California dreamin

After writing in my last post about the Green Goddess dressing at Chez Panisse, I realized that I never wrote about Chez Panisse. What a travesty. I've got a couple of minutes to spare, so let's take a walk down Memory Lane, shall we?
I'm sure I have mentioned before that Sal and I lived in the SF Bay Area for 5 years before moving here to Wilmington. We've been back only once since then, so decided to go for Spring Break this year. (Bless the career of Education and it's forced vacations). Here are some of the highlights.

We stayed with a friend who lives on a 44 ft boat instead of a house - because you may have heard that housing is ridiculously expensive there. Hence our move to Wilmington. Anyway, staying on the boat was such a cool experience - getting up in the morning to see the sun rise over the Alameda estuary (thank you, jet lag), falling asleep to the slight rolling of the boat, and having a glass of wine on deck while watching the other sailboats glide across the water. Beats the Hilton.

We saw a lot of old friends and visited some our favorite places from our past life. Wondered more than once why on earth we left such a spectacular place. We also spiced it up by doing a couple of things we hadn't done when we lived there - one of those being dinner at Chez Panisse. If you don't know anything about Alice Waters and her world famous restaurant, please check it out and prepare to drool. She is one of the pioneers of local and seasonal eating, and has made a career of doing it with simplicity and elegance.

We made reservations a month before for the upstairs Cafe. We chose the Cafe over the downstairs prix fixe menu. Since the menu is newly created each week, it's impossible to know what you will be eating a month ahead of time when you make the reservations. I am way too picky an eater to find out that there is squid or some other atrocity on the menu at the last minute, especially at $65 - 85 per person. So - the Cafe it was.
I had:

A gorgeous Butter Lettuce salad with yellow and red beets and the aforementioned to-die-for Green Goddess dressing.
Followed by Rosemary Free Range Chicken with asparagus and fingerling potatoes
Rhubarb Tart with Kumquat ice cream for dessert.

The menu at Chez Panisse mentions all of the local farms who provided the ingredients, as in this week's offering of "Baked Andante Dairy goat cheese with garden lettuces" - sounds delish. I was tempted to take photos of our meals while I was there, but thankfully resisted the urge.

The other new thing we did was to spend two days in wine country instead of our usual one. We used to go up about every 3 months, or whenever anyone came to visit. Normally we'd just drive the hour and half up there, drink ourselves silly, sober up at V. Sattui with some delicious picnic food, and head back home. This time we stayed in Calistoga after all the tasting, sobered up at a great little bed and breakfast called Craftsman Inn (with an emphasis on the breakfast - yum!) and headed back down through Sonoma the next day. We found a couple of great new wineries, and visited some of our favorites. Needless to say, we came home with a case of CA wines. Our plan is to return once we drink through them all.

Spring brings new things

Okay, so here's one of the things I meant to write about awhile ago: The Farmers' Market has started up again. Both the downtown and Poplar's Grove markets have been packed every time I've been there - it looks like business is booming. That's good stuff around here. There are all kinds of great new things coming in to add variety to my life.

Here's a sample of what we picked up this Saturday for less than $20:

Head of lettuce
Beets
(Black River)
Carrots
Romaine
Another head of lettuce
Tomato
Onions
Cauliflower
(Gilbert's)
Sweet potatoes
(Hanchey's)
Chevre
(Nature's Way)
Zucchini
Squash
(Swart's)

I made up a menu that will allow those staples to feed us for the next two weeks, along with what we've already got in the house. We've recently started adding in some non-local food to help stretch our food budget. Although we are still doing almost all of our shopping from local sources, we've added a few "luxury items" to make up a meal. This saves us from running out of food mid-week and deciding to just go out, which we've found ourselves doing more of these days. This is not good for the purse nor the plan we had for ourselves.

So, for example, here is our menu for this week. Everything non-local is indicated:

Mon - Roasted veggies (zucchini, squash, cauliflower, carrots, onion, sweet potatoes)
Tues - Salmon (not local) with snap peas and rice
Wed - Chicken gyros with cucumber, feta and tomato (pita bread not local)
Thu - Pork chops and Bibb lettuce salad with Green Goddess dressing and beets (using an avocado to make the Green Goddess)
Fri - Gnocchi with Pesto sauce (Gnocchi not local)
Sat - Curried veggies and rice

Looking at this list, I think - I could use a locally caught fish instead of salmon. Maybe I will if the Fish Market has something comparable. I could also leave out the avocado in the dressing, but I'm trying to recreate the salad I had at Chez Panisse. I could also make my own Gnocchi, and will if I have the energy, but I'm trying not to make myself crazy. It's funny - we've remained relatively ignorant of rising food costs, since so much of what we've eaten has been put up from last year, or purchased from local sources. So adding a couple of non-local items doesn't hurt us financially, and actually helps by adding to the variety of meals we can make with a majority of local food. For example, there's no way to make chicken gyros without pita bread - but if we spend $2.00 on some flatbread, we can use up our leftover chicken, tomato and cucumber in a way that makes us happy. That's worth the non-localness to me.

As a side note, Saturday's market was extra fun because my sisters joined me for the first time. They were astounded by how inexpensive everything was, compared to the grocery store. Having not bought produce in the grocery store for some time, I was unaware that ONE pepper can apparently go for $2.99. Mr. Gilbert was selling his for 5o cents each. I was warned beforehand by my youngest sister Rachel that they were not into "chatting with farmers", but they actually had a great time, got some delicious, inexpensive food and ended up doing some chatting after all.

This is my brain on blogging

Do ya'll ever do something that you like to do, but then other people start paying attention to it, and expect it, and then it feels like a chore? That has happened to me with various hobbies before, and I have to confess that it really has happened with this blog. I've got a ton to write about - there are all kinds of awesome local things going on, and yet - I'm too busy actually doing stuff to write about stuff. Then I get all frazzled and guilt ridden and bogged down by the idea that I should be writing about this stuff, that I put it off even more and it becomes this ridiculous cycle. So lets just put all my mental silliness out there: I am making a pact between you, anyone who reads this, and my brain, that I will write when I feel like it. That might be every other month, or every day. Cool? Okay, settled. :)