Honor Guard pork rib roast

The first big recipe out of Molly Stevens new book, All About Roasting: A New Approach to a Classic Art, was out of this world. For a festive Christmas dinner for the family we tried her honor guard version of bone-in pork rib roast. It is her alternative to the crown roast, which she says never cooks properly and is difficult to carve. No one can argue with her result, which lent itself to a dramatic presentation and a truly superb flavor.

I went to Whole Foods to order the roast ahead of time and was sent to the holiday order desk staffed by someone whose sole qualification seemed to be that she knew nothing about meat. Crown roast was on her computer and beef rib roast (which is what she completed an order for but we caught at the last minute), but not what I wanted. So I went back to the butcher counter (at Friendship Heights) and convinced Andres to take the order for two bone-in center cut roasts, eight ribs each, chine bone remove and ribs Frenched. He came through and tied two beautiful roasts for me, exactly according to specifications, weighing about 5 lbs. each.

The roasts are each brined in 5 c. cool water, 1/3 c. kosher salt, 2 Tbl. brown sugar, 1/4 c. honey, 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, 2 garlic cloves smashed and peeled, and 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes. You dissolve the salt and sugar solely by stirring, no heating. I put each with its brine in a ziploc bag and "refrigerated" (outside on the screen porch) for a little less than 24 hrs. I took the roasts out of the brine, patted dry and let sit for an hour at room temperature.

Then the fun begins. Each roast gets seared on the fat side, about 5 min. Then you set them parallel to each other in a roasting pan, fat side out for each, so that the ribs interlace with each other in the way an honor guard will interlace their rifles over someone passing under. You tie them together this way (don't squeeze) and put the pan into a preheated 325-degree oven for about 1 hr 45 min, until the internal temperature reaches 140.

What comes out is a spectacularly beautiful golden brown roast that we presented to the assembled diners, rested 15 min., and then carved, one beautiful thick chop for each place (I used her dressing with dried apricots and rosemary as a cushion as she recommends.) This Niman Ranch pork had a marvelous flavor wonderfully enhanced by the brining and roasting, was totally tender and juicy and was a tremendous hit among all the pork fans.

The whole dinner was very festive. We had two kinds of shrimp as appetizers -- the shrimp seviche from the Barcelona cookbook and a very nice shrimp in North African spices (got to use my Aleppo pepper!) from Olives and Oranges. To accompany the pork, we had, along with the dressing, a potato-celery root gratin and roasted brussels sprouts in brown cranberry butter, with a lettuce avocado salad to follow. Dessert was a stunning stompe de noel, like a bouche, only a tree stump instead of a log, which was beautiful and very tasty.

Braised pork belly and glazed turnips

Finally normal supermarkets are carrying pork belly regularly, so I bought some when I saw it at Whole Foods and found a nice recipe in Molly Stevens' All About Braising. There's a lot of steps, but it's basically a simple recipe and I fixed it for us during the week.

You toast 1 tsp of coriander seeds (and 1/2 tsp of dill seeds if you have them, I didn't) and crack them in a grinder with 1 tsp black peppercorns then give it another pulse with 1-1/2 tsp coarse salt to make a rub for the pork belly. You apply the rub and wrap in plastic for a day or two.

When ready to cook, you brown the pork belly in olive oil, pour off some fat, then sautee chopped onion, celery, carrot for 10 minutes, add chopped garlic, 2 bay leaves, 4 cloves for 1 min., deglaze the pan with 1/2 c. white wine add 1 c. stock, bring to a simmer and put the pork belly back in. You put braising pan in a preheated 325-degree oven and cook for 2-1/4 to 3 hours, basting and checking every 45 min.

Then you let the pork belly cool in the braising liquid before removing. You score a cross-hatch pattern on the fatty side and cut into serving pieces (the recipe calls for about 2 lbs for 4 people and I had a little over 1 lb for 2). You strain the braising liquid and reserve 1/4 c. for the turnips (and if you can skim off any fat, use that for the turnips, too -- I couldn't).

To finish, you put the pork belly into a 425-degree oven to brown for 20 minutes. In the meantime, you take 1-1/2 lbs small turnips, peeled and cut into 1-inch wedges, and put into skillet with 1 Tbl butter (or pork fat), 1 tsp sugar, and the 1/4 c. reserved braising liquid and cook 10 to 12 min. until tender.

It all comes out pretty spectacular in a homey way and is delicious. Stevens' book has been consistently great and I'm looking forward to using her new cookbook, All About Roasting.

The connoisseur syndrome

It started, I think, with wine. The boomer generation traveled through Europe, learned to appreciate wine, and created demand for a vast and diverse assortment of wine. Now everyone is a connoisseur. Go into any wine store on a Saturday morning, and you will find scores of gray-haired, balding, slightly pudgy but prosperous looking men talking knowledgeably to attentive sales people about the respective benefits of wines from every corner of the globe.

We truly live in a golden age for gourmets and connoisseurs, with so many kinds of food and drink now readily available. But I worry it goes too far. I worry about my own penchant for getting enthusiastic about selecting the very best of everything.

In addition to wine, you can become a connoisseur of single malt Scotch and small-batch bourbon. Now you can also choose from a selection of finely crafted gins and vodkas, as well as tonic water and bitters.

The same holds true for coffee and tea, for salt and pepper, with vast new categories of special products becoming available. I'm currently reading and enjoying a book about olive oil, Extra Virginity, to review for the Washington Independent Review of Books, and I'm sure it will stimulate me to pay more attention to oil provenance and cultivars (the equivalent of varietals for olives).

Where will it end? Will it ever be possible just to have a cup of coffee, without knowing which bean it is, where it comes from and how exactly it was roasted? Will we ever feel free just to salt and pepper our food without knowing what sea basin or pepper tree they come from?

I'm supposed to pay attention to where my meat was raised, what it was fed, how it was slaughtered and how far away all this took place. I have to decide whether I want ultra-pasteurized organic milk or non-homogenized raw milk and whether I buy it in a carton or a glass bottle with a deposit. I buy heirloom beans with exotic names in amazing shapes and colors.

Yes, it's all fun, kind of a game, really. But I think it's easy to get carried away and perhaps a little too precious.

Coffee

For a long time, I drank only decaffeinated coffee because there was a bad chemical reaction in me between whatever chemicals stress releases in the body and caffeine. Now that I'm older, mellower and working at home in a much less stressful situation, I'm increasingly drinking more regular coffee. Although decaf has improved, regular still tastes better and there are many more choices.

I've grown to abhor Starbucks coffee. They have convinced people that over-roasted mediocre coffee is the way it's supposed to taste. No wonder they have to have so many gunky drinks to hide the flavor of their coffee. Although I will drink a cup of coffee there to be sociable, I've decided to simply not get their packaged coffee. I've ended up throwing out the crap I bought a couple of times when I wavered in my resolve and gave them another chance.

Oddly enough, my favorite local coffee is not some trendy micro-roaster, but the old-line M.E. Swings Co., which used to have an iconic shop on 17th St., across from the Old Executive Office Building. David Pursglove took me there once when it was still open, praising the quality of the coffee. Fortunately, Swings is still recognized for its quality and has fairly good distribution around town. I can get it in packages at Broad Branch and in bulk at Rodman's. Bought some Decaf Colombian at Rodman's and ground it there, though my favorite is the regular Mesco blend.

Mayorga is another good local roaster, and distributed through Marvelous Market, though the choice isn't always great. Quartermain I avoid because they have adopted a dark roast policy, hoping, I guess, to capture the crumbs from Starbucks' table. They have retrenched and I expect them to go out of business. Other trendy micro-roasters tend to fall into the over-roasting trap -- perhaps they are compelled to because people think that's what coffee should taste like.

My brother, surprisingly, while he would not call himself a coffee gourmet, has a flair for finding flavorful coffees. He has determined that the Eight O'Clock coffee available at Costco has great flavor, and sent me a sampler from Old Bisbee Roasters in Arizona as one of his thoughtful Christmas gifts (the other was BBQ from Jack Stack in KC). They are deliciously fresh-roasted and I've liked the two I've sample so far. I'm sure I'll end up ordering some, too, though obviously it's not locavore.

Eating is not always about the food

I like good food and don't like to eat bad food, let alone junk food, particularly when I go to a restaurant. But sometimes there are other priorities than just the food. I meet regularly with a couple of groups of writers and it is the company rather than the food that makes the meeting worthwhile. In fact, the food takes a decidedly back seat, and we trade the comfort and convenience of some oldline eateries for fancy fixings.

The one meeting is with a group of about 70 published authors in the DC area convened a couple of times a year by Dan Moldea. It's a group that fits with a little squeezing into the Rathskeller at Old Europe, a Washington standby that hides its Bavarian identity behind a European facade. Dan has a deal with the restaurant for a prix fixe menu at $25, with a choice of pork schnitzel, trout, chicken or steak in the entree, preceded by salad and followed by apple strudel for dessert. This is not award-winning cuisine and if it is Zagat-rated, I'd probably rather not know the rating. But I like a breaded pork schnitzel and the cottage fries and red cabbage that go with it and it's the chance to mingle with a group of writers that counts.

More recently, a smaller group of us, a kind of subset of the Moldea group, has begun meeting for lunch on a monthly basis. The initiator of this group picked Hamburger Hamlet, a pre-franchise hamburger joint on Old Georgetown Road. It is the kind of place where only the brave venture any dish besides the namesake hamburger, which is pretty good, has all the fixings and decent fries. Someone else suggested a Portuguese restaurant which has white tablecloths and a more sophisticated menu, but he was voted down, unanimously.

An earlier writers group I belonged to met regularly at the Democratic Women's Club, an historic building at Dupont Circle, which served a hot meal buffet style for just $16, but they had to shut down their kitchen operation and the group itself is fairly moribund.

Bottom line is that for some meals, even when the creative muse is involved, humdrum food can fill the bill. It's easy, quick and doesn't distract from the purpose at hand.

Pasta and beans

The weather is still mild but autumnal enough to make us seek comfort in these Italian dishes. After all the turkey and stuffing, a pasta e fagioli dish from Domenica Marchetti's The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy was just the ticket.

This recipe, in her winter section, used the heirloom Christmas lima beans I bought recently at La Cuisine in Alexandria. She just calls for the soaked beans to be dumped in the pot along with the finely chopped onion, chopped pancetta (though I used some leftover ham steak), chopped celery, and a paste of three garlic cloves and rosemary -- no sautéeing or anything -- and then 1/2 c. olive oil and 8 c. water.

You cook this for a couple of hours, then purrée half the soup, bring it to the boil again and add 8 oz. spaghetti or fettucini (had a package open) broken into 1-inch pieces and cook for another 20 minutes. You drizzle "your finest olive oil" over the soup when you serve it.

The dish was delicious, though I would make a couple of adjustments next time. I used too little water because I was afraid it would be too watery (and my package of beans may have been more than the 2 c. called for, I forgot to measure). The pancetta would probably add more flavor than my ham substitute. And I would try it without purréeing any next time. The beans themselves are prettier, even when cooked, than the mushy purrée and it would be soupier.

Other recent dishes have included two great standbys from Marcella Hazan -- the cauliflower with penne, where you break up the cooked cauliflower in oil and dress the pasta with that, along with red pepper and parsley (she uses anchovies as well but they are banned in our household); and the ever-good shell pasta with ricotta, bacon and peas.

Cast iron skillet

A couple times this week I've pulled out the trusty old cast iron skillet and been able to make such tasty meals I wonder why I don't use it more often. Maybe it's the pulling out part, from the cabinet underneath the range.

The first time was our second go at the lovely chicken with apples and escarole, this time substituting endive for the unobtainable escarole. The whole point of this recipe by Sara Jenkins is to let the flavors accumulate by cooking everything in the same skillet, and I think they accumulate much better in the cast iron skillet.

The next day was simply to fry some hamburgers. First, however, I sauteed onions in the skillet and then transferred them to a smaller skillet for reheating and fried the hamburgers in the same skillet. I used a couple of James Beard's tricks -- flavoring the oil with a crushed garlic clove and folding some creme fraiche into the center of the patties. With a little salt and the onion and garlic flavors from the skillet, the hamburgers came out delicious, served with the onions on a toasted bun with ketchup. Hard to beat.

America Eats Tavern

What's happened to Jose Andres? This blatantly commercial attempt to gussy up American classics is too precious by half. The food tastes good -- Andres would not serve bad food -- but who needs overpriced Buffalo Wings seen through the eyes of a Spaniard?

After seeing the price creep at Jaleo, the mediocritzation of Oyamel and now this pretentious act of hubris, one can only conclude that Andres has sold out. They want $6 to have some of their precious bread and there are very few wines on the list under $100 a bottle. Who but lobbyists on expense account are going to spend $386 for a half bottle of Chateau d'Yquem with their dessert.

We spent $100 for two people and got at best what could be described as a light supper. Thanks but no thanks. We'll explore other eating options.

Catering a book party

Andrea and her brother Henry operated a catering service for a couple of summers in Rehoboth, back in the day when they could name their service SABU for spinster aunt, bachelor uncle. Both are happily married now, but they revived their collaboration to cater a book party for my new novel, The Grand Mirage, and the food was terrific.

Andrea baked hundreds of small biscuits, only about an inch in diameter, that were flaky and buttery and light. She sliced each one in half and Henry put on some cranberry-pear chutney with roast pork tenderloin on half of the biscuits and a mustard sauce with roast turkey breast on the other half to make delicious little sandwiches.

Henry also experimented with grilled skewers of winter vegetables -- Brussels sprouts, beets, parsnips, shallots and others -- to make a refreshingly different vegetable finger food. Andrea made some light, buttery tuiles that she topped with a smoked salmon tartar and creme fraiche. She also made a goat cheese galette that resembled a small pizza with a great crust and a white cheese mixture that included ricotta and mozzarella with the goat cheese, then cut into thin slices. For light snacks, she had savory biscotti with aged gouda and shallots, spiced almonds and dates stuffed with blue cheese.

Did I mention that the food was terrific? Virtually everything was gone at the end except some of the biscuit sandwiches because they had made truly a boatload of those. As Andrea said, if every guest had eaten just one more biscuit, they would be all gone.

For the wine, I experimented with Paul's and was very happy with the 2007 E. Guigal Cotes du Rhone and the 2008 Macon-Villages that we got from there. We also had some wonderful fresh apple cider from the farmer's market and chilled San Pellegrino. Simple and perfect for a fall afternoon.

Still grilling

As the days get shorter and the weather gets colder, it's clearly less inviting to grill something up for dinner. Usually about this time of the year, I swap out some of the grill cookbooks on the kitchen bookshelf for those focused on braising, slow cooking, stews -- the good winter stuff.

But we enjoy grilled food so much -- whether it's the pork chops from our 1/8 of a pig or salmon fillet from The Fishery or asparagus or eggplant -- that I still find myself out there once or twice a week. Last year, I covered the Weber and Big Green Egg ahead of a snowstorm and they stayed that way for a couple of months. We'll see what the weather brings this year, but maybe we'll be grilling in January!

An 1/8 of a pig

It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Blue Rooster Farm, which started selling its meat at the New Morning Farm market in DC a few months ago, emailed customers with an offer to buy 1/8 of a pig in late September. The haul is a collection of pork chops, bacon, sausage, Boston butt, cured ham slices and a couple of other cuts. Some cuts aren't included and are presumably sold separately. It is essentially a big shopping bag of frozen meat that fit easily into our limited side-by-side freezer.

So far, as with all the other meat we've gotten from Blue Rooster, the pork has been terrific. These are Berkshire pigs grown only to a year old and a hundred pounds. The bacon and ham have been flavorful and juicy (saftig in the German sense), the sausage fresh and mildly flavored. It's not that it's a big savings buying in "bulk" like this -- it's only a 10% discount from buying each cut retail -- but that you get it at all and you get it all at once so you have a nice store in your fridge.

When I picked up my 1/8 pig I jokingly told Julie Hurst from Blue Rooster that I've decided to regard buying meat frozen as a plus. For a long time, I resisted buying frozen meat at farmers' markets. I longed for the markets in France where refrigerated counters display the fresh meat openly. That's just not the way it's done here, and these vacuum-packed fresh frozen meats don't lose any quality over what you buy in the supermarket, even WholeFoods. After all, how does that lamb get here from Iceland and New Zealand?

The advantage is you get local farm-raised meat, butchered by local butchers, that is healthier, fresher, and as a rule tastier. Blue Rooster's lamb and beef are also delicious.

I'm  not quite there yet but I don't exclude the possibility of getting a deep-freeze in the basement to store a side of beef or a 1/2 pig. Once growing up, we bought a side of beef and stored it in a rented freezer locker. I thought it was pretty cool at the time to take a trip to the locker and pick up some steak and ground beef. It seemed like free food, though of course it wasn't. My mother grew up on a farm and I think for her it was a small way of recapturing that feeling. Maybe I have that gene.

e-Cookbooks

The New York Times had a story last week about how Julia Child's pathbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking was now available, finally, as an e-book. The article discussed the particular challenges of putting a cookbook onto an e-reader, from the often complicated layout and color photos to the concern about splattering grease onto your Kindle or iPad.

Now apparently technology has advanced enough to have column formats in e-books, and new readers like iPad and Kindle Fire have all sorts of color. As for the grease, I have experimented with downloading a Kindle single by Mark Bittman on grilling and using it. I usually keep the recipe across the kitchen on the table anyway, so the real danger, especially with a touch screen, is having dirty or greasy fingers when I want to consult it.

What would really be cool and would get me to take the plunge immediately is if somehow your entire cookbook collection would be searchable (or even your entire Kindle library because the search terms would be specific enough). The big plus of Epicurious, of course, is that you can search by ingredient or technique. This is virtually impossible to do with the hard copies, because you pick a likely book, check the index, are invariably disappointed, check another index, and so on, and usually end up at Epicurious anyway.

The only way I can navigate my print cookbooks is to pick one arbitrarily at random and leaf through it looking for likely prospects that use seasonal agreements. It would be more satisfying to go to the store or market and simply pick what looks good, then come home and easily find the right recipe.

Nonetheless, I may experiment. Paula Wolfert has a new cookbook out, The Food of Morocco, and it will be available in a Kindle edition on Nov. 15. I love Paula Wolfert's books and we have been on a real Morocco kick, so I will get one edition or the other. The hardcover print edition is just $27 on Amazon, and the Kindle edition, at the insistence of the publisher, will be $20, so it's hardly competitive given the uncertain performance of a cookbook on an e-reader. We'll see what people say.

Chicken with escarole, apples, and potatoes

Sara Jenkins has done it again. A delicious, simple, elegant dish for a weekday that is really something special. The trick here is that everything gets cooked in the same skillet, so the flavor accumulates.

You boil 12 oz. of new potatoes until just tender (7 min.), let them cool and flatten them a bit. You season 4 8-oz. boneless chicken breasts with skin with salt and pepper. WF doesn't have boneless breasts with skin so we deboned regular breasts -- the skin adds a lot of essential flavor in this dish. You cook the breasts in 2 Tbl. oil until skin is golden and then turn over for another 3 min. Transfer to baking pan, cover with foil and put into preheated 250-degree oven. Drain oil and melt 2 Tbl. butter in skillet and cook apple sections (2 tart apples, peeled, cored and cut into eighths) in single layers. Add more butter and saute the potatoes. Add a garlic clove smashed and peeled and escarole leaves (WF had no escarole so we used spinach). Wilt and add 1/2 c. wine to finish cooking. Put apples back in to warm through. Assemble on plate with potatoes, chicken breast, escarole and apples. Syrupy, buttery, flavorful, rich and satisfying. Drink white or red wine with it.

HalfFoods and other disappointments

WholeFoods has been at pains to expand its prepared food offerings -- it's a shame they don't take a little more pride in it. I was astonished to see how unappetizing all of it has become by the late afternoon since I'm not often there shopping for dinner. The hot food was dry or mucky looking, the deli counter dull beyond belief, the kabob station offered nothing enticing. Went to the meat counter and got a ham steak packed in cellophane. What a half-a***d approach to food service!

We've had other disappointments lately in the DC food scene. Brunch at the Poste restaurant in Hotel Monaco was no culinary delight. An uninspired menu and half-hearted execution made it truly lackluster. We had an out of town guest so brunch was not just about the food and we had a good time, but it's sure off our list for the future.

An even bigger disappointment was Oyamel, which we always treasured for its fresh, inventive rendition of Mexican cuisine. It seems to have fallen into some sort of rut. The food was just all right, but these small plates seem to have gotten even smaller -- and way to small for $10-11 a pop -- so it's kind of hard to tell with what you actually get to eat. If the food isn't magic you notice much more how loud and unpleasant the ambiance is.

Chili à la Cindy Lou

Getting a little head start on our winter repertoire, I decided to try this chili recipe from Steve Sando's new book, The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower's Guide. I don't have any plans to grow beans, but we're such fans of Sando's beans and his earlier cookbook, I wanted to have this one for its recipes and comments on the various kinds of beans.

My usual chili recipe is for Cincinnati-style chili from Epicurious. That is mostly about putting a good mix of spices in with the ground beef and adding a can or two of beans. This recipe, of course, starts with the beans, in this case, Good Mother Stallard beans. I soaked and cooked a pound of these with a mirepoix. When they were soft, I sautéed the ground beef with some more onion and garlic and added it into the beans with 2 cans of diced tomatoes (I took that to mean 28 oz. but it was pretty tomato-y), 1/4 c. cider vinegar, 2 Tbl. balsamic vinegar, 4 Tbl. each of cumin, Mexican oregano, New Mexico chile powder, and brown sugar, 1 Tbl. paprika and 1 tsp. salt. Cook all that for "several hours" -- in this case 3-1/2 -- and you've got yourself a pretty good pot of chili. Can't beat those beans.

Grilled potatoes

Batali's recipe for grilled potatoes caught my eye and it seemed like a simple recipe for a weekday. Equally simple was Sara Jenkins' recipe for grilled skirt steak with cucumber and avocado garnish, so it had the makings of a great weekday meal.

With the potatoes, you essentially end up with a warm potato salad. You parboil the Yukon gold (or other waxy) potatoes in salted water -- he says for 6 minutes but his potatoes were smaller than mine so I let them go longer, maybe a bit too long. You cut each potato into 3 or 4 thick slices and toss the slices in a mix of olive oil, celery seed and sliced scallions (which I forgot to buy so used shallots). Then you thread them, horizontally, onto skewers, about 5 per skewer. You grill them for 15 min., he says, though my time was a little shorter because of the longer parboiling, and get a nice crust on them. Then, you remove the potato slices from the skewers and toss them again in a mix of oil, Chianti (or other red wine) vinegar, and Dijon mustard. Delicious!

After I took off the potato skewers, I put on the skirt steak, seared it on one side for 2 min., turned it, sprinkled salt and pepper on the cooked side, and grilled the other side for another 2 min., removed the steak from the grill, turned and sprinkled salt and pepper on the unseasoned side and let it rest 5 min. before slicing it. A mix of diced avocado, cucumber (peeled, halved, scraped clean and sliced into half moons), basil, oil and lemon juice goes on top of each serving of meat.

We had a very nice, and very cheap, Spanish red wine to accompany.

Spit-roasted duck

I bought Mario Batali's Italian Grill after a friend asked for a grilling cookbook that also discussed wine pairings. I ended up recommending this one and liked the description so much I got one for myself. I haven't used it too often, but after trying out his Spit-Roasted Duck with orange and rosemary and the Butternut Squash with vin cotto to accompany, I will be using it a lot more.

The two dishes had a similar treatment. The duck was covered with a glaze made from simmering 1/2 c. orange marmalade, 1/2 c. orange juice, 3 Tbl. balsamic vinegar, 4 minced garlic cloves and 2 Tbl. chopped fresh rosemary for five minutes. Batali makes a big point of pricking the duck skin all over, especially in the thighs, for a total of at least 50 times. This of course permits the fat to escape in the roasting process and makes the skin very crispy.

Well, it was delicious. Duck is always such a treat and the meal seemed very special. The squash gets sliced into 1/4-inch slices and marinated in a mixture of 1/2 c. olive oil, 1/4 c. red wine vinegar, 3 Tbl. honey, 1 Tbl. chopped fresh rosemary and 4 minced garlic cloves for 2 hours.

Once I took the duck off the spit and let it rest, I drained the squash and grilled it over the same fire. Truly delicious sweet, nutty taste. I would slice them a little thicker next time because the thicker pieces seemed to let more of the squash flavor come through.

The spit-roasting attachment to the Weber grill has proven to be a great investment. It's not that I use it so often, but it's nice to be able to follow a recipe like this without any workarounds.

I steamed some wild rice as a second side. Rebecca Wood, in her cookbook The Splendid Grain, makes a big deal about getting the organic wild rice that is hand-harvested by native Americans in Minnesota as opposed to the commercially grown California version. Too late. The wild rice I had from Rancho Gordo proudly proclaims itself to be California wild rice. Wood has a helpful table for estimating the amount of water and cooking time needed for different types of wild rice and a nice variation on the basic recipe that involves sauteeing chopped onion and celery with the rice in butter and oil before adding the boiling water to cook it.

Grilled top round, Cuban style

The "Basque" chicken wings from The Thrill of the Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby tasted so good the other day, I decided to try another recipe and this was also a hit.

You just take a nice, thick slab of top round, otherwise known as London broil, salt and pepper and grill it to medium rare. You cut the nicely seared meat into cubes and mix in a bowl chopped red onion, red pepper, green pepper, slice radishes, minced garlic, olive oil, tabasco sauce, chopped parsley and cilantro, ground cumin, chili powder and fresh-squeezed lime juice. Not the tenderest cut of meat even after a hot grilling, but flavorful and nicely set off by the vegetables.

Also used their recipe for black beans to accompany, which they cook with lots of onion and most of the same flavoring as the steak salad. They also recommend fried plantains and rice as sides, but that's way too much for us for a weekday, so we stuck with corn tortillas from the Latino market.

Pork

I got a 7-lb Boston butt from the Virginia farm that raises forest-fed pigs ("Babes in the Woods"). I'd been wanting to try pulled pork in the Big Green Egg since I got it, but the 10+ hours of cooking it was a daunting prospect. So Labor Day became the big day to try it.

As always, I used my barbecue bible, the Jamisons' book, using their rub of paprika, pepper and other ingredients and their mop of vinegar, leftover rub and more pepper. I applied the rub the night before and another coating in the morning when I took the butt out of the fridge. I lit the fire at 7 and got the pork in at 8 at about 220 degrees. I mopped it every 45 to 60 minutes and in the afternoon inserted my newly acquired digital thermometer probe into the meat. It was at about 120 degrees and needed to go to 180 according to Jamisons. Other recipes had put the internal temperature at 160 to 180, so I was willing to accept the lower end of the range. The new probe, for what it's worth, registered the "oven" temperature about 20 degrees lower than the Egg's own thermometer. I pulled it out at 6:30 at 160 degrees and wrapped it in foil for half an hour.

The pork was delicious and was a big hit with the family members who came over for the holiday, but it was different than I anticipated. I thought I would have a tender, fibrous, gray pork that would shred at a touch to turn into those piles of pulled pork we had on our road trip last summer. I had prepared the vinegar sauce to go on this pulled pork. What became evident as I sliced through the crust to the pink meat underneath was, as Henry said, "I don't think this is the shredding kind of pork." It was in fact, as Henry also observed, much more like ham, though with more of a smokey, porky flavor than you usually get with ham. It was very tender and pretty moist, but firm and I carved thin slices for the platter. The vinegar sauce was still delicious on it.

Clearly there's some things I don't understand about barbecuing. Was this more of a picnic cut, so that I got smoked pork shoulder, rather than a real butt with the marbling that would yield the shreddy texture I anticipated? Are these forest-fed pigs, which have great flavor, simply too muscular to get that kind of marbling? (There was plenty of fat, but as a slab along one side of the cut.) Is the Egg simply not going to yield the kind of result that a real smoker would?

Don't get me wrong -- it was a great meal and a very successful recipe. But I would like to have a better idea of what I'm doing. Everybody brought great sides and Andrea did her delicious corn sticks. I also grilled some wings (about three dozen) and sopped them in a "Basque" sauce from Thrill of the Grill (this was very good and will prompt me to try more recipes from there) and in Frank's Louisiana sauce, said to be the sauce of the original Buffalo wings.

Locavore flavors

We're getting the hang of being locavores. Went to the farm stand on Beech just off East-West Highway for peaches, plums and heirloom tomatoes, picked up some green beans at the Silver Spring market, and a Boston butt from a Virginia farm that has forest-fed pigs.

Used the tomatoes and beans for a couple of simple recipes from the oft-cited Olives and Oranges by Sara Jenkins (can't wait for her next book). Her subtitle talks about "recipes and flavor secrets" and it is all about the flavor. I cut the tomatoes into eighths, sprinkled a little salt on them and let them sit for 5 min., then crumbled feta cheese (the Greek kind, not locavore) and sprinkled chopped cilantro over them before drizzling with sherry vinegar and olive oil. Her point is that as good as tomatoes taste with basil, they also taste great with other herbs and that certainly was true in this case.

The beans were simmered for half an hour in a tomato sauce made by sauteeing diced onion and minced garlic in 2 Tbl olive oil, then adding a small can of tomatoes (she says through a food mill, I just pulsed a few times on my mini-processor), simmered together for 10 min before adding the beans. This gets chopped parsley at the end.

The two simple dishes were a great accompaniment to fried chicken with some end of the season rose wine. Terrific.

Tagine bis

Alas, careful as I was, my first tagine cracked and then broke in circumstances I won't go into. I've decided that Tunisian clay pots probably work well in Tunisia, simmering away over some embers, but they are too anxiety-ridden for cooking on gas stoves.

So Tagine bis is a hardened clay artifact from Emile Henry. Even though they do specify it has to be heated up slowly, it seems a good deal more robust than the first one, though the color is not as pretty.

I inaugurated it with another one of Ghillie Basan's recipes, this one a simple chicken with artichokes and green grapes. Chicken breasts are cut into thick slices and marinated for a couple of hours in olive oil, garlic and turmeric (great color!), then cooked with lots of onion for just 15 min. before adding artichoke hearts, another 5 min. cooking, then add grapes and lots of cilantro. Even better the second day with flatbread (in this case, naan from Whole Foods).

Ribs

I've been wanting to try ribs in the Big Green Egg since I got it. Let me say right away the ribs came out really tasty and fairly tender, but they were not moist and falling off the bone and I'm not sure why -- whether it was the meat, the recipe, the Egg, the execution (timing, temperature?).

I followed the Kansas City recipe from Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking, which had a rub of many ingredients (paprika, chile powder, smoked salt, etc.), applied one-third the night before, one-third just before smoking, and one-third halfway through the cooking. I got three St. Louis cut slabs which weighed 6.25 lbs altogether. I also went ahead and got the Weber rib rack to hold them in the Egg. I used just beer and Worcestershire sauce for a mop (every hour). I kept the temperature pretty steady at about 200, though in the late stages it snuck up to 250 when I wasn't looking and I had a little trouble bringing it down. I gave up on them getting more tender after 4 hrs and applied the sauce (tomato sauce, brown sugar, corn syrup, tomato paste, etc.), cooking for another 40 min. Then I wrapped then in a double layer of foil for about 45 min.

It occurs to me that brining might get them more like the Rocklands finished product, but I also think these ribs (from Whole Foods) may have been a bit too lean. Researching a bit just now, I'm thinking the "country style ribs" from WF were more like baby backs and less like spareribs. Also the 4-hour cooking time specified by Jamison is too short, 6 hrs would be better. Temperature usually given as 225, so outside the 180-220 range Jamison calls for. Live and learn. I will no longer take Jamison as the last word or the gospel, but will consult other sources, too.

Used the pinto beans with beer and pepper from the same book, with the Rancho Gordo pinto beans. They were great but the recipe called for 2 Tbl of lard to sautee the onions that are added towards the end of cooking and it tasted too much of lard. Also, the beer does lend a slightly bitter taste, which I didn't mind but I might use a blander beer next time (or Mexican, as they recommend).

But it was a great meal, rounded out with Andrea's corn sticks, a big green salad with goat cheese, and a very seasonal fruit salad (peaches, plums, nectarines, raspberries) in mint sugar.

Chicken with plums

I've acquired some new cookbooks recently and I'm going to be trying them out. This simple recipe from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food was great for a week night.

Originally, this Turkish recipe (Tabaka Piliç) was made with a whole boned chicken but she calls for chicken fillets, both white and dark meat. I shopped at the co-op and all they had was chicken thighs so I skinned and boned them and flattened them into fillets. These simply get sauteed in a skillet and then the plums added to soften. The co-op plums were big and a bit hard so I cut them up to soften more quickly. The real addition here is a sauce made of plum jam (St. Dalfour) with a Tbl of vinegar, a crushed garlic clove and a pinch of chile pepper flakes. I also cooked up some bulghur wheat from the co-op (too much, two cups!) and sauteed some zucchini to stir into that. Nice little meal.

Re-creation

You can never really duplicate a meal you eat in a restaurant and that was not our goal when we nonetheless set out this weekend to approximate a couple of the meals we had in France.

If the market had had girolles or any suitable mushroom, we would have tried the tagliatelle with girolles, but it didn't so we went to Plan B, which was to have the salmon rillettes on toasted baguette for a first course and a version of Christophe's pork and polenta for a main course.

The salmon recipe came from Susan Loomis's Cooking at Home on Rue Tatin. It had a great flavor though it did not come out as fluffy and light as the one at Bastide de l'Odeon. Andrea thought it needed more olive oil in proportion to the butter. Other ingredients were steamed fresh salmon, smoked salmon, shallots and chives.

We obviously were not going to get Basque country heritage pork and I'm not sure you can even get an "echine" cut here (which, according to Julia Child, is the shoulder or blade end of the loin). So we opted for pork tenderloin and used piment d'Espelette to acknowledge the Basque country. I got the tenderloins out of the fridge an hour ahead of time, salted (with our coarse salt from the Camargue) and peppered and pimented them. To cook, I seared them in a combination of lard and peanut oil then put them on a sheet pan in a 350-degree oven. I wanted to pull them out at 140 degrees, but by the time I realized the one instant-read thermometer wasn't functioning correctly, they had reached 160. So no pink, but still very moist and not overdone. I had deglazed the skillet and reduced that in a saucepan, enriching with butter (and a little jam since it was a bit bitter) to drizzle over the carved tenderloin.

The polenta I baked at 350 in my cazuela for an hour and a half, stirring after an hour and checking seasoning. I turned it out onto the pizza paddle and let it cool, cut it into small rectangles, then sauteed the rectangles in olive oil and let them crisp up in that same oven. It actually made for a very nice meal.

We had a white Cote du Rhone with hors d'oeuvres (cheese and crackers) and the salmon, and a slightly chilled Fleurie with the pork. Andrea had her first go at re-creating Ladurrees macarones, but may have made a mistake putting them in the fridge after they cooled because they came out a little tough.

Southern France

We had many nice meals when we were staying with friends outside Uzès, including friends of theirs who kindly included us in dinner parties. But the highlight of the week was a lunch at one of their neighbors. It was a repast that shows how deep the culture of food goes with the French and how intertwined it is with social interaction.

We started with champagne -- what else? -- and munchies consisting of olives, saucisses and a saucisson roquefort. We sat at a table in the courtyard under a big tree that created lots of shade. The hosts had decked out three outdoor tables for a dozen guests, tablecloths of Provencal colors, and several glasses at each place.

The first course was the classic melon and prosciutto, though the melon was from the market and perfectly ripe, so unusually flavorful. (The host had been a farmer and grown melons himself, so he knew how to find just the right ones.) The ham was local jambon de pays.

What followed was an assiette de crudités that raised this humble dish to a new level -- cucumbers, tomatoes and wonderful beets with vinaigrette, all fresh from his own garden. In the meantime, our cook lit some dried oak branches and let them burn down to charcoal so he could grill lamb chops from the local market. These he served with individual vegetable (courgettes) casseroles. No salad course but some beautiful cheeses that we lingered over with much more wine. And then large portions of a creamy, smooth flan, more champagne, music, coffee, more wine. We started at noon and left at 4:45.


The other culinary highlight was our meal at L'Olivier in nearby Serviers. It was a small simple restaurant with a fresh and innovative cuisine. We ate in the courtyard. Because it is limited to five tables some of the dishes were no longer available. Andrea got the daily special of foie gras de canard in roasted fresh figs for a starter -- a very nice combination -- and then got the scallops as a main course. I took the sauteed crayfish tails with chervil and ginger for a starter and filet of sandre, a freshwater fish similar to perch, for the main course. We had a white Cote de Rhone with it. Dessert was an assortment of chocolate dishes, with the standout being a kind of pudding that was like the molten part of a molten chocolate cake.

On our last day, I fixed a meal for our hosts that I had often fixed in France, a grilled chicken with lemon from Roger Verge's Cuisine du Soleil cookbook, paired with his tomato salad and grilled eggplant. We got two poulets fermiers at the market, along with the tomatoes and eggplant. You butterfly the chickens, flatten them as best as possible, then marinate four hours in salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano on a bed of sliced onion with lemon slices covering them. You remove the lemon slices, grill the chickens on both sides, then return them to the roasting pan with the onion, put the lemon slices back on top and pop them in a very hot oven. The tomato salad is very simple -- you put a couple of tablespoons of salt on the tomatoes, immerse them in red wine vinegar, drain after half an hour or so then dress with olive oil.

Paris

We had many nice meals in Paris and especially nice times with old friends. We tasted some classic French specialties in places like Fontaine de Mars (the foie gras!), Perraudin and Wepler.

But for the blog I want to focus on two restaurants where young chefs are adapting classic French cuisine in new ways. Chef Gilles Ajuelos at La Bastide de l'Odeon, a small restaurant tucked in next to the Odeon where we had lunch the day we arrived, seeks to reinvent Provençal cuisine.

For starters, we had rillettes de saumon and a roasted eggplant timbale they called a millefeuille. Both were delicious -- the rillettes were fluffy on toasted baguette slices and the eggplant was al dente with a great vegetable flavor. What stole the show, though, was Andrea's tagliatelle with girolles. The homemade noodles were perfectly cooked and the girolles were redolent of garlic and butter without reeking of either, firm and tender without being chewy or tough and were simply delicious. I had a very nice mullet filet with a version of ratatouille also done as a timbale (yes, somewhat similar to my starter).

On Sunday, after a nice appero at Closerie des Lilas, we walked down to Christophe, another small eatery behind the Pantheon on Rue Descartes, for another inventive meal. Where Bastide was all warm Provençal colors, Chef Christophe Philippe wants to paint in earth tones.

I had a spring roll with cochon basquaise that was delicious and we were asking ourselves what was Basque about it because Andrea ordered the echine as a main course. It turns out there is no spice or rub, these are simply a breed of pigs that are raised in France's Basque country. So Andrea's echine (loin) had the most marvelous pork flavor, savoring of the marbling that characterizes this cut. It was a dark brown rectangle on a white plate, with another brown rectangle of polenta overlapping it. Not a presentation to my taste, but the flavors were delicious.

I had a similarly monochromatic main course with my sweetbreads and mashed potatoes, both an off-white on a white plate. It was certainly the largest portion of sweetbreads I've ever eaten and tender beyond belief, with that oh-so delicate flavor of this cut. The potatoes may have been the smoothest whipped potatoes I've ever had, with a strong earthy taste and just the right hint of butter. Andrea's starter, by the way, were some very green haricots verts with a slice of bacon, no doubt from those same Basque pigs.

Wines were a good deal here (three young diners at the table next to us went through at least four bottles), and we had a nice chilled red (sorry, forgot where it was from).

Both of these restaurants were among the 102 reviewed in Alexander Lobrano's Hungry for Paris. These chatty descriptions, apparently a collection of magazine reviews, are supplemented by a helpful "In a Word" summary and a "Don't Miss" catalogue of signature dishes. Equally helpful are the listings at the end. We found both these restaurants under the heading "Bistros, Contemporary", as opposed to "Bistros, Traditional" and other restaurant categories ("Haute Cuisine", etc.).

To my amazement, under "Foreign Cuisines" (a short list of four), Lobrano listed L'As du Falafel, which indeed was exactly the takeaway falafel place in the Marais that I always went to on Sunday and that we visited again on Sunday for a falafel sans pareil.

Pesce

Serendipitously we were looking for a place to eat at Dupont Circle and Pizzeria Paradiso had a 40-minute wait so we went across the street to Pesce. It was our first visit since the restaurant had moved down three doors to a space at one time occupied by Johnny's Half Shell (since, of course, moved to Capitol Hill).

Pesce is one of those restaurants pretty much under the radar but an old favorite of ours because we ate there so often with Andrea's parents. So it was sentimental to go back there. The new space, while not as charming as the smaller former location, was still very familiar, and the fish, as always, was very fresh and prepared just right. We split the popcorn shrimp appetizer, which was about as good as popcorn shrimp can be. I had the whole grilled Branzino, which was moist with just the right taste of fishiness, and Andrea got the lobster risotto, a super-rich buttery concoction that was enough to have leftovers for lunch the next day. A glass of Sancerre was the perfect accompaniment.

Update, Oct. 11, 2012: On Tuesday we actually booked a table at Pesce to meet downtown after events. Perhaps it was an off night. The waiter was distracted and intermittent; the chalkboard menu seemed to have fewer seafood choices; the dishes were all a bit "precious" with elaborate sides; the fish did not seem all that fresh. This is all the polar opposite of what we remember and like about Pesce.

I had grilled sardines, which were fine, but very fishy and perhaps not real fresh. Then I had seared tuna, which was served sliced on what turned out to be a "salad" of black peas and a few hundred other things. Perhaps I had the wrong thing in mind, but I had not been expecting a cold dish (yes, I know that seared tuna is not hot). When I queried first the bartender then the waiter, their answers were perfunctory. My glass of Sancerre cost $14 and when the bill came the waiter had charged us for a bottle; his apology was once again perfunctory.

Now it may seem this is the case anyway, but for sure we will not rush back.

Farmer's market again

I like to make a point of going to the New Morning Farm farmer's market Saturday mornings and simply buying what looks good to me. It's fun then to find the right recipe for the ingredients.

Last Saturday they had "cheddar cauliflower," small little heads that truly were the color of cheddar cheese. I roasted it with butter and lemon per a technique in a Canal House cookbook I bought recently, and, together with a sautéed yellow squash we had around, put it over penne with a little grated pecorino. Pretty good.

I also got some fava beans. These were pretty late stage beans but I used a recipe from Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges for a salad with "spring" fava beans because she specified you could use more mature beans and blanche them to remove the tough skin. It's a bit labor intensive to first shell the beans, blanche and shock them, then pop them out of their skins, but playing with food is for me part of the joy of cooking. The beans get mixed with greens, herbs (mint, basil, parsley), and tiny cubes of pecorino and dressed just with olive oil and salt.

I paired it with a pork loin spit-roasted (felt like using the spit on my Weber grill) that was marinated in roast garlic and spike with springs of rosemary. The recipe from the Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking called for fennel and onion to be roasted in the grill underneath the spit and then tossed with orzo. So it was a great little meal, with lots of leftover pork for later in the week. No chianti with these fava beans, but a nice Montalcino.

Pure Food and Wine

This lovely vegan restaurant at Union Square in New York bills its food as raw, though some of it is gently cooked, below the 118 degrees when enzymes break down. It bursts with fresh vegetable flavors, enhanced by silky oils and seasonings.

Unfortunately the restaurant doesn't update its menu so I can're recreate what I had, though I know I had a creamy polenta with a braised green and the salt caramel tart for dessert, both very good. The wine was a crisp, southern French with a nice mineral taste and matched the vegetable dishes well.

Fresh pasta

So I created enough time and space to experiment with making fresh pasta. It's always something lurking in the back of my mind. My mother often made egg noodles when were growing up and we'd have noodles draped over furniture on towels to dry all over the house when she got in a noodle-making mood. I had attended a session on pasta making in Princeton and bought the machine but never really used it.

I used the recipe and technique from Domenica Marchetti's The Glorious Pasta of Italy. Very simple -- 2 to 2-1/4 c. flour, 1/2 tsp salt, pinch of nutmeg in a mound, create a well and crack 3 eggs into and add 1 to 2 Tbl olive oil. Break the yolks with a fork, whisk eggs and olive oil together and gradually fork in some flour from the inside of the well to make a batter-like consistency. Then push the flour into the batter and start kneading. She suggest flattening with heel of hand, quarter turn, flattening some more, etc.

My first attempt failed because, as she suggested for hand kneading, I used the maximum amount of flour from the get-go. It was too much and dough came up very stiff and even after resting for half an hour was too stiff and dry to put through the pasta machine. So I started over, using just the 2 c. of flour. We got the "00" imported flour from Vace as recommended by the recipe. This time it worked much better. The dough was smooth and supple, and after resting 1/2 hr. I could cut it into quarters, roll out the quarter into an oval and feed it into the machine (Atlas from Italy) at the #1 setting. Following her technique, I folded it over in thirds and repeated this process 3 or 4 times. Then I started narrowing the setting -- #2,#3,#4,#5 -- feeding it through twice each time. She said to cut noodles at either #5 or #6. I didn't want to press my luck and have the dough start to break on me so I stopped at #5. It turns out this is too thick for fettucini, so next time I will go to #6.

The dough stretched out nicely and the cutting attachment worked perfectly to yield long, even fettucini, which I wrapped around my hand into a nest and dusted with cornmeal while I stretched out the other 3 chunks of dough. The noodles were very long and next time I will probably cut them in half as well as making them thinner.

We had been to the farmer's market in the morning and I got yellow zucchini and a couple of types of mushrooms just because they looked so nice. We found a couple of pasta recipes in Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges, one using zucchini and mint and the other using mushrooms and mint and decided to combine them with our fresh pasta. The mint gave me pause, but I used 4 Tbl in the end and the dish did not taste "minty" but the mint gave it a zingy freshness that was very nice. The zucchini got grated and then sauteed with chopped shallot.

For the mushrooms, she had an interesting technique I hadn't seen before. She called for putting just a single layer of trimmed and cut mushrooms into the heated oil and butter, adding some salt and pepper, and cooking them for 2 or 3 min., then pushing them to the side of the pan and adding a another single layer. Of course, the mushrooms reduce and the cooked ones continue to cook and brown, but this worked well for the 3 or 4 layers I had. Then you add some butter and chopped garlic at the end and cook until the butter foams. In both cases, you add the chopped mint at the end. So I tossed the cooked pasta -- it took nearly 5 min. because they were thick -- with the two dressings and some parmesan and it was really good. The mushrooms predominated because we had more of them than zucchini, but the mix worked fine. Jenkins' zucchini recipe has squash blossoms and a couple of other optional ingredients as well as a lot more zucchini, so it would probably be worthwhile to try it on its own someday.

Not sure how often I'll go to the trouble of making fresh pasta, but I will find a place to keep the machine that's easier to get at. We had it way back in a lower cabinet that I had to empty and almost crawl into in order to retrieve the equipment. Also, I have to move some stuff to open up counter space for this operation. When we renovate the kitchen we'll plan for a space that's always available for dough-making.

Tackle Box

Fresh fish, great ambiance, reasonable prices -- what more could you want? A little more food, maybe. The latest eatery from Jonathan and Bethany Umbel has opened in Cleveland Park and we had a nice lunch there Saturday. No lines, though the kitchen was a little slow in getting our fresh-made tacos and sandwich out.

The prices are reasonable, though they don't give anything away. Two tacos costs $8, and that's what you get -- two tacos. No rice, beans, salad or garnish of any sort. Just two tacos, each half full of a tiny, grilled fillet of tilapia and some slaw. Tasty, but not filling. Andrea's fried haddock sandwich came with fries, but came on two slices of totally untreated bread -- not a roll, not toasted, not buttered. So it's a little primitive.

The ambiance -- with well-used boat tackles hanging from the walls and a general feeling of Maine lobster shack -- is really nice, with a great bar and a friendly bartender. Drink prices also very good -- my 16 oz. Landshark draft cost only $5.

We did not try the lobster roll for $19, though it would be interesting to compare it with the lobster truck's $15 roll and Persimmon's $17 roll. The fish taco ranks behind Persimmon's and behind Surfside's, at least in volume, though sometimes the Surfside fish is not as fresh as it should be, or not freshly cooked.

The meal combos look like a good deal, and the shellfish pot, starting at $35 per person and going up depending on what fish you add, does not look like a good deal but looks interesting. We'll go back, though Cleveland Park is not always easy to deal with.

Web recipes

Among the many wonders of the Web are the wonderful recipes that pop up from various corners. There are Epicurious and Recipes.com and various blogs but you just never know where a good recipe is going to come from -- a wine site, a cooking store email, wherever.

I printed out a recipe for Braised saffron chicken with pasta the other day, and I honestly have no idea where it came from. (Update: It's not where I found it, but it turns out the recipe comes from Epicurious.) It was really good and a simple dish for a weekday. You brown 2-1/2 lbs. of chicken thighs ("with skin and bones") in 2 Tbl olive oil, set them aside and sautée 2 c. chopped white onion with 6 peeled and crushed garlic cloves. Then you add 2 c. (!) white wine with 1 tsp crushed saffron and boil it down to half. Then you add 2 c. chicken broth and the thighs, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hr., turning halfway through. You remove the thighs, let cool, then remove skin and bones and separate meat into bite-size pieces. You skim the fat off the braising juices, and 1 c. heavy cream and 2 Tbl lemon juice and reduce that, then add chicken pieces to heat through. You cook 1 lb of paccheri or rigatoni, drain, put back in pot, pour chicken mixture over, toss, and add 2/3 c. of chopped basil and serve. We also sprinkled parmesan on individually.

Update: Two Web recipes in a row. Last night it was Spanish pork burgers that I found on Recipes.com by googling. Very simple. Sautée 3 c. sliced onions (they say Spanish onions, but nobody seems to really know what that means), then chop up half to mix with the ground pork and save the other half to put on the bun. Mix 1 lb. of pork with the chopped onions, 2 tsp of pimenton (doesn't say, but I presumed sweet), 4 cloves chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Don't overmix, then divide into patties (three or four, we like them big). To accompany, mix some lemon zest, lemon juice and a pinch of saffron with mayonnaise. Grill 10-12 min. Delicious, a real keeper!

Local gems

Despite my negative comments about some new Connecticut Avenue arrivals, I have a number of local favorites that reliably serve up high-quality food, are affordable, and not too hard to get into.

Recently I've been back to Surfside, Pete's New Haven Apizza, and Black's Market Bistro and they all fall into this category.

Surfside is just a bit far to be considered neighborhood. But it takes 7 minutes to get to Blue44 and it is certainly well worth the extra 8 minutes' drive to go to Surfside and get a really good, very affordable meal. We went back recently and realized we don't go the extra mile often enough. Also, as we ate our favorite Cuba and Maui tacos (pork and fish, respectively), we realized we don't experiment enough and need to try their burritos and quesadillas, which also look great. So we resolved to go more often and try different things. My target is the Bar Harbor quesadilla.

Pete's serves large, family-sized pizzas, which takes some getting used to. But a quick and easy lunch is their pizza by the slice. Again, very high quality for a very reasonable price, and, like Surfside, a very efficient system for ordering and serving.

Black's Market is one of the four Jeff Black establishments in the area. He is one of the happier success stories coming out of the seedbed of Kinkead's. I've been to two other restaurants of his lately as well -- Addie's and Black Salt -- and enjoyed them as well. Black's Market in Garrett Park has proven to be very handy on Sunday bike rides north on the Rock Creek Park Trail, following Beech Road to Garrett Park Ave. then up through the little park and across the railroad tracks to Black's very nice brunch. I've gotten the skirt steak with scramble eggs the past couple of times because that goes well with beer, but the pancakes and other sweet items look very good, too.

There are other casual dining options that are very good and it's good to remind myself we don't have to settle for mediocre restaurants just because they're a few minutes closer.

Update: Let me add Buck's Fishing & Camping to the list of local gems. We went back last night and it was refreshing after the misfires at some of the new places in the neighborhood to have a quality meal and service. I actually tried their big steak for the first time, splitting it with a friend, at it was truly delicious (still way too skimpy with the fries, though). The wedge was terrific as always and desserts -- chocolate cake with Lewes cream and a strawberry/rhubarb cobbler -- were superb.

Belga Café

You can plan and read and scheme but sometimes serendipity serves you best. We went to a cocktail party at a friend's place near Eastern Market and since we secured a parking place decided to explore 8th Street SE, which was hoppin' on a Friday night.

As we walked along looking at the numerous restaurants and their sidewalk areas we saw an empty two-top at Belga Café and got ourselves seated there. It vaguely rang bells and clearly sported a fairly authentic Belgian menu. It turns out that Chef Bart Vandaele claims to be the original Belgian restaurant in the District, leading the way in one of DC's biggest trends.

We split the four-cheese croquettes, which were hot and creamy and richly cheesy, with a frisée-bacon salad and balsamic gelée. I had the Flemish beef stew with red cabbage and the rich, brown braised beef truly melted in your mouth with a deep beef flavor. The red cabbage tasted of cabbage but was blander than some other versions I've had. It was served with frites -- which were very good and served nice and hot.

Service was good though I made the mistake of letting the server pick my beers without checking the price and while the blond Lucifer was good to start with and pricey at $9, the stout, though it paired well with the beef stew, was too expensive at $12.

We like Brasserie Beck and Marcel's, so we're definitely susceptible to Belgian cuisine. The Belga Café menu looks great, with a good mix of authentic traditional dishes and updated or Eurofusion creations. Not sure how pleasant it would be inside, but the patio on a breezy spring evening was ideal. The whole 8th Street SE scene was a revelation. It is really far from our house but definitely worth a trip back.

Blue 44

I don't want to be too negative but my first visit to the new restaurant on Connecticut was not promising. The new family restaurant that moved in after two mediocre Mexican restaurants failed in this location, certainly brightened up the place with some nice cosmetic changes. But it's still a small place with lots of tables crowded together. And, while a family restaurant presumably is great for families, the noise and running around of unruly kids is not always pleasant for the rest of us.

In the end, though, a restaurant is judged by its food, and I found the food in this first foray decidedly mediocre. I ordered a "Pittsburgh style" cheesesteak sandwich which was not very good. I don't really know whether Pittsburghers make a bad sandwich or whether this was just a poor version of it, but I suspect the latter. The meat was not freshly cooked but warmed up and the addition of fries to the sandwich as well as on the side may be authentic but it means there's less meat on the sandwich. The fries may have been "hand-cut" as advertised, but I got odds and ends of small fries that also did not seem to be particularly fresh.

Andrea ordered a Caesar salad which she said did not do any of the things that can make a Caesar salad good -- tasty dressing, crisp croutons, etc. I found the Romaine lettuce surprisingly pale and not very fresh tasting. She had to order an extra portion of dressing, but it is a common failing of entree salads not to have enough dressing.

The place was packed because the rich Chevy Chase market is under-served by neighborhood restaurants. It may survive on that basis alone. I will go back and give the place the burger test. If it fails that test, I don't rule out going there for convenience but I doubt it will be very often.

While no one can expect a neighborhood restaurant in DC to match a trendy West Hollywood eatery, we couldn't help noticing that we paid the same for a really great meal at BLD in LA as for this ho-hum offering at Blue 44.

Update: I realized looking back I never blogged about Jake's, the other new neighborhood restaurant on Connecticut. I've been there twice, sat at the bar, ordered a hamburger each time. Nothing special, but OK. I think it will be like Clyde's or Chadwick's -- a place where it's safe to go for a beer and burger but not much else.

Update 2: While I'm at it, I may as well include the comment I made about Terasol on the Chevy Chase listserv. I'm probably too hard on these neighborhood restaurants, but I think the problem here is the same as it was in Princeton -- you have a wealthy, captive audience so you don't have to be that good to stay in business. There were not any really good restaurants in Princeton, either.

On March 15, I wrote:

I'm glad that other people who have had an unsatisfactory experience at Terasol are also weighing in. Our first dinner there could at best be described as mediocre, but friends who like it persuaded us to give it a second chance, and the second time the food was even worse. There will be no third time for us.

It's good to have neighborhood restaurants, but they will survive and flourish only if they provide good food at a reasonable price-quality relationship. Sometimes, as when the Mexican restaurant closed recently, some people seem to suggest that we should support these local establishments because they are local. That's not the way it works for any other local store, which earns its support by providing quality goods or services. Restaurants are no exception to that rule.

Los Angeles

Our long weekend in Los Angeles was not all about food -- the graduation at Occidental and ancillary ceremonies were classy and spectacular in the Southern California settings and the Getty grounds and gardens were breathtaking in their spring beauty. We saw some old friends, made some new ones and had a convivial time with family. But LA is a real culinary destination. It has that critical mass of money and people to support a lively and creative restaurant scene so we had a great time sampling the offerings.

La Bastide has a charming interior courtyard with a vertical garden that is intimate and refreshing. I had a marvelous turbot, the best I've had since France, preceded by a spring truffle salad. We had a great bottle of Montrachet that managed to be stringent and fruity at the same time. For dessert, we went down the street to Sweet Lady Jane for some wonderful moist cakes served in gigantic portions. I had German chocolate, which was actually several layers of different chocolates and delicious.

We went to trendy BLD for lunch, and I had the signature spicy Cuban pork sandwich, which was generous and tasty. The cocktails, including one with a cocoa nib-infused tequila, were stimulating. Another day, we had a late breakfast at Blu Jam Cafe, which had a good two dozen breakfast dishes on the menu that are served all day. I had the Eggwich, a tremendously filling egg, cheese and avocado sandwich on a toasted ciabatta. Both of these were just fun places to be, with clean, funky decors, bright, innovative menus, and a nice buzz. LA can fill a breakfast place at 10 a.m. on a weekday because a lot of people don't work 9 to 5.

We went to a pizzeria and a sushi place where I had to learn these simple concepts could be taken to new heights. Pizzeria Mozza has so many lovely appetizers that even after we had ordered several for our table of six there were others to try another time. One standout was the farro and bean appetizer, which seemed to burst with flavor; the duck rillette, the fried squash blossoms and the crispy goat cheese were also fabulous. I couldn't pass up the chance to get the pizza with stinging nettles -- kind of a cross between spinach and greens in flavor -- with pepper salami and a salty cacio di Roma cheese. The pizza crust was light and puffy and the whole package excelled anything I'd had before.

Nobu offered some really special hot dishes, notably the signature rock shrimp tempura and a seared salmon with spicy cilantro sauce that were simply out of this world. While the sushi and other cold dishes were very good, I would focus on the hot dishes on a second visit. It's also the first time I've drunk sake out of a bamboo box, with an equal portion spilled into the saucer for good luck. That and a special single malt whiskey cocktail made the drinks the match of the food.

The Getty has a beautiful light and airy restaurant where I had a surprisingly delicate crisp pork belly on polenta for a starter and then a delicious farro risotto with spring peas, mushrooms and parmesan cheese that was delicate and hearty at the same time. Two for two on the farro dishes, so I've found a new favorite grain.

It was marvelous fun having this cornucopia of choices to play with. The dinner restaurants, particularly Nobu, were pricey, but the lunch places and even Pizzeria Mozza were reasonably affordable. I'm sure we'll go back to explore some more.

Yellow Indian Woman bean salad

I was looking for a recipe to use up the half-pound of Yellow Indian Woman beans from Rancho Gordo when I came upon this Moroccan-inspired salad in Heirloom Beans. It seemed the perfect follow-up to our chicken tagine earlier in the week because it used up the other half of the preserved lemon as well as using some of the newly opened jar of harissa paste.

It turned out to be delicious. And it was a stroke of genius, I say in all modesty, to pair the salad with grilled merguez from Broad Branch Market.

Steve Sando's beans once again proved their worth. I soaked these overnight then cooked them with a mirepoix. In order to use the bean pot, I sautéed the mirepoix in olive oil in a skillet and added it to the cold beans and soaking water to heat up gradually in the clay pot. It took a good hour or so to come to a boil and then simmered for another good hour. I added a tsp salt in the last quarter-hour of cooking then drained the beans. Per Sando's instructions, I heated up the 2 c. beans in the microwave at the time of assembly.

The other essential ingredient in this salad was 1 c. bulgur wheat. You simply add 2 c. boiling water and let it sit for an hour. The grain absorbs all the water, but remains moist and you fluff it up with a fork. It looks a lot like couscous but has a different, wheatier flavor.

Other ingredients were 2 Tbl chopped preserved lemon, 1/3 c. chopped scallions, and 1 c. chopped parsley. The dressing was 1/4 c. lemon juice, 3 minced garlic cloves, 2 tsp harissa, 1/3 c. olive oil and salt and pepper. You put the salad ingredients in a bowl, pour over the whisked dressing and toss to make a healthy, well-balanced salad.

The merguez was great, though it created huge flames on the grill as the fat escaped. I also put on a couple of the thicker sweet Italian sausages from Broad Branch but the merguez really matched the salad best. We drank a Gruner Veltliner with it, though I think a red would have been a better match.

Tagine

Tagine was the last on my list of special clay pots to buy and I finally got one at La Cuisine in Alexandria. It was made in Tunisia and is a pretty pistachio green.

I was not in a hurry because I wasn't sure how well I would like these stews that mix sweet and savory. But after trying it the first time, I think I'm going to like them fine.

After all the lamb over Passover and Easter, I didn't want to try the traditional lamb tagines, but took a recipe for chicken tagine with harissa, artichokes and green grapes from Ghillie Bașan's Tagines & Couscous, a new cookbook I bought on the basis of its high rating on Amazon.

The result was really delicious -- warming, exotic, tangy and very pretty with the ocher-yellow color it got from the turmeric. And very simple for a weekday.

I had cured the tagine right after I bought it, soaking it 24 hours then smearing the inside with olive oil and baking it at low temperature for 3 hours. Although this is a working utensil, it is also very decorative sitting on top of the hutch.

Whole Foods was very cooperative in providing the special ingredients needed for this recipe -- a nice jar of harissa paste and both artichoke hearts and preserved lemons in the olive bar.

I cut 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts into wide strips and tossed them in a marinade of 1 Tbl olive oil, juice of 1 lemon, 1 tsp turmeric and 2 crushed garlic cloves. I covered it and put it in the fridge for 1 to 2 hours.

For the tagine, I sautéed 2 onions cut in half lengthwise and then sliced with the grain and half a preserved lemon, thinly sliced, with 1-2 tsp of sugar, in 2 Tbl of olive oil until the vegetables were lightly caramelized. Then I added the chicken strips along with 1-2 tsp of harissa and 2 tsp of tomato paste. Then I poured in 1-1/4 c. chicken broth, brought to a boil (slowly in the clay bottom sitting on a heat diffuser), put on the conical top and reduced the heat to let it simmer 15 min. Then I added 13 oz. of artichoke hearts cut in half and let it simmer another 5 min. At the end, I stirred in 16 seedless green grapes cut in half and part of the coarsely chopped leaves from a bunch of cilantro. I sprinkled the rest of the chopped cilantro over the top for serving. Bașan suggested an accompaniment of warmed flat bread, which Whole Foods also thoughtfully provided. We accompanied with a dry Côte de Provence rosé that we had picked up on our rosé shopping spree last weekend at Weygandt's and Addie Bassin's.

Both the new clay pot and the new cookbook passed their inaugural test with flying colors! We'll be doing more tagines.

Easter dinner

Very simple, very nice. My brother was visiting and he likes to celebrate Easter (so do I, really). I got a butterflied leg of lamb from Whole Foods (actually two, since they seemed to be half legs) and used the "Basque" marinade from the Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking. This was just 1/2 c. olive oil, 1/4 c. sherry vinegar, 1/4 c. minced fresh tarragon, 6 cloves garlic minced, 1 Tbl coarse salt. Mix and pour in Ziploc bag with 4-1/2 to 5 lbs lamb, pounded to uniform thickness, 1-1/2 to 2 in. for overnight marinade.

Pull out and drain the lamb an hour before grilling. Jamison talks about 2-heat grilling but I just fired up the Big Green Egg for direct heat and grilled for about 20 min. turning 3 or 4 times, and let it rest 10 min before slicing. Really good -- A. even said it might be the best lamb I've done.

We accompanied with a Fingerling potato salad that we had tasted the previous weekend at La Cuisine in Alexandria during a tasting of French olive oils. This one demonstrated the virtues of Picholine oil. It has 1-1/2 lbs potatoes, boiled till tender, 4 hardboiled eggs, mustard, garlic, 1/4 c. white wine vinegar, 1/2 c. Picholine oil (so fruity and peppery), blanched green beans, salt and pepper. You add a little water to the vinaigrette (and we left out the 2 anchovy fillets). This is a real keeper, and I think the oil does make a big difference.

Cote du Rhone was the wine, brown sugar shortcakes with a strawberry-rhubarb compote and whipped cream the dessert. Happy Easter indeed.

Pork shoulder braised in hard cider

When Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo and author of Heirloom Beans, a cookbook that has given us many great meals, mentioned that Cooking in the Moment by Andrea Reusing was his favorite cookbook of the moment, that was reason enough to order it. Specifically, the comments mentioned this recipe, which made a second good reason.

And it was delicious. As simple as Marcella Hazan's classic pork loin braised in milk, this yields an equally tasty and very hearty dish. The recipe calls for a 5-6 lb. pork shoulder, but Whole Foods doesn't cut them that big, so I settled for their biggest, a 3.5 lb piece of meat. You insert a dozen slivers of garlic in the meat, salt and pepper, sear in 2 Tbl of vegetable oil, and remove to sautee a sliced carrot, quartered onion and apple cut into chunks in 1 Tbl of the oil (though I used new oil). Add 2 c. of hard cider and 1 c. of regular cider and a head of garlic cut in half, bring to a simmer, put pork back in, cover with parchment and lid and put in preheated 300-degree oven for 3 hours.

The dry hard cider adds an edge to the sweet cider and both flavor the pork with the other aromatics while the braise keeps it moist. Since my piece of meat was smaller, I probably didn't need the full 3 hours, but it doesn't really matter.

We accompanied it with a delightful little recipe from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors. You slice half a small Savoy cabbage, the white of a large leek, and a quartered fennel bulb, wash them (don't dry them) and put the vegetables in a sauteuse with 1 Tbl butter and salt and cover to let them steam, not brown, for 10 min. In the meantime you reduce juice of one lemon to 1 Tbl and then, away from the heat, swirl in 3 Tbl butter. You chop 3 Tbl of parsley or chervil (I used parsley) together with the zest from the lemon and add half of that to the butter and half to the vegetables. Then you toss the vegetables in the butter. Madison refers to it as a "big green mess" but it was delicious, preserving the freshness of these flavorful vegetables and getting some real zing from the butter and lemon.

Cookbooks

Cross-posted from my book blog, Cogito Ergo Sum

It is a fair question when you already have literally hundreds of cookbooks why you should ever buy a new one. It's safe to say that I could do a Julie and Julia and cook one recipe a day from my existing cookbooks and not run out until it was time to go to the old folks' home.

But, like everything else, taste in cookbooks change. Julia Child deserves all the credit she gets for revolutionizing Americans approach to food and cooking, but not too many people will be cooking the recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The only three I still use regularly are cassoulet, ratatouille and boeuf carbonnades.

I have numerous cookbooks I've picked up along the way that simply are not very good cookbooks. I have English-language books on Swiss cuisine I bought in Switzerland -- totally useless even when I wanted to do Zuercher geschetzeltes recently. I have another with South African cuisine that I've never used. I have a big book on Spanish cuisine, in Spanish, that I use every once in a great while simply to decipher the recipe for paella with the aid of a dictionary. I have the Larousse gastronomique in French, but it may as well be in Greek for all the use I get out of it. I still have a few cookbooks in German, but they're not very practical to use here. Chef's cookbooks are by and large useless, I find -- too complicated, too many hard to find ingredients, not practical, etc. -- and I think sometimes their purpose is to convince you that you have to go to a restaurant to get a really great meal.

The modern classics -- Julia Child, Marcella Hazzan, James Beard -- still sit on my shelf, along with Elizabeth David and others in that first wave of cookbook authors. There's no reason to think that just because these books are devoid of lovely color photos that the dishes produced from these recipes will be any less delicious. New cookbooks nowadays have a color photo virtually every other page. And that of course is an art it itself, and can sometimes bear little resemblance to what you will come up with following the recipe, given all the tricks and shortcuts the photographers use.

But times change, and just as translator Richard Howard says every generation should have a new translation of the classics, many of the standard dishes can use a freshening up and "translation" for the current generation. For one thing, Julia and Marcella had to find substitutes when ingredients readily available in France or Italy were not so easy to find in the U.S. Some dishes they would not even include for that reason. Now, many of these ingredients are much easier to come by and mail order is much more sophisticated.

A cookbook written today can cater to the new focus on fresh, local products, put more emphasis on vegetables like kale and broccoli, give advice on sustainable sourcing -- addressing concerns that hobby cooks a generation ago didn't have.

But cookbooks themselves are under threat from online recipe sites like Epicurious. These books with their gorgeous photos -- and it is the photos now that distinguish them from the online recipes -- are not searchable. In pursuit of the seasonal, it's nice now to go to the farmer's market and pick what is in abundance and looks good, and hunt up a recipe for it when you get home. But who wants to plow through a half dozen indexes to find a good treatment for rapini. Just put it in the search box at Epicurious and you have dozens of recipes to choose from.

So managing cookbooks becomes a logistical challenge. We keep about 60 in the kitchen in our pseudo-hutch -- several of the standards, many favorites, and others that get swapped out seasonally -- braising books in the winter, grilling books in the summer. But the only way I can actually get to the recipes in these books is to pick one or two at random and leaf through them, noting recipes that are appealing and seasonal, and then arbitrarily selecting some to put on a shopping list and actually cook. In this way, we find many wonderful dishes that you could easily repeat, though we hardly ever do. Some we cook for guests, others just for ourselves (concluding almost invariably that this would be great for guests).

Not surprisingly, I find myself gravitating most often to Mediterranean dishes -- French, Italian, Spanish, or regional cookbooks that include Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco and so on. Paula Wolfert is a current big favorite, but Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges is also one I turn to a lot. I have several Indian cookbooks, but it's not that easy to assemble the ingredients if you just want to cook Indian every once in a while. We have a number of Mexican cookbooks and perhaps we can do more with them this summer.

But it's a wonderful problem to have. As I've said before, we live in something of a foodie paradise right now, with a true cornucopia of choices. Who knows what tomorrow brings. While my attitude is not exactly "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die," I am inclined to order a new cookbook from Andrea Reusing when Steve Sando recommends it, and save the $20 to buy it by skipping that pizza and beer and staying home with leftovers instead. (It cost $20 from Amazon, but retails for $35, and I have to say cookbooks are something I will generally buy from Amazon. I don't understand why Politics & Prose, for instance, hasn't caught on and made it an incentive for their membership to offer a permanent discount on cookbooks.)

Pot-roasted chicken with gnocchi

This is a kind of Italian version of chicken and dumplings. It is the first recipe I've tried from my new Canal House Cooking #5, and it appealed to me because it's a simple recipe for a weekday meal, given that I skipped the gnocchi-making and just bought fresh gnocchi at Whole Foods. It turned out well enough but I'm not convinced about this cookbook series.

You are supposed to rub 2 Tbl spoons of softened butter onto the chicken. My butter was soft and my chicken was dry, but it just clumped along the skin and did not spread at all. Oddly, then, I thought, you also rub 2 Tbl of olive oil onto the chicken once you've put it in a enamel cast-iron pot. You salt and pepper it, pour in 2 c. water and 3 sprigs of fresh sage. Then you cover and put the pot into a preheated 375-degree oven.

So far, so good. But then it says to roast a 3-4 lb. chicken (mine was 3.5 lbs.) only 30 min. before taking off the lid, basting the chicken, adding 4 carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds, and returning to oven uncovered -- for only 15 min.!

I was skeptical about the time and I was right. The chicken was still snow white after 15 min. (supposed to be crispy, golden), so I turned up the heat and after another half hour (total 1 hr 15 min -- about what I would have expected), it was golden enough to be presentable and the juices ran clear. It was still plenty moist (I basted it some more in between). You remove the chicken and let it sit 10 min. before carving.

You cook the fresh potato gnocchi in batches in simmering, salted water, removing with a slotted spoon after they float on the surface for 10 sec. and put on a heated plate. When the gnocci are done, you toss with melted butter and parmesan. Then you serve gnocchi in a wide bowl, with slices of chicken on top, spooning over some broth and carrots. The chicken has a great flavor, the broth is rich and rounded from the sage and carrots, and the gnocchi are a lot like dumplings.

It worked fine for a weekday meal. I see a problem for serving it to guests, though, because getting it to the table with everything hot is a challenge. I'm also concerned that the timing was so far off. Added to that, the cookbook has a quirky selection of recipes and I don't see too many that I'm interested in doing. Bottom line: May not get another Canal House cookbook. I got this one because one of the authors in a book I'm reviewing recommended the series. Pretty photos seem to be the main attraction.

I may try to follow their recipe for gnocchi some weekend, though. It doesn't look that hard, just a little time-consuming for a weekday.

Assaggi Mozzarella Bar

Assaggi means "tastings," though for a while I thought it meant just plates because of the nice collection of ceramic plates on the wall. The specialty is a mozzarella plate with buffalo mozzarella, buffalo ricotta and burrata along with condiments like grilled zucchini, roasted peppers and green tomato marmalade. This is ideal for sharing and the four of us also shared the salumi plate with prosciutto, salami, speck and a couple of other cured meats.

The cheeses were creamy and delicate and paired very nicely with the condiments. While the portions were not huge, the combination of plates was enough to make us all comfortable with just ordering pasta as a main course. I got the dill tagliolini with Dungeness crab meat and green peas, which was different and tasty. Others seemed quite happy with their choices as well, though I didn't taste any of them. The hard crust bread was delicious and they brought more when you asked.

We accompanied with a very nice Aglianico, a black grape varietal from the Basilicata and Campania regions of southern Italy, which I don't think I'd ever had before. It was among the more moderately priced selections (the online menu doesn't have it so I don't have the details) and turned out to be very good value, with a rich, mineral taste, quite velvety. We liked it well enough to order a second bottle.

It's a testimony to the richness of Italian cuisine that this Bethesda restaurant can carve out its own distinctive niche among Italian offerings and introduce us to things that are new. All in all, very pleasant and worth revisiting. Note to those who care about this, it is fairly noisy and we even had a table at the end of the bench that was not in the noisiest part of the restaurant.

Rehoboth restaurants

We ate at two great restaurants in Rehoboth over the weekend, Espuma and Mariachi. They were coincidentally the two closest restaurants to our B&B on Delaware Ave. but I had picked them independently based on reviews in Tripadvisor and Rehobothfoodie.

Espuma is a truly innovative fine dining experience, based on Mediterranean cuisine. I had a ham hock ravioli starter, which has a surprisingly delicate pork taste, and a beautiful halibut filet that managed to be nice and crispy on the two sides and creamy and moist in between. Another in our party had the signature bacon and eggs, with the egg soft-boiled and somehow enshrouded in a crispy crust. The four of us made a dent in the menu, which had just changed that day. Other dishes included a beef cheek cassoulet with melt in your mouth meat, a classic paella with a wonderful smoky flavor, and the 3-day Berkshire pork. When our first two pinot noir choices were not there they gave us a nice discount on a more expensive pinot. Plus, the bartender is very creative and I had an unusual absinthe mojito with a very complex flavor that I grew to love.

A little downmarket the next night was Mariachi, a warm and friendly Mexican a cut above in quality and freshness. We shared the guacamole and pupusa starters and I had the marinated pork chunks (masitas de puerco), which was very good.

It was a treat to have such good choices and to be able to walk there. Our favorite Rehoboth restaurant, Back Porch, won't open before Easter.

Red Hook Lobster Pound

Food trucks are all the rage here and elsewhere and none is more sought after than Red Hook, offering authentic Maine-style lobster rolls. So there I was stupidly standing in line in the rain with two dozen other people waiting for the truck to open for business in front of the Subway at Wisconsin and Albermarle. But, hey, in nice weather, the line would probably have been much longer.

The lobster roll is great, no question about it. Lots of lobster, toasted bun -- I got the Maine-style with the mayonnaise dressing though many were ordering "Connecticut" style (warm butter) because of the inclement weather. Didn't get the "meal" -- an extra $3 gets you chips and soda (real Maine soda!). It's better than the very good lobster roll at Persimmon and more generous than the one at Tackle Box. Would I stand in line 20 min. or so again to pony up $15 for lunch -- probably, but certainly not every week.

The service, once they got going, was very efficient -- a big plus, especially when it's raining. Of course, it stopped raining about the time I got my roll and retreated to my car to eat it.

The DC lobster truck is a spinoff from a Brooklyn restaurant. I wonder how much they will expand the operation -- just one truck for DC, but other trucks for Va. and Md.? Or several trucks everywhere? We'll see.

Red Hook does a pretty good job of alerting their Facebook and Twitter followers where they will be. It's social networking and smartphones that make these mobile gourmet snacks possible in the first place. Unfortunately, it means that like all trendy places, they will be mobbed if they are any good.