Christmas is A-Coming!

Christmas is getting here fast! It seems like it gets faster each year. I got the tree from Beth at the farmers market on Saturday: she and Gene had picked out a beautiful white fir (concolor) for us. I've never seen one of these trees before, but the large needles are striking!

Carter Actually Wanted to Help This Year

Ta Da!

Ann thought I was hamming it up for this picture, but what I was really doing was getting my evidence documented. She has this thing for gigantic trees and even though she hasn't said anything about this tree, I can tell that she's feeling a little underwhelmed by it. She asked Beth for a 9-foot tree and that is what we got, maybe even a bit more. Exhibit A: with my arm extended, I can touch 8 feet easily.

You Call THAT a Hammer?

I thought my idea of smashing the bag of candy canes against the granite was a splendid, no-fuss way of getting the job done. Too chef-like apparently, for we had to get out the world's most ridiculously small hammer to gently tap the candy canes. Love you, baby!

Carter and the Ricotta Cookies

Always Good, and Sunday, Needed

What's the Christmas season without a little Champagne to get things going? While we were decorating the tree and making cookies, we opened this bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The old widow, she's always predictably good and I do love the yeasty Clicquot house style. Later in the afternoon, we opened a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and it is nowhere near the wine that the Clicquot is. I am still spoiled by our Roland Champion grower Champagne, but Ann is not so much the fan.

The Champagne was well deserved and as it turns out, well needed, witness the next photo:

Caption Contest: How Would You Label This??

Yeah, OK, so teenagers are wont to turn teenage at any moment, no matter how nice and cooperative little adults they seem to be at any given instant. I'm going to let you pick a caption for the photo above. My suggestion: "I brought your ass into this world and I'll take it right out!" Thank God for Champagne!

The Inevitable Mess: Champagne Helps with This Too

Ricotta and Lemon Cookies

And Without the Lemon

Peppermint Bark

P.S. I forgot to say that Ann did all the work for these cookies. Didn't mean to take credit for her work.

Buona Pasqua!

Easter Sunday started off on a beautiful note with a full bright moon hanging in the sky illuminating the landscape at midnight after a long hard slog of a Saturday night dinner service at the restaurant, a slog that left me both sore and exhausted and sadly unable to sleep. Ma que bella luna!

What precious little sleep I got came well after midnight and was disrupted way too soon at 6am by a lot of racket from out back of the house. Despite 35-degree temperatures and frost on the grass, there was some kind of caterwauling happening out back, not unlike what I imagine a cat sounds like while being strangled.

Tossing and turning and fighting to go back to sleep, it dawned (pun intended) on me that it was Easter morning and the noise was an outside Easter sunrise service at one of the two churches in our little community. Both are within 400 yards of the back of our house.

I'm sure the choir sounded good up close, but it sounded anything but decent coming over the big field behind the house, especially to my sleep-deprived mind. But in the spirit of neighborliness, I was trying to forgive and forget when the preacher kicked in over the PA system, which got both dogs riled and barking.

And so I threw in the metaphorical towel and rather grumpily set about my day, taking the dogs outside at just about the time that the Baptist preacher from the closer of the two churches pushed his "big pitch"—as my former neighbor and Lutheran minister friend used to call his most important sermon of the year—as he pushed his big pitch to a nasally Southern Baptist crescendo.

Their business complete, the dogs and I headed back inside, they to eat breakfast like it was their last meal ever and I to start prepping for Easter dinner and wishing for some strozzapreti to cook and take next door as a neighborly gesture. You might have to be Italian to get that joke.

Easter is a time for flowers, no doubt. Our daffodils have been done for weeks, but here are some beautiful specimens that I brought to Ann from the farmers market and the phenomenal clematis we have growing out front. My aunt Susan also brought us a bunch of double daffodils and yellow tulips from her garden. How come everyone has daffodils but us?



At 7am, after getting the animals settled down, Ann was still asleep when I started prepping my part of the menu that Ann had worried over for weeks: grilled butterflied leg of lamb, grilled roulade of shiitake-stuffed pork tenderloin, roasted asparagus, and a green salad with tomato vinaigrette.

Ann's part was a shiitake and fingerling potato tart that she learned from Jen and a gorgeous layer cake, more about which later. And naturally Ann took care of the table, which was beautiful with its crown of hyacinths. It was a good division of labor, even if I drove her nuts not being able to nail down exactly what vegetables we were serving weeks in advance! She's a planner, Ann is, and it is taking some getting used to that I am a wing-it kind of cook. How do I know weeks in advance if we are going have asparagus for Easter? She's thinking, "How can he not know?"

Ann is crazy for cocktail napkins!


Our guests were Ann's parents Bob and Mary, my uncle and aunt Marshall and Susan, their daughter and my youngest first cousin Melissa, and our good friends Jen and Dewi. Isn't this the greatest photo of lovebirds Bob and Mary? And again you see them at the table with my uncle Marshall.


Here are Dewi, Marshall, and Susan and then my cousin Melissa.


Jen, Ann, and a shot of the two of us—I never realized how tiny Ann is beside me. I have no recollection of who shot this picture. Too much wine?


After everyone arrived, we poured around a couple bottles of our house sparkling wine, Bailly-Lapierre Crémant de Bourgogne, and then we attacked the hors d'oeuvres, a tray of things we had rustled from the fridge and a shiitake and fingerling potato tart that Ann made. Yes, there is always cheese and salame in our fridge, and yes, we did rip off this tart: it is the very same one that Jen has made for us a couple of times; thanks to her for the recipe! [That dough is crazy sticky!] Everyone wanted to know what was up with the artichoke hearts. Really, I found some leftover canned chokes in the fridge and just poured some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on them, with a sprinkle of salt, peppers, and dried herbs.


For the main course of our Easter dinner, we had long planned to have local lamb. I had a nice saddle that I was going to bone out and stuff when we had four guests. Then I switched to a leg at six guests. And a ten, I said the heck with it and stuffed a couple of pork tenderloins. The leg I butterflied and rubbed with a mint-rosemary pesto made from our garden. The pork tenders I butterflied and stuffed with a shiitake mushroom duxelles flavored with balsamic vinegar, then rolled and tied into a roulade. Both grilled at medium heat outside. The lamb, especially the charred pesto, was really good; the pork tenderloins fell apart (at the restaurant I would have wrapped them in caul fat to hold them together). Good, but unsightly and bad form for a professional chef.


To go with the meats, Ann made a delicious orzo salad and I scored some outstanding baby greens at the market.


And score! First asparagus of the year, roasted with olive oil, salt, and pepper!

With dinner, we had a lot of wine. Ann requested Syrah with the lamb, so we opened a Castello di Poppiano Syrah di Toscana. And I like Petit Verdot with lamb, so we opened some 2006 Linden PV. Ann also cracked one of her beloved Barrel 27 Right Hand Man Syrahs from Paso Robles, but I never saw or tasted it! And Dewi brought a Chinon, a 2009 Clos de la Niverdière, which has a bit of a barnyardy but otherwise typical Cab Franc nose and is especially pleasant for having seen no oak. I really love wines from Chinon and from just across the river in Bourgeuil.


We ended our delicious feast with one of the very best cakes that I have ever eaten. Ann baked a phenomenal lemon layer cake with lemon buttercream frosting! She keeps saying that she doesn't know how to bake, but I think she is sandbagging us! She presented the cake with a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday for Melissa's birthday coming up early next week. Dewi and I rousted a 1989 Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey Sauternes out of the cellar to go with the cake. It has a slightly oxidized nose with hints of cream sherry and toasted hazelnuts, and a pure lemony crème brûlée flavor with waves of acid and candied papaya. Delicious, but not as delicious as that cake! Ann, as I told you earlier, I have never had a professionally made cake as good as yours! Amazing, just amazing!


I cannot imagine a better Easter celebration with friends and family, memorable not only for the company, but for starting off with a full moon and noisy neighbors, and punctuated by fierce winds that ripped the siding off the south side of the house—a day we will never forget!

Linden Vineyards

Sunday was a pretty nice day; high 40s, mostly sunny, with a bit of a breeze. Not a bad day at all to head down to Linden to drink a bit of wine with our friend Karen. You can see from these photos that it is still late winter: nothing doing yet on the Chardonnay vines and the witch hazel wreath at the front door.


My partners in crime:


We did the obligatory tasting which was my first chance to taste the 2010 Seyval Blanc, which is a lot bigger, fatter, and more tropical than the 2009 that we're currently pouring at the restaurant. This is all due to the hot, hot 2010 summer. And it was also my first taste of the finished 2009 Claret; it seems a bit disjointed now and needs some age (which it will probably never get) to come together.

From there, we moved on to the library wine, always a highlight of our winter visits to Linden. They were pouring the 2004 Boisseau Red, a mostly Franc blend from Richard Boisseau's really warm west-facing site. It really was drinking superbly and a lot better than I imagined that hot site wine would be drinking at this point—I was really thinking it might be beyond prime, not so at all. And it has developed the most unusual cinnamon bun flavor right in the mid-palate, very cool.

After this, we had some sorely needed breakfast, whose detritus you see here, first with the 2008 Petit Verdot, which is simply wonderful with its dried blackberry leaf and big dense black fruit, and then with the 2008 Hardscrabble Red, which has more structure than the more opulent hot weather 2007.

And finally, the two of us, thanks to Karen, staring into the brutal late afternoon sun.

Feeling no pain, no pain at all!

Thanksgiving 2011—Good Friends

Thanksgiving 2011 at our house with family and friends.

Kelley, set to attack the mash.

Look at this spread!

Somebody grabbed my camera and got Carter in a picture, the only one of him all day, as he hid in the office and played games on the computer. He's as tall as his proud mama now. Nice bald spot on the chef.

Cindy's mom Jeanne looking great this year.

Jen holding court with Patty, Dewi, Marco Due, and Cindy all spellbound.

Dewi in action. A very rare photo of an empty Champagne glass. It would have been rude to start with anything else.

Girl chat.

Bob Chips, sunning himself. This is the best photo I took all day.

And Bob doing what he does best in the corner, out of the action.

Kelley and Marco Due. Note the vivacious and gregarious Marco.

What did Ann say to have Mary shaking her head?

The ladies playing Dance Party. Ed hiding behind the camera! Charlie making a rare appearance.