When the Grapes Go Marching In

Sunday Morning Biscuits

Sunday Morning Biscuits

Let the dog out.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Put the kettle on to boil, grind the coffee. Let the dog in.

Mix together:
2 c flour
2 tsp sugar
4 tsp bp
1/2 tsp salt
(1/2 tsp cream of tartar- optional)

Add to bowl: 1/2 c cold butter, or a combination of butter and shortening, cut into small pieces
Use your hands to find each little piece of butter and squish it into the flour, until it is evenly incorporated with no big pieces. (Don't put the flour away yet.)

Wash your hands. Pour boiling water over your coffee grounds.

Add to bowl: 2/3 c milk/soy milk/cream/buttermilk. Stir in with a fork until thoroughly mixed, with no wet or dry spots. (If you'd like to turn these into scones, use cream, an extra tablespoon of sugar, and currants, raisins, cranberries, or diced, orange-scented prunes and candied ginger.) You can add a few tablespoons more liquid if it seems too dry.

Pour more water over your coffee grounds.

Dust a piece of parchment paper with a little flour.
Put the dough on the parchment, knead just enough to keep it all together, flatten to about 1-1/2 inches thick.
Cut with a sharp biscuit/cookie cutter, or a knife. If using a knife, be sure to cut straight down. It doesn't matter how big or small the biscuits are. I like mine at least 3 inches across.
Place them on another piece of parchment on a glass pan, close but not touching. Place on top rack of oven.
Set the timer for 20 minutes, but keep smelling the air for the aroma of toasty biscuits in case your oven is hotter than mine or you've chosen to make tiny biscuits. They'll be barely golden brown on the top.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee, curl up on the sofa, and read for 20 minutes before anyone else wakes up.

Serve biscuits hot from the oven with butter, jam, honey, or scrambled eggs. Be sure to take them off of the hot pan, or at least flip them over, immediately, or the bottoms will over-brown. Bacon optional. Coffee not optional.

What.......to.....................EaaaaaaaZZZZZZZZZ

My progress on the book has slowed to a crawl. I was reading bits at night and bits at breakfast, and I've made it a little past the halfway point. I kept falling asleep at night-- it's so dense and sometimes technical that it's a great sleep aid. And in the morning, well, I always try to cram more into the morning than I should.

I want to finish it, but I've lost a little steam. The stack of books at my bedside has a few other titles that are calling me at this point, so I'm going to take a little break and start reading again this week. Have to digest (npi) what I have read already so I don't feel overwhelmed.

Stay Gold

It's hard to believe that one month ago, when I made this header, it was almost 100 degrees, blindingly sunny, and we were just starting to pick grapes at the ranch. One thing I've always noticed, and loved, about the Napa Valley, is that the seasons are always right on schedule. Sunday was the first official day of Fall, and we'd had a little rain and cooler temperatures. The leaves have started to fall, and colors are just beginning to change in the vineyards. Still about 30 percent of the grapes waiting to be picked. (Collectors make note: 2007 was a long, moderate growing season, and the wines should be really dense and flavorful.)

The veggie box came with the first delicata squash of the season, the last of the corn, tomatoes and zucchini. I already had some tomatoes that needed to be used, some carrots, onion and a few other items.

It's time for soup.

This recipe is from The Garden Vegetable Cookbook.

Fall Vegetable Soup

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 large carrots, cut into small cubes (or sliced, depending on what you like)
1/2-1 yellow onion, diced
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
3 celery ribs, diced
6 c chicken stock or veggie stock or water
4 large tomatoes (or more or less, depending on what you need to use up) roughly chopped
3-4 zucchini, diced
3 small ears corn, removed from cob
1 can cooked beans of your choice, or 1/2 can each of two kinds of beans
5 or so Swiss chard leaves, center ribs removed, roughly chopped
1 1/2 c frozen or fresh peas
3 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano
2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
(reduce quantities if using dried)
Salt, to taste
Pepper, to taste

Materials
Chef's knife
Cutting board
Strainer or "china cap"
Wooden spoon
Medium saucepan
Large pot

Method
1. Heat olive oil in large pot, add carrots, onions and half of celery. Saute until just a little tender. Add garlic and remove from heat so that the garlic warms but does not burn. If using dry herbs, add at this point.
2. Place tomatoes in saucepan with enough stock to cover, cook until tender, 10-20 minutes
3. Place strainer over soup pot, carefully pour in tomato-stock. Press tomatoes against strainer until pulp and juice are all in pot and skins and seeds are left behind. Discard skins and seeds.
4. Add remaining stock to pot, simmer.
5. Add remaining vegetables to pot. Simmer until soup is hot and vegetables are slightly tender. I like to save half of the celery to add at the end so that some of it is still a little crunchy. If using fresh herbs, add at the end.

This soup would also be great with lima beans, cauliflower, potatoes-- almost any vegetable. There are a lot of ingredients, but it's really just tomato-infused stock with herbs and whatever vegetables you have on hand, the "mirepoix" vegetables chopped first and simmered with the stock, and everything else put in at the end. I find the methodical chopping very contemplative. Cut the carrots in half, then in long slices, then sticks, and finally, into cubes. Same thing with potatoes. I like cubes, because I can make all of the vegetables about the same size, so you can get a bite of everything in a spoon, but if you want it to look a little more rustic, do what you like. This time, I didn't have any cooked beans on hand, so I had to cook white and kidney beans from scratch, but I still finished the whole soup in under 2 hours. (See my without a pressure cooker quick bean method below.) I served with Levain bread and a spoonful of summer pesto for dinner.

Cooking beans from scratch if you forget to soak them:
Place beans in pot with plenty of cold water
Bring to boil, uncovered
Reduce to manageable simmer/low boil for 30 minutes
Remove from heat, cover for 1 hour
Bring back to boil, cook until desired tenderness
It is ok to add salt to cooking beans, but DO NOT add acid, ie, add these beans to your vegetable soup with tomatoes,above, until they are cooked to your desired tenderness. Acid will stop the softening process.

Format note: something is funky with my blogger interface, so I don't have all of the tools I usually do to make this aligned, bold and pretty. Anyone else having this problem? (Fixed!)

Cross Your Fingers

I got this email today:

I was hoping that a dog would find me and then I hear about Angel. I had a dog for 12 years and he died this year on my birthday. I have been heart broken ever since. Many people have encouraged me to get another, but I did not want to go looking for a dog-I wanted the dog to find me. My best friend forwarded the message, once I saw her picture, I thought "here I am Angel, your new mommy."

Wouldn't You Love Somebody to Love?

Meet Angel. My big-hearted friend Lisa rescued her from a kill shelter in Sonoma this week. When she saw her for the first time, she recognized that there was a lot of intelligence and presence in this little sweetie. She just couldn't leave her behind.

Unfortunately, Lisa's other rescue dog, Benji, a seven month old bundle of shar-pei/shepherd puppy energy, is too much for Angel. She is four years old and has spent all of her life with her owner and her sister, until two weeks ago. Her owner had to surrender both dogs when he lost his home. Her sister was taken out to a pet adoption fair without her, and was immediately adopted. So now she's a little bit confused and anxious. She'll need time to feel comfortable in a new home, so Lisa wants to find her one as soon as possible. She is heartbroken over this.

Though Angel's a little bit wary now, she loves to be scratched and petted, and would snuggle contentedly on the couch with you if you'd let her. She'll make a good companion for someone who is ready to be her buddy. A retired person or persons would probably be her dream date. I don't think I'd recommend her to a family with toddlers, playful dogs, or children who do not know how to behave with dogs, as she is only 16 lbs and is still wary at this point. My guess is she is the kind of dog who will be very loyal to her new family, and whose personality will blossom as soon as she feels safe again. She is a Jack Russell, so you'll have to show her the rules of the house-- with a gentle, patient hand-- and have some time to give her attention and exercise while she adjusts. She's a very smart and perceptive girl.

If you don't need a dog, please forward this url to someone who might, or might know someone who might: Lisa is going to foster her as long as she can, but she doesn't want to hurt her chances of being adopted by the right family and will have to take her back to the shelter soon.

She's an excellent sitter-upper!

She patiently sat up for her biscuit while I took these pictures, hopping forward-- still in sit-up position-- when I took too long. She really is sweet.

Not just beautiful, but smart, too!

Sale Alert

If anyone is in the market for some All-Clad pots and pans, Shackford's locally is having a sale-- something like 30-40% off. It's a "factory-authorized" sale, so there are probably others out there. Check Sur la Table... You may wince at the prices, but these pans last forever.

A Shot of Espresso

Just purchased this small painting from Robert Chunn. I don't know why I love his stuff so much. I just do. The color palette, the warm, chunky realism, the comfort of everyday objects...I don't know, all of it. I want to build a whole room around this thing.

Late Summer Pleasures

I worked from Friday through Monday this weekend, for the second weekend of the harvest tours at Hendry. I got a tip from Gonzalo that there were still blackberries out in block 2. I had been bemoaning the fact that I missed picking blackberries here this year. Back on Long Meadow Ranch, I had access to a dry creek full of wild blackberries throughout summer every year. Now that I don't have my own patch, I have to remember to find some and buy them or find some to pick during that window when they are ripe and sweet. After the Hendry berries are picked-- they have a few hundred jars to make, and I wouldn't want to be the person who picked the one bucket of berries that would have finished the last batch.

At Long Meadow, it was such a luxury to be able to wander to the blackberry patch with friends after dinner and pick a bowl for dessert with ice cream. In the summertime, we ate them, still dewy with bananas for breakfast, in pancakes, in syrup, cobbler, crisp and pie. And quite a few straight off the vine, warm and sweet. This year, though we had a few (still pretty sour) in the northwest in August, I missed the picking and the jam-making at Hendry, and I thought the season had passed.


Sunday afternoon after the last tour left, I put a ratty quilted flannel shirt that the guys keep around the winery for messy work over my white polo shirt, donned a leather glove on my left hand, and grabbed a big white bucket. I stirred up a little dust rounding the bend behind the white barn. A grand tangle of vines topped the sagging wire fence, and I could see lots and lots of dark berries.

There are few times in life when you can stop and catch yourself in the act of feeling happy and really savor it. It's often a fleeting feeling, remembered rather than sustained. But Sunday afternoon, with thorns pulling my hair into a mess, the sound of birds and wind and creaking trees in the forest, and the smell of blackberries, I was able to feel it, and hold onto it. Not to mention the fact that spotting ripe berries and picking them one by one completely satisfies my compulsive side.


In about an hour of leisurely picking, I filled about 1/4 of a five-gallon bucket. My left hand (the bramble-dominator) was completely clean, and my right hand (the picker) was half-purple, scratched and stained. Just the way I like it. My cuticles are still a little blackish, but for the most part, I was able to de-stain.



Sunday night, I bagged three little quart bags for the freezer to add to smoothies, or maybe use in a pie, and cooked the rest with some sugar on the stove, for pancakes, ice cream and toast.

As the jam/syrup was cooking, I breathed in the distilled scent of summer: warm afternoons picking berries with the sun on my shoulders; sweltering August days spent stirring jam in George's hundred-plus-year-old kitchen, imagining the many cooks that stirred the pot over the years with a flat-edged wooden spoon stained deep aubergine; the summer week I spent with my friend Tammy on her family's ranch in Visalia, pulling stumps with a chain and a tractor, eating coke and peanuts, picking peaches, and of course, filling bowls very slowly with ripe blackberries-- coming back to the ranch house too full of them to eat any more.

And I thought: when I die, I want to smell blackberries cooking into jam. Don't have a funeral, just wait until summer, put a pot on, and stir it and smell it. Let the whole house fill with it, like love, like happiness, can fill your heart. Savor it, and smile.

Concentration

Maggie and I worked on an art project during our time together today. We went for a walk before lunch and collected leaves, then made rubbings of them with different colored crayons. When we were finished, she cut them out and glued them on trees and we hung our creations on the refrigerator. I got to bring one home for my refrigerator, too. Maggie concentrates very hard when she is working on her art.

Produce of the Day Extravaganza

A missed gem-- I wish I could remember the name of this beautiful watermelon. And figs, figs figs. End of summer, beginning of fall.

I started taking photographs to document the flowers and the produce of each season, so that I could paint them all in watercolor. Then I found that I loved just taking the pictures. When I paint, it tends to be quick and simplistic. A little bit naive. Although I am an excellent pencil drawer, if I do say so myself, when I start working with color, I want to get right into it. Color enthralls, but it also distracts. Some artists can see in color, and reproduce it. (See Robert Chunn) For me, color is so fun that I want to skip past the accurate rendering of the object.

I am shite at flowers. So many details, so many beautiful colors. My eye struggles to see depth and volume, whereas with fruits and vegetables, I can still sense the orb, or the stalk, almost the weight of the object.

But my idea was to start documenting what was around each month, with the idea of eventually doing a calendar/cookbook. Since I didn't grow up with the seasonal connection to food, (aside from summer peaches, that is) I wanted to make a calendar and cookbook that helped other people like myself. I found a cookbook that does a fantastic job of this: The Garden Fresh Vegetable Cookbook. THIS IS A GREAT COOKBOOK. But, alas, it does not have photos OR art. Not even simple line drawings which, by the way, I could provide for you if you need them. When I was a restaurant manager, I drew all of the coloring pages for children myself. A pizza on a paddle, a regional map of Italy with all of the foods identified, a field of mustard and an explanation of why it is important in the Napa Valley. My pizza is still used at some of the restaurants.

But, as usual after a glass of wine, I have wandered far from the path. Maybe it is the smell of a plum-blackberry upside down cake in its last five minutes of baking that is distracting me. Maybe it is the fact that I have just purchased the espresso painting from Robert Chunn While writing this post. That's right, it's mine now, and you can't have it.

Maybe it is the fact that I spent the day with Maggie and Molly, and we had such a nice time that I've had a halo effect on the rest of my day. I'm going to go post a picture from that so you can see.

What to Eat-Whew!

The thing that stands out to me as I read this book is that it's all food. Just food. There are some things that have been surprising (natural beef may not be as natural as you think) some things that have been a bit disheartening (every food has its own powerful lobbying body, and profit battles constantly with the public health greater good) but for the most part, the thing I am taking away from it is that there are no wonder foods, and with few exceptions, there are no purely evil foods.
As long as you vary your diet, don't eat or drink too much, and eat plenty of fresh vegetables, you're going to be ok. If you have a candy bar every once in a while, it's not going to make you self destruct.
As she says in the introduction, food should be pleasurable. It's not a pleasure to run around like Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-Little, worrying about the hydrogenated sky falling one minute, and whether soy will give men breasts the next. It's food. Don't overdo it. Relax. Eat what's good, and what's good for you. It helps that she's been a nutritionist for 30 years, and she knows what she's talking about. Whew.

Wine, Wine, Wine

Here's what's been going on at the winery lately: All of the chardonnay that was picked a couple of weeks ago is fermenting in its barrel or tank, as the case may be, and most of it is now "dry" meaning fermentations are finished and there is no more sugar for the yeast to eat. Bye-bye yeast. Thanks for all your hard work.

The pinot noir has all come in and is fermenting, and the primitivo (a relative of zinfandel) was right behind it on Monday. That's Santiago shoveling the grapes into the hopper and Rafa picking leaves. A picture of saignee, or bleeding the juice out of the tank during crushing, to reduce the sugar and concentrate the flavors, colors and tannins of the final wine. Yeast foaming in buckets, Jan minding the yeast foaming in buckets. Bubbly pinot noir fermenting spontaneously with the natural yeast that clings to the grapes in the field. Sugar test-- the wine's getting dryer! And finally, a picture of the native grapevine, a relative of the rootstock that we use so that the fragile European vines don't get eaten by the phylloxera root louse. As you can see, the berries are small and it's not much of a producer.

More Upside-Down-ness

Hey! I was just thinking: Randy and Jen could try the cake with ripe or slightly green mango slices instead of plums. Doesn't that sound good? Are you game, guys? You could post a picture of it on your blog. (You can get mangos, right?)

Damn Good

A comment from my friend Karen reminded me about that Plum Upside-Down Cake, so last night I bought some plums (nothing but veggies in the veggie box this week) and made another one. Karen used Pluots, which would be delicious: both keep the cake from being too sweet. She's right. It is damn good. And damn easy. So make one already.