Wild Thyme

Yep. The Fanch and I went to see it Sunday night. My favorite scene: on day 2 or 3 of the narrator Morgan Spurling's 30-day nothing-but-McDonalds experiment, he supersizes for the first time. Sitting in his parked SUV, he wolfs down his burger, his giant portion of fries, and 20 minutes later, yaks it all up on the sidewalk. Brilliant!

Even if you think you know what it's all about (and you do), I recommend it. You'll still find yourself gasping at what happens to Spurling over the course of a month. It's smart, it's tightly-edited, it's got inventive infographics and funny interviews. Spurling finds Don Gorske, a totally dweeby guy who looks like a Trekkies reject, who claims to have eaten 2 or 3 Big Macs a day for several years. The guy is thin as a rail and has a cholesterol level of 140.

Today I had a cheeseburger at Slider's Diner on 9th Ave. At $4 and change and free access to a bounteous condiment selection (which I treat as my personal salad bar), the Slider's half-pounder is the best burger value in town. Mmm, cheeseburgers.

I'm on a mission to refute every single one of the Chron's choices for Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants. First of all, I'm peeved that I've tried so few of them. Second, the ones I've tried are by and large unworthy of Top 100 praise (Hello? Chow is good and usually dependable, but those attributes do not a Top 100 entry make).

I was in Lafayette one day last week for baseball practice and decided before BARTing back to SF to get dinner with one of my fast-food-addicted teammates. He suggested Round Table. Fortunately, another guy who lives nearby suggested Bo's BBQ, right on the main drag in Lafayette. (The whole time I was in town I couldn't stop singing this Lucinda Williams song.)

So you don't have to look it up, here's the Top 100 blurb on Bo's:

Since he opened about five years ago, Bo McSwine has become one of the reigning kings of barbecue in the Bay Area. He cooks from his mother's recipes, uses great products from producers like Niman Ranch and Acme bread, and has a deft touch with smoke and sauce, which balances sweet and sour with a peppery kick at the end. The tiny dining room is comfortable and the outdoor patio of the brown-shingled building is especially popular during the warmer months.

We got there at 8pm and they were out of chicken. Some customers on the patio with half-crazed looks in their eyes told us they'd been waiting 45 minutes for their take-out orders. (How is this possible? Last time I checked, BBQ wasn't made from scratch.)

The woman running the cash register was indifferent to the delay, at best. The prices were reasonable but not cheap: $8.50 for the brisket or rib or chicken "sandwich" (I'll explain the quotes in a second), $12 and up for the platters.

Before I heap further scorn, I will say that Bo's had the most exotic bottled beer selection I've ever seen east of the Toronado. I recognized very few, as most of them seemed to be Belgian, German and other Axis of Weasel microbrews.

I ordered the brisket "sandwich," which was a fair amount of meat (Niman Ranch, for those who keep track of such things), a plastic ramekin of very mild sauce that held true to the above sweet/sour/peppery description, another plastic ramekin of potato salad, and a tiny piece of baguette. This morsel, this crumb, apparently made the meal a "sandwich." Sorry, but not having succumbed to the current carbofascism, I was looking forward to a real sandwich. I was also looking forward to the corn that was advertised as part of the meal. It was nowhere to be found; Affectless Cashier Woman told me it would be ready in five minutes. I also asked her for hot sauce, which she said she would bring right out.

Ten minutes later, neither corn nor hot sauce was in my vicinity. Back at the cash register, a young man told me the corn would be ready in five minutes, and the cashier woman told me again, with a little more brevity, that she'd bring the hot sauce out. I stood my ground. It was tense.

Fortunately, Bo ambled over with a beatific smile and produced a ramekin of hot sauce. The good news is Bo is a genuinely kind man--when I went around back to the bathroom before our meal, I caught sight of him in the kitchen and he nodded and smiled as if he had known me for years. The bad news is that Bo's langorous demeanor seems to set the pace of service for the rest of the workers.

The hot sauce dulled the disappointment. Innocuous at first and ten minutes later, with lips on fire and nose running, you realize you've been sneak-attacked. I love it. And the corn eventually emerged from the kitchen, a little gummy but flavorful.

If you're hungry for BBQ in Lafayette and the wait's not too long, Bo's might be worth it. But that's a far cry from Top 100.

Among the numerous things Fanch and I ate in Healdsburg this past weekend, none may be more memorable than the whole onions wrapped tightly in tin foil and set on the BBQ grill. Near completion, a splash of red wine was added to the foil packet and allowed to simmer further. That's it, as far as I know. No salt, no pepper, no herbs. The result, once peeled in layers but still warm, were thick, sweet, nearly creamy slices that were perfectly paired with something no more complicated than a salty tortilla chip.

No more Costco hot dogs for me.

I discovered tapenade at a wonderful little restaurant called La Columbe d'Or (The Golden Dove) I favored for for biz lunches when I worked at 1 Park in New York. This was a dark little Provençal place you had to step down to get to. They always put ramekins of housemade tapenade on the table, happily refilling them as often as you wanted. (A few years ago when I was in New York, my friend Fenton wanted to take me out for a special dinner. I suggested La Columbe d'Or. It had declined beyond recognition, under new owners, I'm sure. I wasn't upset; after all, experience never ceases to teach us that life is change.)

This tapenade is absurdly easy to make, but people love it out of all proportion to its cost or complexity. It's from an old--well, 1985, which isn't so old, I guess--paperback cookbook titled Appetizers & Hors d'Oeuvres, published by Ortho Books in cooperation with the California Culinary Academy.

I bought the book, I'm sure, out of Appetizer Anxiety. Living as we do in an era when appetizer standards are set by caterers with Ph.D.hD's (doctorates in hors d'oeuvres) rather than at-home hosts, this is an unavoidable condition. Happily, I've dropped out of the competition, having given up on impossibly fancy finger foods and emphasizing, instead, the easy, the accessible, and the good, of which this tapenade is an excellent example.

I always use a food processor, which offers an object lesson in the value of these appliances. Here's the recipe and accompanying text:

An earthy olive spread from southern France, tapenade (pronounced TOP-eh-nod) is traditionally spread on grilled bread bread sticks, or a chunk of a crusty country loaf. But try it with goat cheese on Toasted Bread Rounds or with cold roast beef, or slather it on lamb chops jusst off the grill. Tapenade can be stored in thne refrigerator for up to six months.

1/2 pound large, black Greek olives, pitted
1 ounce anchovy fillets
I clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons capers
2 tablespoons olive oil
Black pepper to taste

1. Place pitted olives in a food processor or blender. Add anchovies, garlic, capers, and olive oil; process or blend briefly. Mixture should be blended bu still coars. Transfer to a bowl and addd black pepper to taste.

2. Spoon tapenade into a crock or jar and cover with a thin layer of olive oil.
Makes 1 cup.

That's it. I usually, however, triple or quadruple the recipe. The stuff keeps so well, you might as well make a bunch. Also, people gobble it up at parties, so a cup is nothing. Nada! I believe I've used oil-cured olives or a mix of oil-cured and kalamatas. Definitely get them pitted as you don't want to spend hours pitting them yourself.

I sometimes add Italian parsley to the mix, but never never add salt as the olives and anchovies are plenty salty. For the platform, I like to slice up a sweet baguette or two and toast the thin slices in the oven, half of them with butter, turning them once or twice as needed. (You know what I say about butter: "Everyone avoids it, but loves it if you add it to anything because everything is better with butter, so *just don't tell them!*)

Beverage recommendation: Toast and tapenade go really really well with dry, *toasty* champagne.

Shya’s right: Gâteau de riz is so delicious. It’s made with arborio rice, lots of milk, lots of eggs, caramelized sugar, and everyone’s favorite edible orchid, or technically, the ovaries of the orchid, i.e., fruit, better known as vanilla bean. I’ve made it three times, for very special occasions only (like Shya’s birthday). It’s a bit of work, but so worth it.

According to “Desserts, Volume One,” a chapbook-size supplement to Saveur, the recipe comes from the Parisian bistro Aux Amis du Beaujolais, a few blocks off the Champs-Élysées: “Chef-owner Bernard Picolet borrows his grandmother’s recipe for rice pudding and transforms it into something of his own. She use to cook hers for hours near an open fire, he recalls; he bakes his in a pan coated with caramelized sugar, serves it with crème anglaise, and calls it a cake—without robbing it of its elemental homespun appeal.”

Ingredients

1/3 cup raisins (I double this)
1/4 cup dark rum
6 cups mil
1 cup arborio (Italian short-grain) rice
1 1/2 cups plus 1 TBS sugar
1 vanilla bean, split
4 eggs separated

1. Soak raisins in rum in a bowl for 1 hour, then drain and set aside. Combine milk, rice, 1/2 cup sugar, and vanilla bean in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, reduce to medium-low, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until rice absorbs all liquid, about 1 hour. Remove pan from heat and scrape seeds from vanilla pod into rice, discarding pod. Set aside to cool to room temperature.

2. Pour 1 cup sugar into a skillet, shaking it so that sugar spreads evenly. Cook over medium-high heat without stirring, until sugar begins to melt, about 2 minutes, then stir with a wooden spoon until just golden and beginning to foam, about 3 minutes. (Sugar will continue to darken in color.) Carefully pour melted sugar into a 9-inch baking pan and quickly tilt to coat bottom and sides. [Here’s what I do: I pour some of the melted sugar into the pan and spread it as much as I can by tilting the pan and using the wooden spoon, returning the skillet to a low fire in the meantime to keep the remaining sugar viscous. I keep doing this until I’ve successfully coated the bottom and sides of the baking pan. Doing this in stages is necessary because the caramelized sugar dries very quickly and becomes unspreadable. Don’t worry if you spread it unevenly in the pan, by-the-way; what matters is getting total coverage, not uniform smoothness. Be careful not to touch the caramelized sugar; it’s napalm de cuisine. When you’re done, you may hear the sugar cracking as it dries. Don’t freak: this is normal even if you’re not.]

3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Stir egg yolks and half the raisins [assuming you doubled the amount as suggested] into rice. Beat egg whites until foamy, then slowly add 1 tbsp sugar and beat until soft peaks form. Fold whites into rice mixture. Transfer to caramelized pan, set pan into a larger, shallow pan of water, and bake until a knife inserted into middle comes out clean, about 1 hour. Cool slightly in pan, then turn out onto a platter. [The cake actually rotates in the pan, lubed by the re-melted sugar, so this is easy.] Serve with crème anglaise or whipped cream if desired

How it’s done at Barry’s Aerie: You must use crème anglaise. I could eat this liquid ambrosia by the ladleful and nothing else the rest of my no doubt short life. I’ve never used store-bought crème d’anglaise so I can’t comment on that. I rely on the enchanting recipe in Julia Child’s The Way to Cook (“You must be careful not to overheat it and scramble the yolks, but you must have the courage to heat it enough so that it thickens.”) I assume most recipes are the same or nearly so. I dollop some of the crème on the dessert plate before putting a wedge of rice cake on top, then drip some more on the cake, followed by a teaspoon or so of the raisin-rum liquid followed by a few of the extra raisins. Lovely to look at! Tell your guests to fuck carbs, fuck fat, shut up and open up. They’ll adore you forever.

And Shya, what else did you ask for, the tapenade recipe? Another day, but it's coming. Promise....

Left over from our middle Eastern dinner several weeks back are bags and bags of what seems like the raw inventory from a trail mix factory. Sliced blanched almonds. Pine nuts. Currants. Raisins. There's also more pomegranate juice, pomegranate molasses and rose water than we know what to do with. (I thought I knew what to do with it--add it to the pan juices and reduce after cooking meat, but the last time I did it, I overdid it, and the fumes from the rose-water gravy nearly made me gag.)

A more successful attempt was last night's dinner. For the main course, a head of spinach, washed well and chopped against the axis of the leaf, added to a cast-iron pan in which was simmering a can of chopped clams (drained) and minced garlic, made for a lovely impromptu sauce for our pesto tortellini. The Fanch noted, however, that the clams lost a lot of flavor at the table, far more than they lose when cooked in a tomato sauce. Could this be a function of the tomato acidity bringing out their flavor? Good question.

The Fanch made a complementary side dish: green beans and portobellos, cut into roughly half-inch-square chunks, sauteed with onion and balsamic. Sprinkled atop once the sauteeing was done was a good fistful of blanched sliced almonds, first toasted for roughly 10 minutes in the Tost-R-Ov'n at 300 degrees. (Keep an eye on 'em, as your Tost-R-Ov'n mileage may vary.) The textures--light, crisp, nutty almonds, the moist snap of green beans, the chewy density of the mushrooms--were fabulous, one of the best side dishes I've had in a while.

Top it off with a simple romaine green salad with sliced radish and crumbled feta, and we're talking $14.95 at Park Chow, which, I'm sorry, but no way no how is it one of Bay Area's Top 100 Restaurants.