The Dinner Files

“Not bad,” I said twenty-five years ago after choking down the chewy, gray nugget with a smile on my face.

“They are super, aren’t they?” my Dijonnais host father asked, full of enthusiasm, as he always was when exposing me to something particularly French.

“It is strange that escargots are a Burgundian specialty,” I observed, avoiding the question he had actually asked.

“Strange? Why strange?” he asked.

“Because we are so far from the sea,” I said.

“The sea?” he asked with that tell-tale mocking tone of his, “but what does the sea have to do with it?”

“The snails,” I said, speaking more slowly than usual, having a sense that I was digging my own grave, “are from the sea, no?”

The entire family looked at me, stunned, for a second or two before dissolving into Gallic laughter.

“No, no, cherie,” the father said, “snails, they are from the land!”

They then took turns incredulously wondering out loud how on earth I could have possibly thought escargots were shellfish. It seemed obvious to my Minnesota-raised self: they were in shells and they were fancy. Shellfish were rare and the harsh winters meant I had seen neither snail or slug in all my days of weeding my mom’s garden and pulling dandelions from the lawn. Too bad for the snails, too, since the rock garden my mom tended to one side of the house was a snail’s paradise, full low-growing leafy greens, stalks of tulips and iris, and plenty of dark, dank spaces between and under the rocks.

Since there are sea snails that get eaten (whelks!), I maintain that my seventeen-year-old ignorance was (and is) completely understandable. So imagine my utter delight when it came out – through a loud declaration on the street during our New Year’s trip to Paris while we were talking about finding a restaurant that served escargot to indulge our omnivorous son’s desire for same, that my dashing husband had the same impression. He managed to carry that impression with him for well over four decades. I understood, of course, and stopped myself from immediately pointing out that our garden had, at one time, been full of snails.

Yet the fact that our garden snails and escargots are, at heart, the same, came out on New Years Eve when our son finally got his escargots, and the table reveled in that funny fact. At our son’s insistence – since escargots are so very delicious, mind you – I then harvested, purged, and cooked snails from not our but our friend’s Bay Area garden. You can read all about it in my story “A Snail’s Tail” in Edible San Francisco. It includes detailed instructions on catching, purging, and cooking garden snails. I feel I must first warn you, however, that the whole endeavor is a messy process.

I started with this colander full of snails. They lived in a bucket in my study, kept in by a pair of old black tights stretched across the top which proved a great top since they could happily cling to it (they seem to really dig being upside down) and I could keep it, and thus the bucket, damp without any standing water lying around making things gross. Correction: grosser.

Every day I would take the snails out, put them in a big bowl on the kitchen counter, and, while they riled around in what can only be described as an orgyistic fashion, I cleaned out their shit- and slime-covered bucket. The snail excrement was really the least of it. It was the slime that made the process so disgusting. The poo rinsed right out, easy peasy. The slime, though, the slime clung to the bucket and required scrubbing.

The slime then stayed with them when they were parboiled in a pot of salt water for three minutes so when I pulled them from their shells I was pulling out gray snotty-looking chunks that stretched somewhat straight before springing back into their spiral shape. The slime then needed to be cooked off in a bath of vinegar-laced water before the snails could then be prepared to be eaten.

A quick run-down: first catch the snails, then feed them cornmeal for a few days, starve them for about a day (trust me, you want all that poo out), all this time you’re washing out whatever you’re keeping them in daily, then rinse the snails clean, boil then in salt water for three minutes, use tweezers to pull the snotty snails from their shells, boil the de-shelled snails in a mix of three or four parts water to one part vinegar until the slime cooks off (you’ll see the slime in the form of curdles little bits in the water), drain the snails and rinse them very very well. Only then can you cook them up with plenty of garlic-shallot-parsley butter. (Oh, did I mention that if you want to use the shells you’ll need to boil them in six cups water that has one-quarter cup of baking soda added to it, drain them, and let them dry.)

I don’t know, none of it really seemed worth it to me. And after all that slime, I found I wasn’t much in the mood for snails, even if I dubbed them escargots.

Worst of all, the whole process made my friend dream that I served her hamsters and rats I kept in cages and was “working on the smoking technique to make them less chewy.”

Truth be told, after taking care of the creepy crawlies all week, I had intermittent thoughts of vegetarianism as I prepared them. Even mucus-factories were, it became clear, in search of life and freedom. When they weren’t entwined in indiscriminate snail humping, they were up and out of that bowl, scurrying away as fast as they could (and faster than the phrase “a snail’s pace” would have you imagine).

My moment of sympathy would pass, however, as I scrubbed up the trail of slime they left behind them.

If you’re a food writer and you go to Paris, people are going to ask you about what you ate. Or, to be more specific, a remarkable number of people will ask “What was the best thing you ate?” It will be their first, and often only question about your trip.

If you answer that, honestly, the best thing you ate was the bœuf bourguignon you made yourself, well, they aren’t going to like that. They want, I assume, to hear about the best baguette ever or flaky croissants every morning or cheese that blew your mind (okay, I did have a cheese that was washed in walnut liqueur that was pretty crazy awesome). They want tales of loupe de mer so perfectly cooked it was worth the surly attitude of the waiter. They want you to be as enthralled by the meals you ate as they are about the idea of you eating them.

The problem is that while there is a lot of delicious food in Paris, there is also a lot of mediocre food there. There is also a lot of really good food here. And if you’re a family with tastes that tend towards either the ultra-fresh produce California-style and/or spicy, Paris in winter is not going to hit your culinary sweet spot. I first went to Paris 26 years ago. I lived there at two different points and visited many times in between. The difference in quality that used to exist between the average French meal and the average American meal – at least the average meal I eat in America – is no longer a giant slap in the face. And, I would humbly assert, if you’re operating on anything resembling a budget, the City by the Bay has the City of Lights beat by a mile on both variety and quality.

I’m not saying we didn’t eat well – we had some great meals and, just as importantly, we had some really super fun meals. And my son would point out that any place where steak frites is a normal lunch option and where escargots are thick on the ground is nirvana – I’m just saying that nothing stood out and grabbed us by the throat and screamed “eat more of me!” while we wondered where it had been all our lives.

Nothing, that is, except the individual gateaux Paris-Brest I bought at Maison Landemaine on the rue des martyrs on an impulse while picking up what are widely considered to be one of the best baguettes in Paris (yes, the baguette was very good indeed). As we ate them I kept wondering why they were so much better than any other I’d ever had.

A few weeks later, when called upon to bring dessert to a surprise birthday party, I though I’d make one. I pulled out a recipe I’d used before and what made the one at Landemaine such a winner slapped me in the face: they left out the pastry cream.

Genius.

The dessert was lightened considerably, the praline flavor could shine through, and it was scads easier to make in the bargain. I made the big traditional wheel-shaped version for the party, but had just enough choux left over to make this mini one, like that from Landemaine. It was perfect to photograph and, I’ll be honest, to eat all by myself with a cup of coffee after lunch. So far it’s been the best thing I’ve eaten while thinking extremely fondly of our trip to Paris.

Gateau Paris-Brest

Created, so the story goes, to commemorate a famous bike race between Paris and Brest in 1891, this cake will strike some as a fancy riff on an eclair. As mentioned above, usually the praline is added to a pastry cream which is then spread in there which is then topped by a lesser amount of whipped cream than used here. I am not lying when I say that this is a prime example of less being more. The whipped cream-only version may be less, but it is way, way more.

Part of what I love about this pastry is that it contains just butter, flour, eggs, sugar, almonds, and cream. That’s it. There’s some water thrown in here and there, but those six ingredients are used in various ways to create a remarkably complex, delicious confection.

Start by preheating an oven to 400°F.

First, you need to make a choux paste. In a medium (2-quart is ideal) saucepan, bring one cup of water and 1/2 cup of butter to a boil – start it off on a low enough temperature so the butter melts before the water starts bubbling. Dump in 1 cup of flour. Seriously dump it all at once. Use a wooden spoon to stir everything together into a mass. A dough will quite quickly, and rather surprisingly, form as you do this. Reduce the heat to medium or so and cook and stir the dough until it clearly forms a single mass that holds together as you stir it and pulls away from the sides of the pan. Take the pan off the heat.

Add an egg. Stir like hell. At first the dough will fall apart and look horrible. Do not panic. This is just what happens. Keep stirring. It won’t seem like it, but the dough will come together again. Now that you’ve passed that hurdle you need to do it a second time. And a third. And a fourth. For this cake, instead of adding a fifth egg I like to add two egg whites. And no, you cannot add all the eggs and egg whites at once. You must do them one at a time and go through the dough breaking apart and then you man-handling it with a wooden spoon to get it to go back together each time. Choux paste is not for babies. Man up.

Lightly oil or butter the largest baking sheet you have. Use your fingertip to trace as large a circle as will fit on said pan (I find tracing around a cake pan or plate works nicely). Use a spatula to transfer the choux paste from the pan to a pastry bag fitted with a large tip. Make a circle of the choux paste on that circle. Make a second circle directly inside the first. Now make a circle on top of the two concentric circles. See how it sort of looks like a bicycle tire? A little bit?

Brush the pastry with a beaten egg and sprinkle it with about 1/4 cup of sliced almonds.

Increase the oven to 425°F and bake until the pastry is a dark golden-turning brown and the whole circle feels fairly light when you lift it, about 50 minutes. Cut horizontal slits into the sides of the pastry and return to the turned off oven for about 10 minutes to dry out the insides a bit more. Transfer the pastry to a rack and let it cool to room temperature.

Meanwhile, make the praline, which is a real flavor of this dessert. Bring a sauce pan of water to a boil. Add one cup of raw almonds and boil/blanch for about 30 seconds. Drain the almonds, rinse them with cold running water, and slip off all their skins. This is an excellent task for children, should any be loafing about. Spread the almonds to dry on a clean kitchen towel or layers of paper towels.

Place a baking sheet next to the stove. If it’s nonstick, great; if not, spray it with cooking oil or lightly grease it.

In a light-colored frying pan, bring one cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of water to a boil. Swirl the pan as the water heats to dissolve the sugar. Add the almonds. Keep boiling and watching until the mixture turns a dark amber color. You want the sugar really caramelized and the almonds toasted. This goes from done to a burnt mess in the blink of an eye so, seriously, just stay there and watch it. When it’s ready, pour the caramel-almond mixture onto the pan. This mixture will be extremely hot and burn like hell, so be careful. Have the almond-peeling children well out of the way. If you happen to get the sugar mixture on you or someone else, get the coldest water possible on it immediately to harden the sugar and then pull the hardened caramel off the skin and get that skin under cold water.

Let the almond-caramel harden. Once it is completely cool, break it up and whirl it into a powder in a food processor. Now you have what the French call “praline.”

Just before serving, slice the pastry in half horizontally. Pull out any doughy bits of pastry, if you like.

Whip two cups of heavy cream until soft peaks form. Fold in about 3/4 of the praline. Spread the cream over the bottom of the pastry wheel. Sprinkle with about 1/2 of the remaining praline. Set the top of the pastry wheel on top of the whipped cream, being careful not to push down on it.

If at all possible, bring it to your friend’s house to surprise him for his 43rd birthday. Cut it into sections and serve the pieces sprinkled with the remaining praline, of you like (you may prefer to just eat the extra praline with a spoon). Set aside an extra slice for the birthday boy and stand with him while he eats it at the kitchen counter as you both sip a late harvest Riesling and reflect on the fact that being friends with someone for over 20 years is a fine and noble thing.

If K’s are funny, Norwegian is hilarious.

In all seriousness, it’s been a month of crab and kransekake. Crab because I wrote a story about going crabbing for Edible San Francisco, so I had to go crabbing to write it because the whole angle of the assignment was that 1) I love crab and 2) I’d never caught one before. Rough seas and crab fishermen strikes seemed like they were going to thwart my best efforts, but I finally found myself on Baker Beach at the ass crack of dawn with my My Very Tall Cousin Sam, a two-person kayak, a crab pot, and a professional photographer. My dad, who was visiting from Minneapolis, came along to see the show. You can read the full story in the Winter 2013 issue.

Kransekake because two different friends had occasions to celebrate and for both of them I made a kransekake. The one above was for our friend and neighbor. In place of the tiny paper Norwegian flags that traditionally decorate this wedding/birthdayChristmas cake, my son and I made flags with pictures of the man of honor on them. It was, to put it simply, a hit. I was thinking of baking kransekake for Christmas Eve, but the entire household agrees that two kransekakes in one month is sufficient.*

These kransekake-marked celebrations were both for people I admire a great deal. They are both smart, creative professional artists who are completely unpretentious and always up for fun. They remind me what I love about San Francisco.

And as much as I love my adopted city, there are times when I hate it. One of my younger cousins was in town and we met for lunch. Being the younger brother of the cousin I went crabbing with, he had heard about our adventure and was asking about it. As we talked, a woman eating several tables over came to our table and said “Excuse me, but I’m a vegetarian. I’m trying to eat my lunch and your discussion of crabs is disgusting.” She proceeded to use the word “disgusting” two more times and to have the unmitigated gall to ask us, in the most righteous, entitled way imaginable, to stop talking about what we were talking about.

I won’t get into how I laughed and asked if she was kidding, or how my cousin recognized that getting into it with such a person was a waste of time and told her sure, whatever. I won’t go into detail about how our discussion was not “disgusting” by any common definition or how we weren’t talking about killing, eating, or cleaning crabs, just going out in boats on cold water with traps. I won’t drone on about how her reward was getting to listen to us talk about how bat-shit crazy she was and trying to come up with scenarios where we would ever feel we had the right to tell someone else what to talk about (we only came up with examples that would first and foremost involve a call to the police).

I will, however, tell you my New Year’s wish: May all the grown-ups stop telling each other what to do.

I will eat my crab and bake my kransekake, as my adopted city and my homeland dictate, respectively, for this time of year. You can eat your bananas (disgusting!) or join a drum circle (my own personal nightmare!) and I promise I won’t get in your way.

* If you haven’t made any kraneskakes yet, here’s how: Whirl 1 pound blanched almonds (I use slivered almonds to avoid having to boil and peel all those nuts individually) in a food processor until they are ground to a fine meal. Stir in 1 pound powdered sugar to combine them well before stirring in 3 egg whites. If your kitchen is warm, you may be able to proceed as is, but I find the dough is easier to work with if I warm it in a double-boiler (or a metal bowl set over simmering water). Once the dough is malleable, transfer it to a pastry bag or large plastic bag with a snip of one of the corners cut off (I like this method because of the insanely easy throw-it-away clean-up). Pipe out thin rings into well-greased kransekake molds (you can get the Norpro Nonstick Kransekake Forms I use here) or, draw concentric circles on pieces of parchment paper and semi-free-hand it – a bold but workable move.

Bake the circles at 300°F for 30 minutes, remembering to rotate the pans or sheets about half-way through the baking time to avoid over- or under-done specimens. Let them cool for 10 minutes in the pans, then remove them and let cool on cooling racks.

If they break coming out of the molds, don’t stress – you can glue them back together easily enough when building the tower. While they cool, make a royal icing of about 1 cup powdered sugar, either a drop or two of vaniall extract or 1/2 tsp. lemon juice,  and enough milk to make an icing that is at once spread-able and drip-able. Stack the cooled rings, from largest to smallest, using the icing to glue each ring to the one underneath in. Decorate with drips of icing around the outside and any tiny flags you like.

My son dreams of the day I will let him add sprinkles to the whole thing. Serve the kransekake by letting people simply rip off pieces (in my experience, people need a bit of prodding to do this). Like all Norwegian desserts, it’s truly fabulous with coffee.

When I opened my eyes on Sunday morning there were snow flakes floating past the window. I lay in bed, trying to savor the extra hour at my disposal as much as I had savored the craft beers and fine company the night before. I was in Montreal, a guest of the tourism board, there to eat in general (I did) and experience their brand spanking new restaurant week called Montréal à Table (ditto). Friday and Saturday had been cold, windy, and drizzling at times, but the charm of the city shone bright in the gray depressing weather. I put on the heaviest clothes I brought, layered up, and ventured outside just as the snow stopped. As I walked the four kilometers to meet an old college friend for breakfast I stopped a few times to check the street signs and twice pulled out a map – my fancy-pants phone refused to roam – to make sure I was still heading the right way in an efficient fashion as I meandered a bit. Each time a fellow pedestrian or two would stop, ask if I needed help, and wish me a bonne journée.

My friend and I caught up, toured his neighborhood (he thoughtfully took me to his favorite food shops – all I can say is why doesn’t my neighborhood market have house made jars of cassoulet and choucroute in the fridge? why, it’s almost enough to make a girl pull up stakes and move like les filles du roi in the 1660s, so called because Louis XIV gave the poor, often orphaned or otherwise unprotected women trousseaux and dowries if they agreed to go marry settlers along the St. Lawrence, have as many French babies as possible, and generally act as a civilizing influence on the young colony), and I peppered him with questions about his adopted city. I asked if he had noticed the uniquely, to my mind, Quebecer habit of referring to North America as “the New World.” He had, and found it equally striking. In the way of a history professor and former historian, we batted around ideas about why that might be, all while tucking into plates of lost bread – French toast to you and me (so called either because it is made with bread that would otherwise go to waste or because to make it properly you need to let the bread really get lost down in the egg and milk mixture, depending on who you ask, and the restaurant‘s namesake). Mine all simple with plenty of maple syrup and his a savory version with cheese, topped with a poached egg, and served with a big pot of beer-braised ham and potatoes.

And before I knew it, it was time to grab my suitcase and hop in a cab to Pierre Trudeau airport to head west. I forewent my usual habit of decidedly not speaking to cab drivers in favor of getting in a last bit of French. He immigrated from Lebanon, loves Montréal, and seemed truly delighted that I – an American! – was so interested in food. He gave me his card. I am to call next I am in town. He knows some restaurants he thinks I would like.

In exchange for breakfast and a walking tour of the Plateau, I paid the price of an end-of-the-day flight home from parts east. I’ve done it before and I always manage to forget that particularly icky film that covers one after a long flight at the end of the day that lands late. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself until I walked into the gate area and saw the throngs of people waiting to get on the next flight, a red-eye to Guadalajara. From French-speaking Canada to Spanish-speaking California with U.S. customs in the Québec airport and a lay-over in Chicago in between; it was all very NAFTA.

I took a cab home. I was in no mood to talk about either the Giants or Sandy. But my cabbie was having none of my anti-social behavior. He started on the subject of the unseasonably warm weather and quickly shifted to politics, particularly the various “props” on the ballot in California. We agreed yes on 37 (labels those GMOs!) and that taking one’s absentee ballot to the polling place on Election Day makes it seem like more of an event. He and I moved to the same neighborhood at about the same time. I came to California to go to grad school. A Palestinian, he came to escape violence and oppression and make a better life for his family. He told me he enjoyed talking to me; I said I did too and wished him luck with the rest of his shift.

Montréal is a place where people will put rosemary in beer (bad idea Dieu de Ciel, although your trappist ale was fabuloso), pour warm maple syrup over creamy brie (Le Saint Bock you are clever!), and serve lamb tartare (Chez Victoire, vous me manquez déjà!). We may lack the obsession with maple syrup that our neighbors to the north embrace with such fervor, but Californians have, I’m quite sure, done all of those things at some point. We are a continent of immigration and invention, at our best when questioning tradition, not falling for “that’s how it’s always been” as a reason for anything, and open-minded about what else could be. The tour guide’s explanation of how French-Canadian sugar shacks are amalgams of Gallic, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon traditions doesn’t capture it in any way that makes the phrase useful in a contemporary context, but two cabbies, three thousand miles and eleven hours apart, with their love of their new world and their desire to talk with a stranger about the things they love best about it sure did.

I know too much about history not to appreciate the right to vote. Ladies: it hasn’t even been a 100 years since our kind have had that right throughout the U.S. I’m going to be casting my ballot with the new world in mind: a place, slowly but surely, of opportunity and civil rights for everyone.

Then I’m going to come home and douse some cheese in maple syrup.

I’ve eaten dozens and scores of oysters on the half shell over the decades, once carrying a cooler full of them back to Minneapolis for Christmas when one could still carry a cooler full of oysters on a plane to the delight of security personnel.

These lovelies were not eaten on the half-shell. Rather, they were on the half-shell, but they were not raw.

I sort of set out to make barbequed oysters. I didn’t want just cooked oysters slathered with sickly sweet barbeque sauce, though, I wanted to replicate the ones I’ve had twice at the Marshall General Store on Tomales Bay. Both times I was up in Marshall for work – once to write a profile of cheese maker Marcia Barinaga for Culture magazine, the other time to tour the Straus Creamery. The oysters are cooked on a grill with some garlic butter and then lightly brushed with a barbeque sauce.

The thing is, I flew through Houston airport last month. I had a two-hour lay-over at lunch time. I hit Pappadeux’s and treated myself to a dozen raw oysters. They arrived, plump and fresh, with a dish of cocktail sauce and a dish of something much more intriguing. I’m pretty sure it was a mignonette made with sweet and spicy pepper jelly. And yet… I had no pepper jelly at hand.

So instead of barbeque sauce or the magic I had at the Houston airport (stranger things have happened, surely, than the discovery of something delicious at an airport?), I made my own spicy concoction that I dub spicy mignonette. I heated up the grill, set the oysters cupped shell-side-down on the grill, cooked them until the shells loosened, took them off the grill, easily shucked them, topped them each with a bit of garlic and parsley butter (a.k.a. beurre maitre d’hotel), put the oysters now on the half-shell back on the grill to cook through (look for the edges to just start to curl up), used tongs to carefully lifted them off the grill and onto a platter without spilling too much of their juices or the yummy butter onto the flame, and served them with the spicy mignonette.

We worked our way through the two dozen oysters pretty quickly. I sat, happy with my work, watching as my dashing husband went back at his shells to pry off any remaining bits of oyster and my omnivorous son licked his shells clean. Then they both attacked the remaining sauce with bits of bread. Dipping and eating until the dish was as clean as the oyster shells. Trace of neither bivalve nor sweetened and spiced vinegar was left when we were through.

We are well stocked. At least when it comes to tomatoes. At least for the moment. Over 100 pounds of ripe San Marzanos and dry-farmed Early Girls have passed into my kitchen and been forwarded into jars in various forms. I dried them, as above. I popped them into jars, blanched and peeled, but still whole -

I realized that approximately all of the time I end of chopped whole peeled tomatoes to use them in sauce, so I canned some of them already chopped -

Of course, if I am chopped them to turn them into a sauce, a person may as well can sauce too -

Then I figured I may as well round things out and put up some perfectly  smooth skin-free and seedless purée -

What I really did with the vast majority of all those tomatoes, though, was to put in a supply of over a dozen half-pints of homemade tomato paste or, as we lovingly call it in my house, tomato conserva -

My dashing husband reckons that while he’d love to go through a full pint every week, he can probably limit himself to a half-pint each month, stingily spreading it, as Brits spread marmite, thin and scraggly on his toasted tranche of baguette before topped it with a fried egg for breakfast. Dabbing a bit here or there in pasta dishes when it’s his turn to cook. Doing this, please understand, when what he’d like to do is eat it by the spoonful while he researches graffiti artists or streams soccer games. He will sacrifice because he has seen what it takes to produce this brick red gold, because he is grateful anyone does such a thing for him, and because he can’t bare to think of that window of time that will inevitably come between when the last jar has been scraped clean and the first jar filled with a new harvest, when once again the house will smell of bubbling tomatoes and the seeds and pulp I pull from those tomatoes destined to become conserva -

get strained and we drink the most tomato-flavored and refreshing concoction I know -

It is a flavor that cannot be canned or jarred or kept with any integrity. I tried freezing it and something fell flat, if only my imagination. This tomato juice must be consumed immediately at best, within hours at the outside to capture all its tomato-ness. It is a reminder that you can only stock so much, only prepare and plan for things you can actually imagine. Some things must be taken in when they come along, no matter how much you’d rather have have had time to prepare or wished they’d come to you earlier. Cupboards may well be for stocking, but fresh tomato juice, like life itself, is for drinking up right now.

Spring never slowed down. At all. If anything, it ramped up and yelled in my face for weeks on end. Most of what I was doing was not, honestly, all that interesting. But there were a few exceptions. I like to think this little contribution to the fine food zine Put A Egg On It was one of them:

Warning: this video of a young abalone (1-2 years old) dancing in my hand may tempt you to acquire an abalone as a pet.

I cannot recommend this path.

Sure, they’re cute now, but after years of changing its seawater and shoveling in kelp for it to eat, it’s going to grow, and before you know it, it will weigh a few pounds and become amazingly delicious and, honestly, you’re going to want to eat it.

This is where William Randolph Hearst stored many of his treasures while his castle on the hill was being built. It looks onto the Pacific Ocean, waves lapping on the beach just feet from its doors, all the better to unload shipped goods directly into its locked walls. It sits empty, save a few stacks of building materials and many piles of guano. It is not open to the public. I got to see it because I was on a press trip last week. Plenty of things I do as a food writer that sound super fun to other people don’t end up being nearly as great as one would think, but once in awhile I get to do something that excites even my jaded self.

I went on the trip for the abalone farm (see my visit here), but found delight around nearly every corner, from a singularly focused (some might say almost crazed) Frenchman bent on making the “perfect Cabernet,” to a farmer with a preternatural ability to find the silver lining (“we lost our peach crop to a late freeze last year, but all that energy that would have gone into the peaches went back into the trees and we got tremendous growth!”), to a family of grape growers turned wine makers with a fine tradition of layering Tellegio on their polenta before topping the lot with spicy beef stew. And, of course, I walked through the space pictured above which, despite a truly objectionable smell of guano and mold, was wondrous. You could sense the cool stuff that has spent time in its colonial mission-style walls, with recessed windows and a bell tower (all the better to announce that help was needed down at the dock) and custom-made locks. It is a singular place, which stands out in an increasingly cookie-cutter world.

For the last two months I had been feeling as overloaded as my cookbook shelves. I’ve had so much work on my plate at such a constant rate that I frequently felt like a deer in the headlights, unable to move or think, confused at what item on my to-do list could possibly be the most pressing. Spending a few days around people so fully engage in what they do, having a few hours away from the screen, being out of doors for more than half an hour at a stretch—it all worked together to start to fill the well. I hadn’t even acknowledged how dry my creative well felt (although my utter inability to come up with a single thing to write about here should have been a sign) until, all of the sudden, it wasn’t. It’s not overflowing, by any means, but at least I can remember that it’s there.

Between the few days in the green hills of the Central Coast and seeing how much more valuable and useful my cookbooks are after having been culled by over 30%, I’m going to take a leap and do something different here at The Dinner Files. The picture-story-recipe format isn’t exciting me anymore, and I think it shows. I’ll still be posting yummy and often painfully easy recipes over at Local Foods. (If you like my cooking style I encourage you to check over there frequently—I put up new stuff all the time: sign up for my weekly seasonal cooking newsletter, like the About Local Foods Facebook page, follow @aboutlocalfoods on Twitter). Other, usually food-centric projects will be coming this way.

Posts here won’t be as frequent, but I think they are going to be way more interesting.

It’s funny, just when things seem all tight and locked up, as secure as a well built warehouse:

They tend to open up:

If I ever own lots of treasure that needs to be stored, I can only hope I will have the decency to give it such views.

When my friend and neighbor Naomi Fiss came over to shoot my cookbooks for an article in Edible San Francisco close to two years ago, she had plenty of material to choose from (including this lovely shot she did of a set of Time Life cookbooks I assembled over years of buying one here and one there from thrift stores and used book dealers). Years ago my dashing husband moved a stack of four book shelves into the kitchen. We both figured that was where my cookbooks would go.

And they did. But I’m not sure what happens when I’m not in the room. Are they breeding? Cloning themselves? Signing for packages of their brethren?

So those shelves are what can only be described as full – with books stacked on top of the rows of books and books jammed in between the shelves. More books tend to be stacked on my desk, awaiting review over at Local Foods. Then there are the multiple shelves of food reference books that fill the bookcases in my study, most in double rows. And, I am ashamed to say, there is plenty of overrun filling more than one shelf in the basement.

The thing that gets me down is that I in no way keep every cookbook that comes my way. Review copies that don’t work to feature on Local Foods get sent straight to the box in the garage to be given away or traded. I exhibit self-control in purposeful acquisition, too: I once brought four boxes of cookbooks to a cookbook exchange and managed to bring exactly zero home. Once something has entered the collection, however, deciding to get rid of it becomes complicated. Is the standard whether I ever use it? Whether I think I might use it? Whether it is important or interesting in the food writing world? If a friend wrote it? If it was a gift?

As a friend put it recently when talking about her substantial collection of novels: I could just decide to get rid of all of them, but to pick and choose seems impossible. That’s why I no longer have any wine books. I got rid of all of them in one fell swoop.

To be realistic I am not going to be getting rid of all my cookbooks and yet I do want to pick and choose to reduce their mass.

I tried coming up with a system based on the one I use for clothes: Do I wear it? Does it fit? Does it look good? I need a triple-yes to keep something. But what are the equivalent questions for cookbooks?

Darling readers, can you help? Can anyone offer up a rubric to use to cull a book collection? It need not be cookbook-specific – in fact, I’d love to be able to apply it to other areas of our family’s bibliophilia, so general is good.