"You don't make friends with salad!"

Or so goes one of my favorite Homer Simpson quotes....but I think even Homer would like THIS salad:

The salad portion is a bed of fresh basil, mint and spinach leaves underneath rice noodles topped with chinese barbecued pork tenderloin with spicy peanuts and fried ginger as a garnish.  I found this recipe in my Donna Hay Flavours cookbook.  Tasty and delish!

Potato Sorrel Gratin

We made our first recipe with sorrel from our herb garden earlier last week.  I found the recipe for potato and sorrel gratin at marthastewart.com and it was very tasty!  Sorrel has a lemony herbal taste that's nice and refreshing with hot summer weather.  Given the other recipes on her website, I gather that Martha thinks it's also good with fish, too.

This message is brought to you by the Berkeley Cheese Board....

This weekend, Gropius joined the BMW 2002 caravan down to San Francisco for the Bay Area 2002 Club's annual get-together.  Everyone in Sacramento met up at 7:30am and drove down together.

Because getting me up and dressed and Lulu up and dressed before 8am on a day that we don't absolutely have to just ain't happening, we had a nice girls morning together with Daddy weg (away).  We had a nice breakfast of biscuits before getting ready and driving down ourselves.

We met up with Kristin, my colleague, and her daughter, Tia, for lunch at The Cheese Board in Berkeley.  Kristin had forgotten her keys in Sacramento and we were happy to return them to her.

After waiting in line, we enjoyed tasty cilantro pesto pizza with red onions, feta, mozarella and corn.  Delicious!  Afterwards, we had a little gelato.

After the ice cream was gone, the girls were fascinated with dropping leaves, etc. into an Asian-inspired garden area near where we were seated.

Such a nice day!  Thanks for forgetting your keys, Kristin!

Random Food-related Photos.

In no particular order, here is a variety of photos taken in the past couple of weeks:

Getting ready to do a little gardening with Auntie Hellen and Uncle Derek's latest gift:  

a pink plastic spade from Wal-Mart!

Posing with our transplanted sage from Tina and Kyle

Me, indulging my inner anal-retentive chef tendencies....that dicing is very uniform!

One of the new(er) arrivals in the vegetable section of our local Whole Foods:  emu eggs

I wonder if chickens feel egg-envy??

Someone enjoying her shopping trip?

Enjoying a post-Maifest repast on the patio.  

That's Mt Tam triple cream cheese on rye bread in her hand btw....

Who, me?

Citrus Heaven

Gropius and I have spent the past several weekends on a major landscaping project that has involved quite a bit of manual labor, especially on Gropius's part.  We have taken out the sidewalk that went around the side of our house, along with the roses.  Gropius used a 10lb sledgehammer to bust up the concrete sidewalk and then he, Lulu, and I carried buckets of it over to the garden in the backyard.  (she's big into the "monkey see-monkey do" phase right now and started spontaneously helping)  Why?  To use as the base for some pebbled pathways (eventually).

We are letting the larger pieces settle into the dirt before we will in the spaces with sand and smaller pebbles.  We are just excited that we no longer have to get muddy to walk around the garden!

Once that was done, the side of our house looked like this:

The more astute of you may notice that we also took out the rose bushes that were there along the sidewalk, too.  Gropius and I (mostly Gropius though) broke up the hard-packed clay soil and we amended it with "soil-buster," compost, fertilizer, etc. so that our trees will grow more easily:

Lulu helping shovel

Gropius planting the Moro blood orange tree

Lulu was a very interested assistant in the proceedings as you can tell from the fact that she's in almost every picture:

We went and got some 24" square paving stones, pea gravel, and a creeping thyme as a groundcover so that the finished product looks like this:

Hopefully we will be enjoying Moro blood oranges, Palestinian sweet limes, St Teresa lemons, and Rangpur limes.  I'd still like to persuade Gropius to plant a Mexican key lime in a large pot on the back patio, but that may have to wait a while...I think he's through with planting trees for a while!

Dinner.

Our friends Trent and Aimee sent us Thomas Keller's cookbook Ad Hoc as a thank-you for letting them stay with us when they were here last month. The book arrived the day before we were leaving to be out of town, so our first opportunity to really peruse the recipes wasn't until we got back this weekend.  I must confess that the possibility those recipes presented was taunting me all week long....

We cooked three recipes from it for dinner:  chicken with tarragon, buttered farro, and rainbow swiss chard.  Wow, was it tasty!  The chicken had sweet paprika and curry powder that added an interesting twist to the usual, classically French pairing of tarragon and chicken.  And the swiss chard had serrano ham and wine-soaked raisins that presented a salty, sweet undertone to the chard.

But the true winner was the buttered farro.  OMG was it good!  Ironically, it was the simplest of the three recipes, but the integrity of the ingredients really shone.  Gropius and I both commented that with farro that tasty, it's a wonder why more people don't cook with it more often!

Thanks, Trent and Aimee!  Come back to visit and we'll cook you something....farro, anyone??

Recent Meals

Gropius and I have enjoyed some really good meals recently (as Lulu can attest).  On Saturday, we had a very Spanish meal--chicken with piquillo peppers and a tortilla española.  To round things out, we also had some locally-grown asparagus and a nice riesling from Pacific Rim.

The tortilla española

And tonight, we had an oldie-but-goodie, Golden Beets with Sunflower Seeds Salad.  We substituted regular red beets for the golden ones (we had the red in our fridge), but it was tasty nonetheless.  I think the red beets looked beautiful on our new blue salad plates, too.