The Dinner Files

Last week San Francisco hosted the annual Winter Fancy Food Show. It takes over the Moscone convention center downtown and runs roughshod on food professionals of all sorts for three full days.

Vendors bring their products, hoping to connect with buyers. Buyers come hoping to find products. Other people mill about getting in the way with their pesky questions and cynical journalistic tendencies.

I am interested in very little of what fills those giant halls. My big picture take-aways this year are:

1. If you are thinking of starting a fancy tea company, you might want to go back to the drawing board because, to me, the market looks a wee bit saturated.
2. I’m glad to see fewer people are risking their life savings trying to start a granola company, but sad to see so many people making “snack bites.”
3. Apparently there is a large segment of the population that wants to drink water but cannot abide by the taste and there are many companies trying to bridge that gap for them. Many. I predict flavored water is tomorrow’s fancy tea.
4. There is also plenty of fancy soda on the market and I was forced to consider whether “bits of real ginger” are something you want in your ginger ale. So far I’m thinking not so much. Vignette and Hot Lips still lead the fancy soda troupes on overall quality, flavor, and sweet-but-not-too-sweet sweetness.
5. While it is possible to package delicious flavored popcorn (props to San Francisco’s own 479!), judging by all the examples I tasted it seems to be infinitely easier to make nasty flavored popcorn.
6. Flavored popcorn is the new tortilla chips and salsa, at least Fancy Food Show-wise.
7. I get it. Bacon is delicious. You can make lots of things taste like bacon. Guess what? None of it comes even close to being as good as, you know, bacon. Accept this and move along.
8. Indian is the new Thai. Or something. Lots more prepared Indian dishes out there – frozen or shelf stable.
9. The folks at La Tourangelle had already looked into the million dollar idea I offered up to them (I want a source of pine nut oil!), and found it just way too expensive. “No one wants to pay $30 for a little can of oil,” I was told. They are, most likely, correct. Lord knows I don’t want to pay $30….

Each year I do find a few gems among the processed crap, painfully not-quite-actually tasty baked goods, and endless array of tea. This year, those gems included:

• Bermuda Triangle from Cypress Grove. It’s not new, I’ve probably even had it before, but it hardly ever sells retail (mainly at restaurants), so I had no memory of it. Totally crazy delicious. Note to cheesemongers in the Mission and Potrero areas of San Francisco: if you carry this, I will come to your store to buy it.
• The folks at La Quercia continue to take those Iowa pigs and turn them into delicious coppa, prosciutto, and other luscious cured slices.
• Wild Planet Foods now cans sardines as well as sustainably caught tuna. Yum.
• Whitson Chile Products from Terlingua, Texas. They use a fourth generation recipe to make an aromatic chili base that is not quite hot but is fabulously and deliciously warm. The candied jalapeños are oh so right.
• Olli Salumeria in Virginia is just getting started. They source locally pastured pork and have a nice Roman man (Olli!) cure it to great success.
• In a  Pickle out of Fort Worth makes a dill pickle and then puts it through a “sweet and spicy process” with some Sante Fe Grand chiles to great effect. I sort of liked how cagey they were about the process, like maybe I’d go and open a rival pickle company which, let’s face it, no one needs to do because pickles are becoming a lot like tea.

Raw bitter leaves must have a tonic effect. Am I right? I feel virtuous eating them – not as some sort of penance because they taste bad, but because I feel so alive when I crunch into them. In a let’s-bleed-you-with-leeches-to-make-you-feel-better  kind of way, they taste like they will clean my blood. And that bitter edge? I love it. I find myself craving bitter greens – the kales, the collards – and chicories – the radicchios and endives – with great regularity this time of year. It may be sacrilege to say in these parts, but if I had to choose between only being able to have tomatoes or chicories for the rest of my days, I’d choose chicories.

Why, you may ask, does my blood need cleaning? Well, I’m not sure it does, but I find cleaning things incredibly anxiety-reducing. As I’ve written here before, my closets are never cleaner than when I have multiple projects due at once. If I’m going to clean out the kitchen cupboards and organize the tool shelves in the garage, why not scrape my blood clean with bitter salads, too?

Of course I wouldn’t want it to get too clean. That could be dangerous, right? So in this case I’ve thrown in a fair amount of blue cheese (I like a mountain gorgonzola – neither terribly soft nor rock hard) and a few toasted hazelnuts for good measure. I find the traumatically strong tastes of radicchio and blue cheese magically tone each other down. The sharpness of the cheese and the bitter of the leaves giving into each other, softening each other, as if by each being so difficult to take they understand each other and make the other one not need to be so very much like that. (I think I’m still talking about this salad but I’m starting to see why we like this salad so much at our house….)

The secret to this little addictive radicchio hazelnut blue cheese salad is, I must admit, in the agrodulce. The fine people at Katz and Company once sent me some samples of their agrodulce – a slightly sweetened vinegar – and I found it so useful and we all loved the salads I made with it so much that one morning I discovered myself spending a rather ridiculous amount of money online ordering up a full assortment. I mean, I make very tasty red wine vinegar myself. Why not just doctor that up with some sugar in the dressing, which really does work just as well? I don’t know. Just know this: you can just add sugar to the vinegar and the salad turns out great. If, however, you’re in the market for some fancy “artisan vinegar” or find yourself in the happy possession of same, here is your chance to use it.

Radicchio hazelnut blue cheese salad

First, make the dressing in the bottom of the salad bowl. I use equal part extra virgin olive oil and agrodulce. For a single head of radicchio, use 2 teaspoons of each or 2 teaspoons oil and good red wine vinegar plus a teaspoon of sugar. Add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of salt. If you want to be a bit fancier, mince a small shallot and let that sit in the agrodulce or vinegar for a few minutes before you add the oil.

Second, trim the radicchio (trevissio is also tasty here), chop it into bite-size pieces or slices, rinse it, and dry it. Add to the salad bowl and toss with the dressing.

Third, you can now, if you like to keep things simple, just eat the salad. It’s great just like this and I’ve been known to down a whole bowlful by myself at lunch. Fancy it up, though, by adding about 1/2 cup toasted and chopped hazelnuts and 1/3 cup crumbled blue cheese. Or just use one or the other – all the couplings are delicious! You can toss these in or make it fancy by dividing the salad between salad plates and sprinkling the nut and cheese on each plate. Top with a grinding or two of black pepper if you’re so inclined.

Luscious. Silky. Salty. Fishy. Yum.

This gravlax was all of these lovely things. It was also cured in the trunk of my car. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started, as all salmon do, as an egg (yum, salmon roe!) in a creek or riverbed in a tributary that drains into the Copper River in Alaska. It grew and swam (and was swept) downstream into the cold, rich waters of the Pacific Ocean. The cold water made it develop a lot of fat, tasty fat that doesn’t congeal in the cold and thus is healthful and all things good for us humans to eat. It ate lots of stuff – crustaceans, squids, jellies, and other things that eat lots of marine plants and even smaller things that eat more marine plants. You know those omega 3 essential fatty acids health people are always going on about? They are mainly found in marine plants. So when things eat those plants and then other things – like salmon – eat them, the omega 3s build up in a most pleasing and beneficial way. Yet, like magic, this salmon remained low in mercury – they eat fairly low on the food chain compared to, say, swordfish or sharks, and they also simply don’t live that long enough (about 3 to 5 years) to build up mercury the way longer-loved fish do. Nice work, salmon.

This particular fish then had the great misfortune (or is that supreme honor?) to end up in Bill Weber’s gillnet last September (it was on its way to spawn – and die– in the same river where it was an egg). If I know Bill, and I don’t know him well but I have met him and heard him speak at length about how he handles his fish, this salmon was hand-picked off the net, bled (which drastically slows down decomposition), and immediately put on ice. Bill has all kinds of special and advanced methods because, at heart, the man is an inventor of things, an improver of ways.

There are people who will say – and they are probably right – that the wild salmon population is not doing so well and that, really, we probably shouldn’t be eating any of these creatures. We should let them all spawn and reproduce as much as possible. Fishermen and the communities they support, of course, have many arguments against this stance. I’ve decided that if there are only so many salmon left and other people are eating them, I want my share. I don’t eat it very often and when I do I buy it from fishermen I know are fishing responsibly and with great care so the fish I get is as awesome as possible.

And I did. Behold! A thing of great beauty!

It was then packed and shipped to SFO where my editor and pal Bruce Cole picked it up and brought it to his garage. I arrived, fillet knife in hand, and – visualizing but in no way imitating the clean, swift lines of the professionals I witnessed in Cordova – filleted this lovely creature while Bruce laughed at my lack of upper body strength (it’s a BIG fish!). I then took full advantage of my excellent fine motor skills, superlative manual dexterity, and expensive professional tweezers to pull out the pin bones one by one:

I then lugged it home in a trash bag with a few of its equally mangled brethren and one to fillet at home (so I could photoshoot it for you! see above!), packed it up very carefully, and put it in the deep freezer.

The Sunday before Christmas, I pulled this salmon out (yes, the whole salmon, both sides) and let it thaw. I did this because there is Norwegian in me and every Christmas (usually on the Eve) we have gravlax. It is what we do.

On Tuesday I rinsed the salmon, patted it dry, lay the two halves on a very clean counter skin-side-down, and sprinkled each half with 2 tablespoons of horseradish-infused vodka (usually I’d use aquavit, but we were out – yes, we usually have it in the freezer and yes, we ran out; what can I say, it was a trying fall). I then sprinkled each half with about a third of a mixture made of 1/3 cup fine sea salt, 1/3 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper. A person could add dill to this mixture – about ¼ cup chopped – if they were so inclined and I would be so inclined except that my dashing husband really doesn’t like dill and really, really, really loves gravlax and Christmas is, despite how some people may choose to proceed, not a time to torture loved ones.

I put one half of the salmon skin-down in a large baking dish and laid the other half skin-up on top of it so the flesh more or less matched up. I covered it with foil and plastic wrap, weighed it down with a cutting board that fit inside the dish, put it in the fridge and laid a few wine bottles on top to weigh it down further.

On that Wednesday morning I woke up at the ass crack of dawn. I took the salmon out of its dish, patted it dry, and transferred it to a small baking sheet I had sprinkled with half of the remaining salt-sugar mixture (leaving the two sides cleaving to one another the whole time but flipping it so the fillet on the bottom was now on the top) and sprinkled the top of the salmon with the rest of the sugar-salt. I then wrapped this whole thing in foil and plastic wrap and transferred it to its new home – a small $1.99 Ikea cooler lined with a kitchen garbage bag with several ice packs at the bottom. I then worked a small cutting board (that fit into the cooler) on to of the wrapped fish, put the various bottles of champagne we were bringing to Christmas on top to weigh it down, added more ice packs to top the whole thing off, tied the garbage bag shut, and zipped the cooler closed.

We put the cooler – FACING UP AT ALL TIMES FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DON’T MOVE THE COOLER! – in the trunk of my Honda Civic with scads and scads of presents (our luggage had to go in the backseat), filled our travel mugs with coffee, and carried a very sleepy son to the backseat where I’d made a nest with his favorite quilt, a pillow, and all our luggage. We hit highway 101 before the sun rose and drove north for two days (with plenty of stops to hike in redwoods, eat seafood, and buy one hell of a fabulous late-60s dress at a junk shop) until we got to Manzanita, Oregon.

On Thursday evening, I ransacked the cupboards of my friend’s mother’s beach house for a baking dish, unpacked the fish, flipped it again while transferring it to its new home, re-jiggered the fridge and found place for both fish and champagne. Then I said hello to the various lovely people with whom we were to pass our holiday.

Christmas morning, after Santa’s good will had been fully investigated, we got out the fish.

My dashing husband carved it and we put it – with or without cream cheese and red onion and capers as individual tastes dictated – on rye crackers, baguette, pumpernickel, and/or lefse.

We ate, we drank coffee, and before we knew it, our work was done.

I hope you all had holidays that were just as delicious and lovely and extended as mine were. It’s good to be back.