The Dinner Files

My dad took this photo. His wife, a.k.a. my mom, is in San Francisco fetching me water and cooking up her famously fabulous wild rice salad and shuttling her grandson all about town while I lie in bed with ice and Percocet as my constant companions recovering from knee surgery (surgery necessitated by this incident).

My dad is no cook. He makes superlative toast, grills bratwurst to crispy juicy perfection, fries fish over camp fires, and turns out a mean bacon-and-eggs (he’s no fool, he fries the eggs in the bacon fat), but, in general, he doesn’t cook. Left to his own devices he tends towards take-out of one sort or another. He is no stranger to the prepared foods section at the Whole Foods near their house.

While he is no old-school meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he doesn’t mind meat and potatoes and has, more than once, commented on the sheer number of vegetables I seem to eat on a daily basis.

So when he sent me this picture he had snapped of the dinner — a bowl of split pea soup (defrosted), steamed asparagus, and a salad that, upon further questioning, was revealed to be from lettuce from the garden — he pulled together for himself the other night (subject line: “healthy dinner”), I was proud and charmed and terribly glad not to have fallen too far from that tree.

He is a man of many strengths, but one of the greatest examples my dad has always set is to be willing to try new things, like steaming asparagus or taking pictures of your meals.

That, and he always modeled the very important role Tabasco can play in any meal.

We were headed out of town. We needed to eat dinner. I wanted to use what was in the house. I didn’t want to put a bunch of effort into anything besides packing and trying desperately to clear crap off my desk. A quick reflection on what was in the house revealed unto me the wonder twin combination of spaghetti carbonara and a salad. Done and done. Easy peasy.

Except when I went to start cooking I realized I had thought we had bacon and we did not. I also realized that the parsley I had pictured sitting in the vegetable drawer was equally absent.

Some people might have panicked. Plenty of folks would have headed out for tacos or pizza or called up the Thai delivery place. Not this one. This one rooted around in the fridge just a moment longer and came up with the end of a salami and a bunch of fresh mint and proceeded as much as planned as possible under the circumstances.

What we then ate wasn’t spaghetti carbonara, that’s for sure. But it was also totally and completely delicious. I will make it again.

That spaghetti carbonara recipe is delicious, to be sure. But practiced cooks know that no recipe is so good or so perfect that it can’t bear to be toyed with and tweaked and modified as taste and supplies and audience demand. As I like to say, one way or another there is always dinner in the house.

I’ve tried drinking these cucumber sake cocktails without an ocean view, but it doesn’t quite have the same effect.

Click on the recipe, if you must, and you can shake and strain it, if you like, but once the ocean effect has taken affect and I’m in a sundress and there’s salt water in my hair and I’m as lazy as lazy can be, I’ve been know to just pour the sake over ice, add the cucumber slices, and call it a day.

Photo @ Marcia Gagliardi, a.k.a. the tablehopper.com*

I briefly hit the Pebble Beach Food and Wine event at the end of April (wow, I know, this post is amazingly late!). As I ran into colleagues and confessed that I hate tasting events, I was asked again and again, “why?”

While this may be shocking to people, I did not go into food writing because I like to wander around giant tents, convention halls, or hotel ballrooms eating bite-size portions of stone crab tamale with mango foam and drinking two-sip servings of wine.

I went into food writing primarily because I like to write. I also like to cook and I like to eat. I prefer to eat sitting down, surrounded by friends and family and the fine conversation that tends to follow. Remove the social element or an authentic context (I’m using “authentic” to denote a context that has some life and history to it since I am well aware that even a tasting event in a hotel ballroom is a context, it just happens not to be a context I value or want much of a part of) from food and my interest plummets. Quickly.

And wine? I would chose a full pour of something tasty I could sip while engaged in riveting or even just interesting conversation over six of anything I had to evaluate while standing at a folding table and being talked at by the winery’s director of marketing. Anything.

That said, I was amused that as teeny rabbit tamales and the aforementioned stone crab tamales (there, that’s my reporting from the event—chefs with a ton of servings to make ahead and serve to the masses have figured out what abuelas in my neighborhood have known for generations: the answer is tamales) were being doled out by chefs who seemed very earnest about their role in the Grand Tasting Tent (ugh, is the word “grand” a total flashing red light to anyone else? it’s like the classy, understated version of “classy”), the masses there to taste were busy lining up 40-deep to get a handful of the roasted lamb Tom Colicchio was meting out.

I believe at some point the roasted lamb was part of a dish or sandwich or something (there was no way of knowing because Tom, unlike the other chefs, did not bother to put the name of the dish he was serving on his sign), but after about an hour into the tasting the crowd’s insatiable demand for food Tom had touched meant the other ingredients had been run through and only the lamb was left. Lamb that had been, I should note, beautifully roasted and perfectly seasoned, but still simple roasted lamb. The people stayed in that line. They waited for plain roasted lamb that Tom Colicchio himself was carving up and pulling apart into serving shreds with his bare hands.

It warmed my heart. It really did. It exposed four things for which I was glad to collect empirical evidence: 1) No one really likes tastings, not really. If they did, they wouldn’t have waited around for something they already knew what it tasted like. 2) In the end, most people want simple, well prepared food, they really do. 3) To a striking degree people are complete celebrity whores. Shocking so. 4) Tom Colicchio has a wicked sense of humor. He is nice enough to play it off to great effect, too, and that is a sight to behold. He seemed to know that the first three things are unbelievably true and work it for his own entertainment. I mean, the guy was actually laughing as he tore the lamb apart with his bare hands and dropping handfuls of ripped-up meat onto the eagerly held tiny paper plates. There was a twinge of “fuck you” to the crowd desperate for his attention, sure, but he also posed for pictures and signed shirts and napkins and whatnot. He seemed to take pity on the poor bastards, paying their hard-earned—well, at least good—money to spend a beautiful California Saturday in a crowded tent standing in line to eat his meat. (Yes, I went there. Can you blame me? I mean these people were waiting forever just so Tom Colicchio would handle their meat. Oops, there I go again….)

At this point in this long-winded “story” you might have the presence of mind to wonder, “but Molly, if you hate giant tastings in tents so much, why on earth were you there?” And that, dear reader, would be a very good question. The short answer is that failed to scroll down on an email until it was too late. The full and complete answer is that I was invited by Driscoll’s berries to visit their research and testing farm in Watsonville and if there is anything I love more than visiting a farm, it’s visiting a research farm at which I am promised face time with a berry breeder. The email then went on to mention that Driscoll’s was a major sponsor of the Pebble Beach Food and W…. Oh, I don’t care who you sponsor, I thought, I just want to chat with the berry breeder. So I set aside a Saturday and agreed to go. I was sent the complete itinerary the Wednesday before, but I did not open said itinerary right away. The exact order of the field visit and the berry breakfast and the lecture from the berry breeder didn’t, I thought, make much of a difference. When I opened it on Friday I realized that I had mistook the stick for the carrot: Driscoll’s was getting other food folks to stop and learn about berries by promising them tickets to the Pebble Beach thing. After a morning visit to the berry farm we would be shuttled over the the festival and the Grand Tasting and seminars and such. It was last-minute and the mistake was totally mine and I wasn’t raised in a barn, so I didn’t cancel. But I did, I maintain, end up in the Grand Tasting tent totally and completely by accident.

* Cheers to Marcia for her mashing purple dress at the event, not to mention permission to use her photo of Tom Colicchio. If you don’t subscribe to tablehopper.com for her e-newsletter about dining in and a little bit around San Francisco, you are missing some very good weekly dine and dish in your inbox.