Carrying the Bacon Over the Threshold

 Photo by Andrei Rubaniuk.

My long absence from the blog is due to a number of very plausible excuses, one of which was that I got married on July 31st in West Seattle. This being a second wedding, the un-traditional was very much in order. Along those lines, in lieu of the boring white wedding cake, my groom and I had gourmet doughnuts from Frost Donuts, which included such goodies as Aztec Chocolate and Maple Bars with Bacon. For our "wedding doughnut," the folks at Frost generously (and most enthusiastically) offered us the option of a Bacon Cake, which is something akin to two massive fritters engulfed in the richest maple frosting and chock-full of seemingly a whole side of a pig.

Although the result looks somewhat disgusting, it was nothing short of delicious. And amazingly difficult to cut through, which is why Ron and I are laughing so hard in the photo below.

Incidentally, September 4th (this Saturday) is International Bacon Day. Celebrate it wisely!

 Photo by Anna Crowley.

Back to the Basics

A recent bout with food poisoning, among other things, has been making me think more about the complexity of what we eat. Simpler is definitely better, by a long shot.

This sounds trite, a sentiment an older generation, enmeshed in a fast-changing world with its drinkable-yogurt tubes and fancy pad thai noodle mixes in a box, might tell us young’uns. But the longer I digest my way through life on this planet, the more I realize that the best meals are often the ones with the fewest ingredients and simplest preparation.

A couple of years ago, I compiled a popular book about cooking with fruits, vegetables, and herbs. At booksignings, many enthusiastic people ask if I cook a lot, and they are dumbfounded that I actually don’t do it very much at all. (I much prefer eating to cooking anyway.) But being constantly asked this question has made me consider precisely why I don’t spend much time in the kitchen. The answer is this: I simply prefer food in its most elemental state—three to five of the very freshest, best quality ingredients in any given dish, savored for just what they are, no less, no more.

So I end up preferring a buttery piece of unctious salmon draped across a tiny pillow of sticky rice, splashed with good soy sauce and dabbed with real wasabi rather than say, a tuna casserole heavy with unidentifiables. There are things I enjoy so thoroughly that I never tire of them, like a perfect hard-boiled egg sprinkled with salt, or a simply cooked steak with cracked pepper and well-chosen mushrooms, or a verdant salad fragrant with basil, thinly shaved fresh ginger, and exquisite lettuces. A can of sardines in hot sauce. Even as a child, I discovered that my favorite ice cream was not an airy one fluffed with cellulose gums and polysorbate 80 and slicked with hydrogenated oils, but one made with just milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and strawberries.

The key is not too many ingredients, so each food has expansive space for its own flavors to sing true, whether they be sharp, decisive, nuanced, subtle, redolent. And such space allows zero tolerance for any ingredient to be less than superb quality. Freshness and peak flavor are givens. After all, as Alice Waters, that California doyenne who helped launched an American gastronomic movement, says in her book The Art of Simple Cooking, “When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.”

After a recent, delectable meal at Ms. Waters’s restaurant, a long-time dining companion who eats out a lot wistfully commented, “Why does good food have to be so expensive?” His question caught me off-guard; the irony is that such food can be had at home by anyone with access to high-quality raw materials (such as a farmers market or a home garden) and knows a few basic cooking techniques. No elaborate sauces, recipes with twenty ingredients, or hours of preparation. Not that there’s anything wrong with these per se (and the world is chock-full of toothsome creations involving these parameters), but an incredible variety of delicious meals can be created within minutes from a few well-chosen elements.

This thinking also fits in well with modern safety concerns. After my food poisoning bout, I looked on the Internet to see if I could track down any explanation for the nasty digestive culprit. What I found was a recent recall of possibly salmonella-contaminated hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HPV), a flavoring agent common in seasoning mixes for products ranging from meatloaf to gumbo soup. HPV could be a poster child for the overly processed, overly complex, impossibly mechanized food industry that presides so pervasively in America’s supermarket. As Michael Pollan has said in his famous tome, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Less is more, and more good things to savor.”

Stalking the 10-Foot Fennel

My tardy return to this blog has been in part because of a recent birthday jaunt to my favorite place in the world, San Francisco.

This trip was a way of easing into my fourth decade, a kind of coming home both literally and figuratively. Every few years I return to this city that calls relentlessly to my soul, and when I am there, I usually revisit places both familiar and sentimental, resetting my inner compass of memory and comfort.

Most of my close friends and family over the years have witnessed my tremendous fondness (obsession, rather) for eying and nibbling edible wild plants wherever I go, whether it’s blackberries in a forest, watercress along a creek, or seaweed on a beach. My foraging instinct is so strong that even domesticated nasturtiums and snapdragons dangling from an outdoor shopping mall hanging basket are not above intense scrutiny and dear temptation.

These desires began young. As a small child growing up in California, I repeatedly checked out all the books on wild edible plants from our local library that I could find, even the one on famine flora that the librarian said no one else ever took out. I studied, scoured our square-acre backyard for hidden delicacies, devoured, studied again, and ate some more.

So it was with these memories in mind that I returned to see if I could find one of the wild treasures of San Francisco that I had tasted so long ago. Along the city’s southwestern edge near the old Sutro Bath ruins and Lincoln Park, the Pacific Ocean still hurls itself against steep cliffs cloaked in ice plant and stately, wind-bent cypresses. Pelicans, hawks, and murres glide silently over the sea, floating above and below you. And if the air has been dampened by winter rains as it was a few weeks ago, the sharp tang of salt spray mixed with the herbal aromas of eucalpytus, pine, sagebrush, and yerba buena truly intoxicate the lungs.

The lone red shoes. Photo by Ronald Swartz.

This is where I remembered stands of something very tall, very fragrant. But after 17 years, would they still be there? My memory was as blurred as the Marin headlands swept in fog across the bay, and yet my senses pulled me along the increasingly muddy hiking trail. With each step I doubted, second-guessed—maybe they had been eradicated, maybe they were on the upper trail instead, perhaps they had never been where I had thought.

But around a corner, I stopped short. There they were—stands of wild fennel, a virtual thicket of 10-foot-tall dead stalks, exactly as I remembered them. And although they were at their least attractive at this time of the year, in some ways it was the best—the tiny new, fernlike shoots were just beginning to emerge from the previous year’s skeleton, and they crunched delicately between my teeth, releasing their sweet, anise-flavored juice.

Wild fennel grows like a noxious weed all over northern and central California, where it is sometimes dubbed “freeway fennel” for its habit of growing profusely along roadsides. Unlike domesticated fennel, it never forms a bulbous root, but it a delicacy for many, including some San Francisco chefs who use its aromatic fronds and pollen to perfume their chicken and seafood dishes.

Miner's lettuce, with its distinctive leaf pattern.

New Zealand spinach thrives in temperate coastal climates.

Other plants delighted my foraging soul that day as well ... lush patches of succulent miner’s lettuce (so named because they used to provide California’s Gold Rush miners much-needed vitamin C and greenery in the winter), colossal nasturtiums gone feral (their pepperiness is at its most sinus-blowing in late summer, when the arid Mediterranean climate concentrates their oils), the ever-present and humble plantain, and a pleasant surprise—clumps of salty, juicy New Zealand spinach growing under the protection of a craggy juniper bush.

Note the light-green wild nasturtiums beneath the dark-green juniper.

Thankfully, some things never change.

Tasting Notes from the San Francisco Trip

• A luscious reuben sandwich at Boudin, home of the genuine San Francisco sourdough bread
• Chicken paillard followed by blood orange sorbet with candied kumquats at Chez Panisse, Berkeley
• Excellent carpaccio at Firenze by Night, a North Beach Italian restaurant
• Delectable Bündnerfleisch from the deli at Andronicos Market
• Sigona’s Fresh Press Frantoio olive oil from Livermore Valley—peppery, grassy, superb
• Pretty good Chinese hot-and-sour soup at Jennie Low’s in Petaluma
• The best mussels ever (locally gathered from Tomales Bay) at the Station House Cafe in Point Reyes Station
• A pitstop at the world-famous Voodoo Donut in Portland, Oregon, where we waited in a line that formed down the block; the best maple bar with bacon bits we ever tasted

Traveling with Spam

I admit it. I love Spam.

Before you regard this as heretical, repulsive, absurd, or any combination thereof, consider this: We all have secret foods that we adore, even crave, but would never want to tell anybody we actually enjoy. And why? Because we’re afraid of being laughed at, or being regarded as having too unsophisticated a palate. But every one of us has something weird or ridiculous we gustatorily relish, and in my unabashed opinion, there is absolutely no reason to be ashamed.

I love Spam so much that a year ago last Thanksgiving when I was driving to see family in the Midwest, I actually stopped at the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, to pick some up. Yep, there is an entire 16,500-square-foot mecca devoted to that little can of luncheon meat within a stone’s throw of one of the two Hormel Foods plants in the United States that produce Spam. There is Spam memorabilia, Spam history, Spam clothing, a 3,390-can wall of Spam, and of course, Spam products.

You see, Spam comes in many different flavors, and many of them are not available in Seattle, where I live. There is garlic Spam, Hot N’ Spicy Spam (my personal favorite but is distributed mainly in the Southwest and California), Bacon Spam, and the Golden Honey Grail Spam that comes in this nifty brown collector’s edition Monty Python Spamelot can.

The Wall of Spam, made up of 3,390 Spam cans.

I wanted to stock up, and who knows how much Spam I might end up consuming in a year, so I bought five dozen cans of Spam, all different flavors, packed neatly in five brown cardboard flats. Yes, sixty cans of Spam. The woman at the counter told me with a straight face that outside of Internet orders, no one had ever actually bought that much Spam at the Museum before. Undeterred, I paid for my Spam and loaded the flats in the trunk of my car.

Over the course of my travels, I acquired a large, empty cardboard Land’s End box that turned out to be just perfect for nesting my flats so that they wouldn’t shift or unpleasantly tumble around in the 2,300-mile drive back to Seattle. I folded the box up and shoved it way in the back of the trunk, but didn’t tape it down, because I was going through Canada and thought it unwise to seal it up completely in case the border patrol was really hungry.

Things were fine driving through the frigid North, and when the wind chill dipped to minus 30, it was genuinely comforting to know that if the car broke down, I was traveling with a sleeping bag rated to minus 15 and enough protein in the trunk to last me for weeks. But when I came down to re-enter the United States at the Idaho border, the guards did ask me to pop the trunk open.

Most conveniently at this border crossing, an upright mirror stands near the driver door so you can see what the guards are rifling through in your trunk. I watched them intently as they quickly pawed through various bags and suitcases, looking for weapons, drugs, and other contraband. Then they stopped when they got to the Land’s End box.

“What’s in the box?” one friendly, boyish-looking guard asked, curiously. I then explained that I had been out in Minnesota and Wisconsin for Thanksgiving and I liked Spam, so naturally I’d been to the Spam Museum. “There’s flavors there that I can’t get in Seattle,” I said earnestly, thinking what a cheesy story this was sounding. “If you want, you can open up the box.”

He paused for a few long moments, carefully evaluating the situation. “Naww, that’s okay,” he finally said. “But that really IS a lot of Spam.” He slammed my trunk shut, grinning from ear to ear. “Have a good day!”

As for my culinary interest in Spam, I have run out of space here to go into detail now. You will just have to wait for another blog post on the matter. But I’ve eaten more than my fill; there is now just one flat left sitting in my pantry.



A gift of Spam, in a friend's Idaho kitchen.

The Perfect Caesar Salad

The biggest and best things about a good Caesar salad are the lettuce and the dressing. It is absolutely essential to begin with the freshest, best quality romaine lettuce you can find, or the salad is simply not worth making. Nothing will ruin any salad, not just a Caesar, than tired, limp lettuce, and there is simply no excuse for it, unless you’re at an Old Country Buffet in the upper Midwest in the dead of winter. But then in that case, you’re better off going for an extra helping of overcooked green beans.

It is my humble opinion that the romaine for a Caesar should be torn, not cut. Cutting lettuce seems a ridiculous act to me, much like filling a gas tank almost to the top but not quite. Most of the romaine in prepackaged salad mixes in supermarkets consist of cut greens, and this is fine for most salads, but not for a real Caesar. A Caesar worth its dressing should tell a story of love, of being handled by human hands and not the kitchen scissors or a knife. Tear the greens coarsely, and include a mix of the darker outer leaves and tender inner greens; the combination gives a nice mix of textures and flavors.

In my world, garlic is essential. So not only slice open a clove and briskly swipe it all around the inside the bowl, but finely mince or puree a couple cloves to go into the dressing as well. If you will be dining alone and have few social obligations the next day, pop the other half of the clove that stroked the inside of the salad bowl into your mouth and munch raw. Of course, if you decide to indulge in the latter activity, you won’t need to rub the salad bowl with the cut clove—the taste in your mouth will be plenty sufficient garlic seasoning for several meals thereafter.

Once the burn has subsided from your tongue and your palate is heady with the ensuing garlic inferno, you can turn your attention to the dressing. In my opinion, the biggest problem with American salads is that restaurants here simply drown their greens in too much dressing. That said, I know that I am an unusually skimpy salad dressing eater; I like only enough to taste, and a coating that weighs down the lettuce will always make me push my bowl away.

A great Caesar dressing is a very delicate balance. It must be sharp and tart and garlicky, but not abusively so with any of these qualities. A good mustard is essential. Raw eggs are indispensable in my book when making a Caesar, as is the best olive oil you can afford, freshly minced or pureed garlic, fresh lemon juice, and a decent vinegar. And no true Caesar is worth its salt without an honest anchovy, either in the dressing or draped lovingly atop the salad.

If you like, sprinkle your Caesar with freshly shredded Parmesan cheese (not grated). Croutons are a highly personal matter; some diners wouldn’t dream of a Caesar without them; I personally am not fond of them and daintily pluck the bread cubes, one by one, off the salad and onto a side plate, to be nibbled on later by my dining companion. And that’s my recipe for a dream Caesar. Bon appétit!

In case you want more specifics, the following is the original recipe for the Caesar served for decades at the restaurant of the legendary Wrigley building in Chicago, home to the chewing gum company and one of the Windy City’s most beautiful architectural landmarks. This recipe creates enough dressing for four people. If you decide to double it, it often gets watery for some reason; possibly cut back on the lemon juice. A huge thanks to Maureen Cooney, whose father Maurice ate at the restaurant often, for this recipe.

Marco’s Caesar Salad

Dressing

¼ teaspoon salt
½ clove garlic
2 to 3 anchovy fillets, or use anchovy paste (but do not skip this)
5 turns of the pepper mill
¼ teaspoon red wine vinegar
½ lemon
1 egg yolk, coddled
½ teaspoon Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce
2 drops Tabasco sauce
¼ cup olive oil
½ teaspoon Grey Poupon Mustard

Mash the above ingredients in the bottom of the wooden salad bowl. Adjust to taste.

Salad

Romaine lettuce, washed, dried, ripped into bite-sized pieces, and chilled
Parmesan cheese
1 to 2 tablespoons croutons

Add the romaine, toss with hands. Top with the croutons and sprinkle with Parmesan.

Picture credit: Linda Hewell, Dreamstime