page on their website for details) and a great backroom with a few pool tables and jukebox.

In the spirit of Citizenship

I was sworn in as a citizen of the United States yesterday. And I'm damn proud of it.

It's so easy to forget how good we really do have it. I hear people bitch and moan about how the current administration is going to ruin the world. But I know that, on its worst day, America is a better, freer, stronger place than 75% of the rest of the world on its best day. And I know that, while America's glory days might be on hiatus, we will be the great, proud, glorious nation that we were once again.

This is a young country, barely in its adolescence, really. We have to learn from our mistakes, and we are just waking up to that fact. As the population of the country opens its eyes, and begins to see clearly the events of the past 200 years from a global perspective, it will demand change.

On another note, as I sang the national anthem yesterday, along with 1242 other people, I couldn't help but notice that not ONE of the 30 people immediately around me was able to sing it without the lyric guide in front of them. And maybe half that number couldn't remember the words to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Maybe I'm jaded, but shouldn't it be required, when you renounce your allegiance to your former homeland, that you be able to recall the words to this extremely moving piece of music, and the pledge of allegiance to your NEW homeland without a cheat-sheet??

Anyway, I'm proud to be an American. And while I will never stop loving the soil on which I was born, and will never stop speaking my first and native tongue, I pledged to be a good American, and a good American I shall be.

Brunch at La Note (Berkeley, CA)

This past Sunday, C and I met our friends K & O at La Note in Berkeley. It's one of our favorite brunch spots, but we hardly ever make it there anymore.

First, La Note does not accept reservations for brunch, so on a pretty fall morning (as this was), the wait can be longer than an hour. But there are so many shops around to keep yourself entertained that it's not such a big deal. So we waited our 50 minutes patiently, and then were herded inside.

The menu is very simple - a selection of baked goods, fruits, yogurts, etc. followed by some omelettes and finally a choice of specialty plated (these are named Côte Sud, Nord, Est & Ouest. Very cute.)

K & I shared a tartine (a perfect baguette with real, fresh butter and jam). I had the Côte Est (a pancake - I ordered the crème fraîche version, a scrambled egg & 3 strips of bacon). The pancake was awesome. I usually get their oatmeal/raspberry pancake, but decided on the departure this time. It was delightfully sweet but slightly tangy, rich yet delicate. Lovely. The bacon was also VERY good, and I gobbled that down quickly. The eggs were the only mediocre thing on this plate and that only because they were slightly overcooked.

K had the Côte Nord, her regular. It's a scramble with goat cheese and some vegetables, with La Note's potatoes and a roasted tomato (which, imho, is the best part).

C had the omelette du fromage et jambon with gruyere. It was really delicious - his eggs were cooked perfectly. Also served with their potatoes, which are so yummy.

And finally, I can't even remember what O had - how terrible. But clearly it was good because he polished it off, and I didn't even get a bite. :-(

C's cafe au lait was pretty darn close to perfect

Dinner at home with friends

Sometimes, it's just about surrounding yourself with people who make you laugh, in your own home, cooking a comforting meal and relaxing.

This past Sunday night was just such a night.

I had procured from Jeff at Pierotti (see the post about them here) a gorgeous 2.5lb sirloin roast. I rubbed the meat with a mix of coarse-ground ground sea salt, four kinds of peppercorns, herbes de provence, and coriander seeds. I seared the roast on all sides over very high heat in my Le Creuset dutch oven, til I had a nice brown crust all 'round. I let the meat rest for a few minutes while I got going on the vegetables.

I started some really beautiful autumn-y vegetables (butternut squash, sweet potato, beets, cipollini and red onions, and a few stalks of celery) cooking in the pan I seared the roast in. Seasoned very similarly to the roast, but excluding the herbes de Provence.

Everything went into a 400 degree oven for around an hour, until the thermometer in the meat registered 135. Note: I put the meat directly on the rack, with the pan of vegetables positioned directly beneath to catch all the drippings. I gave the veggies a toss every 15-20 minutes. I turned the meat one time about half-way through the cooking time (thermometer would probably register around 100 degrees at this point).

While the roast was resting, the veggies were transferred to a serving dish and kept warm in the oven. Meanwhile, I made a pan sauce right in the pan the veggies were cooked in. These are "eyeball" measurements, but I used about 1.5 cups of red wine and a cup or so of good, low-sodium beef broth. Let everything reduce down, adding a pinch of allspice and ground coriander. Added a good pat of butter to finish it off and give it a beautiful sheen.

Carved the roast and presented everything at the table with a simple salad of peppercress, arugula & romaine with thinly sliced shallots and a balsamic vinaigrette.

With this deliciously simple, and extraordinarily comforting meal we opened a bottle of Green & Red Chiles Valley ' 99 Zin. This is an image I borrowed it from their website, so it's not the right vintage.

I'm really glad we opened it, because even though my original notes said to drink through 2006, it was definitely advanced because of my prior sub-optimal storage conditions.

Once the wine opened up, there was still plenty of fruit on the palate, with a subtler spice than I had remembered. It seems to me that the earlier vintages of Green & Red were heavier on the pepper, while this bottle was a softer anise type of spice.  It had a beautiful long finish that was slightly "toasted". All told, an excellent companion to the meal.

It's been a while...

So, it's been a while since I last posted... some health issues have kept me eating only bland foods, while some family issues have really been taking up 90% of my free time.

That all said, I'M BACK!!! And I'm looking forward to posting later today about the exquisite dinner I made last night for some out of town friends.

Ciao!