Polenta with Mushroom Ragoût

It's been a quiet few weeks at home since we got back from Santa Fe in early December, weeks in which we have uncharacteristically not done any entertaining. At long last, we had Andreas and Michelle, newly engaged, over for dinner. Ann asked me to make polenta with mushroom ragoût and then suggested a Caesar salad served on a romaine leaf to go with the polenta. I decided to roast some olives for a simple appetizer.

Roasted Olives

Roasted olives may be the easiest thing in the world to make. Fundamentally, you toss olives with herbs, spices, garlic, and olive oil and roast them for a few minutes in the oven.

Olives, Ready to Roast

I mixed several kinds of olives from various sources with minced garlic, fresh rosemary leaves, tangerine peels, red pepper flakes, dried oregano, fennel pollen, and a splash of olive oil. They sat on the counter for a couple of hours before I put them in a moderate oven and roasted them for 15-20 minutes or so.

"Caesar Salad"

Caesar salad has been done over and over and over and I wanted to do something different, while still adhering to Ann's vision of a salad served on a romaine leaf. In my reimagining, I would use a lemon-anchovy aïoli both as the base of a dressing and as a garnish. And I would add the bulk of the cheese to the salad in the form of a pecorino romano crisp. Finally, Ann wanted croutons, but Michelle cannot eat gluten. I wrestled with fried polenta cubes before deciding to go with chestnuts spiced with oregano, garlic, salt, and a touch of pimentόn. 

Starting the Aïoli: Anchovies, Garlic, and Peppercorns in Mortar

After pounding two cloves of garlic, three anchovy fillets, and four black peppercorns to a smooth paste, I mixed this base with a cup of commercial mayonnaise and the zest of one lemon. I put it into the refrigerator to bloom and marry the flavors for several hours. I used commercial mayonnaise because I only wanted a final yield of one cup of aïoli. I find it much easier to make mayonnaise in quart quantities, and I just did not want that much product in the refrigerator.

Next I grated a big bowl of pecorino romano, most of which I formed into long pecorino crisps on a silicone mat on a sheet tray. The rest, I reserved to mix into the salad.

For the chestnuts, I spiced them like I would croutons, by melting a little butter in a pan and cooking the freeze-dried chestnuts for a minute, then tossing them with a mix of salt, granulated garlic, dried oregano, and a pinch of pimentón.

I have these freeze-dried chestnuts thanks to my friends Yael and Dan back in Virginia. They grow truffles in an orchard that they planted in front of their house. Hazelnuts and chestnuts are the happy side-effect of growing truffles. I have been working with the chestnuts to find good uses for them and this is a very natural and delicious use. These spiced nuts are an addictive snack, not to mention a great way to add crunch to a salad.

To make the salad dressing, to a half a cup of aïoli, I whisked in the juice of a lemon and an equal amount of olive oil. Then I thinned the dressing to my desired consistency with cool water, an amount probably equal to the lemon juice and olive oil. I re-seasoned with a tiny pinch more of coarse ground black pepper. The remaining aïoli went on the plate to anchor the pecorino crisp in place so that the salads could go to the table with mishap. 

"Caesar Salad" with Pecorino Crisp, Anchovies, and Spiced Chestnuts

I greatly prefer this salad to any other Caesar-type salad that I have ever had. It seemed to be a great hit with everyone.

Polenta with  Mushroom Ragoût

The star of the dinner was polenta topped with a sexy ragoût of mushrooms and an even sexier poached egg. The poached egg was my addition to Ann's idea. The yolk just adds extra creaminess to the dish. I also flavored the polenta with a big sprig of rosemary as it was cooking for about an hour (my corn was fairly coarsely ground).

Rosemary Polenta, Mushroom Ragoût, Grated Pecorino, Poached Egg, Green Onions

I cooked the polenta at least 90 minutes in advance and held it warm, ready to finish at service, using a trick from the restaurant. Once the polenta had cooked, I laid a piece of film wrap directly on the surface of polenta and forced all the air out from under the film. In this way, the polenta stays warmer and does not form a skin on the surface. Then at service, I swirled in a bit of butter and cream and stirred it rapidly while bringing it right back up to temperature.

And now some food porn pictures from the mushroom ragoût, made by sweating a couple of leeks in butter with a bunch of fresh thyme, then adding the fresh mushrooms and cooking, then adding the reconstituted porcini and its rehydrating liquid, all to be cooked down to a nice ragoût.

Rehydrating Porcini
The Water From This is Liquid Gold, an Umami Bomb

Paper Sack of Chanterelles, Oysters, and Shiitakes

Prepped Mushrooms Ready to Cook

It felt good to get back in the kitchen and cook something other than our standard low-fat, complex carb-laden nightly fare. It feels good every now and again to splurge a bit at the table. And I think I came up with a winner of a salad technique.

Everyone had a good time and we put a hurt on a few bottles of Langhe Nebbiolo.

New Year's Eve 2024: Mushroom Galette

As is our tradition, we spend New Year's Eve at home or with friends rather than going out to celebrate. We no longer have the desire to stay up late or to be on the roads with a bunch of drunk drivers. And having to be at the restaurant until the crack of dawn each New Year's, I suppose that I am still avoiding New Year's Eve like the plague some 7 or 8 years after I closed the restaurant.

Once upon a time in McMinnville, I made some crostini of wild mushrooms and Taleggio cheese that Ann cannot get out of her mind. It seems that whenever we want to celebrate, she remembers the flavors of that simple appetizer. From that memory, somehow we got to a mushroom and leek galette topped with two flavorful cheeses, one rather more pungent and one with a bit of blue veining.

Mushroom and Leek Galette

I cheated. I used commercial puff pastry that I rolled out into a big rectangle and topped with mushroom and leek ragoût. Then I rolled the edges over like a country tart and topped the mushroom mixture with thinly sliced cheese, followed by a good grating of pecorino romano. After a simple egg wash on the edges of the galette, it went into a very hot oven and baked until brown.

Leek and Mushroom Ragoût

The ragoût is terribly simple. I sweated two leeks in butter, then added three fresh mushrooms: wild chanterelles and domestic oysters and shiitakes. Once these started shrinking down and cooking, I added chopped rehydrated porcini and the highly flavored water in which I soaked them overnight. After about 15 minutes on the heat, the whole became a thick ragoût suitable for topping a pastry crust.

Grand Cru Guiborat Blanc de Blancs Champagne

We were able to get our hands on a bottle of Guiborat Champagne, a blanc de blancs. Although we enjoy all styles of Champagne, we really love crisp and high acid 100% Chardonnay bottlings such as this, especially with rich and fatty food.

And another year is in the books. Our neighbors were only too happy to remind us of this as they continued with the big fireworks mortars until after 3am. So much for getting to be early and getting some good sleep.

Christmas Lima Beans Bourguignon

As I continue to play with the box of dried beans that I got from Rancho Gordo at the beginning of the year, next up on my list was the bag of gorgeous Christmas Lima Beans, huge limas with chestnut-colored mottling.

Christmas Limas After Overnight Soak

These huge beans are reportedly quite meaty, so I decided to treat them like meat. And I was disappointed with the results, truth be told. But not all our dishes can be wins, can they? Not if we're experimenting.

Rummaging through the pantry, I saw my canister of dried porcini and that cued me to braise these limas with bacon, onions, porcini, and red wine, in the manner of boeuf bourguignon. 

Dried Porcini

Mirepoix: Leek, Onion, and Carrot

I cut several strips of bacon into crosswise strips called lardons and then rendered those lardons. The lardons went into the slow cooker with the beans while I poured off most of the bacon grease and sweated the leeks, onions, and carrot in the remaining grease. As the onions became translucent, I sprinkled a couple tablespoons of flour over the vegetables and cooked the mixture for another couple of minutes. Finally, I added a half a bottle of Pinot Noir to the pan and let the sauce thicken for a couple of minutes before pouring it over the beans in the slow cooker.

Christmas Limas with Porcini Liquid, Porcini, Bay, and Thyme

Added Bacon Lardons, Mirepoix Sweated in Bacon Grease, and Pinot Noir

7-1/2 Hours Later: a Big Bowl of Beans

I mentioned above that I wasn't happy with this dish. It was tasty and perfectly edible, but I won't be doing it again for two reasons. First, the melding of the beans with the bourguignon technique yielded something less than the original dish made with beef. The delicious red wine gravy added nothing to the beans. And second, after soaking overnight and then braising for 7-1/2 hours, a full third of the beans were still crunchy and not cooked through. To me, this seems like a quality issue with the beans and not an issue with my cooking of them.

These beans are so beautiful. I'm a bit sad that I'm not jumping for joy after having cooked them (and truth be told, probably will never again do so).

Late January Dinner

In the past several months, we've pretty much stopped going out to eat at restaurants around Bend. The lousy food we have had in the past couple of years has made us really tired of spending a lot of money with almost no return. For myriad reasons, quality and consistency of restaurant food is lacking and so for our special meals lately, Ann and I have been cooking at home and inviting friends over to dinner.

This past weekend, I really had no overarching theme for the menu; I simply wanted to use (and use up) items that we had on hand already. In addition to a bunch of stuff to use up in the refrigerator, we have a pretty robust pantry that includes a great many items that we can use to cook whatever it is that we want.

Ann was in charge of cocktails and dessert. For cocktails, she made us one of her favorites, dirty martinis with blue cheese-stuffed olives. I am sorry to say that white liquor isn't my jam and although the cocktails were well made, I just couldn't drink mine and opened a bottle of Crémant d'Alsace to go with my appetizer. As much as I would like to be a martini guy, I am resigned to never being one.

Lovely Dirty Martini

Blue-Cheese Stuffed Olives

For appetizers, I had more Scottish cold-smoked salmon and sea trout caviar leftover from our aborted New Year's Eve celebration that I wanted to clear out of the refrigerator. So I envisioned an appetizer of smoked salmon, smoked salmon mouse, and sea trout caviar that is similar in many ways to the smoked salmon smørrebrød that I made a couple of weeks back when we got pounded by snow. Because this appetizer needed to be gluten-free, I cut cucumbers on the bias to mimic crostini. 

Smoked Salmon, Smoked Salmon Mousse, and Sea Trout Caviar

For the main part of our meal, it was pretty much a no-brainer that we were going to have pork tenderloin. A recent foray to Costco saw a package of four tenderloins come home, two of which were salted away in the freezer, leaving two more in the fridge that needed to be cooked. I decide to stuff a tenderloin with goat cheese and spinach and wrap it in prosciutto, a technique that I developed for the restaurant and which is documented in a separate post for anyone curious about how to do it.

The beauty of this dish is three-fold: it looks a lot more complicated to pull off than it is, it looks beautiful, and you can prep it well in advance, leaving only the final roasting to be done and freeing up your time to visit with your guests.

Searing the Prosciutto-Wrapped Stuffed Pork Tender
(cut in half so it would fit into the pan)

Seared Pork Tenderloin Rolls, Prepped in Advance, Ready to Roast

To accompany the pork, I turned to our pantry where I found the tail end of three separate bags of Arborio rice that I wanted to use or consolidate. Moreover, we just ran out of dried porcini and ordered a new bag which is more than will fit into the canister. I wanted to use the overflow that would not fit in the canister and so it seemed pretty natural to make an earthy risotto to go with the pork.

One of the neat things about risotto is that you can par-cook the base about ten minutes and let it cool. This then means that it will only take 8-10 minutes to have the risotto ready. In other words, all I had to do when guests were over was spend ten minutes at the range finishing the risotto while the pork roast cooled and rested. I spent the rest of my time socializing and enjoying the evening.

I get really tired of chefs making out like risotto needs some kind of crazy voodoo to pull off correctly and that it takes far too long to prepare to put it on the menu. In fact, I have good friends who run a restaurant whose menu claims that a simple plate of risotto will take the kitchen 45 minutes to make, and oh by the way, that will be $45 for the plate. Ridiculous. I love you guys, but that's ridiculous.

Spinach and Goat Cheese Stuffed Pork Tenderloin on Porcini Risotto

Ann asked also that I reprise the salad that I made last weekend and I obliged her. She just really loved the combination of ingredients: greens, spiced pecans, pomegranate seeds, and pickled shallots all combined with a pomegranate-pickled shallot vinaigrette. You can find all the salad magic covered in prior posts: spicing pecans, pickling shallots, and making the vinaigrette. 

Greens with Pickled Shallot and Pomegranate Vinaigrette

In keeping with the theme of using up, I remembered that for the holidays, Ann had prepped a batch of her delicious shortbread made with orange zest, rosemary, olive oil, sea salt, and very little sugar. Unfortunately, she became sick before she could do all the baking that she wanted to do. I suggested that we take the remaining log of dough from the freezer, cut it into discs, bake them, and then dip the shortbread cookies in melted chocolate for an easy finish to dinner. I sliced; Ann baked; I melted the chocolate and dipped the cookies; and Ann applied sea salt to the chocolate. Tag team and done!

Chocolate-Dipped Orange-Rosemary-Olive Oil Shortbreads

As a final thought, I love having leftovers in the refrigerator that can be repurposed into another meal. The following evening, I formed some of the leftover risotto into cakes that I crusted in a pan while gently rewarming the two remaining slices of stuffed pork tenderloin. While I poached four eggs, I whipped up a little of my pimentón sauce with which to finish our dinners of leftovers.

Leftovers: Stuffed Pork Tenderloin and Risotto Cake
Topped with Poached Eggs and Pimentón Sauce 

Porcini Onions for Steak

Ann loves steak. Ed does not love it. What to do?

When I say that I do not love steak, it does not mean that I do not like the flavor of it, that I have some moral objection to it, or that I will not eat it. To the contrary: I like the flavor of steak; I am OK that we raise these animals for food; and, I certainly will eat steak, but I prefer pork or lamb or duck.

Strip Steaks with Porcini Onions and Beurre Rouge

My not loving steak has to do with a few things, I believe, if I am to dig down in my mind. First, as a retired professional chef, I have cooked many thousands and thousands of steaks. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps also, it annoyed me that so many people ordered steak rather than the more creative dishes on the menu. Ultimately, we stopped serving steak altogether at the restaurant, moving more to a seven-course tasting format that had no room for honking slabs of beef.

Also, braising is my favorite style of cooking. There is something incredible that happens when you cook a tough protein slowly for hours and hours that elevates that protein to food nirvana status. I love the fork tender nature of long-cooked beef and for me, that texture wins out each time over steak.

More importantly though, I think, is that my palate loves flavor and big, bold flavor at that. And while I appreciate the umami-laden flavor of a finely raised, aged, and cooked steak, there are a gazillion other foods that would appeal more to my palate.

Finally, I grew up without money. Beef in general and steak in particular were luxuries that never graced our table. Historically, the fiscally conservative part of me had always found that steak was priced out of my budget. It was more important to save money for my kid's college education than it was to eat steak.

But fast forward to the present day in which I do the grocery shopping for our house. My doing the shopping really started during COVID when Ann was confined to the house for fear of infection and has continued ever since. Prior to that, I was running a restaurant and Ann did the food shopping. I was never home during meal times, however.

Truth also be told, Ann does not like my style of shopping which is to make an exact list of what I want in the order that it appears on the store's shelves, to get in the store and make a beeline from one needed ingredient to the next, and to get out as efficiently as possible. I am certain that this stems from the restaurant days when I had almost zero time to make weekly forays to buy certain things at retail that were not available from our farmers and foragers or not convenient to order from distributors.

In contrast, it seems to me that shopping for Ann is more closely akin to entertainment. It seems to amuse her to bounce all over the store looking at everything quite apparently at random. Given that I find little joy in the chore of shopping, we chafe at each other's shopping style. But I digress.

Because I do the shopping and the bulk of the weekly menu planning, beef really isn't ever on my shopping radar, which has caused Ann to become increasingly more vocal about the lack of beef in our diet. I believe that she would eat steak several nights a week if she had her druthers.

Knowing that I am not the sole arbiter of our diet, I have been making a conscious effort of late to bring home beef from the store at least a couple times a month. To wit, I made ossobuco last week and this week, I brought home some decent looking strip steaks.

We were sitting on the sofa, both knowing that steak was on the night's menu and sipping a rare bottle of Cab (generally, too heavy for us and we prefer lighter grapes such as Nebbiolo, Pinot Noir, and Sangiovese). Suddenly, Ann mentioned somewhat wistfully and seemingly out of nowhere, "I'd really love some mushrooms with the onions for the steak."

We had already discussed onions for the steak and I was going to quasi-caramelize some to have with the beef. Mushrooms were a new wrinkle and one that I was almost unprepared for.

I do not like and cannot really abide the ubiquitous common mushrooms in both their color forms: white mushrooms (champignons de Paris) and the brown portobello/cremini form. My dislike is mostly textural; unless these mushrooms are seared really hard, I find them off-puttingly rubbery. And there is also the flavor that I cannot tolerate; even the smell of these mushrooms makes me gag a bit.

Interestingly and paradoxically enough, I do really like a lot of wild mushrooms as well as cultivated shiitake. Kings among the wild mushrooms for me are porcini, which I mainly love in their dried state as drying really concentrates and improves their flavor. So, I always keep a canister of wickedly expensive dried porcini in the pantry.

To sate Ann's desire for mushrooms, I grabbed the remaining handful of porcini from the pantry and put them to rehydrate in a bowl of water. And to keep dinner simple, I decided to chop those porcini and add them and their rehydrating liquid to a couple of sliced yellow onions that had been sweating and nearing caramelization on the range for the past hour.

The outcome, once the porcini liquid was reduced to nothing, was an incredible mushroom and onion umami bomb for our steaks. Now having discovered this, I want to keep it in my culinary arsenal and that means keeping it top of mind, hence this post.

Over the years, we had done many onion-based condiments for steak at the restaurant, all much more complex than simple mix of porcini and onions. For example, we used to cook down an incredible onion and bacon jam with stout. I loved it as a condiment on its own, but something always nagged at me about the smoky bacon flavor with steak. I love bacon on my cheeseburger, but I always found that the bacony jam clashed a bit with our fantastic steaks. I think I have silenced that little nagging inner voice (chefs are highly self-critical) forever with this simple mushroom and onion condiment.

Truckee: Easy Sunday in Truckee

This is another post in the series about our visit to see our friends Kelley and Mark in Truckee, CA, our first time to the Lake Tahoe area. Today, Sunday, was all about taking it easy after our long drive down from Central Oregon yesterday. Today would see us laze about, then get a delicious breakfast with Mark and Kelley, take a short walk at 9000 feet with some fine feathered friends, dip our toes in Lake Tahoe for the first time, and while all this was going on, have our crockpot produce some really fine ragù to share with Mark and Kelley. In short, it was a delightful day.

On this vacation, after our recent whirlwind of visits to neighboring states of Idaho and Washington, we were hell bent on relaxing and staying in more of our normal routine in California. Since my retirement, our morning routine each day at our home, barring some highly unusual event, is to make a pot of coffee and do several NY Times crossword puzzles while enjoying our coffee. It's our thing. Make of it what you will. We take comfort in the ritual.

After a so-so night's sleep, the two of us jammed into a tiny, soft bed, I was pretty violently kicked awake and assaulted by my life partner. What on earth, I wondered. It turns out that Ann was attacked by a Komodo Dragon in her sleep and she was fighting it off! Rudely awakened, I got up to ease my aching back and set about figuring out how to make coffee.

To facilitate relaxing and staying in more of our normal routine, we brought beans, a grinder, and all the adulterants that Ann adds to her perfectly good coffee to contaminate it, but we depended on our hosts to provide a coffee maker. I found what I call a single-serving coffee maker in the kitchen and ultimately a tiny filter to fit it and a few minutes later, Ann and I were ensconced on the sofa with our puzzle books in hand. Really, the coffee wasn't bad even though I had to guess how many beans were appropriate for this tiny pot. The second pot was spot on!

How Cute! A Single-Serving Coffee Pot!

Our Normal Morning Routine

We were up, thanks to a very early bed time, no doubt for several hours before Mark and Kelley who were at the restaurant until close. But we were in no hurry to do anything and were content with a lazy morning with no agenda. At some point, Ann and Kelley decided that we would drive into town about 11-ish and that the four of us would get some brunch before taking a quick hike up above Lake Tahoe.

I confirmed that Mark and Kelly would come over for dinner and made a mental note to start the crockpot of meat sauce before we left. While I was waiting to go into town, I poked around a bit outside the condo we were staying in and came across a large bird's nest on top of a large outdoor light on the back porch. I'm guessing that it was the home of some baby Steller's Jays.

Steller's Jay Perhaps?

Ann and I did not have a chance to look about the Truckee-Tahoe area yesterday. We merely got off I-80 at CA 89 and then drove to our condo at twilight. Today, after rendezvousing with Mark and Kelley at their house, Mark would drive us down CA 267 to Kings Beach where we would see Lake Tahoe for the first time as we navigated east to Incline City on the Nevada side of the lake. If you're ever wondering if you're in CA or NV, just look for the casinos.

As we entered the west end of Incline Village, Mark detoured off the ring road around the lake to take Lakeshore Blvd right down on the water, where we could see the mansions of the ultra-wealthy all along the shore. Incline Village is super spendy, no doubt thanks in large part to its location just across the border in Nevada whose favorable tax rates attract California money. There's a ton of Bay Area tech money, Hollywood film money, and old school old money in the area.

At the end of Lakeshore Blvd, we backtracked into Incline Village to have brunch at Sage Leaf restaurant. In a stroke of good fortune, Mark was able to find an open parking space just opposite the restaurant. I have to say that we had a really great breakfast. I wasn't going to have anything to drink with my meal, but then when Ann (always the instigator) ordered a Bloody Mary, I followed suit. I ordered it spicy and, unusually in my experience, it was spicy, a good omen for our forthcoming food.

It was noon and I was torn between a traditional breakfast or a lunch entrée. I decided to roll the dice on a lamb burger (because I love lamb) and was rewarded with a delicious burger that actually tasted of lamb. My fries were a bit old, but the duck fat fries accompanying Ann's burger were hot and delicious. Mark got a traditional old school breakfast plate and Kelley got biscuits and gravy; both plates looked good. Ann and I, we're so used to sub-par food that this was a very pleasant meal indeed.

Sage Leaf: Delicious Lamb Burger

After breakfast, we had to wait on several confused drivers jockeying for position in the cramped parking lot before we could pull out to head up the Mt. Rose Highway. On the way up to Chickadee Ridge, we stopped at an overlook for our first real views of the lake, of Crystal Bay more specifically. It is almost impossible to take in the entire lake as it runs 22 miles north-south along the NV-CA border and 12-miles east-west. At this point in the day, the water was still capped with a mist, a mist that would burn off by the time we would return to the shore line.

Misty Crystal Bay from Mt. Rose Highway

We continued up towards the Mt. Rose ski area and parked on the side of the road just shy of Ophir Creek. We started walking on an access trail to the Tahoe Rim Trail, our goal being to see if we could see any of the local Mountain Chickadees. Mark and Kelley had heard that the tiny little birds were used to landing on people's hands to eat birdseed. I think we were all a bit skeptical and we did not bring any birdseed; I'm not down with feeding wild animals. Your mileage may vary.

We were 50 or so yards down the trail when our skepticism vanished, as the following pictures will attest. It was a very cool experience having a tiny little bird land on my hand, one so close that I could barely get my camera far enough away from it to focus! Try framing, focusing, and shooting a traditional non-point-and-shoot camera with one hand some time! As the tiny creatures buzzed noisily in the trees about us, at one point, I had four of them vying to land on my hand at once.

Priceless! A Skeptic No Longer!

So Close I Could Barely Focus, Especially with One Hand

From the access trail, we joined and continued on the Tahoe Rim Trail for a mile or so, maybe two, as we explored the landscape, ultimately turning around after having sat up on a granite outcrop looking down on the lake.

Looking out over Tahoe Meadows

Joining the TRT

A Crazy Lodgepole Pine

We started our walk something shy of about 9000 feet of elevation and climbed to just around 9000 feet according to my phone. That's a really good elevation for the endangered Whitebark Pines, a couple of which I thought I may have seen, but I did not know if they grew this far south. And I didn't notice any Clark's Nutcrackers around in the woods along the TRT. Those two species are pretty symbiotic and you typically will not find one without the other.

The woods along the TRT are full of Western White Pines, a closely related species that is easy to confuse with Whitebarks. While the trees are very similar in appearance, the cones are diagnostic for they do not look anything alike. It was not until I came upon this grouping of young Whitebarks, likely from a forgotten Clark's Nutcracker seed cache, that I found a diagnostic purplish Whitebark cone. I would finally see a Clark's Nutcracker a half mile or so down the trail.

Group of Young Endangered Whitebark Pines, Pinus albicaulis
Likely a Sprouted Seed Cache

Clark's Nutcracker

This trip to the Tahoe area would provide my first encounter with the Jeffrey Pine, a pine that is very similar to our local Ponderosas, but whose range is largely restricted to the Sierra Nevada. I probably have seen them before in Yosemite, but I was much younger then and not really focused on my surroundings. I first spied two of them right off Mark and Kelley's back porch on Saturday. On Sunday, we saw many huge specimens along the TRT. They are notable for their huge cones of which I have a photograph in a later post. 

Jeffrey Pine, Pinus jeffreyi

Salt and Pepper Sierra Nevada Granite and Pinemat Manzanita, Arctostaphylos nevadensis

Looking at Sand Harbor

Huge Western White Pine, Pinus monticola

Hillside Full of Granite Glacial Erratics

Lodgepole (aka Tahoe) Chipmunk

Late Blooming Tufted Phlox, Phlox caespitosa

Mountain Coyote Mint, Monardella odoratissima

It's Sagebrush, but Tiny! Low Sagebrush, Artemisia arbuscula

After sitting up on a large granite outcrop staring out at the distance, we wandered back to the truck via a different path, completing a circuit. From there, we headed back down to the lake to Sand Harbor on the undeveloped east side of the lake which is primarily park land. We scrambled down a bank to the crystal clear water that was quite chilly to the touch. As we were scrambling through the manzanita scrub, the experience reminded me of the shore of Paulina Lake back home.

Clear Tahoe Water

I think that perhaps Mark and Kelley wanted to do more in the afternoon, but Ann and I had had plenty of exploration for one day and were residually tired from our long drive the day before. Plus I had a pot of meat sauce cooking back at the condo and I did not want it to dry out or scorch. As we made our way back to Truckee from the lake, Kelley mentioned to Ann that it might be possible for us to change to a much nicer house for the remainder of our stay. From Mark and Kelley's, Ann and I headed back to the condo where we were staying while Mark and Kelley went to check out the condition of the other property.

When we arrived back at the condo, the glorious aroma of meat sauce greeted us. Soon enough, we got a text telling us to pack our stuff and head to the new location. So we packed our stuff and grabbed the hot crockpot full of meat sauce and headed up the hill to a gorgeous house in the Tahoe Donner neighborhood high above Truckee and Donner Lake. We proceeded to open some wine and we got busy in the large, well appointed kitchen. Dinner was a quite simple affair of meat sauce over casarecce pasta with some asparagus.

Casarecce with Ragù, Asparagus

This meat sauce, I prepped on Friday so that it could cook autonomously while we were out and about in the Truckee area. I started by rendering a fair amount of chopped bacon. The bacon went into the crockpot, while I browned cubed beef chuck in the bacon grease. After three batches of beef cubes browned, I poured off most of the grease and added three huge leeks, cut finely, to the pan. Once they were cooked, they too went into the crockpot along with a big bunch of dried porcini mushrooms that I had rehydrated the night before.

While all this was browning, I was making a braising sauce from a quart of half and half, a pint of red wine, a quart of beef broth, and a pint of porcini rehydrating liquid. This three quarts of liquid cooked down to a single quart, that when cooled, I added to the bacon, beef, leeks, and mushrooms. When the contents of the crockpot liner were cool, I put them into the refrigerator to get cold for the trip in the ice chest all the way to California.

Start of a Great Meat Sauce

After a leisurely dinner and wine at the dining room table, we moved to the large glassed-in great room with its vaulted 25-foot ceiling and stone fireplace to watch some comedy on Netflix. Late in the evening, Mark and Kelley headed back down the hill into town and Ann and I headed to bed, opening the windows a bit on either side of the bed to bring in some cool mountain air. At home in the desert, we always have the windows open to let in the cool night air.