In praise of Puglia.
We tried a new wine tonight, the 2003 A Mano Primitivo from Puglia. It’s a good wine, with roasted fruit flavors – maybe strawberry? - and some earth notes, followed by a decent finish. A nice wine for a pasta with a roasted tomato sauce, perhaps. For about $11, it’s a good bargain, and a wine I’d be willing to buy again.
Primitivo is one of the main grape varieties of the Puglia region in Italy. It’s genetically identical to the zinfandel grape; the primitivo/zinfandel variety is said to have descended from the Croatian grape called the crljenak, which looks like it’s a parody of a Croatian word. I mean, come on – when you’ve got that many consonants stacked up against each other, you’re really just showing off at that point. There are some significant differences between the primitivo and zinfandel varietals, however. Despite the similarly hot growing regions in Puglia (which is located at the heel of the boot) and California, alcohol levels in primitivo (around 13-14%) rarely reach the standards for California zinfandel (anywhere from 14% to 17%).
Why that is I don’t know, but it’s interesting because the other wine I’ve had from the Puglia area and liked quite a bit is the 2004 Copertino Riserva, made by the Cantina Sociale Cooperativa from negro amaro and a small amount of malvasia nero. The last bottle I had was a little while ago and I didn’t have any official notes, but it’s a nice red at a very nice price – around $12, I believe. Now you don’t see negro amaro all that often in California wine – I could only find one winery that offered a negro amaro bottle, Chiarito Vineyard in Mendocino County. That winery’s negro amaro happens to be nearly 2% higher in alcohol than the Copertino Riserva! What is it about wines made in California that makes them contain such significantly higher quantities of alcohol? You can’t blame it on the weather, unless there are peculiarities to the growing season in Puglia that somehow temper the sugar content in the grapes. What’s the answer here?
Anyways, Puglia is putting out some really good, affordable wines these days, and if you see one in a store, give it a whirl. It’s an area well worth a little adventuring.
I am often wrong.
No less than three stunning wine-related things happened to me last night.
- I was recommended a cheap bottle of California chardonnay at a wine store that I trust.
- I bought it.
- J and I enjoyed it.
The world was never the same!
OK, not really. But hey, that’s a big deal for us. It might be a stretch to say that we’re card-carrying members of the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) collective – we’ve been known to sneakily enjoy glasses of white Burgundy at Lou – but we’ve certainly attended more than our share of meetings, put it that way. California chardonnay has never really appealed to either of us. And not just us; it seems like the wine world is positively teeming with those who are brave enough to join the angry mob in denouncing the dreaded Cal chardonnay. “Over-oaked.” “Manipulated.” “Buttery.” “Too toasty.” “Fat.” “Quotidian.” “Swill for the proletariat.” Okay, I made those last two up. But you know the drill.
And you know what? I agree with a lot of it. California chardonnay is not something I can say I’ve enjoyed on very many occasions at all. Other than the fact that it’s usually cold, which makes it refreshing to some degree, and that it is quite wine-like, there is very little I can think of to recommend the stuff I’ve had in the past. Maybe I haven’t had the right wines…but more often than not, the right wines tend be rather expensive. Most importantly, Cal chardonnay never seems to have that sense of place that really attracts me to wine – the individuality that makes you wonder what the conditions of soil, climate, and vineyard must be to create this specific range of sensory experiences in your mouth. That thing that makes you think about the wine. Chardonnay – not so much for the thinking.
So I’m standing there at Colorado Wine Company, which I’m finding myself in more and more these days, and the guy in the store is showing me this bottle of chard – 2005 207 Chardonnay, from the north coast of California, to be specific. After pulling it off the shelf, he quickly informs me that it’s a nontraditional Cal chard – “minimal oak,” he says. “Not too buttery – a nice clean white.” I love how much explaining wine stores have to do these days for having chardonnay on their shelves. It’s like bringing your friend with an NRA membership to a DNC luncheon. “No, he’s cool. He’s from Wyoming, everyone’s in the NRA there.”
Well, I thought to myself, am I going to be the jerk who tells this guy – who clearly likes and believes in this wine – that we don’t drink chardonnay? Don’t I firmly believe that challenging one’s established tastes in food and wine is one of the most rewarding things one can do for one’s self? Can I really not take a swig of my own medicine?
So what the hell. I got it.
Miracle of miracles, what’s this? It was good! It was a simple, but very charming little bottle of wine. Straw gold in the glass. On the nose, it was sweet but not too sweet – maybe some roasted fruit, something with a little depth. There was a little butteriness on first taste, but certainly nothing that hurt the fruit, which was very present in the form of citrus and maybe some peach. A little vanilla. Enough acidity to keep it honest. Not much of a finish, but enough of one to notice and move on. We had it with a roasted garlic and red pepper risotto I whipped up, and it went very well. When I told J what she was drinking, her face alone was worth the $8 (!) I paid for it.
The whole experience got me thinking about Cal chardonnay as I knew it. Why are so few of them like this one was? God knows there’s enough cheapo chardonnay out there. Not one that I’ve had is nearly as good as this one. This is supposed to be the golden age of winemaking. Vintners all over the state are looking at new and interesting ways to make good, affordable wines. Go to a good wine store and you’ll see quality California riesling, gewurztraminer, chenin blanc, viognier, and pinot grigio. Can’t chardonnay fall in there somewhere? Or has it really been there all along and I’ve just made massive errors in selecting the wines to bring home?
Maybe it’s a little of both. Chardonnay as a grape isn’t terribly fashionable these days among “serious” wine drinkers, even if it’s still the most popular white wine in the country. Maybe that’s the reason it’s not fashionable. But in that 207 Chardonnay, I saw what California wine could be right now – that is, able to compete with the affordable wines from Europe and South America in providing something to think about in a glass – and it made me a little sad that I haven’t felt that way more often.
It made me think about some of the things that folks in the wine blogosphere have said recently about Californian versus European cheap wine – Eric Asimov, Fredric Koeppel, even James Suckling, whose blog is behind the fearsome Wine Spectator wall and therefore unlinkable. Generous guys they have over there at the Spec. Anyway, the point is that a lot of folks feel like California has really been left behind by the rest of the winemaking world when it comes to everyday, affordable wine. And I tend to agree. While there are certainly cheap wines that I enjoy from California that I will/would buy on a regular basis (McManis and Sandoval Cab, Rosenblum Vintner’s Cuvee Zin), most of them aren’t the most flexible food wines in the world. As a rule, they tend to be fatter and sweeter than European everyday wines, which really limits their uses on our dinner table. And as much as I can enjoy a wine like the 2005 Dry Creek Chenin Blanc, if it’s going up against my boy the Domaine du Salvard Cheverny, well, that’s what we call a losing battle.
I wonder if California chardonnay is at a sort of crossroads. I wonder if the cutting-edge winemakers are going to abandon it in increasing numbers, leaving the varietal only to those who will pay anything for a glass of perfect Aubert or Kongsgaard, and those who would gladly pick up a bottle of blush if the chardonnay space on the grocery store shelf was empty. I wonder if chardonnay will ever bottom out like merlot is right now, and if that would be fair or not. It’ll probably never happen, but the warning signs are there: increasing global competition, rising local prices, intriguing alternatives beginning to appear in mainstream areas, indifference among the cognoscenti. It’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
In the meantime, I’ve got to see if there’s any other cheap chards I’ve been missing out on.
This and that.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently, had a weekend that was completely packed. The backlog of activity left me with a few things to talk about, though:
Went out Saturday night and had a great meal at Daikokuya. Only recently have we realized how quickly we can get to Little Tokyo (10 minutes on Temple – it’s faster than going to Hunan Cafe!), so we have barely touched the surface of the food and drink offered there. Now that we know, though, we can get to it proper. And Daikokuya was a great place to start. The little ramen shop on 1st St. was everything I love about the food in LA’s ethnic neighborhoods – cheap, fast, and really good. Everything about the ramen in pork broth I ordered was terrific – the broth (cooked from soy sauce and pork bones all day, apparently, and ladled out of a huge cauldron – very cool), the noodles, and the pork itself, which was some of the most flavorful I’ve had in a while. And it’s a reliable place, apparently – it’s been around for years and while I can’t vouch for its long-term quality personally, by all rights it’s been serving ramen up right all along. That’s one of the things I love about this kind of place in LA – you can go to a restaurant and get the one thing they do really well, come back years later, and order the same thing. It seems like the Bay Area doesn’t have that kind of food stability – everyone’s always changing it up, trying to show off their versatility or their creativity on the menu, even in the small places. Hey, there’s brilliance in knowing your strong points, too. Oh well.
Tonight, J and I went out to celebrate the “liberation” of one of my former coworkers from her place of employment, and we ended up at El Conquistador in Silverlake. The food, as always, was mediocre, and it’s hard to sit there with your tacos de papa or whatever and know that Alegria is so close by…yet so far away. But of course, you don’t go to El Conquistador for the food, you go for the margaritas…which are outstanding, naturally. The best house margarita on the east side, if you ask me. The only problem is that they are so big that one isn’t quite enough, but two means it’s Designated Driver time. The El Coyote margarita with the rocks on the side is still the best bang for your buck. But if you haven’t tried El C yet, give it a shot. And go during happy hour.
We opened more than a few bottles over the weekend, most over some heated rounds of Apples to Apples and Wise and Otherwise with friends. O the board gaming fury! J and I cracked open the closet cellar to pull out the 2002 Spencer Roloson Syrah La Herradura, which was a young, tannic monster. There was just the smallest amount of fruit hiding in that wine, which was otherwise completely dominated by tar and alcohol. Opened it probably 2 years too soon at the earliest. It was beginning to settle down after an hour of decanting, but by then it was almost gone, so…also tried the 2005 Bodegas Muga Rioja Blanco, which was a decent little wine made of Viura and Malvasia. It had some pleasant notes of pear and citrus, but leaned a little too heavily on its oak flavors for me. A better wine for my taste was the 2005 Dry Creek Chenin Blanc, which, like the Muga, I bought at Colorado Wine Company. The Dry Creek was an impressive California chenin blanc – dry, sure, but with nice citrus notes and a very nice floral quality. A pretty but balanced food wine, and a good bargain at about $9. Nice.
Next time I promise I’ll get into something more interesting. Until then…
You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.
(Sometimes.)
Seriously, you should really watch The Wire. But back to our scheduled programming…
I am a fan of wine from France. It’s true. Much of it is inexpensive, it’s made in traditional methods that bring out the natural expression of the grapes’ environment, and a lot of it is very good. One of the specific things that I love about a lot of inexpensive French wine is that it’s not afraid to…speak frankly about the farms and vineyards that it was raised in. What does that mean? It’s a kind of taste profile that brings to mind things that one wouldn’t ordinarily assume a grape could mimic, like dirt, sweaty leather, mushrooms, “barnyard smells,” etc. Some of these taste patterns can be linked to a substance folks that call “brett” (short for brettanomyces, a naturally occuring yeast that can appear during fermentation, and that can create many curious smell and taste factors). Some call the characteristics of brett “rustic.” Some call it “disgusting.” I’m kind of fascinated by it, so in most cases, I end up calling it good. For whatever reason, at the times that I have detected a barnyard smell in a wine, I haven’t been bothered by it. Not quite sure what choices I made in my life that lead me to that, but the point is that there’s no going back. I like-a the brett.
What I didn’t know until tonight was that I like-a the brett only up to a point. Early in the evening, I opened a bottle of 2004 Les Traverses des Fontanes that I’d picked up from Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant when I was in the Bay Area. This is a Vin de Pays from the Pic St. Loup region in the Languedoc. It carries the Vin de Pays name because it uses a single grape variety (cabernet sauvignon) that isn’t one of the elected grapes of the region, so it is forced to hide its shame on the back label. Of course, this excommunication from the church of Sanctified French Wine is part of the reason why I picked it up in the first place. Now there are many non-Bordeaux French Cabernet wines roaming around, and cabernet is a tricky grape to get right on the cheap, but KLWM rarely swings and misses, so I took a chance.
This wine came in a clear glass bottle, which was a little surprising – if you’re going to keep it for more than a few months, I guess you’d better make sure you keep it in the dark. In the glass, it was a deep, inky purple, enticingly thick. On the nose, it w-What the crap?! What is that? Smells like someone dumped a pot of stewed tomatoes on top of a pack mule. Yeesh! I don’t think it’s corked; there’s no cardboard-y odors on the nose or in the mouth. It’s not nearly as wacky on the palate; mainly some pepper and spicy notes, without much fruit or structure. That nose, though…too weird. Not for me. Not a bad table wine, necessarily; maybe its barnyardiness just reminded me of when I was a little kid and I was mildly scared of the goats at the petting zoo. But probably not a wine I will go back to willingly.
So I guess everything has its limits.
Just so I can prove myself totally wrong about everything, I’ll throw in a quick plug for a relatively inexpensive and very enjoyable Sonoma Pinot Noir. The 2005 Malm Cellars Pinot Noir, which is sourced from fruit in the Russian River Valley (unsure as to which vineyards), is made by Brendan Malm, who I think is still the assistant winemaker at Merriam Vineyards. Malm has been around for a few years, putting out mostly Rhone blends that were met with muted interest. His Pinot Noir, however, is only is its second vintage, and it is a very nice bottle of wine for around $20. Cherry red in the glass, with a kind of jewel-like clarity – very pretty. Nose of berries isn’t huge, but focused, and on the palate it leads with cherry and some vanilla mixed with a sort of smoky apple flavor. It’s not a huge, Central Coast-style Pinot, but it all comes together very nicely. I wish I could find more Sonoma Pinot at this price and quality. A good wine to look for – I bought my bottle at Silverlake Wine. Together with the 2004 Stangeland Pinot Noir and the 2005 Elizabeth Spencer, that’s three nice pinots at Silverlake for less than $30. Not bad! Maybe the world is worth saving after all.
Burgers and half-empty bottles.
Talked/thought so much about burgers recently I thought I’d try my hand at actually making some. After all, I’ve got the Zuni recipe…that at least gives me a good blueprint. After perusing the web and thinking about what I would want in the perfect burger, I settled on a recipe. To wit: the meat was a three-way mixture of eye of round roast, sirloin tip roast, and short ribs, equal parts of each. The short ribs were salted two days before cooking, the round and sirloin one day before. All three meats were ground in a food processor, then mixed by hand. The patties were seared on the stove, then finished in the oven with a slice of smoked gruyere.
Verdict? Pretty good. Not perfect, but the burgers definitely displayed the effort put into their creation. The salt did come through in the flavor, so I’m glad I presalted. I try to presalt meat as often as I can, and this was simply another lesson in how important that is. The three-meat mix was interesting. The depth of flavor was more pronounced than I thought it would be – it almost took your tastebuds a second to recover after taking a bite. That sounds ridiculous and narcissistic, but that level of richness in the meat wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It sits heavy on ya after a while, and after a whole burger, you feel kinda “ugh.” In the future, I would want to play around with the percentages of the meats a little, and maybe change the meats themselves, too. Eye of round probably isn’t the best meat to mix with the short ribs, another flavor-heavy cut that is dense and usually requires long, slow cooking. Perhaps top round next time.
The other problem was the texture. The burgers were very thick and heavy, which made for a bit of a laborious chewing experience. Why was this? Three reasons: 1) choices of meat – this is probably not as important since the food processor destroys texture, but two of the three meats are very heavy, which tipped the scales a little; 2) the food processor – really, meat should be ground with a meat grinder, not a processor, since the processor can pulverize the meat beyond the necessary level of grind. I don’t own a grinder, but I think I let the meat get a little too chopped up in the ol’ Cuisinart, which made for very small meat particles and led to heavier burgers. Next time, I have to keep a close eye on the meat in the processor, and take it out the moment I can form a patty out of it; and 3) the process of mixing the three meats together required some effort, which further messed with the meat’s texture. Next time I think I’ll try to mix the meats in the blender to save some mixing effort.
So I have a ways to go before I can craft a burger like Sang Yoon or Judy Rodgers. But I felt that it was a good first step, and I look forward to the next one.
We drank most of a bottle of the 2003 Twenty Rows Cabernet Sauvignon with the burgers. This is an okay California cab that you can find for less than $20 most places; we got ours at Silverlake Wine. 2003 wasn’t a great year for California cab, so it wasn’t surprising to note something of a green character to this wine. It had some nice notes of spice on the nose (and what I swore smelled like ketchup – maybe cumin? I dunno…), and dusty, tart berries on the palate. A bitter note on the finish. A workmanlike effort, let’s say, and not nearly as exciting as the 2004 Sandoval Cabernet Sauvignon I picked up last week at Colorado Wine Company on the recommendation of Dr. Debs. No formal notes for that one, but it had great dark fruit and good structure. Well worth seeking out for $13.
Tasting notes: wines from Du Vin Fine Wines.
J and I took a recent trip north to the Bay for a bridal shower. As I was not allowed to participate – curse the heavens! – I decided to get a little editing work done during the day. After a bit of this, my wandering mind got the best of me and I found myself walking into the small wine shop on Santa Clara avenue, (relatively) recently opened, called Du Vin Fine Wines.
Now, most of you will know that I lived in Alameda for a long, long time. Because of that, I have certain ideas about how Alameda goes about its business – in short, not very quickly. If I go to a store, I expect to see certain things that real Alamedans expect, because businesspeople are generally savvy about understanding things like this in a generally fuddy-duddy community like Alameda. So if I walk into a new wine shop in Alameda, I expect it to go about its business in specific ways – ways that don’t rock the boat. Not that this is a terrible thing, mind you – Farmstead Cheese and Wine in the Alameda Marketplace is a real non-boat-rocker of a wine store, but it still has a lot of great bottles, many of which I’ve tried and can recommend wholeheartedly.
So you can imagine my shock when (as if you haven’t already guessed this and have been waiting impatiently for me to arrive where you’re standing) Du Vin turns out to be a crazy little wine store, the likes of which I have pretty much never seen in California. OK, it’s got some run-of-the-mill wine store stuff – Lynch Bages, Silver Oak, Duckhorn, JC Cellars. All good names, of course. On top of that are some names I’ve seen in stores that put an emphasis on boutique wines, like Sean Thackeray, Neyer, and Roger Perrin. Hm. Shelves dedicated to wines from South Africa and New Zealand. Not bad. THEN you get to the back of the store, and that’s where they proceed to blow your mind. Just read the tops of the shelves: Greece. Turkey. Slovenia. Croatia. Hungary. Hungary makes wine??? OK, what do I buy?
Since we already had a full rack of everyday wines in our kitchen, I only made two purchases. But they were both interesting and worth mentioning.
The 2005 Tselepos Moschofilero “Mantinia” is a dry white made from the moschofilero grape, an indigenous grape to Greece that grows on the Mantinia plateau in north Arcadia. The grape often compared to Gewurztraminer, which makes the fact that the Du Vin clerk compared this wine to a Traminer no surprise. In the glass, it is pale straw-gold in color, a little lighter than chardonnay. The nose is nice and friendly, with some notes of honeysuckle and peaches. On the palate, you can see where the the Traminer comparisons come in, as there are strands of pear and lychee on the palate. It’s lacking some of that richness you get from the better Alsatian Traminer, though, and it ends on a bit of a grapey note. Still, it’s a nice wine and at $16, not a bad investment if not the greatest one either.
The red I bought without recommendation, since the clerk hadn’t tried and and couldn’t speak for it. But I had to get something from Croatia, so I picked up the 2004 Dingac Plavac Peljesac for about $12. According to my books, the grape in this wine – Plavac Mali – can be used to make very big, tannic wines, but this wine was far from that – it seemed more like a cross between gamay and pinot noir to me. In the glass, it was red/violet, fading away at the rim. One of the palest reds I’ve seen in a young wine. The nose was…odd. Is this the “wet dog” people refer to? More like “wet cow at the goulash farm.” Unique…but I’m not sure I like it. On the palate, this wine went through several stages. At first it was just a mushroomy flavor on the back of the palate, but as time went on it developed some tart fruit, like gooseberries maybe, and after a few hours, some cocoa as well. By that point I really came around on this wine, but it certainly took its time getting there. Good acidity, but not much of a finish – this isn’t really a wine built for storage, I think, but it was a fun bottle and I’d certainly consider picking up more, although I don’t know what I’d eat with it. We had salmon with this wine and it didn’t quite work out with the funky. Maybe next time.
Of course, I write all of this only to find out that Derrick Schneider over at An Obsession with Food put the Dingac in his “Wines of Germany and Eastern Europe” class, and Purple Liquid has already blogged about it. Oh well. It was a weekend for the bride, after all, and I guess I’ll have to play the bridesmaid on this one, too.
Ghet what you pay for.
I got an email from Ghetto Gourmet a few days ago. It was one of those happy/sad moments. Happy because the night J and I spent with the Ghetto Gourmet folks was a lot of fun and featured some pretty dang good food, and it was fun to remember that night. Sad because unless the Ghet takes a serious turn away from the direction they’ve been heading in, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever get a chance to go to one of their events again.
A little background for the uninitiated: Ghetto Gourmet is a roving, semi-clandestine dining group that puts on small (less than 40 people, usually) dinners in houses, lofts, warehouses, and anywhere else they can find a room or two, an oven, and a range. Most of their meals have taken place in California, but upon checking their website, they seem to be heading off for more dinners across the country. If you want to go to a Ghetto Gourmet event, it’s pretty simple: you pay in advance through their website, they tell you where to go and what time, and you show up (with wine/beer – it’s BYOB), sit down at a long, low table, and chat with your neighbors while 3-5 courses are brought out in succession. Most of the dinners feature some sort of entertainment, like a local band, a performing troupe, or whatever else happens to be hip at that particular instant. The faux-secrecy, the intrigue, and the quality of the presentation make GG a fun and novel attempt to put a little spark and surprise in the California/US dining scene.
The night that J and I went out for a Ghetto Gourmet meal, the dinner was took place at a house in Culver City (it was originally supposed to happen in Silverlake, but apparently had to be relocated due to size issues). J and I aren’t world champion conversationalists, but everyone we met (including Steve Julian!) was very nice, and the dozen or so people we ended up with at the table were a great group of 20-30somethings. For the most part, the food was excellent and interesting: sushi with cured beef and mint as an amuse bouche, for example. A few dishes felt like they could have been just a smidgen better with a slight tweak or to. But that’s splitting hairs; the dinner was well worth the $40 per we shelled out. The acoustic guitar duo that performed during the dinner was even decent, although they alternated complaints that we were either too quiet or too loud during their songs. The Ghetto Gourmet owner also spent a little too long waxing poetic about how terrific the underground dining community was and what an exciting vanguard we were part of. Nonetheless, the Ghet made for a fun meal and good stuff all around.
So why won’t we be heading out to any more GG events? Well, since that night about six months ago, Ghetto Gourmet’s dinners have risen in price from $40 per head to $50-60. Forty bucks for a dinner of that size, with no tax or tip needed, is a solid deal – a similar dinner at any number of upscaley places in LA will set you and your mate back $100 at least. $50 is pushing it a little…but $60? Without alcohol? If you’re talking about paying $120 for dinner w/BYOB, now you’ve got a whole host of popular restaurants that can compete in that price range. Sunday Suppers at Lucques, prix fixe at Opus, the market dinner at Hatfields, even a standard three-course dinner at Range – all these places can match or beat a dinner at that price, depending on what you order. Places with a lot of weight and heft in foodie circles (and, admittedly, mostly places that I haven’t visited yet. Er.). Places that I would bank on having a good meal at before going back to the Ghet. Another possible outcome of this is that the higher the entrance fee is, the less interesting people you are going to see at the dinners, as the spaces are taken by more guests who are looking to take a break from their usual routine of Patina and Spago, shocked that their neighbor would ask them for a taste of their wine. In other words, a very standard LA restaurant crowd.
I dunno…maybe the folks at GG think that their ability to provide a night’s entertainment has evolved to the point that the extra $ is worth it to their customers. Or maybe people are just tired of going to the same places and they need something new and a little exciting, and they’re willing to shell out a little extra for it. I haven’t been to one of the $60 per dinners, so I can’t speak to their value. But to me, it seems like ringing up that kind of a tab goes against what the owner of GG was going on about at our dinner that night – something that cut across the normal dining experience. Kind of a shame.
This is what it means to say “strip mall in Berkeley.”
Huddled in a corner together on the corner of Cedar and San Pablo:
Acme Bakery. I still haven’t found a bakery in LA that measures up to Acme bread. No, not even La Brea. Sorry. You should get out more.
Cafe Fanny. Everyone thinks “Alice Waters” when you mention this place, but she’s only a part owner and she never cooks there. But it’s terrific stuff nonetheless. Recommended: cafe au lait, buckwheat crepes with ham and gruyere (quite small, though), and the chocolate chip and lavender cookie. That’s a slice of ricotta coffee cake in the photo. Pretty darn good. In fact, the best thing you can say about the place is that I haven’t found a weak link of a dish yet. Solid stuff from top to bottom.
Kermit Lynch, the Gallic oenophile’s august, idiosyncratic patriarch. This barrel head watches over Fanny’s patio. Odd that Lynch’s most outwardly facing symbol would be so “heavily oaked,” no?
Bagel rules.
I’m currently working on a very short-term temp assignment (less than three full days) for a company in Glendale. On assignments like these, you really only have time to meet your immediate supervisor and maybe two or three other workers you’ll be interacting with, and that’s it. You stay pretty incognito the whole time you’re there, smiling at people while making no effort to introduce yourself or engage in anything longer than 10 seconds of conversation. As long as you’re fine with being an anonymous pawn, it’s good work.
The tricky part comes when someone in the office brings communal food into the kitchen – bagels and cream cheese, for example. You’re not really an employee…are you allowed to partake? Nobody will call you out for not being allowed to eat if you’re caught, but when I’ve had office food as a short-term temp in the past, it’s always felt a little bit like stealing. The longer that an assignment lasts, though, the rules change. As far as I can tell, here are the ground rules for how long you have to work in an office in order to gain certain food-related privileges:
1-2 days: You can get water from the office cooler during off-peak kitchen hours. Avoid eye contact at all times.
1 week: You can pour the cold dregs remaining in the office’s coffee pot at 11:30 into a mug (that you brought yourself).
1 month: You can use the microwave. If whatever you are warming up explodes, however, leave the building immediately, don’t look back, fly to Tibet and become a monk. Underground. Forever.
3 months: Go ahead, take the last bagel. It’s an unidentifiable flavor (pistachio? guacamole?) and stale anyway. But don’t touch that cream cheese. That is not for you!
6 months: Where’s the secretary? Three-martini lunch? Oh, three-martini coffee break. Well, see that basket of gawdawful hard candies on her desk – the ones that probably taste like milk and kerosene? Help yourself to a handful; nobody else has.
1 year: You can take a third slice of pizza from the box. Just make sure 1-Month Guy watches you do it as he stands there with an empty paper plate. Yes, 1-Month Guy, this is how it is!
2 years: At the company holiday party, you can order a fourth gimlet, while your boss – still stuck on the eighth step in AA – watches. Bottoms up, sir! Nice sweater.
5 years: At last, the double-whammy – you decide that you need to stay late to finish the project that in all truth would have been finished last week were it not for sheer laziness, so you order Chinese food from across the street for delivery and expense it, along with the $20 tip you gave the half-stoned dude who showed up. Hey, you didn’t have anything smaller in your wallet, right?
10 years: You can store half-eaten candy bars in coworkers’ desks, then ask for them back a month later.
15 years: The new CEO walks into his office in the morning to find you sitting behind his desk, without any pants on, eating cubes of butter. You are given a $5000 raise on the condition that next time he catches you doing that, you are at least wearing underwear.
20 years: You catch the new guy on his first day trying to sneak a bagel into his pocket. His disappearance is mentioned once on the evening news a few days later.
State of the cookbook nation.
I was killing time in Barnes and Noble today, waiting for a group of friends to arrive so we could head over to Azeen’s Afghani Restaurant (verdict: not bad, but a little overpriced), so I decided to check out the cookbook section. I was in one of those browsing moods where you aren’t really inclined to buy anything, but if you see something that you really want, you’ll probably end up getting it. For me, the particular brass ring on this particular day was Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli. I’ve read enough raves about this book and its approach to labor-intensive, meticulous cooking that I’m ready to buy it the minute I see it. But tonight…I don’t see it. Which is fine; I wasn’t really expecting to see it here. It’s a little too specialized to be seen at your average B&N.
But I keep browsing…and the funniest thing happens. I can’t find an interesting cookbook in this entire store! Anything by Alice Waters? Nope. Thomas Keller? Nope. Suzanne Goin, Judy Rodgers, Marcella Hazan? Nope, nope, nope. Instead, it’s a armada of Rachael Ray bookbooks – each with an identical photo featuring a maniacally grinning R. Ray – supported by a flotilla of Paula Deen, a battalion of Sandra Lee, and a brigade of Martha Stewart (who actually is not that bad at some things). Okay, so there are some books here that I am interested in. The Cafe Boulud cookbook looks interesting, the Babbo Cookbook is intriguing, and I’d like to get my hands on one of the smattering of Lidia Bastianich books I can find here. But for the most part, it was the Unholy Trinity of Ray, Deen, and Lee, all three of which are currently dominating programming schedule at the Food Network, that ruled the roost.
I spent a little time flipping through some of these cookbooks on the shelves. On first impression, it seems as if the vast majority of these books are designed for those who cook, yet intend to devote as little time as possible to cooking. The underlying perception here seems to be that cooking is something that is as palatable as doing your taxes; its value is gauged by the celerity of its completion. I guess I can’t get mad at anybody for feeling that way. There’s no moral imperative that dictates that people need to learn how to make their own red wine vinegar or Italian sausage. People have busy lives; there aren’t many folks who have the time or inclination to spend 2+ hours in the kitchen each day carefully constructing the base elements of, say, tagliatelle in brodo. On the other hand, cooking isn’t like playing an instrument. While just sounding capable on a violin can take years of practice, a month’s worth of concentrated effort in the kitchen can produce some pretty amazing results. The fundamental tools for many basic items – flour, sugar, salt, produce – are cheap and readily available. Cooking is a great democratic process through which you can either push yourself to make things that you consider beyond your reach, or be pulled by recipes that you enjoy perfecting through your own methods. Personally, I find great joy in carefully constructing a recipe from nothing more than a few staples. Beyond the power of quality control, there is a meditative aspect to it that appeals to me. It’s rewarding to watch something slowly come into existence for no other reason than your own hard work, be it bread, ice cream, or boudin blanc.
Which is why the preponderance of do-it-quick books at B&N makes me a little sad. One of the Sandra Lee cookbooks proclaims, “Nothing made from scratch!” Ouch. But hey, would these really be so popular if they weren’t good? It’s hard to believe that the recipes in these texts produce bad food. In cookbooks that sell their practicality, that would seem to be a lethal shortcoming. And it’s not often that I have the time to make anything even halfway elaborate from my Zuni or Sunday Suppers at Lucques books.
With this in mind, and in order to knock my culinary high horse down a peg or two, I’m going to try to cook at least a couple dinners from the pages of the Ray, Deen, and Lee playbooks over the next month or so. We’ll see how these recpies stack up in time, effort, cost, nutrition, and taste to my usual repertoire, culled from my own cookbook collection and years of internet recipe browsing. Stay tuned.
