Saturnalia Report
Mar. 9th, 2009 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleBusy weekend! Let’s see:
Reer Rust: An excellent party all around. But so very brief. I wish I had more time to spend with everybody. It’s hard being in a room full of all the people most dear to you and have to either ignore most of them or rush from one conversation to another. The night could have gone on for ten years and I don’t think we could have finished with all the things we would have liked to share. I hope the RMC is sufficiently friendly with new faces, though – in an environment where most people know each other so well and for so long, it’s hard for strangers to break in. Unless they happen to be beautiful, hairy, fleshy, and nearly naked save for a few big heavy floppy parts jiggling around with only the sheerest and smallest swatch of fabric to keep them in check. ;-)
The food came out OK – I experimented with the absolute, absolute minimum equipment set for serving finger food and it looked pretty good. The nice kit has huge, heavy, totally impractical ceramic platters that look great but don’t pack so well. Instead, I used half and quarter baking pans lined with parchment, and everything either dumped out of a bag or was cut from a roll. Still, setup took nearly half an hour. When you’re serving lots of food, the tiniest annoyance becomes huge. Top of the list: trying to find the end of the saran wrap that’s wrapped tightly around your smoked salmon maki. Try doing that twenty times in a row in a dark corner of a noisy bar, and before you know it, it’s nervous breakdown time. In the future, I will wrap them diagonally and twist the ends.
Neatness and consistency continue to elude me. The sushi was OK but to my eyes it looked like the Tokyo Chainsaw Massacre. The rice was too sticky, and the sizes were way inconsistent. For some reason – believing it would be easier - I cut all the rolls into six instead of the usual eight, and in the future I will probably aim for ten or twelve. I have accepted the inevitability of gummy seaweed, but that can be forgiven if everything else is perfect.
Foccacia sandwiches: Tasty and easy, but I must find a way to prevent the two halves from falling apart.
[An aside: Cooking for two, for twenty, and for two hundred really is a different world. I realize now that a lot of bizarre “time-savers” that I’ve read about, which puzzled me since they seemed like wildly inconvenient solutions for problems that didn’t exist, were simply directed to cooks that feed either ten times more or fewer people than you are imagining. I would never have guessed that saran wrap would prove such a mortal foe in the battle for efficiency. If there were such a thing as a saran wrap end-finding doohickey, I’d have given almost anything to have it that night.]
The orchid show was interesting, although since it’s at the same time every year it doesn’t change much from one year to another. I will post some photos later, including what struck me right away as the World’s Ugliest Orchid. While Cym. “Annette Funicello” may have won for sheer gaudiness, it wasn’t nearly as pathetic and dejected as this one.
Dinner at Oliveto was an eye opener. They had REAL escargot – fresh, apparently wild-caught. It was prepared in a fashion I’d had once before in France, with braised scallions and a buttery white wine and garlic sauce. I never order escargot because almost all French restaurants serve the little rubber things out of a tin, blasted with salt and garlic. This, in contrast, was indescribably delicate, just a bit firmer than oysters, and seasoned with the lightest touch.
Then they served my Nonna’s ravioli. You remember the flashback scene in Ratatouille? It was just like that, and completely unexpected. I’d always taken it for granted, but tasting this made me realize that her ravioli came from what we would now call an artisanal producer, and that I had not tasted that particular braised pork and parmesan filling since I was a child. At least, not like that, with deep, gamy undertones booming under one of the most lowly-looking and unadorned dumplings you’ll ever see. It’s the austerity of such things that makes me love them – not the goopy overflowing of tomato sauce and cheese you’ll see in American-style Italian food, but spare, runty, minimalist dishes that make you feel as if you’re being punished for something. At least until you taste them.
Their polenta was exactly what I had hoped it would be, and it was excellent. Every time I drive through Hopland I’m faced with a huge billboard advertising prime rib at the casino for $4.95. I had to laugh because I’d just shared a small glop of corn mush that not only cost slightly more than that but surely tasted much better. Oh the irony.
The main course, chicken stuffed with sausage, was also perfect if not so personally meaningful. But I found myself swooning over Brussels sprouts for the second time in a week. This is something I haven’t been able to achieve myself, they’re among the most temperamental of vegetables.
In short: Oliveto is now my favorite Bay Area restaurant, hands down. Acquerello is also excellent, so much so that I hate to put it in second place, but Oliveto is my cuisine, and embodies everything I aspire to as a chef. I sensed this immediately on picking up Bertolli’s book, and I was not wrong.
Reer Rust: An excellent party all around. But so very brief. I wish I had more time to spend with everybody. It’s hard being in a room full of all the people most dear to you and have to either ignore most of them or rush from one conversation to another. The night could have gone on for ten years and I don’t think we could have finished with all the things we would have liked to share. I hope the RMC is sufficiently friendly with new faces, though – in an environment where most people know each other so well and for so long, it’s hard for strangers to break in. Unless they happen to be beautiful, hairy, fleshy, and nearly naked save for a few big heavy floppy parts jiggling around with only the sheerest and smallest swatch of fabric to keep them in check. ;-)
The food came out OK – I experimented with the absolute, absolute minimum equipment set for serving finger food and it looked pretty good. The nice kit has huge, heavy, totally impractical ceramic platters that look great but don’t pack so well. Instead, I used half and quarter baking pans lined with parchment, and everything either dumped out of a bag or was cut from a roll. Still, setup took nearly half an hour. When you’re serving lots of food, the tiniest annoyance becomes huge. Top of the list: trying to find the end of the saran wrap that’s wrapped tightly around your smoked salmon maki. Try doing that twenty times in a row in a dark corner of a noisy bar, and before you know it, it’s nervous breakdown time. In the future, I will wrap them diagonally and twist the ends.
Neatness and consistency continue to elude me. The sushi was OK but to my eyes it looked like the Tokyo Chainsaw Massacre. The rice was too sticky, and the sizes were way inconsistent. For some reason – believing it would be easier - I cut all the rolls into six instead of the usual eight, and in the future I will probably aim for ten or twelve. I have accepted the inevitability of gummy seaweed, but that can be forgiven if everything else is perfect.
Foccacia sandwiches: Tasty and easy, but I must find a way to prevent the two halves from falling apart.
[An aside: Cooking for two, for twenty, and for two hundred really is a different world. I realize now that a lot of bizarre “time-savers” that I’ve read about, which puzzled me since they seemed like wildly inconvenient solutions for problems that didn’t exist, were simply directed to cooks that feed either ten times more or fewer people than you are imagining. I would never have guessed that saran wrap would prove such a mortal foe in the battle for efficiency. If there were such a thing as a saran wrap end-finding doohickey, I’d have given almost anything to have it that night.]
The orchid show was interesting, although since it’s at the same time every year it doesn’t change much from one year to another. I will post some photos later, including what struck me right away as the World’s Ugliest Orchid. While Cym. “Annette Funicello” may have won for sheer gaudiness, it wasn’t nearly as pathetic and dejected as this one.
Dinner at Oliveto was an eye opener. They had REAL escargot – fresh, apparently wild-caught. It was prepared in a fashion I’d had once before in France, with braised scallions and a buttery white wine and garlic sauce. I never order escargot because almost all French restaurants serve the little rubber things out of a tin, blasted with salt and garlic. This, in contrast, was indescribably delicate, just a bit firmer than oysters, and seasoned with the lightest touch.
Then they served my Nonna’s ravioli. You remember the flashback scene in Ratatouille? It was just like that, and completely unexpected. I’d always taken it for granted, but tasting this made me realize that her ravioli came from what we would now call an artisanal producer, and that I had not tasted that particular braised pork and parmesan filling since I was a child. At least, not like that, with deep, gamy undertones booming under one of the most lowly-looking and unadorned dumplings you’ll ever see. It’s the austerity of such things that makes me love them – not the goopy overflowing of tomato sauce and cheese you’ll see in American-style Italian food, but spare, runty, minimalist dishes that make you feel as if you’re being punished for something. At least until you taste them.
Their polenta was exactly what I had hoped it would be, and it was excellent. Every time I drive through Hopland I’m faced with a huge billboard advertising prime rib at the casino for $4.95. I had to laugh because I’d just shared a small glop of corn mush that not only cost slightly more than that but surely tasted much better. Oh the irony.
The main course, chicken stuffed with sausage, was also perfect if not so personally meaningful. But I found myself swooning over Brussels sprouts for the second time in a week. This is something I haven’t been able to achieve myself, they’re among the most temperamental of vegetables.
In short: Oliveto is now my favorite Bay Area restaurant, hands down. Acquerello is also excellent, so much so that I hate to put it in second place, but Oliveto is my cuisine, and embodies everything I aspire to as a chef. I sensed this immediately on picking up Bertolli’s book, and I was not wrong.
