McMinnville July 2024

Once spring arrives and before fall closes the summer growing season, we try to get back over to McMinnville in the Willamette Valley to shop at the farmers market and to revisit the town where we used to live before coming across the Cascades to Bend. We have a goal of making the trip once a month, centered around Thursdays, the day of the McMinnville Downtown Farmers Market.

After getting in our morning workouts, we grabbed a couple of to-go trays of sushi at Market of Choice on our way out of town for our combination breakfast-lunch. We got away from Bend at 12:30 and that put us in McMinnville at about 4pm, traffic in Salem trying to get across the bridge into West Salem being a bear.

The timing of our first trip of 2024 could not have been better. It was the prettiest trip we have ever made across the Cascades because the timing placed us right in the middle of an exquisite wildflower bloom.

The wildflower show kicked off between Tumalo and Sisters where the forest floor under the widely-spaced Ponderosa Pines was highlighted with sulfur-yellow blooms of wild buckwheats, spikes of blue lupines, and masses of yellow balsamroots. As usual, traffic is a total pain in the rear in Sisters, but the trip out was far less a pain that the return trip on Friday afternoon when traffic was backed up a mile into Sisters.

As we climbed up toward Santiam Pass, we saw more and more penstemons along the roadside, both Royal penstemons and big patches of mat-forming ones, like Cardwell's. From the pass down into the Willamette Valley, the roadsides were colored by blooming rhododendrons, lupines much larger than we see east of the mountains, acres of oxeye daisies, red and black elderberries, masses of tall yellow dandelion-looking Cat's Ears near Detroit Lake, and ditches full of digitalis, more than I’ve ever seen in one place before. As we descended into the valley proper, masses of fuchsia sweet peas and acres of white to light purple Himalayan Blackberries added to the day.

On arriving in McMinnville, we went back to our old neighborhood and dropped in on friends Pat and Mary Jo. Unfortunately for us, it is hard to go back and see what has become of our magnificent gardens. We spent about 90 minutes catching up with them before heading to check in to our room conveniently located downtown near the county office, court, and jail complex.

After resting for a few minutes and changing into dinner clothes, we walked the block to dinner. This was our first visit to Pinch which opened last December. Located in the former Red Fox Bakery space next door to McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon, it is run by Paul and Emily Bachand, former owners of an old favorite of ours, Recipe, in Newberg.

Having dined at Recipe many times in the past, we already knew that the food would be really good. While it is a new restaurant, it is really pretty much a known quantity to us. 

Champagne to Start
It Would be Rude Not to

Starters: Sardinian Carta da Musica aka Pane Carasau
Olives, Pickled Peppers, Feta, and Manchego

Barbaresco with Dinner

Isn't She Beautiful?

Grilled Octopus, a Gorgeous Plate

Rigatoni with Lamb Ragù

While our preference would have been to have grazed small plates, the menu is a more traditional appetizer-entrée style. No matter; we certainly enjoyed our dinner. While the octopus plate was absolutely gorgeous, the lamb rigatoni stole the show. 

Ann and I agonized over choosing between the two pastas, rigatoni with lamb and cavatelli neri with Dungeness crab. While we much prefer the thicker cavatelli to rigatoni as a shape, really the Barbaresco dictated our choice of lamb over crab. We did not regret the choice at all and the rigatoni could not have been more perfectly cooked. That's our style: simple food, brilliantly executed.

After dinner, while chatting with Emily, Ann had mentioned our indecision and that she was intrigued by seeing a video that they had posted of their cavatelli maker in action making the black cavatelli. Emily retrieved the maker from the kitchen so I could see it. The first thing I did on going back to our room was to order one from Amazon, the price being extremely reasonable. I am not one to buy special purpose kitchen gear, but this machine looks to be a huge labor saver and thus worth finding a place to store it in our kitchen. It will actually fit in the drawer with the rest of our pasta gear.

Coffee at Flag & Wire

Well-served and well-sated, we walked the block back to our room and soon enough it was Thursday morning. The options for good coffee in McMinnville are slim so we always go to Flag & Wire over in the Grain Station building. Their coffee is always good and it is an easy walk from anywhere downtown. If we did not have a more-than-a-decade-long relationship with another Oregon roaster, we might order our beans from Flag & Wire.

After coffee and a brief return to our room, we were on to the main reason for our trip to McMinnville, the farmers market that opens at 11:30 on Thursdays. It is one of the main things that we miss about McMinnville. We managed to fill our cooler to overflowing with green onions, sprouting cauliflower, broccolini, beets, cucumber, cavolo nero, salad mix, small carrots, chives, dill, asparagus, hakurei turnips, sugar snaps, squash blooms, chicken eggs, and duck eggs.

Our Farmers Market Haul

After stowing our two overflowing shopping bags in the refrigerator back in our room, we set out for the half block walk to Two Dogs Taphouse to see our friend Brady. Two Dogs, when it was located on Third Street at Ford, was our old stomping grounds and a must-stop after the farmers market before our walk back to our house on the very northern edge of town.

Lunch at Two Dogs

After lunch at Two Dogs, we headed out to see our former next door neighbor Barb. Her dog Sierra is in a really bad way but was super happy to see us. I'm afraid the poor thing is about at the end of her stay with us and we really feel for Barb. It was great to catch up with Barb and see Sierra, whom we've known since she was a puppy, for perhaps the final time.

Our old neighborhood has really changed. Situated on a hazelnut orchard when we lived there, it felt nestled away and secluded on the far northern edge of town, with lots of wildlife: birds, tree squirrels, ground squirrels, skunks, coyotes, and deer.

The School Board owned the orchards, having bought them some years ago for expansion purposes. The trees were no longer neither young nor in good shape and the production costs for hazelnuts no doubt far exceeded the income that they could generate, so sadly, they decided that trees had to go. And with their demise, the character of the neighborhood changed overnight. Now with the trees all cut, it seems more urban and less welcoming. We moved at a good time.

Speaking of moving, our move across the Cascades took us away from the vast hayfields that hit peak bloom in late May and early June. We could see waves of pollen on the breeze. We arrived back in the valley at peak pollen time and it really hammered Ann. I felt bad for her; on the way back from Barb's, we stopped at the drug store to get some meds for her.

After the drug store, we spent a few minutes resting back at our room before changing for dinner at Humble Spirit on Third Street. We tried this restaurant with Dyce and Rob on our last trip on our last trip over and we were impressed. We were probably even more impressed on this visit.

Pink Shrimp Rolls

Hazelnuts and Pork Belly

Hot Mess Croquette

We started with Champagne and an order of shrimp rolls, hazelnuts with pork belly, and a croquette called a hot mess, a dish we ordered on spec, not really understanding what it was. It turned out to be very similar to a charcuterie dish that I used to make at the restaurant in which I would pick shreds of cooked meat (often turkey neck meat) and pack it into a loaf mold. Then I would set it with highly reduced stock and after refrigerating, would slice it and fry it to serve as an appetizer. In many respects, it is similar to souse or headcheese, but served warm. This one, made of pork, was breaded and fried and served as a croquette. Delicious.

Clams and Chorizo

We still had some Champagne left, so we ordered a dish of small clams braised with chorizo and Sherry to go with it, before moving on to red wine and red wine food. The unusual thing is that it was served on top of a croustade smeared with a beef liver pâté. Ann and I fought over this bread that was soaked in the braising liquid.

2010 Tondonia, Still Too Young

We had been chatting with our server all night long and it is was clear to us that he is as passionate about food as we are. In the course of talking about the restaurant sourcing many of its products from its own farm, Ann mentioned that we are looking for a supplier for a skin-on pork belly from which to make a porchetta for the holidays. She wondered if their farm might be amenable. And while we didn't get an answer other than it would not hurt to ask, it seems a seed was planted.

Unbeknownst to us, the restaurant was hosting a large table of family that evening for which the chef had prepared a special meal, including porchetta. After we ordered a red to accompany dinner, our server asked us to hold off on ordering anything else and went to find out if there was any porchetta we could have. He did; there was; we killed it. As good as the porchetta itself was, the beluga lentils it was sat upon were fantastic, having been cooked with smoky ham hocks. 

Porchetta, Beluga Lentils, Fennel and Herb Salad
Cherry Gastrique

After killing the porchetta, we got a piece of cheese with which to finish our remaining wine. All in all, a terrific meal and one that reinforced for us that Humble Spirit might be the best restaurant in McMinnville.

The following morning, I packed up our vegetables and we set out for coffee once again at Flag & Wire. Caffeined up, we headed south toward Salem, getting gas and sandwiches for lunch along the way. Our goal was to stop at Silver Falls State Park on the way home for a nice walk which is described in the next post.

Something Old, Something New

From earlier in the spring, a couple of dishes celebrating the first asparagus of the year and the final butternut squash from winter storage, "Something Old, Something New."

The first dish took full advantage of a rare sunny spring day to grill both the asparagus and the butternut squash, giving them a nice char that works against the sweetness of the scallops. Garnishes are a quick sweet chile sauce and Korean chile threads known as sil-gochu.

Scallops with Grilled Asparagus, Grilled Butternut, Sweet Chile Sauce, and Chile Threads

Grilling the Veg

Black Steel Gives a Perfect Sear Every Time

Sweet Chile Sauce (Agave, Sambal, Salt)

The second dish came on the following night when the weather turned back to its usual rainy springtime norm, making us want something warm and comforting, the genesis of the butternut lentils, a batch of brown lentils cooked with cubes of the bell of the butternut, the leftover bits that I couldn't slice for the grill the evening before. The salad is shaved raw asparagus dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt.

King Salmon, Butternut Lentils, and Shaved Asparagus Salad

Halibut Cheeks with Masoor Dal Tadka

Even though I am retired and have long stretches of time at the house, I still find many nights that I am looking for something quick to get on the table. My days these days seem to be filled with renovation and remodeling tasks. By the time dinner time rolls around, I don't want to make a huge investment in time in the kitchen, yet I do want a healthy and tasty dinner. By quick, I mean something on the order of 15-20 minutes of active work in the kitchen.

To help with this, I am trying to keep a few quick fish portions in the freezer. That is, when I buy fish at the seafood merchant, I try to buy 3 or 4 meals of fish and freeze that which I don't want to cook right away. Which brings us to the halibut cheeks that I IQFed a few weeks ago. IQF is a food service term for Individually Quick Frozen.

What it means in my home setting is that I spread halibut cheeks out on a sheet tray (coated with pan spray) so that none of them touch and freeze them. Once the cheeks freeze hard, I pluck them off the sheet tray and put them in a freezer bag. In this way, I can pull out as few or as many as I want for a meal. And because they are so thin, I can either defrost them under running water in 20 minutes or so, or I can leave them in the refrigerator overnight. In either case, they are ready to cook quickly.

Halibut Cheeks with Masoor Dal Tadka

Our local grocery has a vast bulk section and as I was wandering through last trip to the store, I spied a bin of red split lentils which I know by their Hindi name as masoor dal. I brought some home for the pantry because they too are a quick cooking food, great for when you don't have a lot of time to cook. A lot of folks use a pressure cooker to have the dal ready very quickly, but even without a pressure cooker, they are done in less than an hour.

One of my very favorite dal preparations is called a tadka or "tempering" in which spices are warmed in hot oil and then mixed into the cooked dal. So I made a quick masoor dal tadka for our halibut cheeks by cooking onion, garlic, ginger, and cumin in a bit of oil until the cumin seeds started to pop. For spices, most people use garam masala, the pseudo-generic Indian spice mix, but I tend to individual spices ground at the moment in my spice grinder: coriander, cumin, fennel, cayenne, and mehti (fenugreek seeds). I stir in the spices and then add the masoor dal. I add water as necessary and cook the lentils until they are tender and falling apart a bit, but still have some texture.

For the tadka, I heat a little ghee or oil and add whole cumin and mustard seeds. When they start popping, I drop in a touch of cayenne powder and turn off the heat. Then I pour this mix over the lentils and they are ready to serve.

All this was done in advance of cooking the fish and while the fish was finishing on its second side, I sautéed a bit of baby spinach for a garnish. One hour start to finish is a pretty quick dinner in my book, especially when most of the time was spent having a glass of Pinot Noir with Ann while the lentils simmered away gently.

Lentilles du Puy

I love legumes: dried chickpeas, lentils, and black-eyed peas form a large part of my diet. Lentils are an especial favorite and I have been eating them all my life. They were a constant at my restaurant and our pantry stocked 7 to 10 kinds at any given time to give us the flexibility to make any dish that we wanted.

My love of lentils started early. When I was a youngster, my mom would cook big pots of lentil soup with kielbasa and I would be in hog heaven. As I grew older and had my own apartment, I discovered that lentils come in different colors at a local high-end market. Trips for work exposed me to Indian restaurants and the range of daal so common to that cuisine. Then, in my first foray into the wine business on a buying trip to France, I fell in love with the green lentils called lentilles (vertes) du Puy which have turned out to be my favorite. Opening a restaurant gave me access to many more kinds of lentils including the amazing tiny black lentils called beluga, after the caviar.

These days, I am limited to the lentils that our local grocery stocks. There are the ubiquitous brown lentils, of course. But they also have a bulk section in which I can buy all the Puy lentils that I want!

Pan-Seared Steelhead Trout on Puy Lentils

Along with saucisse aux lentilles, sausage and lentils, a staple of French cafés, bistros, and quotidian restaurants is saumon aux lentilles, salmon with lentils, a classic pairing. Here in Oregon, we have access to amazing salmon of many species. For my version of salmon and lentils, I chose a really fatty side of steelhead trout. While not technically a salmon (but in the family), steelhead trout is the ocean going form of rainbow trout. For all intents and purposes, the flesh looks, cooks, and tastes like salmon. It is totally interchangeable with salmon.

Flavorings for the Lentils

There are two tricks for cooking the small green and black lentils. The first trick is that they readily absorb flavors, so the more flavor you add to the broth, the better. Above, you see that I am using garlic and shallot, both minced, as well as a bouquet garni of a sprig of lovage, a bundle of thyme, and a bunch of Italian parsley stems.

Lovage is a vastly underappreciated celery-like herb that has the most incredibly haunting flavor. It was a priority to plant lovage when we first moved to our new home here in Oregon. I can no longer cook without it.

Ready to Cook

Besides taking flavor from these seasonings, the lentils also pick up the base flavor of the broth, so I used about a quart and a half of chicken stock that I had just made from the bones and skin leftover from breaking down a tray of chicken thighs.

Cooked Lentils, Bouquet Garni on Top

The second trick is not to overcook the lentils. I cover the lentils by about a finger width of broth and then bring them up to a gentle simmer. At this point, I keep an eye on the broth level, adding more if necessary. After about 15 minutes, I am tasting the lentils frequently until they are just done. This pot took exactly 20 minutes. You want the lentils firm, so that they hold their shape, without having a crunchy, raw center.

At this point, if there is any liquid left in the lentils, you have the option of draining them (but save the tasty liquid for soup!) if you want. My pot didn't really have liquid to drain. If you are going to serve them warm, you can dress them with a vinaigrette or a pat of butter, but they are delicious plain. Or you can refrigerate them and make a cold salad from them the next day.

And that's a brief tutorial on cooking my favorite lentils. I'm not alone in my love for them. They are so valued by the French that they have their own AOC and AOP, reserved name status. Nobody but the growers in the Haute-Loire can call their lentils du Puy. By analogy, in a sea of sparkling wine and lentils, for me, lentilles vertes du Puy are the Champagne of lentils.

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.

Walking in the Rain

Our plan to hike to Mary's Rock this weekend imploded about 9:30 Thursday night when Carter casually announced that the high school spring sports celebration at which he would receive his track letter would be held at 2pm on Sunday. That and this crappy weather conspired against us. Our string of beautiful Sundays in rain-filled weeks fell apart as the rain this week extended fully through the weekend.

Sunday at noon just after a wave of heavier rain appeared to have passed on the radar, we threw on our rain jackets and headed out for a just-under-four-mile walk of the neighborhood. We found out just how lacking our rain gear is. My 35-year old rain jacket kind of keeps the water off but really does let it soak through and Ann borrowed a wind jacket from Carter; ditto for that. It was one of those misty rains that when you're out hiking, you have to decide whether it is worse to sweat under rain gear or just leave the stuff off and let the rain wet you. It was about 55 degrees out, so not that cold, but after 75 minutes, we were ready for hot showers.

Although the neighborhood is mostly urban, there are some undeveloped parts especially along the creeks that feed into Opequon Creek and then quickly into the Shenandoah River. I was surprised at the number and types of flowers in bloom. We saw a single black locust tree in bloom (those in our yard are not open yet) and I picked some blooms to munch on. I like their green pea x honey flavor. Oxe-eye daisies are also starting to open, but not in our yard. Rafts of blackberries are everywhere. Lots of purple clover is poking out of the grass here and there.

Sweet Yellow Clover

Penstemon laevigatus, Eastern Smooth Beardtongue

Dame's Rocket

Chilly and cold weather led Ann to suggest a pot of lentils for dinner and I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agreed. Besides being a favorite food, the thought of tucking into a warm bowl of goodness on a blah day was comforting. After the to-do at school, we dropped in to the grocery store to score a couple pounds of lentils, a tube of tomato paste, some carrots, and some celery. The lentils are flavored with mirepoix, garlic, a little tomato paste, some pimentón, and a big bouquet of sage, thyme, and rosemary.

Sage, Thyme, and Rosemary in the Bouquet Garni

Final Product (with Sambal on Top)

Warm lentils, easy to fix, easy to eat, comforting, and tasty. What more do you want on a chilly rainy day?

Quaglie al Barolo

It all started with a fantastic bottle of Barolo and too many cooks in the kitchen.

Just like at home, there can be too many cooks in a restaurant kitchen as well. And last night given the sparse reservations and ugly weather forecast, we had too many cooks in the kitchen. So, I planned to take the night off and let the line cooks fly on their own. Honestly, they wanted their nitpicky boss out of their hair for a night and so they were dropping hints about me going home all afternoon. They're not as slick as they think they are. But I was happy to play along.

That takes care of the too many cooks bit. But what about the Barolo? Earlier in the week, I had tasted an outstanding Barolo that I just knew that Ann would love. It was delivered yesterday morning. I had been looking for an occasion to break it out for her, to let her taste it blind, and to see how she reacted to it, hoping that she would be as beguiled by the wine as was I.

It All Started with a Bottle of Barolo

I was hooked by the gorgeous room-filling nose that offered hints of anise, rose petals, red raspberries, dried raspberry leaf tea, and other floral and herbaceous notes. Moreover, it tasted equally wonderful! There is nothing more depressing than a wine that smells amazing and then doesn't follow through. I am very impressed by this 2011 Guido Porro Barolo Vigna Santa Caterina. In my book, Nebbiolo, like Pinot Noir, can make highly expressive wines in cooler years and on cooler sites. The wines have less fruit to mask the nuances, both in the nose and on the palate.

Knowing that I was going to serve Barolo with dinner started helping me focus on what to make for dinner. Criteria: simple, flavorful, easy on the waistline, less than an hour from start to finish, and pairs well with Barolo. If we both weren't trying to shed a bunch of excess weight, I would have made a simple but mindblowing risotto ai funghi. But rice and other simple carbs are just not on our diet right now, at least not midweek. Maybe if we are splurging on the weekend.

I started by thinking about proteins, what would pair well and what I had on hand. Barolo rules out seafood. What I really wanted was a roasted guinea hen or barring that, a fat hen chicken. Of course, I had neither on hand. But I did have two spare quail which would suffice. Now what to do with them? Pan sear them and finish with a quick braise in Barolo, naturally. And what to serve with them? Two 4-ounce birds by themselves are not going to feed two hungry adults. Risotto, of course! Ugh, we are not doing risotto until we shed some blubber. So what then?

Lentils to the rescue. Complex carbs and highly satisfying to mangiafagioli such as Ann and I. And lentils are a great foil, almost as great as rice (but not quite), for wild mushrooms.

Matsutake Mushrooms

Once I decided on lentils, I took inventory of what else I had on hand and of course, I already had mushrooms in mind. With the Japanese economy struggling, demand for matsutake mushrooms is off and the consequent price decrease means that they are barely affordable this year as opposed to not being affordable at all, Japan by far being the largest market for US matsutake.

Lentils Cooking Away

The secret to good lentils (actually, the secret to any dish) is building layers of flavor which I did a variety of ways. I started by cooking mirepoix (onion, carrot, and celery) with reconstituted dried porcini and a bit of slab bacon. I usually use pancetta but for this dish, I decided I wanted a little smokiness to play with the wine. The cooking liquid is mainly water, but I have added a cup of porcini stock and a quarter cup of pork belly goodness, the pork essence that we find congealed in the pork belly roasting pans at the restaurant. We save all this goodness and use it to amplify many dishes. The only catch is that it is very salty (from the pork belly cure) and a very little goes a very long way. A bay leaf rounds out the seasoning.

Barolo-Braised Quail on Porcini Lentils with Matsutake Mushrooms

While the lentils were cooking, I briefly sautéed the matsutake slices and held them warm. Prep for the quail sauce involved dicing a shallot, mincing some reconstituted porcini, dicing an ounce of slab bacon, and mincing some parsley from the garden. When the lentils were fully cooked and the liquid reduced, I gave them a final season and moved them to the back of the stove. The quail I dredged in seasoned Wondra and then cooked them perhaps 90 seconds on each side until they were golden brown.

Removing the quail from the pan to a plate, I started the sauce by adding the bacon, porcini, and shallot to the pan and cooking until the bacon was starting to render and crisp, about 90 more seconds. Into the pan next went a half a cup of Barolo, a couple tablespoons of pork belly goodness, and a half a cup of porcini stock. And back into the pan with the quail. I basted the quail for a minute or so, flipping them once so that the Wondra could do its bit in thickening the sauce slightly. Out of the pan again with the quail and a final reduction of another minute or 90 seconds to finish the pan sauce.

We Ate at the Table like Big People

And then it was off to the dining room, glasses of Barolo in hand, to eat dinner and talk like real people for a good long while. I never get to sit and linger with my wife at the dinner table. What a great night!

Broiled Rainbow Trout

Monday night, we were going to have rainbow trout for dinner, but we ended up going to the movies and eating cheese steaks there. Ann wondered because of the snow if I might be able to get home early enough on Tuesday to have the trout. I was able: it was a painfully early night at the restaurant.

Rainbow Trout with Roasted Haricots Verts and Lentils

I love trout, always have. As a child, I remember that my father would take the whole family to Graves Mountain Lodge down in Syria, VA in Madison County each spring for the opening of trout season. My brother and I would fish ineffectually with the wrong gear in the Rose River until dinner time, at which point, we would consume massive amounts of fried trout. Bones be damned, I love me some trout.

For restaurant service, I take the head off the trout and butterfly them, removing the spine and then I surgically remove all the tiny and hugely annoying pin bones. This three minutes of labor per fish yields the perfectly deboned butterflied trout that you see above. Now multiply this labor by the 64 fish that I prepped last week and you could understand why I might not want to see another trout again for a very long time. But so delicious is trout that I would willingly go through a lot of labor to put it on the table.

This trout I rubbed with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put under the broiler for about 3 minutes while I reheated the lentils in the microwave. Ann roasted the haricots verts before I got home. Dinner took five minutes to put on the table, which is good, because we were both voraciously hungry. This is about as simple, easy, and delicious as dinner gets.

Snowy Day Lentils

Beautiful and Awful

Tuesday was a real pain in the rear day. It started snowing just before 7am and the temperature dropped through the day with a nasty snow storm settling in above us, midafternoon temperatures in the low teens and winds in the 15-20 knot range. By the time it was said and done, we had about 14" of new powder that drifted to 3' in places thanks to the wind roaring straight out of the north.

We gave up at the restaurant around mid-afternoon when it became apparent that the storm was only going to get worse through the course of dinner. On my way out the door, I grabbed a couple of cups of lentils, knowing that we had a side of steelhead trout at home. I wanted to serve steelhead on the lentils in the style of the French bistro classic saumon aux lentilles. Lentils are in that class of simple and delicious comfort food that are perfect on a blizzardy day.

Comfort on a Freezing Day: Lentils Happily Bubbling Away

Being a chef, I have access to fresh herbs at all times of the year, even when there is snow on the ground and I am not ashamed to say that I also grabbed some fresh parsley, basil, and thyme when I purloined the lentils.

The lentils have mirepoix (onions, carrots, and celery), garlic, herbs (parsley, thyme, bay, and basil), a little whole grained mustard, a bit of tomato paste, and a bit of smoked paprika. The paprika is to mimic the smoked pork I might have otherwise put in: I wanted to keep these lentils low in fat.

White Wine on a Cold Day?

We just don't drink white wine in the winter, so this bottle is notable. It was already open and if I'm not going to have a Pinot Noir with my lentils and fish, a high-acid Oregon white is where I would head next. This delicious Pinot Gris tasted of peaches and cantaloupe with lemon and minerals.