This week’s Caturday is brought to you by Clara, our cat-in-law. She’s a pretty thing, a bit round these days, but not as pear shaped as our own gray Stella. She has gorgeous eyes, loves chasing a laser pointer bug, and has her people firmly wrapped around her paw. She likes to sit in the kitchen sink.
There are several very nice restaurants in Santa Cruz, but the one my brother-in-law and his partner had been most excited to take us to was Avanti. A charming little Mediterranean bistro in a strip mall off of Mission Street, this was one of the highlights of our trip. However, we went in the evening, it was pouring rain outside, and our table was dark. The pictures we took are unspeakably bad. So you shall have to envision the food I am about to describe, and I will appease my need to stick photos into posts by showing off some images I took from the ocean cliffs nearby.
Avanti was one of those places where I look at the menu and immediately want all of it, simultaneously. It was all perfectly seasonal and local and delicious-looking, and I couldn’t see how I could possibly choose. Eventually I calmed down and was able to focus, and we avoided some of the problem by ordering three antipasti for the table.
We’re back from (partly) sunny California! Spring break is over, we’re back at work and looking at a rather involved couple of weeks ahead. I want to do a few posts on some food highlights, but in the meantime you’re welcome to keep an eye on my Flickr stream for photos as I get them loaded in.
We were visiting my husband’s brother in Santa Cruz. The house is fabulously located less than a mile from the seashore, and just a few blocks from a pizzeria, a good grocery, a large collection of wine tasting rooms (more on those later) and a great bakery and cafe. On the first morning of our visit, we discovered that most of the breakfast goods in the house had almonds in them, so off to Kelly’s French Bakery we went.
I’m happy to report that Kelly’s makes a very nice cappuccino. I promised a coworker that I would drink a cappuccino in Santa Cruz for her, which is the sort of mission I take very seriously.
In the annals of putting fried eggs on top of things, this breakfast came very close to perfection. Here’s how to make it.
Take one Dungeness crab, cooked and cleaned.
Pick the meat out and set aside. Put the shell into a saucepan, cover with water, and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Strain and keep warm.
We eat a lot of greens around here, especially this time of year. Usually, just sauteed with olive oil and some slivered garlic, but occasionally done more elaborately with bean broth. I may once have tried simmering some kale with chicken broth, but it didn’t seem to add much. However, I recently obtained a copy of Paula Wolfert’s cookbook, The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean
The technique here is to sear beef or lamb bones in butter (with the pan covered), then add a cup of water, salt and pepper and simmer until the resulting broth is reduced down to just a few tablespoons. The bones removed, you cook mixed greens in the rich broth. You could certainly obtain a similar result by starting with pre-made beef broth and simmering it down, but I have a feeling that starting with bones gives a particularly tasty result.
I had meant to get a post up yesterday, but the pertinent photos are still in the camera, so…how about an adorable picture of a sleepy kitty? This bed, positioned near our dining room table, is one of the places Griffin likes to hang out so he can keep an eye on us. We spend a lot of time at our dining room table, so he spends a lot of time in bed. He takes his job seriously.
When we ordered our first (half) pig, we debated getting some of it cured by the butcher. In the end, partly because I am cheap frugal, we decided to get it all fresh, hams and side and all. I had been thinking we would cure some ourselves, but I’m beginning to suspect we’ll have eaten it all by the time I get serious about it. Oh, well, there’s always another pig.
But in the meantime, we have these nice big roasts of side pork, otherwise known as pork belly, the cut that is usually made into bacon. We’ve eaten it in restaurants a number of times, but this would be my first time cooking it. I decided to play it safe and make red-cooked pork belly, a classic Chinese preparation.
We’ve tried to get fresh pork belly before, at a local meat shop, but to my dismay they had already sliced it like bacon, even though it wasn’t cured. This time things worked out better, as you can see in the top picture. Isn’t that a beautiful piece of meat?
For my braising liquid, I used a combination of Molly Stevens’ recipe and our own “glazed gingery ribs” recipe. I combined chicken stock, water, brown sugar, red chile flakes, star anise, ginger, scallions and soy sauce in a Dutch oven and brought it to a simmer.
Spring has officially sprung! We’ve had some frost on the ground this past week (a rarity this winter), but the days have been mostly sunny and the breezes blow eddies of cherry petals around the streets. Daffodils are in full bloom and the tulips are already beginning to blaze away in pots, borders and farm fields. My garden is beginning to come to life, which makes my fingers itch to get out and weed and plant and take pictures.
I’m beginning to think I should just call this blog “Sandwiches on the Brain.” I seem to get a lot more excited about making sandwiches out of the leftovers of something than I do the original dish. I made a beautiful roast beef last weekend, complete with Yorkshire pudding (I made the mistake of looking through The River Cottage Meat Book
The beef was a rolled and tied cross-rib roast from our grassfed freezer cow, rubbed with fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden, and roasted just until perfectly rare. Sliced, a lot of the nice herb rub came off, so the largest pieces didn’t actually have any seasoning, but they still had a good beefy flavor. I made a special trip down to the co-op for a loaf of Samish Potato Bread, one of my favorite Breadfarm products – it has a nice sourdough tang, and the potato makes it spongy enough to soak up a lot of juices without falling apart. The first few days I stuck to a formula of mayo, horseradish, beef, lettuce, and jarred piquillo peppers, but the very last of the beef was consumed with a good dollop of sauerkraut instead. Mmmm.
I can’t quite believe how long it’s taken me to get interested in Korean food. Until recently, my exposure to it consisted of one red bean moon cake that a Korean friend gave me in college, and the pa jun recipe that I got from David Lebovitz that took over our lives for a while. Then some friends (the same ones who helped us out with our taco crawl) invited us to go with them to Blue Ginger, a Korean grill restaurant in Bellevue.
It was something of a life altering experience. The seafood pa jun, chock full of squid, was astonishing, the banchan (a myriad of tiny side dishes) fresh and tasty, and the hot metal shield draped in pork belly, marinated beef, kim chi, sliced garlic and jalapeños just plain fun. We ate a lot of kim chi and drank a lot of beer, and swore to continue our research at other local establishments.
Life, as it tends to, intervened, and we didn’t get out to any more Korean restaurants for awhile. I did do some research, though (as it turns out, there are a LOT of Korean restaurants between Everett and Tacoma), so when it came time to visit the city of Edmonds (to see world-class ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro – no, that isn’t a joke), we decided to pay a quick, just-the-two-of-us visit to HoSoonYi, a tofu restaurant tucked off of Highway 99. It was a little hard to find, as the street sign was only in Korean, but we made an educated guess at the address and found it.
I had read that HoSoonYi’s specialty was their soondobu, or tofu soup, so of course we ordered that. And the seafood pa jun, so as to compare it to Blue Ginger’s version. It was a very good thing that we had already been exposed to the concept of banchan, otherwise the enormous amount of food that descended upon us after placing this modest order might have sent us running out into the night.
Food on the Brain 