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What better way to spend Friday early evening with your best girlfriend, drinking mojitos, sharing a cold seafood platter, and dishing about work, books, superheros, and movies? I'm sure there are a few things that rank up there, but for simple delight, tonights excursion was right up there near the top of my list. Next on my list? Plan a menu for tomorrow night.
Just in case any of you are actually reading, and i didn't already invite you:
I recently set up a small mailing list for like-minded people to discuss food-related things: restaraunt reviews or advice, recipe sharing, menu planning advice, wine pairing war stories, etc. You get the picture. And people are sharing! It's great. Drop me a note if you'd like to be added.
I was inspired to choose gastronome by some higgeldy-piggeldy poems Andrea wrote us after her birthday dinner last year. They are fabulous, and worth sharing again.
Higgledy Piggledy
Meriko, gastronome
Created five courses,
Crowned by a hen.
I’d love to mimic her
Epicurianism
But I’m much too lazy --
Feed me again!
Higgledy Piggledy,
Russell and Meriko
Drove me to gluttony
(Hard to resist).
Five courses! That must be
Quinto-gastronomy!
Indulgence I’ll repeat...
If you insist.
(If you're truly curious, you can take a gander the menu for the night.
Anyone have any ideas on the current market value for brainsnotgoo? I'm pretty sure Russell and i could go into business this weekend.
The only plan i've kept on this three-day weekend was the one to go into work to talk to my boss. In place of our plans, we've been viewing 2-3 movies a day (X-men, In the Line of Fire, Novacaine, Dinosaurs) and littering the house with drifts of crumpled white kleenex.
I just hope i'm healthier by tomorrow morning - i have to be at work at 8am to have breakfast with our new intern.
Such a decadent day!
We left San Francisco just before noon, and drove north through the intermittent rain. We arrived in Yountville around 1:30, parked, and walked through the rain to a cafe, where Russell had a salad and i had a bowl of soup. Trust us on this; you really don't want to eat much on the day you dine at the French Laundry.
We had a little time before it was allowable to check into our lodgings, so we drove about rural Yountville, and ran into Robert Sinskey's tasting room. I tried a few wines, bought a few bottles, and picked up a Commander Zinskey tshirt. Russell declared that we are now allowed to visit any winery i like, provided it has fish. We checked in, found the Petit Logis not just charming, tastefully decorated, and well-decked-out in the bathroom department, but right next door to Bouchon, and only a few blocks away from our dinner location. We lolled about for a bit, dolled up, and headed to Bouchon for a pre-dinner cocktail. (A sidecar for her, a Maker's Mark manhattan for him.)
And we were off. It started pouring just before we set out, but we were well-prepared with rain jackets and umbrellas. We stopped at precisely 5:45 at the front to risk the camera in the rain so we could show you the front sign. Pretty. Onwards, through the door, where they took our jackets and umbrellas and ushered us towards our table. The room was nicely lit -- not too dark, not too bright, with plenty of natural light streaming in. It felt warm and elegant and comfy - somehow, all at the same time. Only two other tables in our room were seated at the time - we noticed that the reservations were staggered, keeping each table at a different spot moving through the courses.
[Fair Warning: i refuse to torment fellow diners with irritating flashes from a camera. I did want some pictures of food, but i had to catch them in low light with the 'record movie' function on our lovely camera - so the food pictures are mostly for you to have an idea of the plating. If you want to see some professional pics, get a copy of The French Laundry Cookbook - our Coffee and Doughnuts really looked just like those pictures!]
Our waiter was charming, and the service overall during the evening was impeccably smooth. The only place i've been where the service was comparable was at La Folie (thank you, Tom!). (I do hope our primary food runner was either trying to be funny, or knew he was funny. He was so completely a caricature of himself!) We looked over the menus - it was clear that i was going to order the chef's tasting menu, and Russell decided on a set of courses from the 'choose-five' prixe fixe. Kevin (our waiter)came back and discussed wine with me - asked my likes and dislikes, and suggested a few things for the first courses. We agreed he'd come back for the later courses and we'd discuss some glasses to pair then.
I did splurge on the super-fancy champagne to go with my first course - Oysters and Pearls. (A Krug Grande Cru - i forget which year.) The gentleman who i later decided was the manager of the room opened the bottle a foot or so behind me, and i heard NO pop. I tasted the champagne - yum - and then in a single long pour, filled the glass to the top without stopping. So cool. (Side report: unlike most times i've tried champagne, it didn't give me an instant hangover. Either i'm changing, or i just need to drink exceedingly expensive champagne.) Our amuse arrived - Keller's signature salmon tartare on cornets - our creme fraiche was infused with walla walla. Russell nibbled, i went for the full experience, chomping off the head of the cone in one bite.
My Oysters and Pearls arrived - with a HUGE scoop of Osetra caviar on top. The sabayon with tapioca pearls wasn't too weird - it paired nicely with the salt and sea of the caviar, and cradled the perfectly poached oyster sweetly. And what they say about caviar and champagne? True. Absolutely something where the effect is far greater than the sum of the parts. (And when the parts are that good to start with? Careful, laddie.) They brought Russell an amuse as well so he could share in that course - ironically enough, it was a salad of fresh fruits with a chunk of sweet crabmeat in the middle. I found the lump of crabmeat to be quite tasty.
We each paid homage to the venerable foie gras - the cold torchon with brioche, and the sauteed foie with verjus sauce and sauteed grapes. Both were divine - the cold plate lavishly rich and smooth on my tongue, and the hot perfectly crispy on the outside and meltingly rich on the inside. I paired a late-harvest semillon blend from Australia with this course.
We moved on to the fish courses. Cod for me first, with perfectly cooked pole beans and thyme. The thyme-infused oil was brilliant - both in color and as a pure burst of flavor on my tongue. I had a lovely glass of chablis with this. We followed with the macaroni and cheese for me, and a piece of monkfish tail served with artichokes and onions with a deep, buttery sauce for R. The sauce was really interesting - it was very, very light, and yet had a similar mouthfeel to that perfectly silky reduced oxtail sauce we all love. The mac 'n' cheese was glistening - a perfect disc of crispy parmesan balanced over tender lobster meat, sitting atop a bed of orzo swimming in enriched, reduced, creamy lobster broth and mascarpone. The lobster seemed almost crisp and refreshing next to the heavier, more intense lobster of the pasta sauce - each mouthful balanced perfectly. They poured me a glass of a chardonnay from Santa Barbara that was distinctly unlike most California chards - proven by the fact that i quite liked it!
Moving onto meats, i had rabbit rillette with mushrooms, which was well balanced in flavor and in texture. As i'm coming to expect, the sauce was smooth and a pure hit of flavor that complimented the meat nicely. I started on a glass of a Chatenuef du Pape that was just lovely.
They then brought my veal, and Russell's rabbit. His rabbit was a tiny 'rack', the loin, kidney and rabbit pithivier with cherries. Succulent was probably the best word for his dish. The veal, vegetables, and sauce again were lovely - textures pairing perfectly through this dish. Our cheese courses were also lovely; Russell had some pecorino with red and yellow peppers.
When my strawberry sorbet arrived, the burst of clean, cold, sweet, pure fruit was sheer pleasure. After the heavier courses, it was a blast of simplicity that was intense on a completely different axis. The panna cotta and gelee invoked the memory of strawberries and cream in my mouth.
Russell's Coffee and Doughnuts was lovely - the cappuccino semifreddo was so light and creamy, but cold and rich at the same time. I liked it world's more than i like mousses. My chocolate thing was deep and of a pleasing texture. The late-harvest zinfandel was perfect with it.
There seemed to be no end of mignardise - little tarts, tiny meringues, wee twists of chocolates with nuts. (I just looked up mignardise - it literally translates to 'preciousness'. Precious these were!) We had some coffee, signed our check, and walked back.
Total running time? Just under four hours. Was it worth it? Every penny. Every bite i put in my mouth was exquisite, and each dish managed to end with me wanting just one more bite. Keller's signature dishes really shine - the foie gras, the macaroni and cheese, the oysters and pearls, the coffee and doughnuts were my favorites of the evening, if you made me choose. (And yep, they do have a vegetarian tasting menu, too - so you veggies shouldn't avoid it on account of all the meat!) Here i am, sated, on our way out.
oh boy oh boy oh boy!
We're off to the French Laundry - expect a full report on our return!
(lots of picture links today - beware!)
I started the day with cinnamon buns and reading Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Apples. (Recommended! She's a great writer, and if you're a bay area foodie type, you'll recognize many people and places. Priceless stories, well told.)
The Leckmans called, on their way home from Marin, and we headed out in search of pineapples. Russell is always tying his shoes while we're walking, and today he happened to stop in front of our local sex-supply shop, Good Vibrations. On to our local produce market (at 24th and Valencia) where we acquired four large pineapples, and admired the lemons and limes. Another block and a half, and we met Tad & Beca just in time to help carry up a few groceries.
We played with the new camera, extracted lovely pineapple juice, admired Soosh (who really needs to stop brawling and let his ear heal), and played with the new camera. We bore witness to the clever beast using the toilet, just like the rest of us. And then we scuttled off home, stopping back at the veg market, Lucca, and the fish & poultry market. (Where we chatted for a while with Bob, the head of the fishmongers about barbecuing, fish, and Macintoshes.)
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig. We picked up and started cooking. I mixed the first pitcher of Singapore Slings just in time for Tom, Carol, and Tim to arrive. We sipped at the slings, made the first of many toasts, and snacked on pate and olives. Dave & anne arrived, bearing great slabs of meat, which we promptly fed through the grinder & carried downstairs. Everyone mixed their own bowls of steak tartare, accompanied by hot toast, fresh off the grille. (Our condiments? The classics: Worcestshire sauce, mustard, egg yolks, parsley, capers, cornichon, smashed anchovies, salt, pepper & hot sauce.) The weather held; it was cool, but not bitterly cold, even when we were grilling by moonlight. We opened the magnum of Greenwood Ridge '97 Cabernet Sauvignon, and sipped away at that.
Consensus was that we were too full for more starch, so we nixed cooking up the israeli couscous with asparagus pesto, but we did grill up the accompanying asparagus, mushrooms, and scallops with proscuitto. Everyone helped carry the dishes and prep bowls upstairs, where we settled into some '97 Navarro Pinot and some '95 Navarro Cab and a few ferocious Jedi Knight battles.
When we had let our stomachs rest a bit, we had some cheese (d'affinois & drunken goat) with the season's first cherries, a pear, and some of Carol's delicious brownies.
The evening ended content, full, and happy.
Though not quite as, er, complete as Gaiman's Being an Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines, we spent some time concocting our version of the Singapore Sling this evening.
The final winner of a recipe:
1.5 oz gin (We were using Tanqueray 10, but i generally prefer Bombay Sapphire.)
0.5 oz cointreau
0.5 oz kirsh (cherry brandy)
1.5 tsp powdered sugar
juice of half a lime
0.75 oz tangerine juice
2.25 oz pineapple juice
I shook this over ice to get it cold, and then served it over fresh ice with a bit more kirsch floated atop. Good garnish? A sprig of mint, a piece of pineapple, a cherry. Traditionally this has Benedictine as well, but i have no such beast in the house at this time. After a few they get a bit sweet for me, but squeeze a little extra lime, and it evens right out. We'll see how they go over by the pitcher tomorrow.
This camera is so tiny, Russell is afraid he's going to swallow it. It's *perfect*.
(For the record, the Amazon camera had an attempted delivery on Wednesday, and it was deposited into our hot little hands Thursday morning. The Dell camera has not yet arrived.)
A picture of my coffee cup this morning.
Goblin is sultry.
Later: Recommended recipes for a Singapore Sling.
So. I've been craving some digital camera action for a while. I decide that it's finally time to break down and buy one; if i'm going to do it, we should have it in time for our trip to Napa next week. So i do a little research. I ask my geeky friends for their advice. I go fondle the actual cameras in a coworker's office. I make a choice. (The Canon Digital Elph S200, if you're curious.)
My other coworker Tim finds me a kickin' deal on dell.com with several tasty coupons. Oddly, Dell's website lists the camera as 'in stock', but my email confirmation of purchase tells me that it's not going to ship until July 16, 2002. Weird. (Just to clarify: July 16 isn't really an acceptable ship date, for my needs.)
I send email to the dell customer service people. The service people, amongst a lot of apologies, respond with this very confusing sentence:
"The part was, indeed, in stock, however, due to the volume of
orders received for this item, there may be a delay in the restocking
of this part."
We decide to cancel the Dell order, and order the camera from amazon.com, where they generally do mean "ships in 24 hours" when they say it. Tim is all the while explaining how this happened to him with his Clie, except they continued telling him it was going to ship even when he had the box in his hands. So i ordered the camera from amazon, and Russell planned to call Dell to cancel our order in the afternoon.
Imagine my surprise when i found out that the camera from Dell shipped this morning, and amazon (ever-efficient) also had our camera already in the shipping process.
So we'll get two cameras this week. Double our fun? Or a trip to the post office? I suspect it will be the latter.
Such a lovely day.
Woke up in the most leisurely of fashions. Meandered about the house after a while, with coffee and books and laptops and cats. (Well, really, just a single cat.) Finally wandered out to the vegetable market on 24th. Came home. Started cooking.
We started with the cinnamon buns from the Cook's Illustrated recipe i mentioned last week. MMMmmmm. While they were in the oven, i made the peanut sauce. Dropped the tofu in. Chopped up some garlic, and shelled the shrimp, and set them marinating with the garlic, some white wine, and some olive oil. Started the ginger, limes, lemon, mint & sugar macerating for the punch. Moved on to the veggie prep. Snapped some asparagus. Quartered some zucchini squash. Quartered a stack of red and yellow bell peppers. Sliced, trimmed, and parboiled some artichokes. Picked and chopped some parsley. Sliced some bread. Russell started some coals, and was incredibly helpful in the kitchen. (And on the cinnamon bun front!)
Took everything out to the back, and sat with a drink and a book until our lovely guests arrived. (Forrest, followed by Neal, and then the lovely Carrie.)
Picked up the living room, gave the barbecue an overhaul. (We haven't used it since Thanksgiving!)
Everything was incredibly tasty - we started with some grilled bread, rubbed with raw garlic cloves. Moved on to to the veggies - starting with the peppers, and ending with the artichokes (smothered in olive oil, salt, and lemon juice). We had the tofu with a little extra peanut sauce, and the shrimp in a sauce that cooked in pyrex on the grill - garlic, parsley, white wine, lemon, and butter.
The guests helped move the gear back inside, we made some tea, and reheated some cinnamon buns with strawberries for dessert. Then they were off to home and Spiderman, and we are spending some time reassuring the cat that we still like her.
Lovely, all told. Good friends, good food, a good book, a good cat, and a great husband.
Today's entry is in reverse order, for no particular reason.
We ended our night with the cleverly titled encore piece from Josh Redman & his Elastic Band. Grinning, he mentioned that the song had a high end title and a low end title ("And there's nothing wrong with being low-end!", he said.) The high end title? "Sysiphus." The low end title? "Still pushin' that rock." The piece was fantastic, fluidly sliding from very syncopated to crazily slidy. (Here's where you learn that meriko has no real vocabulary to describe jazz music.) It started with Redman playing his sax with some kind of effects pedals solo, and ended with all three of the band members going nuts, and then calming down suddenly into another syncopated ending.
I also particularly liked a piece called 'Jazz Crimes', for no particular reason i can describe other than it kept me firmly rooted in the music, inside the music, from start to finish. Russell's favorite was a piece called "Let Him Go".
The Josh Redman Elastic Band is Josh Redman on sax, Brian Blade on drums, and Sam Yahel on organs and synths. This was the SF debut of the band, and they were hot. If you get a chance? Go see them. Tonight was also my first time (oddly enough) at Bimbo's. Nice venue.
We missed most of the performance (we caught the last 45 minutes or so) because we were busy helping Robert & friends celebrate his birthday at Laureen's place in San Carlos. A small barbecue (we brought a salad, and they were perfectly tolerant of me turning into the resident know-it-all about the grille), met some interesting folks, and most importantly - we were able to spend some time with Robert & his girl, Laureen.
Earlier in the day we took advantage of the gorgeous day to run about the Mission and Castro, acquiring sunscreen to protect the pale white flesh of yours truly, some acrylic glassware for outdoor fire-based dining, and a plethora of nice things for a birthday basket for Robert.
And before that, we had a glorious slow wake-up, pot of coffee, and lazy reading through the morning.
A glorious, elastic day, really.
Amongst everything else today, foremost i'm thinking of Sylvain. I miss him.
(Mike had some things to say, too.)
My good deed for the day:
Russell, my father and i were walking home from a tasty dinner at Ti Couz this evening around 11. On Valencia, the block before our turn onto Hill street, we noticed a cat running around on the sidewalk, chatting with us.
We were in front of the used hardware/appliance store, and the cat was one of three who lives there. The resident cats sit in the window (often on disconnected hot plates!), and we greet them daily. The middle-sized one of the three, who wears the red harness, chatted us up and said hello. She's quite friendly.
We know the cats are let out sometimes in the morning, with their owner around - but they're definitely indoor cats. We were a little worried about her, and she didn't mind cuddling up a bit - so after knocking fruitlessly, i noticed the phone number on the sign above our head.
I called the number with my celll; we heard the phone ring maybe 5 feet in front of the window. In hope, i left a message. In the middle of speaking("Hi, my name's meriko, i live around the corner and we were walking by, and one of your cats is out here, it's about 11 o'clock at night...) a woman picked up, saying that they'd be right down, that her husband was very worried about the cat. We heard them coming down the stairs, and released the cat back to her people, who were very happy to see her.
I love our neighborhood. I'm glad the kitty is safe in her home tonight.
So, the demos this morning in Steve's keynote went very well. The demo i've been helping out with over the last few weeks garnered some of the top applause, and one of the only low, drawn out 'wooooahhhhhhh's from crowd. Satisfying. The rest of the keynote was pretty kickass, as well. (And soooooo goth!)
I felt like i was good at my job today, helping folks work through their presentation and slides for Friday. I think i get the sense of how to present a coherent message for a given audience from my dad.
Speaking of dad, he's here tonight - we had a good Monday night at the pub, drinking beer and telling the saga of the last two weeks. We came home, admired the cat, looked at food porn (The French Laundry Cookbook), showed each other our slides, and looked some stuff up on online. A good night with my dad.
Actually, a pretty good day overall.
I haven't been travelling, but i think i've been homesick. I've been spending a lot of time at work lately, including my first full weekend in the office in a very long time last weekend. Yesterday i was at SJCC prepping for WWDC. Today i am finally just HOME, and it is lovely beyond belief. I have a wee bit of work to do, but my trusty tinybook will be able to help me out.
This morning, i've spent my time reading, making cinnamon buns with creamcheese & buttermilk icing, watering and weeding our wee garden patch, and installing some needed updates on tiny. Cook's Illustrated just rocks. If you cook, get a subscription. The scientific approach to cooking appeals to me greatly, and their recipes are solid.
Amongst other updates you missed (because i never wrote them) are some pics i took of the garden a week or so ago. Check them out!
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The word of the day is cardoon.
So. While i've clearly been a laggart with my writing, everything else seems like a whirlwind these days. Things should return to normal with the close of WWDC at the end of next week, and i'll be sure to start reporting regularly again - if nothing else than for my sanity. In the meantiime, things have happened:
Well, I just noticed that ubvb hasn't had a post in a couple of weeks, so here I am. I'm once again job-free, so I have some spare time in which to ramble...
So, a little background here. I quit a regular job (because the company sucked, because that's what you do when the rats start fleeing, because that's the only way i could figure out to get paid) first thing this year (literally -- I went in to my director's office on the morning of January 2nd and said "I'm here to ruin your day.") and started job hunting. Basically I turned a bunch of computer game industry recruiters loose to see what they could find for me. I had one real interview which, while it went pretty well, didn't get me a job.
During this time, a company that Robert and I had worked with at our little startup a couple of years back was courting the two of us to do a port project. Without going into too much detail, the money looked good, and the project looked tractable. On the down side, this project was closely related to the project that finally exhausted the startup, so there were going to be some psychological hurdles for Robert and I to deal with.
Still, it isn't often that you get paid lots of money to work through your psychological baggage, so in the end we said yes. Getting the project started up took a little longer than we might have liked (but that had its upside too, as it gave me quite a bit of time off), but we finally got a pre-contract Letter of Intent, got some money, got some equipment, and got started.
Just as we started to hit our stride and get familiar with the development system and target platform (the Nintendo Gamecube, which I highly recommend for its developer-friendliness), the publisher pulled out of the project. The Gamecube isn't selling as fast as they anticipated, so they don't think the game will sell.
It seems to be easier to deal with a cancellation early in a project than later once the project has really started to take shape and life. I'll spare you the first analogy that came to mind.
The company who hired us to do this port has a number of projects in the works, and felt bad about the situation, so they flew us out to Texas to discuss things we could do for them.
Now, what they really want is for me and Robert to move down there and join the company. Not gonna happen, if for no other reason than the fact that it was 92 degrees and humid when we got there. What Robert and I really want is for them to send us fat monthly retainer checks until there's something for us to do. Also not gonna happen.
So we talked, and it was nice to actually meet some of these guys face to face (Robert had visited them once before, but I'd only dealt with them via email and phone previously), and it was clear that their head honcho is a good guy who believes in not fucking people over, and who thinks Robert and I are talented and valuable. So in that sense the trip was good. On the other hand, I don't think any of the projects they have in the pipeline are good fits for Robert and me, so I'm going to "thanks-but-no-thanks" him for the time being. It was a social networking exercise, really, which is fine.
So once again the recruiters are on the prowl for me, trying to dig up some job that I can be happy in, and right now I don't even know if I want to be in the game industry any more. I do know that I'm going to talk about the possibility of moving into a game design position in any interviews; I'm not going to take a game-industry job if that's not at least an option. I think I need to seriously start looking at other sorts of
programming positions, at any rate.
In the meantime I get to cook dinner for my lovely wife, and keep the cat company, and hone my Counter-Strike skills, and do some recreational programming. And that's all pretty good.
