José Restaurant, Dallas

We considered several options to get to San Angelo TX to visit with Carter for his 25th birthday. The most efficient proved to be to fly to Dallas, rent a car, and drive the four hours to San Angelo. With a return flight to Oregon at 10am on Monday morning, we decided that we would return to Dallas on Sunday evening and camp out at a hotel near the airport, especially given the inefficiency of the rental car system at DFW.

This schedule left us with the opportunity to have a nice dinner in Dallas on Sunday night, a night when many restaurants are not open. Of all the places we could have gone, we chose José near Love Field in north Dallas, an easy drive from our hotel near DFW. José is known for its elevated Guadalajaran-inflected food and drink, a celebrated female chef in AQ Pittman, its use of house-made masa from corn brought in from Mexico, and a segment on "Taco Chronicles," the Netflix show that you do not dare watch if you are remotely hungry or trying to lose weight.

The Very Handsome Floor-to-Ceiling Back Bar at José

As a chef, when I go to a restaurant, I just want the kitchen team at that restaurant to show me what they do well. The restaurant knows far better than I do what they do well. So, why should I order off the menu if I have the option to let my hosts decide? It's a rare restaurant that will roll with a request to just order for Ann and me (there are some technical POS issues, but that's more a cop out than anything), so when I e-mailed asking if they would just order for us, I was pleasantly surprised to get an affirmative response from GM Victor Rojas within a short while.

Just as we were seated, a runner dropped off a basket of totopos and a couple of salsas, one red and one green. The green salsa was one of the standouts of the night. It was almost identical to the usual salsa verde I make at home, except that it was smoother and less rustic. I really enjoyed it. It's the small things for me that make an experience.

Within a couple of minutes of our being seated, Victor appeared at our table bearing amuses and introduced himself. He would take great care of us personally for most of the evening and we greatly enjoyed chatting with him.

Blue Corn Sopecito with Blue Crab Salad

While we were munching on the tiny sopes and contemplating the cocktail menu, I had a chance to look around the spacious dining room of the building that was once a dry cleaner. The industrial steel clear span framing gives a large open interior and high ceilings that leave room for an immense custom floor-to-ceiling back bar that is the focal point of the room.

Back to the table, the star of the sopecitos was not the crab, but the blue corn masa from which they were made. One of the primary reasons we selected this restaurant is because they nixtamalize their own corn and grind their own masa. Nixtamalization is the process of soaking dried corn kernels in a basic solution that dissolves the hard outer shell, the pericarp, of the kernel.

It is a process that my great grandmothers would have used to make the hominy (posole) so prevalent to the Scots-Irish Appalachians. When I was a boy, I would often see ash hoppers at country auctions. People would fill these hoppers with ashes from the fireplace and the rainwater would filter through the hopper and drain into a bucket below. The solution in the bucket would be lye, potassium hydroxide. Today, rather than using lye, we use refined hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide) called cal to nixtamalize corn.

Victor helped us choose cocktails. I had a riff on a Manhattan called the The José Way Manhattan, a dark complex mixture of mezcal, amaro, Banane du Brésil, vanilla, and Angostura bitters. Ann had a smoked tequila Old Fashioned of reposado, agave, and a couple of bitters. We really enjoyed our cocktails; they are similar to what we are making currently at our home bar where Ann's Oaxacan Old Fashioned will hang with anybody's.

Ann and Her Smoked Tequila Old Fashioned

The José Way Manhattan

Victor also brought us small glasses of the house mezcal and said that he had gone to Mexico to help make it. After smelling its unusual fruity nose similar to an eau de vie or schnapps, I asked how it was made. It is a pechuga of 100% espadín piñas. The pechuga used in the redistillation came from things that he sourced at the market: apples, guavas, and chile chilhaucle. I have had pechugas flavored with all sorts of things, but this was the most unique mezcal that I have ever tasted, a smooth and highly refined spirit that I enjoyed.

Arugula with Peaches, Fresnos, Grilled Okra, and Goat Cheese

Next up was an arugula salad course, the standout of the meal for me. The salad was plated on a spread of goat cheese from fairly local (Waco) Pachi Pachi Farms. The best parts were the fresh salad ingredients: sliced peaches, sliced mildly spicy Fresnos, and the revelatory ingredient, sliced grilled okra. I also loved the crunch of the toasted quinoa sprinkled on the salad.

As a southerner, I have grown, harvested, and cooked okra all my life. Even though I have cooked it myriad ways, I never thought to grill it gently. The smokiness from the grill enhances the small tender okra without activating any of its slime. In the highest form of chef flattery, I may rip this off, if I can ever find some tender baby okra out here in Oregon where it is essentially non-existent. 

Champagne Telmont

Our cocktails were done after the salad, so wanting a wine that would be able to stand up to anything that might come next, we went the sparkling route, ordering a bottle of Champagne Telmont. A label that we have not had before, it was a fine all-purpose wine with lots of red fruit dominating the nose, the palate balanced by a healthy addition of Chardonnay.

Dobladas de Pollo Enmoladas

Our first course with the Champagne was a plate of dobladas covered in mole. I detected chicken thigh meat, poblanos, and a white melting cheese inside the fresh tortillas and the top had a good sprinkle of queso fresco. To be honest, I wasn't expecting mole in a self-styled Jaliscan/Guadalajaran restaurant, but I have never met a mole I did not like.

Victor referred to the mole as "aged mole," meaning that each new batch contains some of the previous batch, old school, the way it has always been and should be done. He regaled us with the story of the line cook who thought to put the final batch of mole before COVID into the freezer to be used as a starter on the far side of the pandemic. Good looking out!

The mole on these dobladas was a fairly dark, fruity, complex sauce that in my world I would call a mole poblano. As much as I loved this mole, I cannot help but wonder how this combination of chicken, poblanos, and cheese would respond to a mole verde or pipián.

The star of this dish was neither the mole nor the filling. To quote Ann, “that tortilla though!” She would have been content with a stack of those tortillas and a ramekin of that excellent salsa verde. As would I.

Carne Asada, "Patatas Bravas," Salsa Roja

The Carne was an Excuse to Snack Fresh Tortillas!

We would get more awesome tortillas with our next dish, a cast iron dish of carne asada, onions, and peppers, served with whole roasted potatoes tossed in spice ("patatas bravas"), and a beautiful salsa roja. The eye opener from this dish was the salsa roja, an intense concentrated tomato sauce. The sauce was enhanced with smoky chile morita. The texture of the sauce and the smokiness reminded me in the best way of a beautiful roasted eggplant sauce.

Again, while the meat was awesome (sous vide tenderloin, I think), the tortillas and the salsa roja stole the thunder. Ann and I asked for more tortillas with which we polished off all that delicious sauce.

Coconut Flan with Candied Amaranth and Pepita Topping

Neither Ann nor I are dessert eaters because sweet flavors are not really our thing. Flan is so often cloying and pedestrian, but not so in this case. The pastry chef had a deft hand with the sugar and the addition of coconut milk made this flan much more interesting than usual. 

After dinner, Victor brought us little glasses of dark, barely sweet Fernet-Vallet as a digestif, a nice parting gesture. We thanked him profusely for his hospitality, the willingness to order for us, the excellent staff training, and of course, a delicious meal for which I would like to thank all the BoH team, especially the prep cooks and dishwashers who never get any credit, but without whom, nothing would happen.

The stand-out components of our meal were none of the star players. The glory goes to the supporting actors: the masa, the grilled okra, the salsa verde, and the salsa roja.

I compliment Victor, a consummate hospitality professional, and the service team on their attentiveness. I always love going to a restaurant where the entire service team takes responsibility for all guests, not the usual "not my table, not my problem" attitude. The FoH staff at José are well trained. Not a lot of guests would notice this, but then, I'm not an average guest, having owned, cooked at, and run a fine dining restaurant for a very long time.

Storm Day

We've been staring down the barrel of a winter storm warning for a few days, a warning on the books ever since the prior storm dumped on us on earlier in the week. This weekend was predicted to be extremely cold with a lot of snow. And oddly enough, the forecasters got it largely correct. Saturday the 13th, the snow really started ripping just before dawn and continued for the next 24 hours, a big, big powder day with plenty of wind and arctic temperatures.

Storm Progression, Saturday 10:30

Storm Progression, Saturday 16:00

Storm Progression, Sunday 07:45

All in all, it was just a day to hole up inside and let the storm rage while we sat under blankets by the fire, made some great food, and watched a little playoff football. My short perusal of social media led me to believe that pretty much the entire town was holed up at home as well. I don't believe that even the Mt. Bachelor ski resort was open in the face of this storm. I saw some pretty gnarly footage of the chairlifts iced up and swinging wildly in the wind.

As nice as sitting bundled up by the fire sounds, the day was punctuated by my shoveling the walk and the driveway three times, dawn, noon, and dusk, and really getting cold. Worse, all this shoveling really exacerbated my hurt back to the point where I can barely walk now, days later as I type this. I'm now in about day 10 of a big flare-up. No fun this feeling of being sliced unanesthetized with a flaming knife.

The temperatures Saturday ranged from a high of 1F at dawn to a low of -7F just after sunset and I could only be outside for a few minutes before the pads of my fingers went from stinging cold to numb and insensate, despite my gloves.

I was wearing my US Army combat gloves, the heaviest ones I own that still allow my fingers some mobility and still, ten minutes of shoveling was all I could take before coming in to warm up. For weather like this, I really needed my thin merino base-layer gloves with some big overmitts, but how to shovel with this set-up?

After the first shoveling expedition of the morning and a couple cups of delightful coffee, the first inside order of business was to get something delicious cooking for dinner. Fortunately, I had the foresight the night before to put a couple of pounds of Great Northern beans on to soak. In the winter, I always try to keep the pantry stocked with dried beans, just for times like this storm day.

White Chicken Chili About to Start in the Slow Cooker

Ann had mentioned wanting white chicken chili the day before (hence my soaking the beans) and I happened to have a big tray of chicken thighs that I was going to roast. I repurposed four of those chicken thighs for the chili, leaving the other six for roasting later in the week.

My idea of white chicken chili is white beans, onions, green chiles, cilantro, and garlic, all put in the slow cooker early in the morning and ready to eat by dinner when the chicken falls off the bone into the creamy beans.

In this case, instead of the yellow onions that I normally use, I had a large leek and half a bunch of green onions that had no other purpose, so into the pot they went. And I remembered that Dyce had given us a pint of New Mexico green chile, so that went in as well, with only half as many poblanos as I would normally use. Those New Mexican chiles had a bit of a sting to them!

A few hours later after smelling the beans and chicken starting to cook, Ann and I got pretty darned hungry, so around noon, it was Mission: Lunch. For New Year's Eve, we had planned a really impressive latke board to take to Dyce and Rob's to celebrate the New Year. I had prepped almost everything necessary for the board before the night got called off on account of illness, so we had lots of components already made in the refrigerator heading into this storm weekend.

These items really needed to be consumed before they went bad, so we set about eating them (but still holding onto the caviar in hopes that we can still share it with the guys in the next week.) Ann proposed for brunch that I do something using the smoked salmon that I had brought in from Scotland for New Years and using the loaf of bread that we had slated for another dinner that got axed for illness.

Smoked Salmon Smørrebrød  

Given that I had already prepared two great schmears for our latke board, a smoked salmon mousse and an egg mousse, I set out to make smoked salmon smørrebrød. Smørrebrød are wonderful and beautiful Danish open-faced sandwiches that started as butter on bread, but have evolved into a thing, now fully part and parcel of Danish culture.

The smørrebrød that I made for our lunch consist of smoked salmon mousse, smoked salmon, egg mousse, cornichons, and dill. The smoked salmon mousse is cream cheese, dill, minced capers, and locally hot-smoked salmon. The egg mousse is soft-cooked egg yolks, mayonnaise, dill, minced cornichons, minced capers, salt, and a touch of pimentón for a smoky je ne sais quoi.

Chardonnay by the Fire

While I was busy assembling the smørrebrød, Ann opened a bottle of wine, a Walter Scott Chardonnay. I wasn't really paying attention or even thinking too much (the pain from my back taking center stage) or I might have warned her off Chard to go with our smørrebrød. Even though Willamette Valley Chardonnay is relatively lightly oaked, oak still clashes mightily with fishy fish and smoked salmon is fishy fish. Oak makes the fish even fishier to the point where it's not fun.

While Ann offered to open something different (a sparkling wine would have been excellent), the solution was simple. Eat first, drink after.

At dusk after shoveling the walk and driveway (this really was snowblower snow) while watching the snowmobiles zip up and down the street, I came in to find that Ann had made us a cocktail to sip while we watched the AFC playoff game. Using the new high-end cocktail set that I gave her for Christmas, Ann mixed cocktails of mezcal, tequila, Ancho Reyes, agave, and lime and served them in a coupe rimmed with smoked salt. This was her best effort yet in that the acid balance was perfect.

Ann's Mezcal Cocktail

We don't watch a lot of football because we cut the cord a long time ago and are not willing to pay for the right to watch games. Also, we can take football or leave it. This is the first time that I can remember that a game has been live-streamed on an outlet that we get. From the get-go, the Chiefs crushed the Dolphins to move on to the divisional round of eight.

Watching Football on a Nasty Day

The announcers, in the pre-game yammering, were making a big deal about the weather in Kansas City delivering one of the coldest game time temperatures in NFL history at -4F. For giggles, I checked our temperature here in Bend (on a day when our high was 1F): seven below. I know what the players were feeling; I had been shoveling in that weather all day.

Cold, Cold Evening

As the game was nearing half-time, I served up white chicken chili from the slow cooker. It's hard to imagine a better dish than this on a very cold night. In fact, it was so cold that we opted to stay downstairs and watch the game by the fire, rather than go upstairs and watch it on the big TV. We keep it intentionally warmer downstairs where we spend the day and cooler upstairs where we sleep.

White Chicken Chili

When we went to bed after the game and after some more TV, it was still snowing, but it was definitely not dumping as hard as it had earlier in the day. Overnight, we added another 4-5 inches to our total accumulation, necessitating another early morning shoveling in the frigid air. Fortunately, 24 hours after the storm hit, it was no longer snowing, a flurry or two here and there excepted.

After coming in and warming my stiff fingers by the the fire, Ann and I enjoyed coffee by the fire and stayed near that fire all morning. If my back were not currently ripped to shreds, we would have been out snowshoeing through all the gorgeous new powder. It sucks to be sofa-bound after a big storm has just dumped oodles of fresh powder!

Late morning, Ann asked me to make some eggs with the smoked salmon leftover from yesterday's smørrebrød. As I headed in to the kitchen to get started, I saw the partial loaf of bread also leftover and quickly a plan came to mind. I still had lots of both chives and dill leftover from our aborted attempt to make a latke board for New Years and I decided that the chives should go in the eggs and the dill into a savory French toast.

Eggs with Chives, Smoked Salmon, Savory Dill French Toast

French Toast Almost Done

Dill French Toast Topped with Smoked Salmon and Chive Scrambled Eggs

After all the powder had blown off the tree limbs, we had a freezing fog event that deposited stunning ice crystals on all the plants. Our front yard was a veritable winter wonderland and I leave you with these parting shots.

Now that we have all this spectacular snowshoeing-depth snow, if I could just get my back straightened out to the point where I could walk....

Truckee: Tahoe Donner and Dinner on the Town

This is another post in the series about our visit to see our friends Kelley and Mark in Truckee, CA. Earlier in the day Monday, we had accompanied Mark and Kelley up to see the sights in Donner Pass: the petroglyphs, the China Wall, the railroad tunnels, the Rainbow Bridge, and the Sugar Bowl ski resort.

Earlier in the day, we had told Mark and Kelley that we'd like to come to Mark's restaurant and see if we could squeeze in for dinner. So, that was our ultimate plan for the evening. In the late afternoon before that, Kelley wanted to run an errand in Tahoe Donner as well as show us around that area where we were staying.

On our way back into town, our car still at Kelley's, she took us on the tour of Tahoe Donner, a neighborhood of some 6500 properties on the mountainside above Donner Lake and Truckee. As one of the country's largest HOAs, the residents have some crazy amenities including a golf course and their own private ski area at which Kelley used to work. We drove higher and higher up the mountain circling the ski hill until we peaked out at a small park on Donner Ridge where we took a brief walk before heading back into Truckee.

Stately Mountain Hemlocks, Tsuga mertensiana

Anderson's Thistle, Cirsium andersonii

Which Pine is it: Jeffrey or Ponderosa?
The Size of These Jeffrey Pine Cones, Pinus jefferyi

Leaving the heights above town, Kelley wanted to stop at the Safeway and pick up some supplies for our boat ride tomorrow plus a bottle of sparkling wine to take to her friends' brand new-to-them house to celebrate their closing and imminent move-in. For our boat ride, Kelley wanted to make sandwiches of genoa salami, spinach, and Boursin on baguette, so while she got those items, I went on the hunt for beer for the boat ride and a reasonably priced bottle of sparkling wine. I rolled the dice on a couple of different California beers (up in Bend, home to so many breweries, we just don't feel the need to drink imported beer, so good are our local and Oregon options). But when in Rome, right? 

Rolling the Dice on "Imported" Beer

After dropping the groceries at Kelley's, it was pushing six and moving on towards dusk. We all piled in her truck for the very short ride to her friends' new house which was directly on the way to Mark's restaurant, not that everything in Truckee isn't pretty much on the way to everything else in Truckee. It's a very small town that is basically laid out in a straight east-west line in the Truckee River valley or the Donner Creek Valley, the outflow from Donner Lake. The town has evolved really in a narrow straight line, like so many others, on the only flat land available in a mountainous area.

Two minutes after leaving, we met Forrest and Deanna at their very cute new home built back in the 1940s. After pouring the bottle of sparkling around, we got the grand tour of their house which unlike so many modern homes, has a ton of character. We even managed to recruit them to continue on with us into the heart of downtown Truckee to have dinner at Pianeta, Mark's restaurant (or in any case, attempt to dine at the highly booked establishment).

Mark in His Element

Beautifully Appointed Bar

My Delicious Cocktail, a Mezcal Paper Plane
Mezcal, Nonino, Aperol, and Lemon Juice

Ann and I Shared Ravioli for an Appetizer
Then Had More Pasta for Dinner

Pianeta: Reputed Former Laundry; Wall Construction by Chinese Laborers

Fortunately for us, when we arrived just after 7pm, pretty much prime time, there were four seats available at the bar, all the tables being booked all night as usual. Being the tallest, I stood while everyone else sat at a stool for a round of cocktails. This gave me a chance to look around the charming space. From the street, you enter to a host station and from there, you head up a half flight to a mezzanine level dining room or down half a flight to the long bar area. The bar area also has booths built against a beautiful old stone wall that Mark told me was also built by the same Chinese laborers who put in the railroad. Pianeta is charming and very tastefully appointed.

In about twenty minutes, another seat became available and I sat down with the crew and we ordered dinner and wine. We had a most pleasant dinner, great conversation, and to top things off, at the end of the meal, Mark picked up the check. Thank you friend, we owe you!

At pretty much closing time, we all bailed out into the now deserted downtown and went our separate ways. Ann and I were really looking forward to our cruise on Lake Tahoe in the morning (afternoon as it turned out), the subject of the next post.

Morocco via Marseilles

It's not a big secret that I love the food of North Africa; at the restaurant, my tasting menus often included dishes from or in homage to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. I find the use of spices fascinating and second only in the world to Indian cooking, another love of mine. North African cuisine also relies heavily on my favorite style of cooking, the braise, in the form of its ubiquitous tagines. Tagines are stews, essentially, cooked in the flat earthenware dish with the conical lid which gave its name to the dish.

Ann and Michelle

And I am a big student and lover of French provincial cooking, the more rustic dishes of the countryside versus the haute cuisine of Paris and the Michelin-starred restaurants. Provence, as a region, really excites my palate with its broadly Mediterranean cuisine, a far cry from the more pan-European cuisine of Paris and the north. I have fond memories of eating exciting and for me at the time, novel, dishes in Aix, Nice, Cassis, and Marseille.

What do these two regions on opposite sides of the bright sunny blue Mediterranean have to do with each other? A lot, as it turns out. People and their food have been coming and going across the water from continent to continent for millennia. And as people and cultures have mixed, each side of the sea has influenced the other in innumerable ways. The second language of the North African nations is French and the second cuisine of the south of France is North African, interpreted through the French lens. Highly spiced tajines, for example, are widespread along the Mediterranean coast of France.

I am always truly fascinated how distinct cuisines meet across political boundaries to inform each other. Think of Tex-Mex or the Polish influence in Pittsburgh and the Rust Belt. The mixing of African and French cooking to form une cuisine afro-française delights me.

We had new friends Andreas and Michelle over for dinner last evening and in the process of brainstorming the menu, Ann was pushing in the Moroccan direction. This naturally had me thinking of a tajine. And then I remembered a subtly spiced chicken tajine that I had once in Provence spiced merely with cumin, garlic, and olives. I would make a version of this tajine but naturally, I would make it my own, adding both saffron and preserved lemons to the dish in my food memory for a subtle, yet complex dish.

What to serve with a tajine? Well, naturally, one would make a very plain couscous to soak up all the delicious braising juices. But a dietary restriction precluded any gluten in the dinner. Ann suggested (she's very good at helping me to focus in my menu-making) panisse, the delightful chickpea French fry replacements from Marseille, the major French port on the Med. Why not panisse? It and other chickpea flour dishes (such as socca from Nice) are so common to Provence though they are likely to originate from another close neighbor, Italy.

That left one more dish for the menu, a side salad. Chopped tomato salads are common across the entire Mediterranean from North Africa to the Levant and back through Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, and France. Everyone has a simple salad of chopped tomatoes simply dressed. I thought to make a Moroccan version spiced with cumin until a sachet of fennel pollen arrived in the mail the afternoon of our dinner. Fennel pollen would make a tremendous substitute for cumin. And with that, the menu was largely set: panisses, tomato salad, and chicken and olive tajine.

Any time we have people over for dinner for the first time, I like to set a menu of dishes that I can execute in advance so that I can spend my time socializing rather than cooking. We save guest participation dinners for those who like to cook for future gatherings. However, Ann conveyed to me that Andreas was really into cooking or at least seeing some cooking, to pick the mind of a chef, and so Ann and I did minimal prep beforehand and left much of the actual cooking for after Andreas and Michelle arrived.

Cooking Chickpea Flour for Panisses

Bartender Annie Pre-Mixing a Batch of  Cocktails

About a week before the dinner, I started the process of preserving a lemon, cutting it into lengthwise quarters, coating it in salt mixed with a touch of cinnamon and thyme, and covering the whole with some kalamata olive brine (rather than lemon juice). I used to keep big batches of preserved lemons in the refrigerator, but they take up too much space, so now I just make them to order. They will cure fairly well in a week on the counter, but two weeks is better.

As an aside, we used to make preserved lemons (and dozens of other pickles) in huge containers at the restaurant and pray that the health inspector would not come in during the two-week period that we left them on the counter before refrigerating them. Health inspectors are notoriously bad at overlooking food items that are traditionally not refrigerated: butter, eggs, cured hams, cheeses, and all manner of pickles including sauerkraut and preserved lemons.

Also, I made a batch of harissa, the super spicy chile and spice paste that is ever so common in North Africa, especially Tunisia. I did not know when I made the batch what I would use it for other than as a condiment to accompany the tajine. I have made my own harissa for so long now that I can barely remember the process of reading through recipes for it and trying a bunch of commercial versions to come up with my own version.

One thing I don't like in a lot of commercial versions is a dependence on tomatoes or tomato paste in the sauce. If it's supposed to be a chile sauce, why use tomato as a filler? And so my version came over time to be a mixture of crushed red ripe jalapeños (easily available in the US), smoked paprika, spicy Hungarian paprika, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, a pinch of cinnamon, and spices. For my spices, I add texture to the sauce by leaving half of the spices whole. My spices include roughly equal parts of fennel, caraway, and cumin. The whole spices soften after about a week while all the flavors marry in the refrigerator. In my not so humble opinion, my harissa beats any that I have ever tasted.

Later in the week when talking with Ann about the menu, she clarified for me that her idea was to serve the panisse as a first course rather than as a couscous replacement with the main course. I loved that and immediately thought that we needed a dipping sauce for the crunchy sticks of cooked chickpea flour. Out of seemingly nowhere, the idea of harissa aïoli jumped into my mind and so the sauce issue and how I would use the harissa were settled.

Early yesterday morning, I ground a bunch of cumin and chopped a lot of garlic which I mixed with olive oil to make a paste. I then rubbed this paste into a batch of chicken thighs and put them in the refrigerator to marinate all day until needed at dinner time. Next, I pounded out a couple of cloves of garlic into a paste in my big green granite mortar and made a batch of plain aïoli that I flavored with a bunch of harissa to give a spicy sauce the color of Russian dressing.

After that, I made a batch of batter for the panisses by whisking water, salt, and olive oil into chickpea flour, bringing it a boil while stirring, then cooking over low heat while stirring constantly for ten minutes. Finally, I would spread the super thick batter into a greased dish to cool to room temperature on the counter. My basic recipe is roughly 250g of chickpea flour to a liter of water with a teaspoon of Kosher salt and a drizzle of olive oil. This is the perfect amount to put into a 9"x9" brownie pan.

In the afternoon, Ann mixed up a bunch of her Oaxacan Old Fashioneds (reposado tequila, mezcal, bitters, and agave nectar). She also rimmed four coupes with smoked salt, meaning that all she had to do when Andreas and Michelle arrived was to chill the drinks and strain into the cups. 

Panisse with Harissa Aïoli

When our guests arrived, I fired two frying pans on the cooktop, one for browning the chicken and one for frying the panisse. While the first batch of chicken was browning, I flipped the panisse cake onto my cutting board and cut it into fingers which Andreas and I fried in olive oil to crispy goodness.

While everyone was enjoying dipping these crunchy fingers into the spicy aïoli, I drained the excess oil from the chicken pan and added diced onion, preserved lemon, and saffron. The onions cooked until translucent at which point I added both green and black olives, both pitted, and moistened the mixture with a bit of chicken stock. Once the sauce was boiling rapidly, I poured it over the chicken which went into a 400F oven, covered, until the chicken was tender, about an hour.

Star of the Show: Tomato Salad

Between sips of wine and while the chicken was cooking, I made a quick tomato salad. It is so hard to get decent tomatoes in this part of Oregon, so I rely on grape tomatoes year round. They aren't awesome, but they aren't bad either. After splitting the tomatoes in half, I minced a quarter of a red onion and a big handful of Italian parsley from the farmers market. These I mixed into the salad with the juice of a lemon, some olive oil, salt, black pepper, and a big sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is something that I used to use frequently at the restaurant, mainly by sprinkling it over a finished dish. There is something special about a big piece of roasted Striped Bass garnished with a slug of great olive oil, a grating of lemon zest, a sprinkle of coarse salt, and a sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is exactly what it sounds, the dried pollen from fennel plants created by harvesting fennel blooms, letting them dry, and then shaking them to release the pollen. Fennel pollen is wickedly expensive but its unique and inimitable flavor makes it so worth the price. And a very little goes a long way as it is extremely flavorful. At first taste, the flavor is clearly of fennel, like fennel seed. But unlike fennel seed, the flavor is stronger, deeper, richer and finishes with a delightful fruitiness. Get you some today and play with it. You are guaranteed to fall in love with it as much as Ann and I have.

I had not set out to create a salad that would upstage every other thing that we ate or drank, but that was the happy result of substituting fennel pollen for cumin. Everyone was blown away by this simple salad. I will never forget it. The combination of fennel pollen and tomatoes yields a result that is far, far greater than the sum of the two parts. Happy, happy belly!

Chicken and Olive Tagine

Once the chicken was tender, I pulled it out of the oven and placed it on the stovetop where I boiled it rapidly to evaporate and concentrate the braising liquid. The result as you see in the photo above was as delicious as it was simple. To recap, the chicken was marinated in cumin and garlic, browned, and mixed with onions cooked in olive oil with saffron and preserved lemon to which I added green and black olives and chicken stock.

Ann, Andreas, Michelle

Philly Part 5, Graduation Day and Return to Oregon

This is the final post in my story of going to visit my daughters Lillie and Ellie in Philadelphia and to attend Lillie's graduation from Sidney Kimmel Medical School.

Lillie's graduation in Philly was on Wednesday. I arrived late Monday night and we spent the day Tuesday seeing the sights in Center City kind of freeform, wandering here and there as we pleased, from 20th Street in the west to the Delaware river in the east.

By contrast, Wednesday was nearly totally scripted: graduation starting at 9:30, a reception at the medical school after that, then lunch, followed by a cocktail party that Lillie and some of her classmates were throwing, and finally, dinner with two of her classmates and their families.

That's a lot, especially on no sleep. Tuesday night, my body still being on Pacific Daylight Time, I didn't fall asleep until 2am Eastern. And the same drill happened Wednesday morning as Tuesday. The garbage trucks started banging lots of dumpsters right outside my hotel at 4:45am. What the hell: I can make it on 2 hours and 45 minutes of sleep, can't I?

At 9:15, I went down to the lobby of the hotel to get a cup of coffee at the little coffee shop there. When I asked for dark roast drip, the barista assured me that their medium roast had plenty of flavor. Boy did it! In the same way that hot water has lots of flavor, so did this awful coffee.

Kimmel Center

And Again at Night

In my not totally broken-in dress shoes, I walked the few blocks to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, arriving at 9:30, the time we were told to arrive to be seated for the 10am ceremony. In a sign of things to come, the doors were closed and there was a massive herd of people on the sidewalk. Apparently Ellie and my ex had already gotten in prior to the doors being shut for some unknown reason, but I wasn't so fortunate. Finally, somebody reopened the doors and we were allowed to enter, but only after masking up and showing proof of vaccination against COVID.

Inside, it was a total fustercluck with ushers scurrying about with nary a clue. Once again, they made everyone get on line outside the doors to the auditorium. Finally, at 10:00am when the ceremony was supposed to have started, the ushers finally started seating people. We had the unfortunate luck to have drawn a snappy usher who was clearly having a bad day.

Inside the auditorium, the ceremony was held up for at least 20 minutes because the ushers were getting in the way of everyone being seated. And that was one of the better parts of the morning. More on that soon, I promise.

After being seated and while waiting for the ushers to stop impeding traffic, I had the chance to look around. The interior of the Kimmel Center is quite spectacular with three levels of balconies around the auditorium. The curved wood of the balconies reminded me of the curves of a violin body. Whether or not that was the intent, I cannot say, but the effect is stunning.

At the center of the stage rise the pipes for a spectacular organ. You can see the pipes in the photo below of Lillie walking across the stage. After I was seated, the organist started playing and I was really impressed with the rich tone of the instrument. Philly has a first class music venue for certain.

The Curved Balconies Remind Me of a Violin Body

Thanks to the inefficient ushers, the 10:00am ceremony started about 10:20. As if that were not bad enough, it was not until about 11:45 before the graduates started to walk across the stage to get their fake diplomas, the real ones being handed out after the ceremony, the thing that we all came to see. I have to say that this was the longest and worst graduation that I have ever attended.

First, they gave out three honorary degrees, at least two of which seemed to be deserved. The third, as the kids snarked at the reception later in the afternoon, went to a guy who had done nothing more than be "a rich white guy who gave a lot of money to the school." What took the cake was the provost who droned on and on and on, clearly loving hearing his own words. What little I heard bordered on nonsensical, what one student termed "word soup."

The entire audience was tuned out, buried in their phones. I was intermittently playing games on my phone and texting Lillie, who was busily involved in a group chat with her classmates. At the reception later, one of the students read some of the highlights of the chat, Wow! The kids were harsh!

Lillie Graduates Med School

Right after the ceremony, while Lillie went backstage to get her actual diploma, I left for the hotel to change, especially my dress shoes, which are not made for walking on city streets. I wasn't alone; pretty much the entire audience decided to change before heading to the reception several blocks away. I finally met back up with Lillie, Ellie, and their mother about a half an hour later, where after a few photos, we set forth for the reception down at the medical school.

The reception turned out to be lame and understaffed with long lines and not very good looking food. Since we had plans to have noodle soup at a restaurant in Chinatown, we bailed and walked the few blocks north to the restaurant.

I am a sucker for hand-pulled noodles and do not get the opportunity to eat them often. These were not all that great, I am afraid, and the girls, who all had the shaved noodles, fared better than I did. Still, in lovely Bend, Oregon, I have zero chance to eat Chinese noodle soup, so even mediocre noodles were a treat.

Post restaurant, we walked back to the apartment building where Lillie was couch surfing with two of her classmates, Thomas and Noah, the guys who came with her to the airport to pick me up. They were holding a small cocktail reception in the party room at the very top of the building. Not having had any sleep to speak of in the past few days, I didn't dare have anything to drink, not with dinner coming up. It would have put me to sleep. The graduate had no such compunction!

From the apartment building, we walked to a nearby Italian restaurant where we were having dinner with Thomas and Noah and their families.

The Graduate is Lit

The small Italian restaurant was swamped with students and their families. Our party of 14 was only one of many large tables and not the largest either. Our poor server had the entire room of all the big tops and he did his best to cope with being swamped. Because the restaurant was BYOB, we all brought bottles of wine, which the server opened for us. By the time we got menus 45 minutes later (all the menus were in use at tables seated before us), we had put a pretty good dent in the wine. None of us were disappointed in the delay because we had just had big bowls of noodle soup in the mid-afternoon.

The food wasn't awesome but it was priced accordingly, so whatever. We weren't there for the food anyway. Ellie fared the worst with her leaden and raw flour-tasting gnocchi. I believe that my being a chef may have done my kids a disservice in that Ellie took one look at my bucatini and said, "Well, that's overcooked!" For an appetizer, I tried their version of squid and white beans with arugula, a dish that is very near to my heart, because, what is not to like? I've had many better renditions.

After dinner, we all said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. While on Broad Street, I took the opportunity to photograph the Union League of Philadelphia Building in the dark. I had admired the beautiful brick and brownstone building during the day, but the shadows really added a lot of interest at night. I continued back to my hotel to get packed for my 8:30am flight back home, but I was pretty wired from my walk. To unwind a bit before calling it a night, I stopped at the bar in the high-end Mexican restaurant attached to the hotel lobby and sipped a shot of Mezcal, an unusual pechuga flavored with toasted corn.

The Union League of Philadelphia Building

The Nightscape from my Room

Travel Back to Oregon

I set my alarm for 5:30am local time (2:30am by my body clock) and was rudely ripped from sleep, it seems just moments after finishing packing, showering, and laying my head on the pillow. Going back to the airport was a fairly simple matter of catching the commuter rail at Suburban Station, just a few short blocks from my hotel.

I did not plan, however, on the subway entrance nearest my hotel being closed and barricaded and it took me a few minutes to find another entrance. I am unused to searching for the very small subway signs in the urban landscape, unlike when I was a regular Metro rider in the DC area. But I did plan for something to go wrong, leaving myself lots of spare time to get to the airport on the 6:25. Not trusting my sleep-deprived brain to find the correct train, I asked directions from several SEPTA employees who were very kind to point me to the correct track. And my wife says that I never ask for directions.

Waiting for My Train to Airport

My train, a local and not an airport express, arrived three minutes early and I boarded the fairly packed car. We left downtown headed west under the Schuylkill River to UPenn, where just about the entire train, all dressed in scrubs, got off at the Pennsylvania Medical Station. There were very few passengers left for the trip south down to PHL, in stark contrast to the madhouse scene at the airport that I found on arrival.

I got off at Terminal C and same drill as coming in. Security at Terminal C entrance was closed, so I had to hike down to Terminal B, the reverse of what I did coming off the plane to find Terminal C exit closed. At this point, just before 7am, it was pure chaos at the airport. I finally got on line for security about 250 yards from the screening area where people were slowly snaking through the TSA lines.

After minutes of standing on an unmoving line and hearing people around me grumble about missing their flights, suddenly things started moving. It seems to me that TSA opened more screening lines and started having some passengers bypass the body scanners. After walking through a carefully roped off corridor where a beautiful female German Shorthaired Pointer was sniffing everyone down, I was one of the fortunate ones who got to bypass the body scan. Points to TSA for getting me to coffee sooner!

We started boarding our plane, another new A321 just like on the inbound flight, about 15 minutes after I arrived at the gate. As I was sitting in the terminal waiting to board, I got a notification on my phone that I had been moved from my original center seat to a window seat closer to the front of the plane. This plane wasn't quite full and there was nobody in the center seat, leaving me plenty of room to stretch out. Thank you American!

When it came time to push off from the gate so that the airline could claim the all important "on time" departure, it being rush hour at the airport, there was too much traffic in the alley for us to back out. We finally got out and joined a line of American jets positioned head-to-tail on the taxiway like elephants in a circus parade. I counted at least nine jets ahead of us. Ultimately thirty minutes later, we got our turn on the active runway. Within a minute, we were over the Delaware River headed north with a bird's eye view of the USS New Jersey docked in Camden. We rolled west and headed up into the clouds, the remainder of the flight into Phoenix going without incident.

As we approached Phoenix, the layer of smoke along the ground from recent fires was obvious. After deplaning, I faced a 9.5-hour layover before my late departure for RDM and my bed in Bend. This gave me ample opportunity to wander the massive Terminal 4 at PHX and have really shitty airport food for both breakfast and dinner. As I was wandering, I wanted to get a shot or two of the Phoenix Mountains just north of the airport, so I snapped the photos below which show to some extent how busy this airport has become.

Our flight into Bend boarded about 20 minutes late. "Mechanical problem," they said, but having been seated at the gate for hours, I'd say that one of the pilot or first officer was delayed for I only saw one get on the plane. In any case, I hunchbacked it down the aisle of the CRJ and poured myself into my window seat where I proceeded to fade in and out all the way to RDM. Ann, who I missed so terribly on this solo trip, was waiting for me at the airport and we got home close to midnight, some 21.5 hours after this miserable travel day started. I slept like a dead thing.