Ravioli

A huge thank you to Fernanda for taking these photos and for providing a delicious filling for the first batch of ravioli. We ate them all. Her account of this is here, if you can read Portuguese (worth seeing even if you can’t; her photos have gotten professional…). It’s a great party idea: someone brings eggs, everyone brings a filling. And off you go.

Feeding the Googleplex

I visited the mother spider of the Web today. I spent the day down at Google in Mountain View for a meeting about a project I may end up being involved with. I can report that they keep the Google engineers well-fed. The following were free for the taking:

In the visitors’ area in the building we were in (one of the smaller buildings on their campus): at left a refrigerator filled with Naked Juice fruit juices. (Upstairs was the massage lounge).

The snack room had organic milk, soy milk, and rice milk in the fridge, gourmet chocolates in bins, any number of breakfast cereals, and a half-dozen sorts of fresh fruit available. A sign reminded people to wash the fruit.

Among the options at the lunchtime cafeteria were the following:

• curried vegetables with brown rice
• white bean and chorizo soup
• assorted sandwich ingredients, including sliced heirloom tomatoes
• a salad with mixed baby greens, tarragon dressing, and goat cheese
• a barley salad
• sauteed summer squash and zucchini for veggies
• main entree choices of chicken cacciatore, pasta pomodoro, and steamed mussels
• pizza with caramelized onion and talaggio cheese
• pistachio ice cream

Needless to say, we had a good pre-meeting lunch.

Korean Mexican Italian

I’ve begun the long journey into learning how to preserve food. Our freezer is humble, so methods that don’t require refrigeration are prized. The garden is starting to produce things in such quantity that if they don’t get eaten or preserved, they’ll end up in the compost.

First, I’ve made my first batch of kimchi. If you don’t know it, it’s a Korean pickled cabbage delight, where the pickling is done entirely with salt and fermentation, not vinegar. It’s not a long process and the kimchi is almost finished, having started the process on Wednesday evening. I couldn’t resist tonight, though, and had a few mouthfuls. (Garlic ginger chilis onions radish cabbage and of course salt: how can you go wrong?) I’m very pleased with it and am hoping it will become a staple in our house, or more precisely in my office, where I’ll go to it at 3:00 pm when I have the munchies.

Second, we roasted a good 25 jalapeño peppers today in the solar cooker. They took on some good charring and will be used in all kinds of things. They’re coming in like gangbusters.

Third, with the oceans of chard and Kathy’s eggs, we made ravioli. From scratch. It’s a long, meditative process. The chard, onions, walnuts, and garlic were from the garden; we opted for tofu over ricotta, mostly because of its texture. Ravioli, we can freeze. I’d forgotten how delicious homemade pasta was… And I’m so grateful I didn’t ditch the hand-cranked pasta roller or devote its energies to Fimo millefiore.

New item for the drawer devoted to the goddess Anoia: a crinkle-cut pasta cutter.

Anthocyanins Abundant

I think I’m turning into a pomegranate.

This all started when our landlady’s daughter tried to interest us in MonaVie. This is a multi-level marketed health juice based heavily around acai berries and other concentrated purplish juices. Being a subscriber to the what color is your diet theory of nutrition (build your diet around a full color palette of fruits and vegetables), I don’t doubt that this juice is very good for you, but the catch is that they want $30-$40 a bottle, depending upon the marketing scheme.

I like the concept, think I, but I can get my anthocyanin fix for a lot cheaper than that. A raid on the food coop nets us blueberry-pomegranate juice, black cherry juice, bilberry nectar (which according to amateur astronomy folklore helps night vision), mango-acai herbal tea, not to mention the Chilean cab. Mix it together, dilute it 1 to 2, there you go. Add to that all the plums from the tree heavy with fruit just outside, and I’m not doing badly for my reds, purples, and blues.

I’m starting to crave orange, though. The beta-carotenes may be next.

Land Of Olives

There are fledgling efforts in this state to promote agri-tourism. Yolo County, which leads the country in direct sales of agricultural products to customers, seems a good place to start. Perhaps surprisingly, Yolo County has become a center for artisanal olive oil production. This directory lists 13 olive oil producers in Yolo County, including Yolo Press, home of the only working olive mill in Yolo and Solano counties, UC Davis, who got into the olive oil production business a couple years ago when their grounds crew came up with a creative way to deal with the hazard fallen olives would create on bike paths, and others such as Frate Sole Olive Company, Hillstone Olive Oil, and the Story Olive Oil Company.

Xocolatl Ecstasy

We just made this as a concession to Valentine’s Day. It’s off the scale. The recipe was taken from the Sunday paper which got it here. It comes from Chef Jesús González and his Rancho La Puerta in Tecate. I roasted the butternut squash in the solar cooker; we used 4 oz. Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate and 2 oz. Dagoba Xocolatl.

Mayan Hot Chocolate

1 small butternut squash
2-1/2 cups 1% low-fat milk, divided
6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
large pinch nutmeg
large pinch cardamom

1. Preheat oven to 375F. Cut squash in half; place halves, cut sides down, in a roasting pan. Fill with water up to 1 inch. Bake 30 minutes or until squash is tender. Discard seeds and scoop out pulp to measure 2/3 cup. Purée squash with 1/2 cup milk in a food processor until smooth.

2. In a large saucepan, mix remaining 2 cups milk, chocolate and spices. Heat over a double boiler or in a heavy-tottomed pan, stirring constantly until chocolate is melted and creamy. Remove from heat and whisk in puréed squash. Reheat. Serves 4.

My Meeting with a Samovar

I went to MacWorld on the train yesterday, bigbying all the way down and back. MacWorld itself was odd — partly a function of separating the two exhibit halls even more than normal, but generally a bit underwhelming. I toured the aisles, talked to vendors whose stuff looked interesting and avoided eye contact with those whose stuff didn’t, and in general was glad I was alone so I could be on my own schedule.

The Samovar Tea Lounge opened a second spot just above the Moscone Center, so I planned to eat lunch there. I knew I wanted to try the Samovar, so I opted for the “Russian Chay Platter and Bottomless Samovar Black Tea,” which included baked ricotta wrapped in collards, tarragon-marinated beets, and smoked whitefish and horseradish (I wasn’t expecting much with the whitefish but it was exquisite).

The tea: a blend of lapsang souchong and a breakfast mixture. Went on to the tongue smoky, with a flowery, almost lavender aftertaste. You’d think that the ultra-strong concentrate would stew on top of all that steam, but it didn’t. I had three or four cups. I was wired for the afternoon and much of the evening.

This place is a temptation for tea lovers like me. Any tea room I visit from now on will be held to this standard. Fernanda, I would LOVE to go to this place with you!!

Persimmon

This persimmon came from our neighbor across the street Mary. I sketched it with Inktense pencils.

Baskets Of Basil

Pica decided to harvest her basil today; it’s now getting cold and the plants are starting to fare poorly. We separated the leaves from the stems, and ended up with enough of them to make pesto for the entire Italian national football team.

Prima Materia

There comes a time in a chocolate lover’s career when one realizes that sugar is basically an adulterant. Today I tried the Prima Materia bar from Dagoba Chocolate, makers of the previously discussed Xocolatl bar. A single block of this unsweetened 100% cacao content bar is almost too much to eat at one time.