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

Hummus

Why is hummus so expensive at the store? When you can make a quart of hummus for $2, even in these inflated times, in five minutes, flavored the way that you want it, why would you buy pre-prepared hummus from the store?

Hummus with Sweet Peppers, Sugar Snaps, and
Roasted Broccoli and Sprouting Cauliflower

At the farmers market in McMinnville last week during our two-day quick trip to the Willamette Valley to see old friends and to do some shopping for wine, fish, and veggies that are unavailable in Central Oregon, we went to the Even Pull Farm stand. This is a farm that I have been doing business with for a long time and I love their products. We really miss being able to shop with them on a weekly basis.

Long story short, I spied several bunches of sprouting cauliflower on the back shelf and asked for two of them to go home with us. The loose heads with tiny florets used to be the secondary shoots that would grow around where the main head was removed, but any longer, seed companies are producing plants whose main crop are these cauliflowers that look more like broccolini in form than cauliflower.

I decided to roast this cauliflower with some broccoli from the fridge, but what to serve them with? As we move fully into spring in early June, the days are getting warmer, some up into the 70s, and with that warmer weather, we are starting to crave more summer-like foods. Spurred by a conversation that we had at dinner the night before with Dyce and Rob, I decided to make a small batch of hummus and serve it with the roasted veggies and also raw veggies that we need to consume before departing this week for Alabama to see my father, who is quite unwell.

Quick Hummus

I really feel awkward writing down a recipe for hummus when it is really something like soup. Everyone makes it to his or her own taste and it is all good. Still, I do understand that people do like to have a recipe to work from and so I offer this one, using a slug of roasted sesame oil rather than tahini. I just don't have the room in my fridge to keep tahini on hand, so I substitute a bit of sesame oil and it works well for me. The following recipe yields about a quart and is flavored as I like it, with olives and lots of spicy sambal oelek.

3 15.5 ounce cans chickpeas, drained
1 tablespoon roasted sesame oil
1 cup pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives, drained
1/4 cup sambal oelek (I like it spicy)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
juice of two lemons
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Add all the ingredients to a food processor and blend until smooth. For a smoother product, you can rub the chickpeas between your hands to remove the outer husks, but this then starts to become work and is no longer a quick recipe. Sambal oelek is an Indonesian spicy chile sauce that is readily available at most grocery stores. Huy Fong, the maker of our most famous Sriracha sauce, is the brand you want.

Taste for seasoning and adjust as you see fit. You may require more sesame oil, olive oil, lemon juice, sambal, or salt to make it taste like you want.

Chickpea Salad with Yogurt Dressing

Chickpea Salad with Yogurt Dressing

This post is mostly a note to myself to remember this salad, because Ann really loved it. I made it last evening from odds and ends I had in the kitchen that needed to be used. It's a two-part salad, the base of which is arugula tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt. The chickpea salad on top is chickpeas, olives, green onions, and grape tomatoes tossed in a yogurt-based dressing.

The dressing, very much a spur of the moment thing, is plain Greek yogurt flavored with garlic, cumin, and salt, spiced with chipotle adobo, and thinned with water. If I were making a true Mediterranean-inspired dressing, I would have used some other kind of spice, such as Urfa or Aleppo pepper, or even a bit of harissa, but I have a can of chipotles open in the refrigerator that needs to be used.

Update: I have cooked so much food in my life that I have forgotten much of what I have done. In cruising through old posts, I came across a recipe for this dressing that I published back in 2020. I totally forgot about it.

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

 

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

I've got this thing for roasted carrots with dobanjang and honey going on lately. I love the texture and flavors.

Last trip to the store, I bought some chickpeas and some carrots, knowing that Ann wanted to dip carrots into a batch of hummus for a light dinner. But the weather is still cold here in Central Oregon and I wasn't really feeling such summery fare. I thought instead to roast the carrots and serve them still warm out of the oven on a bed of hummus.

Right now, it is just too much effort to come up with a recipe for the two major ingredients here, hummus and the dobanjang honey sauce in which the carrots are tossed. Both of these I make at the drop of hat in the quantities that I want, spiced like I want. It robs my cooking of all spontaneity to measure and to assign a precise ingredient list to such whimsy. In short, codifying a dish robs all my joy. Sorry. Not sorry.

The hummus is chickpeas, lemon juice, pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives with some brine, garlic, pimentón, salt, a splash each of sriracha and sesame oil, with enough water to smooth it out to a rough paste. I'm not the biggest fan of super smooth hummus. It's great and all that, but I really do prefer more texture.

The sweet and spicy sauce could be made from anything spicy and anything sweet, but this version is about equal parts dobanjang and honey with a touch each of soy sauce and rice vinegar, to add salt and to tame the sweet a bit.

Maybe someday I will get around to codifying these two recipes, especially if I ever decide to write about creative vegan fare.

Poached Eggs with Chana Makhani

Annie is great at giving me ideas for dinner and something she said sparked me to poach some eggs and smother them in a low-fat chana makhani. I have a hard time eating a traditional makhani sauce, tomatoes with onions, spices, and lots of cream. Granted that it is one of the classic Indian sauces, but the cream gives my stomach fits. So I decided to try to fake the sauce with a bit of low-fat yogurt instead of cream and the results, while not the same as a classic makhani, were delicious.

Poached Eggs with Chana Makhani

Chickpeas, chana dal (or the black ones, kala chana), are one of my favorite legumes. I especially love popping the fresh ones right out of their pods and snacking them, but in any form, they are wonderful.

To start this dish, I sautéed some finely minced onion with whole cumin seeds until the onions started to brown a bit on the edges and the cumin seeds started to pop, then added a bit of ginger, a good bit of garlic, and a quick garam masala that I threw in my spice mill. Next in, a rough purée of  tomatoes and some chickpeas. I added a half a cup of low-fat yogurt along with water to cover the chickpeas and let the dish simmer for 90 minutes.

The resulting dish as you see above was delicious, the egg yolks blending into the sauce and adding some of the unctuousness that the heavy cream would have added. Still, the sauce was missing the silky texture and harmonious flavors that cream brings to the party. The low-fat yogurt with all its binders will never fully integrate with the sauce and leaves little speckles of white in the sauce.

All in all, it was a good compromise for a waist-friendly dish that is light on dairy and fat.

Roasted Chickpea and Broccoli Salad with Yogurt Dressing

We're starting to eat more and more vegetarian meals and I got to thinking about a salad of roasted chickpeas and broccoli with some sort of yogurt dressing. 

Roasted Chickpea and Broccoli Salad with Yogurt Dressing

The salad turned out pretty well, but without a good bit of dressing, I found the roasted chickpeas a bit dry. If I had dried them and coated them in olive oil, they would have crisped a lot sooner, but we are watching the fat intake as we near 30 pounds of collective weight loss.

Drained Chickpeas Tossed with Salt and Pimentón

I drained the chickpeas and used the remaining moisture to help the salt and pimentón adhere. If you're not watching the calories, pat the chickpeas dry and toss them in olive oil before adding the seasonings: the quality is definitely better.

Roasted Chickpeas

Broccoli on a Sheet Tray Coated with Pan Spray

Broccoli Roasted for 20 Minutes in a 425F Oven

Finishing the Broccoli by Steaming

Once the chickpeas and broccoli are roasted, toss them with as much or as little of the yogurt dressing as you would like. Season to taste. If the broccoli is nicely brown but still a bit crunchy for my liking, I like to put it in a bowl covered in film so that it can steam just a bit more and even out the cooking. File that away under school-of-hard-knocks lessons that they don't teach in culinary school.

Cumin-Chipotle Yogurt Dressing

This is a really easy, very low-fat dressing that is super tasty and versatile. I don't ordinarily like low-fat yogurt: it tastes and feels funny and fake to me. But as the base for a flavorful lower-calorie dressing, it works fine.

1 cup plain low-fat Greek yogurt
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin
1 tablespoon chipotle adobo
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
1 pinch dehydrated garlic

Mix everything well. If you need to, thin with additional water and adjust seasonings to your preference. The cumin flavor will expand as the dressing sits in the refrigerator, so go just a little lighter than you think you want, if you are not going to use the dressing immediately.

Chickpea and Roasted Butternut Squash Chili

Every now and again, I come up with a dish that is truly wonderful. I can only take credit for the execution, but not the idea. In point of fact, Ann asked me to make her chili with chickpeas and butternut squash, so I grabbed a decent-sized squash on my last trip to the farmers market. This recipe is a definite keeper. We really enjoyed it.

Chickpea and Roasted Butternut Squash Chili

This dish comes together in minutes once you have roasted the butternut squash, which you can do well in advance, even a day or two.

Roast Squash Until Caramelized

The trick to working with butternut squash is to concentrate its flavor by removing a lot of the water that it contains, otherwise it is pretty boring and will just dilute your dish. And fresh squash like I was working with are wetter than squash that have overwintered. Don't be shy about roasting your squash until it takes on good color as you can see above. This took an hour in a hot (400F) oven. I did a post earlier on how to cube butternut squash, if you need a refresher.

When roasting squash, patience is your friend, but be certain to toss the squash every 15 minutes or so such that all sides get a chance to cook. I cooked these on a dry sheet tray because I didn't want to add additional fat, but tossing the squash in a little oil before roasting will help them caramelize.

Chili Veg: Poblano, Onion, Cilantro Stems, Garlic

Sautéed Veg with Chili Spices

Start your chili by sautéeing the onion, poblano, garlic, and cilantro stems. If you read my recipes, you will see that I always call for sautéeing cilantro stems in the mix. The stems are more flavorful than the leaves and they are well suited to a mirepoix or soffrito. Please don't throw them away.

Once the onions have turned translucent, add the cumin and chile powder and cook for a minute or two before adding the water, roasted squash, and chickpeas.

Cook for about 10 minutes, season to taste, and serve. You can make yours as dry or as wet as you like. I decided to make this version fairly dry as I was not serving it over anything to sop up the broth.

Chickpea and Butternut Squash Chili

The procedure is outlined above, but I will recap it below. For four portions, use the quantities below. It takes a lot of squash. Because squash is mainly water, it is going to shrink a lot during cooking.

1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
1 large poblano, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced

stems of one bunch of cilantro, minced 

1 tablespoon freshly ground cumin
1 ounce ground mild chile (I use Numex)
1 quart water or vegetable stock
3 pounds of butternut squash cubes, roasted
3 pounds of cooked chickpeas
salt to taste

Film a large pan with oil and sauté the onion, poblano, garlic, and cilantro until the onion is translucent, about five minutes.

Add the cumin and chile powder and cook for another minute or so to get rid of the raw flavors of the spices.

Add the water, roasted squash, and chickpeas and cook for about 10 minutes at a simmer to let all the flavors come together.

Season and serve.

Ras el Hanout

During my tenure as a restaurant owner and chef of a fine dining restaurant, I used to get all kinds of trade publications in the mail. Today in the age of digital magazines, how weird does that sound? Although I always blazed my own trail as a chef, those magazines kept me abreast of American restaurant and menu trends. Some years ago, a big trend was chefs putting ras el hanout on everything.

Ras el Hanout Spices in Grinder

Ras el hanout is a general purpose spice blend from North Africa that is used in the same sense that garam masala, five spice powder, quatre épices, dukkah, and so forth are used. While these spice mixes are convenient and used by millions of cooks around the world, I never appreciated the one-size-fits-all nature of them, because rarely does one size fit all. And I probably spent too much time in an Indian kitchen where each dish had its own specific masala.

One of the things that caused American chefs to fall in love with ras el hanout is the complex mixture of sweet and savory spices that adds a definite North African flair to dishes. Some versions are highly complex indeed, counting dozens of ingredients. No matter the composition, we can all agree that those flavors are wonderful.

I happened on a couple of lamb foreshanks at the farmers market last week and instantly I knew I was going to do a lamb shank tagine, in my ever so traditional Western tagine, my crockpot. 

I don't keep spice mixes in the house because I like to tweak the mix for each dish according to my mood, so the first order of business was to make some ras el hanout. For my blend, I used allspice, coriander, paprika, cumin, caraway, fennel, and black pepper, in decreasing order of amount. I would have added powdered ginger, but I didn't have any, so I leaned a bit heavier on allspice and coriander.

Most people add cinnamon to their mix, but I prefer just to drop a cinnamon stick into the tagine. Many versions include spicy ground chiles, but I left them out, knowing that I would be adding some of my harissa paste (recipe here) directly into the dish. Garlic and saffron went into the dish separately as well.

Ras el Hanout

To start the tagine, I put into the crockpot:

a 28-ounce can of tomatoes
2 carrots, chopped
a large onion, chopped
6 cloves of garlic, minced
a couple huge spoonfuls of harissa
a cinnamon stick

a pinch of saffron 

3-4 tablespoons of my ras el hanout

a teaspoon of Kosher salt

 

Ready to Cook

After a good stir, in went the two lamb shanks to braise for about five hours. (How weird to be only cooking two shanks versus the 40 or so at a time we would cook at the restaurant!) At the end, I added a quart and a half of cooked chickpeas and let them warm through for about 20 minutes. After a final seasoning, the falling apart tender shanks were ready to serve, each with a dollop of harissa on top.

Lamb Shank and Chickpea Tagine with Harissa

The sweet and savory spices of ras el hanout are simply terrific with lamb. And simply torture to smell while cooking for the better part of the day!

Unanticipated bonus: the leftover chickpeas and broth from the tagine became hummus the following day!

A Vegetarian Fourth

Almost two years post restaurant, I rarely get the urge to cook full meals any longer. But on July 4th, I felt like I wanted to cook a really simple meal that we could enjoy on the front porch with our vegetarian neighbors, taking full advantage of Oregon's delightful summer weather.

I always associate the Fourth with watermelon and Ann had been asking me to make lentil burgers for a week or two, so I decided to build a meal around that: lentil burgers, pita, hummus, arugula, tzatziki, and a watermelon salad. I started around 7:30 in the morning with some really easy tasks, mixing up some pita dough, making tzatziki, and knocking out a quick watermelon salad.

About 30 minutes before neighbors Pat and Mary Jo came over, I baked the pita, keeping them warm under a towel, while simultaneously frying the lentil burgers which then went into the oven after I turned it off, to keep warm for dinner.

Pat and Mary Jo

"What can we bring?"

We started the evening with a stack of warm pita, a bowl of hummus, and cocktails of pomegranate liqueur and Prosecco. I think that if that was all we had to eat, we would have been happy chatting away on the front porch, hearing all the neighbors doing the same on their nearby porches.

Starters: Pita, Hummus, Pomegranate and Prosecco

I love hummus. Just ask anyone who ever worked for me at the restaurant. I probably ate it every day for lunch. I eat it less frequently now, cooking less, but I still love it. Although you can't see it, this hummus has a lot of green olives ground up with the chickpeas. I also use a drizzle of sesame oil rather than tahini. Same flavor, but easier.

For this batch destined for company, I went to the trouble of peeling all the chickpeas, six pounds of them. For regular batches, I don't peel them. The texture is really much better if you peel them, but I'm not working that hard on a daily basis. I am no longer a restaurant chef judged by the slightest nuances in food. I'm now a guy who values time with people more than time in the kitchen.

Hummus with Olives and a Drizzle of Olive Oil

Lentil burgers, black bean burgers, squash cakes: I have a love affair with fried vegetable patties of all sorts. For these, I cooked the lentils with garlic and herbs, drained them, added eggs, sautéed mirepoix of carrot, celery, and shiitake mushrooms, fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme), and panko. I pattied them out and put them in the fridge to firm up before frying.

Lentil Burgers; Local Sauvignon Blanc

Who doesn't love arugula tossed with some lemon juice, olive oil, and salt? It's one of the greatest and simplest salads.

I couldn't celebrate the Fourth without watermelon, so I made a really quick watermelon salad with feta cheese, red onions, mint from the back yard, olives, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Thank goodness for the smart plant breeders who came up with the infertile (seedless) triploid hybrid watermelons that are so delicious and easy to work with!

Call it tzatziki, cacik, or tarator, it's pretty much the same yogurt and cucumber condiment all over the Mediterranean. I've made a few thousand pounds of it in my life, always preferring the flavor of red wine vinegar in mine, rather than lemon juice. Herbs vary with my mood, but almost always include oregano, this fresh from my back yard.

Arugula, Watermelon Salad, Tzatziki

Behind the Scenes: Frying Lentil Burgers

Not sure why people think pita is hard to make. It's among the easiest flatbreads. I don't have a recipe per se, keying off the amount of water to give me final yield. One cup of water will incorporate enough flour to make 8 pita. Salt, yeast, and olive oil round out the dough, which I let rise twice before shaping into balls. After the balls rested for 20 minutes, I patted and rolled them out and into the very hot oven onto a hot sheet tray they went, three at a time, about two minutes on one side and another minute on the other.

These pita are very similar to the flatbreads and naan that I used to make at the restaurant, but I would typically put some yogurt in the dough for those. I did not for these pita, but it wouldn't have hurt.

Pita, Still Puffed from the Oven

When all was said and done, I was really tired. I no longer stand in the kitchen and cook all day and it shows. But I really am OK with that. I like the word retired in front of the word chef. It suits.

Three Sheets, Portland

Ann's birthday arrived just days after we landed in Oregon and just days after our anniversary. I wanted to take her out for a nice meal and I wanted her to meet one of my former sous chefs, Danny Robayo, before he decamped for a new restaurant venture in Hawaii. I had some great talent in my kitchen back in Virginia and Danny is an all star. His exec gig at Three Sheets in Portland is about his fourth or fifth restaurant since becoming an executive chef in his own right and I couldn't be prouder of what he has become.

When we planned to move, I was excited to be able to hook back up with him. Over the course of the summer though, it became apparent that we might miss him: I did an extensive interview with his new employers in Hawaii and knew that he had been offered that gig back in September. We just did make it to his restaurant with only days to spare. In fact, I met his replacement who was in the restaurant training to take over the reins. That's how close we were to missing each other.

Three Sheets is a brand new restaurant on Hayden Island along the south shore of the Columbia River and is situated in what looks to be a condo building right at the Columbia River Yacht Club. We chose to come for Saturday brunch because that would be one of the slower shifts and hopefully would leave us more time to visit with Danny. As it turns out, we did get to spend several minutes with him at various points in the morning and we got to meet his wife and family as they came in for breakfast.

The Birthday Girl

And Her Date

We got ourselves situated and when our server asked if we'd like a Bloody Mary from their bar, who could resist? She offered to let us garnish our own, but we left her to do it, not expecting these crazily decorated concoctions! I love pickles of all sorts, so it was no hardship to feast on these meal-worthy cocktails. Garnish aside, the texture and flavor of the bloodies was fantastic!

Excellent Bloody Marys

I wasn't sure what to expect. Danny told me that he'd cook us something when I called him earlier in the week. He dropped by the table and told us to order entrees and he'd take care of the rest. So, at this point, we were pretty much starving and ordered two of their vast entrees from the menu, not knowing that we would soon have more food than an army could eat.

Steelhead Caviar with Blinis and Squid Ink Mascarpone

Ann and I are not huge eaters. We like to eat, but this plate of blini with squid ink mascarpone and a tin of steelhead trout caviar was a good start towards satiating our appetites. What a beautiful appetizer!

Matsutake Mushrooms on Pea Purée

Next came this plate of matsutake mushrooms on a pea purée. I'm surprised at green peas in October, but the seasons are very different out here. This was a beautiful dish.

Pork Belly and Quail Egg on a Biscuit with Syrup

Next up was an entire breakfast, a split biscuit stuffed with pork belly, topped with a quail egg and drizzled in maple syrup. At this point, we were already plenty full and our entrees had yet to make an appearance at the table.

Hangtown Fry

For my main course, I ordered a Hangtown fry with soft scrambled eggs, fried oyster, and pork belly all sitting on a grilled slice of sour dough bread, garnished with harissa. Really delicious.

Grilled Cheese with Duck Egg

Ann went for an adult grilled cheese, topped with an over easy duck egg. The plates are huge and so the mammoth slices of bread appear to be normally sized, but don't let appearances fool you: the portions here are enormous.

King Salmon on Fresh Chickpeas

Now a good 2-1/2 hours into our feast, out comes Danny with this plate of king salmon, "just because you have to try this." The salmon was cooked perfectly, but I expect no less from Danny and his kitchen, and it was a really spectacular piece of fish. Not all salmon is created equal, and this stood head and shoulders above most.

What made the dish so outstanding was not the salmon, but the fresh chickpeas, just slightly cooked and mixed with a mild harissa and feta cheese. I love fresh chickpeas and was fortunate to have Yael to grow them for me at the restaurant. They're a pain to shell out, but they taste so wonderful. This is probably the single best dish I had in a restaurant in 2017.

Lobster and Matsutake Mushroom Risotto with Black Truffles

On the way out the door, Danny handed me a cardboard to-go container and whispered conspiratorially, "I know you'll know what to do with these." Not that I couldn't already smell the truffle from several feet away, but I resisted opening it until we got home to find a couple matsutakes, a couple lobster mushrooms, and a black truffle. I did indeed know just what to do with them and made this risotto a couple days later when we had finally gotten sufficiently hungry to eat again.

My great thanks to Chef Danny Robayo for taking great care of us, affording Ann and me the much-needed time to sit and talk for a morning, and of course, for the goodie box. Danny, I wish you all the luck with your move to Hawaii and in opening your new restaurant.

Beer and Butterbeans

Sunday August 23rd dawned a glorious day. I knew, from the moment I set foot out of the house early Sunday morning to walk the dogs, that my morning was going to involve sitting on the patio while waiting for Ann to arise. The temperature was remarkably in the low 60's and the humidity was finally down, a very pleasant change from the August status quo. It was a beautiful morning, one of those very special and rare mornings of which we see only a few a year.

I got off work early Saturday night (yes, slow nights do happen in the restaurant business) and consequently, I was up early. I knew since Saturday morning at the farmers market that my early Sunday morning project would be shelling butterbeans. Beth brought the first of her tiny crop of butterbeans to market and I grabbed a big bag of them for our Sunday dinner. Butterbeans are one of my all time favorites: I would suffer a lot for a batch of fresh butterbeans.

There is much confusion about butterbean terminology. Some people use different names for the different sizes of these beans. Some call the small beans limas and the big ones butterbeans and some people do exactly the opposite. This hardly makes sense because they are genetically the same bean. Me, I call them all butterbeans, but if I really want to call out a size difference, I'll add an appropriate adjective, as in baby butterbeans or large butterbeans. Beth's are large butterbeans as you see in the photo. Lima beans do not exist in my world.



Shelling Butterbeans

Outside on the patio, I shelled beans while Grace lay at my feet on the bluestones and stubby-legged troublemaker Charlie kept getting in the raised bed in which the squash are planted, not that it really mattered: this year the squash have foundered and we haven't got so much as a single fruit. That my toes and fingers were a bit chilled was really novel and got me thinking that I just cannot wait for fall any longer. With the days growing noticeably shorter, the locust trees already shedding leaves, and the nip in the air, I can just about taste fall.

Ann brought coffee out later when she got up and joined us in relishing the amazing weather. As I was shelling beans, I got to thinking about what we should do in the afternoon to take advantage of the phenomenal weather. For some reason, probably the linkage of fall weather and hiking in my mind, I got to thinking about the restaurant to which Kelly invited us a couple weekends ago when we were out hiking sweating on the Appalachian Trail. Although we couldn't make it then, I kept the name of the restaurant filed away. I figure that any place Kelly wants us to visit, given that she is a very fine chef, is worth our time.

So we undertook to drive down to Front Royal and try out PaveMint, styled a farm-to-street grill and micro- and craft-beer taphouse. The micro- and craft-beer part of this is important because Front Royal is one of the last bastions where Budmiller holds sway and it is important to forewarn the masses that only good beer is on tap. Already, I can see on the internet review sites that people are grumbling about the beer selection, i.e., that there is not any Budmiller anywhere to be found. My kind of place already.

Industrial Look and Feel

PaveMint is located in a recycled automotive garage in downtown Front Royal and the décor is intentionally spare and industrial as you can see in the photo with the tap wall clad in stainless steel, the recycled pallets, and the concrete bar top. A lot of people have complained about the décor on the web, but I'm one of those people who doesn't really care what the décor is: I go to a restaurant for the food and the beverage. As long as I am reasonably comfortable, the space and decoration are secondary.

For example, in St. Martin we had a great meal of grilled red snapper sitting at a picnic table at an impromptu restaurant right on the sidewalk of the Boulevard de Grande Case with a bazillion scooters going up and down the street and hundreds of people walking around celebrating Easter Monday, so a little recycled industrial isn't going to phase us. At PaveMint, I am sure that because the space is so hard it gets really noisy when there is a crowd, but at noon on a Sunday, no worries.

I suggested that we sit at the bar so that I could check out the beer selection. Glancing through the roughly 35 tap handles, I spied one for Deschutes Fresh-Squeezed IPA and I was done. This is currently my favorite beer. I keep comparing others to it and keep finding them wanting. Ann had an Allagash White, which she discovered on our visit to Portland, ME. We had tasters of Oskar Blues G'Knight, a double red IPA that is too malty for me; Baltimore's own DuClaw Sweet Baby Jesus Porter, never been a fan of chocolate or peanut butter in my beer; and Winchester's own Escutcheon Kölsch, a credible beer whose style does not appeal to me.



Starters: Falafel Bites and Crab Tots

Beer selection done, we turned to the menu which is pretty eclectic for Front Royal and is appealing to me as a chef. I like the fact that it is a simple and limited menu and pretty perfectly suited for the tiny kitchen. I decided I wanted duck confit tacos because I am always going to order duck confit tacos when I see them on the menu: reminds me of staff/chef-snacks at my own restaurant. Other than that, I told Ann to order whatever appealed to her. She ordered falafel bites and crab tots for starters and a burger for herself.

These falafels were a pretty decent take on the concept and I could snack a lot of them. Personally, I like more herbs in mine than most Americans are accustomed to, but nothing against these. The crab tots were less successful for me. I wouldn't order them again. They ended up being almost like a crab hushpuppy. I had to work hard to know that there was crab in mine and one of the three was still pretty raw in the middle. Not bad, but not memorable. I would rather pay a whole lot more and get a whole lot more crab for my money. I suspect that I am in the minority.

Duck Confit Tacos

These duck confit tacos were pretty damned decent drinking food and I could eat a lot of them, a whole lot of them. My duck confit is much more bomb that this, but these were honest and delicious tacos.

Ann's Bacon-Onion Jam Burger with Polenta Fries

After last weekend's trip to Melt Gourmet Cheeseburgers in Leesburg, I am hamburgered out for a very long time. Apparently, Ann, not so much because she ordered a burger at PaveMint. I strongly suggested she order it rare and she did. This was a good thing because it came out medium. I consider it a success when any burger I order anywhere has any pink in it, so little faith do I have in cooks.

Temperature issues aside, it was a delicious burger and much better than the burger I had at Melt. I'm sure it was a no-brainer for Ann to order polenta fries; I mean, what is a good Italian to do? These were good. I prefer a finer grind of polenta in fries because the coarser grain as in these fries makes a crust that is a bit tough and chewy. Still, kudos to anyone who puts polenta or chickpea fries on the menu.

My little nitpicks aside, I'm really happy with PaveMint and it pleases me that there is finally a decent casual restaurant in the restaurant wasteland that is Front Royal. The prices are very good for the quality. I hope this place really succeeds.

While sitting at the bar, I proposed that since we were already in Front Royal, that we go the extra 10 minutes and visit with Jeff and Kelly at Glen Manor Vineyards and to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner. On arriving, it was immediately obvious that harvest preparations are underway. Both presses are on the end of the crush pad and the north side is lined with empty fruit bins. Looking out over the vineyard, the bird netting is plainly visible.

One Week Before Harvest Begins

After an effusive greeting from Kelly, we spied Jorge and Randall out on the patio and went to say hello to them before coming back inside to taste. The Sauvignon Blanc in particular is starting to round out. I haven't tasted it in a couple of months when it was tasting super acidic. The reds are drinking really well now and we bought a bottle of Hodder Hill for dinner. After tasting, I got a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and we went back outside and sat with Jorge and Randall and caught up on the news.

And after a wonderful day out, we were tired and ready to head back to the house. I cooked the butterbeans and I enjoyed them to no end. As for the Hodder Hill, we decided to save that for another night when we were not so tired and could enjoy it more.

Lamb Loin and Chickpeas

We found a random lamb saddle in freezer this weekend. Seriously. Doesn't everyone have random things in the freezer? And we have no recollection why it was in there. But still, a lamb saddle is a great thing to have just hanging around. I took the loins off the saddle and served them over a sauté of chickpeas.

Lamb Loin with Chickpeas

A whole lamb saddle looks thus, with the loins running down the top side of the back bone and the tenderloins underneath. I took the tenderloins to work to use for a tasting menu. Because these muscles don't get a lot of exercise, they are very tender.

The Whole Saddle

And very expensive. You can see the tiny yield of meat, 4 portions, from the huge saddle. What you see below is the top loin, the bit that is the larger side of the T-bone chop, the part that is cut into New York strips on a steer. The opposing tenderloin from the underside of the backbone is the tiny eye on the T-bone or the bit that gets cut into filet mignon on a steer.

Skinned and Pan-Ready

Steaks like this take almost no time to cook. These were in the pan on super high flame for about two minutes on one side and one on the other. I sliced them after about five minutes of resting. I seasoned them simply by rubbing with olive oil, salt, and pepper before they went into the pan.

Never fear for the remainder of the saddle. The tenderloins went to a tasting menu; the remainder went into stock for soup along with all the bits of lamb that we pulled off the bones and out of the belly flaps. Nothing wasted.