Culinary Landmarks On The Road Of Life

If people question whether I am a sophisticated, big-city adult, I shall look scornfully at them, disdainfully brush invisible dust off of my immaculate shirt-cuffs, and count off the following points in a dramatic-yet-suavely-amused manner:

1) I belong to a wine club;

2) Marina and I have successfully hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner;

3) I can now whisk my own whipped cream, and as God as my witness, I will never use Reddi-Whip again;

and 4) I have baked pumpkin bread all on my own.

I defy you to find anything less than adult and sophisticated about those achievements. See? You can't. And that's because these are all awesome culinary developments.

In order, then, a recap, full of pictures to make you hungry. If I make you hungry, you'll keep reading. That's how I figure it, at any rate. After all, who doesn't love food?

WINING FOR DINING



Whenever we go to Santa Cruz, we stop by the Bonny Doon tasting room to buy a bottle of Calvadoon apple brandy, or better yet, two bottles, because I have a strong taste for the warm fire of golden apple brandy. The last time we went, I was offered a discount if I would sign up for a quarterly wine club. How could I refuse?

Well, obviously I could have refused by saying no, but I didn't choose to.

How could I refuse wine that comes in bottles whose lids feature an alien?

Some would argue that the newsletters that come with the wine are bit much--I couldn't tell you what it means to say that a wine is "fine-boned, lithe and feminine"--but they are fun, the wine is terrific, and the names are great. This most recent shipment featured two bottles of Le Cigare Volant. As the label states, "it is named in honor of the cigar-shaped alien crafts banned from landing in the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape by decree of the village council in 1954." A wine named for an incident in which a village deemed vineyards worth defying an alien invasion would have to be good!

And the bottle of Le Cigare Volant en foudre that we opened for our home-cooked (or mostly home-cooked) Thanksgiving dinner was certainly as fine-boned, lithe and feminine a wine as I've ever had.

THANKSGIVING DINNER

Thanksgiving has always been a meal cooked by other people. Well, no more! Marina and I organized a successful and small Thanksgiving dinner with my sister and Marina's mom and friend Tim.

It seemed like an intense undertaking until we realized we could order some of the dishes in advance. We ordered a small natural boneless turkey breast roast, mashed potatoes, stuffing and rolls from Whole Foods, which provided a surprising customer service delight. I had an initial problem with the online order changing my requested pickup date from Thanksgiving Day to the day after, which would not be terribly useful. When I called the store, not only was I assured that it wouldn't be a problem to pick it up earlier, but the woman I spoke to reviewed my order and advised that given the type of turkey we ordered, it would be best to pick it up on Wednesday night to allow it to thaw properly in the fridge. And when I went in to pick up the order and get the rest of the ingredients for what we would make ourselves, every employee was cheerful and helpful despite the chaos swirling around them.

The turkey needed to be roasted in the oven. I learned it can be a smattering mess to snip off the netting at the end, and that turkey can take a long time to cook. Overall, though, it turned out quite well. We also had roasted butternut squash--the instructions for which, having said to toss the squash with the other ingredients, gave me only a momentary confusion before I realized it didn't mean to flip the squash up in the air. In addition, there was a salad of green beans and slivered almonds, brandied cranberries, cheeses and salami and olives. Pictures will describe it best. Overall, it was a wonderful day, lasting 8 hours, food, drinking, and Wii-playing in a great big celebratory outburst, in mellow fashion.






All I need to say in addition was that Tim's pumpkin-pecan pie with hand-whipped cream was sublime. Seriously, the best dessert we could remember having.

WHIPPING CREAM

Speaking of hand-whipping cream, after seeing Tim do it, Marina and I wanted to replicate it. When we started, pouring whipping cream into a steel bowl and attacking it with a whisk, we thought we must have neglected something yeasty to solidify it. But we kept at it, tag-teaming the arduous whisking and churning, and all of a sudden, the liquid cream frothed up into something light and foamy and more-or-less solid, without the need of steel cans and propellants and what have you. Very liberating.

PUMPKIN BREAD

Yes, I have learned to bake, too. Okay, it was from a kit, but there was a heck of a lot of mixing involved, especially when the bread mix had to be combined with the oil, water, pumpkin and eggs until it was just moist. I wasn't sure what that meant, so I just kept stirring in portions of the bread until it blended in to the rest of the ingredients. A great workout for the arm, I have to say.

As it was baking, I kept sticking in a toothpick, expecting it to come out clean. I thought this meant absolutely no crumbs or hints of chocolate, until the peanut gallery advised me this was not the case.

I was quite happy with the outcome!

Brewery Fare: Good for What Ales You

Let's say you have a Thursday afternoon free from work. You could do worse than spending it in Berkeley on a sunny East Bay Veterans' Day enjoying brewery food.

That's what Marina and I did, meeting her mom and sister and brother-in-law and nephew at Pyramid Alehouse on Gilman Street. We sat in the beer garden, surprisingly vacant except for one other woman drinking ale and reading a book. It was enclosed by metal walls, decorated with climbing plants with pink flowers and room for Boden--the nephew--to march around the table at will. The sun slanted down between the vaulted ceiling in a soothing fashion until it got too hot and we had to retreat to the shade.

Marina and I arrived first and ordered nachos and a beer sampler, the latter proving a fantastic deal. It was comprised of five generous pours for $7.50, which amounted to close to two pints. My two favorites were the Snow Cap and the Thunderhead IPA. The remnants of a six-pack of the latter are in our fridge as I write. Ironically, the two that I can best describe are the two I liked least, which seems to offer a commentary on something about human nature, but I'm not sure what. Or maybe just about me. Maybe I'm a glass half-empty kind of guy. The Apricot Ale was sweet and pleasant enough, but the taste of apricot was undermined a bit by an acrid taste of popcorn butter. The Crystal Wheat Ale tasted like flat tonic water. But they were good, and there is always another beer to order, so really, I think I'm a glass half-full kind of guy when it comes to a brewery, especially when I don't have to drive.

You really can't go to a brewery without eating fish and chips. Well, apparently you can, as most of the others ate something other than fish and chips, which bewilders me, but who am I to judge the eccentricities of others? I'll be honest in saying that I can't always taste much difference between fish and chips from different establishments, but they would have to be really poorly done for me not to enjoy them, and that was not the case here.

And after the beer sampler, a full pint of Snow Cap to go with the food. It's a simple meal, but perhaps that's why I find it so tasty. I've enjoyed other meals at pubs in my time--I often had very tasty pasta dishes at Sean Kelly's in Missoula--but I always come back to beer-battered fish with a side of beer.

What are your favorite pub-dining experiences? You might expect that my all time favorite would have been in Wales, but actually, my memory of the fish and chips from the shop across the road from the University is a bit soggy from excess grease and oil. That's right, even the memory itself is soggy; that's how greasy the fish and chips were. I would say my top five favorite pub-dining experiences, in no particular order and encompassing all sorts of criteria beyond just the quality of the food, are The Irish Bank and The Pig and Whistle in San Francisco, the Drake Hotel in Toronto, Sean Kelly's in Missoula, and Pyramid in Berkeley, but that could be way off. Still, it's a jumping-off point for conversation.

Chicken or Pasta? Why Compromise?

"Anything but seafood." That was Marina's response to my inquiry as to what she would like for dinner on her return from a week's trip to Mexico for work. This was not just because of the prevalence of fish in her Mexican dining options, but also the fact that people constructed a three-kilometer fish burrito outside of her hotel window. As you can imagine, this colored her perception of fish for the moment.

This left a choice of chicken or pasta. But I decided to be daring and combine the two, and not just in the frying chicken to be served over instant couscous paradigm. After some internal debate and exhaustive recipe research--I browsed through THREE magazines--I settled on this recipe for Chicken Puttanesca With Fettucine. I have no idea what Puttanesca means, but it sounds serious and sophisticated, doesn't it?

I also needed an appetizer appropriate to celebrating the Giants winning the World Series, but since I couldn't find any gigantic crackers, and any cheese colored orange and black would raise some questions, I settled on Drunken Goat, as I already knew it was delicious, and I'm sure there were many post-Series parties in which people acted like drunken goats.



Cooking the pasta and slicing the chicken into one inch pieces were simple tasks, as much as trimming fat from chicken and slicing it can be considered simple. Then came the question of gathering the ingredients. It asked for a quarter cup of pitted and coarsely chopped kalamata olives. Apparently you don't measure this before chopping the olives:



Which I guess makes sense, especially because it is hard to pour olives into a measuring cup without letting all the olive juice out of the jar too. Drain first, then chop, then measure, Marina taught me. How counter-intuitive. Also, apparently you can buy pre-pitted kalamata olives. This would have been useful, yes, but I'm not some kitchen lightweight who can't pit his own olives. I can't pit them tidily, true, but I pit them just the same.

As the chicken cooked, I added the sauce, the capers, the chopped olives, and the crushed red pepper. I was a bit worried that the capers would be overwhelming, as the lemony scent suffused everything for a bit. However, it seems like that scent simmered out by the time it was all done.

Visually, it didn't look much, until the garnish was added. What a difference a garnish of fresh basil made!



The only thing with this was that the noodles didn't separate quite as much as they should have, as the package said to cook for three minutes, and the recipe then had me set them aside while cooking the chicken and sauce mix. Otherwise, it was a sucess, a light but warm and tasty meal for a late Saturday night.

What sort of twists on the chicken/pasta combination do you like?