Posts Tagged “tomatoes”

It was Professor N’s birthday on the auspicious 8/8/08 but we were able to score a late reservation at Chez Panisse a the day before joined by his buddy P. We ventured out to Berkeley to Alice Waters shrine to gourmet locavoriousness. We were greeted by the trademark Victorian arts & crafts vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright decor of the place and briefly stored upstairs before being seated at our table for three. There was no room no way for a fourth.

Chez Panisse keeps it simple by offering a single four-course menu for $75 (plus 8.75% tax and 17% service for a total of about $95). Besides a wide selection of beverages, the only option was to add a cheese plate to the menu. We opted in. Even though there were no choices, the waiter glided over to review the menu with us, starting oddly with the main and working backward to the starters.

But the food is far from simple. We started off with an insalata caprese with heirloom tomatoes and hand-stretched mozzarella and basil with a bit of olive crostini. The pasta was summer squash tortelloni with garlic broth and squash blossoms on top. The salad was a great start with zesty tomatoes and supple fresh mozzarella. The tortelloni were pleasant enough but a little on the bland side.

The main was a perfect Wolfe Ranch quail with pepperonata, sweet corn, polenta and rocket. I dubbed it “quail with corn two ways” and enjoyed it thoroughly. It shouldn’t distract from the quail to say that the corn was absolutely fantastic, rivaling the corn I had earlier that day at The Slanted Door. It all went down very nicely with a glass of Grüner Veltliner, and apparently with N’s elderflower spritzer, made with the apparently de rigeur Nikolaihof biodynamic elderflower syrup.

We sprang for the cheese supplement and received a firm wedge of sheep cheese, a creamy disc of goat and a semisoft cow cheese with serious rind. The specifics were not recorded and there was barely time to photograph the cheeses before they disappeared. The dessert proper was a pluot crostata with wild fennel ice cream. I’m usually not a big fan of cooked fruit desserts, but this one might have been the best dish of the night: crisp crust with just enough flakiness, and tart fruit sour enough to keep me interested.

It was a celebratory banquet that lasted long enough for the clock to tick over to N’s official birthday. We had a grand time and enjoyed exemplary service, but we had to wonder if the food could have been a bit more adventurous or surprising to help justify the bill.

I passed it during the day after checking out SF Camerawork - an unassuming brick building, formerly a warehouse or something like that, with subtle signage that says “too hip for the likes of you” while reading simply, “salt house.”  Was it really a salt house?  What is a salt house anyway?  Could somebody who likes salt as much as I possibly pass this up?  Especially after the morning’s flyover of salt ponds?  I made a note and resolved to return in the evening.

At 9pm on a Wednesday, salt house (they use e. e. cummmings’ capitalization - or more likely, k. d. lang’s - in the name) was packed.  It seemed a little late for the after-work crowd but maybe people work late here, or just go for a drink after work and linger.  Lots of business casual and not so casual, and a few poor souls who were still wearing their company logo gear after a trade show.  True to its warehousy heritage, Salt House is all exposed brick and weathered metal and wood.  Way too dark to photograph without flash.  There’s a loft space in the front and double-high ceilings in the back, lit by fixtures made from postcard racks with 4×6 bits of wood in the slots.  In addition to regular tables, there’s a small bar and a long but narrow communal table that reminds me a bit of the one at Toro in Boston.  I found a spot at the group table.

I immediately got a 3-segment pain d’epi (that French bread that looks a bit like a stalk of wheat where you tear off individual rolls) served on a sheet of butcher paper, and after asking, a milk bottle of tap water.  The wine list divides the universe into reds and whites by new world and old world.  Being in California, I chose a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon from Silver Palm on the new world’s North coast.   It was extra purple with a big plum cherry currant thing happening, a little spicy at the end.  Delicious.

The dinner menu was on the brief side with seven entrees and a dozen or so small plates.  Keeping it light since I intended further grazing, I ordered white corn soup with aleppo chile and crispy scallions and heirloom tomatoes with garlic croutons and balsamic.

The soup arrived first with dire warnings about the plate temperature.  It was a bisque with a small pile of whole kernels and fried zucchini flowers in the middle.  No sign of the scallions, but there were a few swirls of chile oil to keep things interesting.  The white corn was smooth and sweet, and the flowers perfectly done with just a bit of crunch, and the chile oil wasn’t overpowering.  I had to slap away an attempt at premature bussing as I reached for some bread to mop with.

I’m almost never disappointed by a nice plate of tomatoes, but I have to say my heart sank when I saw this one.  It was huge.  I was hoping to have room for a third dish (peaches with bacon and pistachios, marinated yellowtail, and poutine were all on deck in my mind) or even dessert.  And it was tasty enough that I ate nearly all of it anyway.  Big chunks of red and yellow tomatoes were heaped in the center with the croûtons under a layer of microgreens and some shaved cheese on top and pools of oils and vinegar all around.  The thoughtful waitress brought salt and pepper.  The tomatoes were meaty and sweet, working well with the cheese and greens.  The croûtons had gotten soaked in balsamic, and I’m not that big a fan of overbalsamified things, but it all worked together well.  I did add salt, but not that much.  it was sea salt from a grinder, but nothing special, salt-wise.

Definitely worth a return to check out the entrees and desserts.

In what is starting to become a Wednesday ritual, I visited the Davis Square Farmers Market today. It was much more lively than last week (and sunnier, too) and there was an impressive array of produce available, as the “menu” board proudly stated:

I was in a bit of a hurry since my traditional manager of a directive boss had the temerity to call me on my cell phone at lunchtime, delaying my plan by a good 30 minutes. So I made a quick survey and zeroed in on the first local heirloom tomatoes of the season, at least the first ones I’d seen. In my haste, I didn’t note the name of the farm, so I hope somebody will comment in and help me out.

The closeup is a little misleading in scale, the red one is (was) no more than two inches across, and the smaller ones grape-sized at best.

As soon as I got home, I grabbed the wrap that I had intended to bring for lunch but forgot in the fridge this morning (smoked salmon, goat cheese and greens) and cut into the juicy green mini-watermelon-looking tomato. Yum.

As I ate the wrap and the tomatoes (with some sea salt and a pomegranate spritzer) it occurred to me that this sandwich would be even better with the tomatoes inside, so I went back to the kitchen to make another, and while I assembled it, I realized that once again I had formulated an excellent Locavore Sandwich. Here’s the lowdown:

• Greens from Julia’s garden: 1 food mile, tops
• Tomatoes mentioned above, from Framingham if I remember right: 19 food miles
• Smoked salmon from Ducktrap River in Belfast, Maine: 209 food miles (plus the nautical miles, but hey, cut me some slack here)
• Goat cheese from the Davis Sq market last week, from Sterling, MA: 45 food miles
• Whole wheat lavash from Boghosian Valley Bread in Lawrence: 35 food miles

At least in the summer, this locavore thing is fun. I don’t see going all the way all the time, but especially with the awful news of contaminated tomatoes out there, eating a little closer to home is working out well for me.

I sometimes rankle when people ask technical and process questions about how I make photos rather than talking about the aesthetic content. But let’s face it, the photos of late haven’t exactly been art, and it presents an opportunity for some tech notes.

I’ve been carrying my usual film camera, but won’t get the film back for several more days so let’s talk about the digital shots. Geek notes on my film process another time. I’ve also been carrying a T-Mobile Dash and using it to take 1.3MP digital photos - largely of food - and email them to the blog. (With Blogger, you can set up an email address, yourblogname.secretword@blogger.com which posts anything you send to it, which is a lot easier than using a mini web browser on the Blogger site.) The photo quality is just good enough for quick and dirty documentation, and the keyboard and connectivity are just good enough for quick and dirty blogging. There’s a convenient setting in the phone for reducing the size of photos (1.3MP = 1,280×1024 native) to save bandwidth, which isn’t cheap when roaming on GPRS. But it has an odd side effect.

Here’s the photo from the recent tomato post, as originally displayed by blogger:

The odd thing is that there’s an IMG WIDTH tag set for 320, but the image is only 300 wide, so it looks fuzzy. Let’s remove that tag and look at it at 300 wide.

A little better. I wasn’t expecting much from a little phonecam, but when I looked at the photos on my iMac, I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s a comparable size reduction saved at a much higher quality. The 1.3MP file was 332k, the phone crunched the file to 16k for emailing, this version is 128k.

And finally, here’s my usual treatment with some color correction and cropping.

That’s more like it. Yum. Now, the question is, should I go back and re-do the photos from the last ten or so posts? I already went in and removed the IMG SIZE tags, but I see there’s more that can be done.

These fantastic looking tomatoes are called “cuor di bue” or “ox hearts.”