So this is Christmas?

Here's a picture of our apartment community on Christmas Eve.  Kind of looks like fall in New England, right?  It's been rainy in the Bay Area lately, which translates to winter weather, but for Stacey and me, it's hard to get in the holiday spirit when it looks like this outside.

We did have a merry, festive Christmas though, with lots of family and friends.  My cousin Rick's brother-in-law Umberto and his family traveled from France to see their new niece/cousin Gaby, and as the only French speaker of the Americans, I spent a lot of time to trying to figure out how to say things like "cranberry" (canneberge) in French.  I had to look that one up, and I'm still not sure they really have cranberries in France.  Anyone know?  Umberto and Rick's wife, Jessica, are originally from Peru, so there were a lot of English to Spanish to French translations.  Definitely the most languages I've ever seen going on at one holiday. Never a dull moment!

Christmas morning brought a sea of presents and a make-your-own-breakfast-burrito bar at Steve and Kendra's house.  Gaby doesn't really get Christmas yet, but enjoyed hanging out with her Nana, below, and many other adoring relatives.

Stacey and I both have today off, so we are having a quiet day at home, trying to relax and get organized now that the Christmas craziness is over.

New Orleans

When we found out that Stacey would be going to New Orleans for a conference, I jumped at the chance to book plane tickets and join her there after the conference ended. We were excited when my cousin Steve and his wife, Kendra, agreed to join us for food, drink and Halloween fun.

First stop: Cochon. When I read this review of Cochon in the New York Times, I actually started drooling a little bit. I didn't expect I'd be going to New Orleans anytime soon, but knew it would be high on my list when and if I did. It was definitely my first thought when I heard about Stacey's conference.

For those of you who don't know, "cochon" is French for pig. "Cochon de lait," which basically translates to "milk pig," is French for suckling pig (in other words, a pig fed on milk), and figures prominently in New Orleans (particularly Cajun) cooking. A young pig is typically slow roasted so that you get very tender meat. Cochon (the restaurant) makes good use of the pig: head cheese, sausage, and pork rillettes, all of which showed up on our charcuterie platter; Louisiana cochon with turnips, cabbage and cracklins, which I ordered; a pork loin special; house-made bacon (which appeared in the fried oyster and bacon sandwich Stacey ordered). You get the picture. You are also probably getting the picture that Cochon is not a restaurant for dieters -- nor is New Orleans a city for dieters. I'm sure there are plenty of places to get low-calorie food in New Orleans, but the classic dishes and local favorites of the city -- heck, the entire region -- lean toward the fatty and the fried. I usually try to eat more healthy food than this, but I wasn't going to visit one of the food capitals of the United States and not partake of their specialties.

Everything was tasty, but I think the favorite dish at our table was the wood-fired oysters; we also enjoyed our spicy fried alligator (yup -- it does taste like chicken). Cochon is cozy, with a wood-fired oven and a barbecue joint-goes-hip vibe, and the service was excellent.

We started out my first morning in New Orleans with the typical tourist destinations: first, beignets for breakfast at Cafe du Monde...

and then a walk around Jackson Square and the French Quarter.

My extensive research sent us to Fiorella's Cafe for a lunch of fried chicken and Abita, and to Mother's for dinner. I thoroughly enjoyed Mother's, which is an old home-style cafeteria-style restaurant serving New Orleans classics -- jambalaya, crawfish etoufee, gumbo, and po' boys. I had a Ferdi Special, which is a roast beef and ham po' boy with gravy, debris (those little bits of meat that fall into the gravy), shredded cabbage, mayonnaise and pickles. It was one of the best sandwiches I have ever had.

Thanks to the insistence of Steve and Kendra, we dressed up and went out on Halloween, which I gather is a particularly beloved holiday in New Orleans, second only to Mardi Gras. We had a great time -- much better than giving out candy, which I have never enjoyed.

Please note that Steve is wearing creepy contacts in the picture above and does not normally look like that.

On Saturday we were (somewhat miraculously) up in time for brunch at the Commander's Palace, a New Orleans institution OR tourist trap depending on who you ask. Based on the fact that the food was actually quite delicious, I am going to go with New Orleans institution. The service was amazing, a jazz trio played a song for each table, and I ate more cochon de lait, this time served over cornbread buttermilk biscuits with poached eggs on top. Amazing. The piece de resistance was probably the bread pudding souffle I had for dessert.

The Commander's Palace is in the Garden District, a very pretty neighborhood of old, quirky homes and shady streets. It feels like what one thinks of when one thinks of New Orleans -- at least when one isn't thinking of Bourbon Street or, more recently, the Lower Ninth Ward. Across the street from the Commander's Palace is Lafayette Cemetery.

We went shopping on Magazine Street, including a stop in an amazing home store called Perch, then caught the famous St. Charles Streetcar, only recently back in service after damage sustained during Katrina.

We went back to the neighborhood that night for dinner at Gautreau's, a tiny restaurant with no sign on a narrow residential street. We would never have known it existed had I not read that their 27-year-old executive chef, Sue Zemanick, was recently named a 2008 Best New Chef by Food and Wine magazine. I am always excited when women -- especially women that young -- get recognition for their success in the traditionally male-dominated restaurant industry, so off we went. No regrets -- it was one of the best meals we had in a while.

On Sunday, Steve and Kendra flew back to California, and Stacey and I set off in pursuit of art. I had serendipitously read a New York Times article just before flying to New Orleans on Prospect.1 New Orleans, a massive contemporary art biennial that was scheduled to begin the very weekend we would be in town! Exhibits were set up in over a dozen sites across the city, and even with shuttle service, it wasn't easy to see all of them. We checked out one in the French Quarter and two in Treme, which sits just north of the French Quarter.

Above is the New Orleans African American Museum, an old plantation house in Treme that housed our favorite Prospect.1 exhibit, by husband-and-wife collaborators McCallum & Tarry. The show was a collection of mug shots taken from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, including those of Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The photographs were reprinted onto sheer silk panels, which were then stretched over paintings of the same images and framed. When you walk past them, the images shift against each other, aligning and then separating, blurring the lines. The effect is sort of haunting, and the exhibit was quite powerful. McCallum & Tarry describe the mug shot project here, but the visual effect of what we saw is more like this project.

Walking back to our hotel, I saw this sign on Governor Nicholls Street:

Not a bad thing to keep in mind. Fortunately I was not wrong about New Orleans, which earned a pretty high rating on my list of eating destinations. Did I mention the pralines?

It's a good week for babies.

Congratulations to my cousin Rick and his wife, Jessica, on the birth of their daughter, Gabriella Amelia, who was born on Thursday.

Congratulations to my friend Pam and her husband, Patrick, on the birth of their daughter, Margaret Donna, who was born early this morning.

Both babies and mommas are doing great.

Eating California

October is "Eat Local" month around the country, and I doubt any city in the nation has embraced the challenge quite like San Francisco. Today I went to Mixt Greens, one of my favorite places to grab a weekday lunch, and bought a salad made with locally sourced mixed greens, Asian pears, blue cheese and walnuts (plus some golden beets, apparently not local). It was delicious.

I've been eating local food in some capacity since childhood, when my father grew tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, onions, garlic, asparagus, beans, peas and herbs in our backyard. I've dug potatoes and picked (and eaten) a lot of blueberries in our friends' garden in Maine, and in Attica, New York, we used to eat corn grown on my grandfather's land. Or maybe I'm conflating different memories. Anyway, ever since I've become more tuned in to the food world, I've been thrilled to support restaurants, like Fish. and Mixt Greens, that serve locally sourced ingredients. Stacey worked at The Blue Room for several years, cooking food that was purchased, when possible, from local Massachusetts purveyors like Verrill Farm (in Concord) and Woodbury Clams (in Wellfleet), so she is no stranger to the pleasures of cooking and eating locally.


There are plenty of reasons to eat local food -- because it's delicious, because it supports local farmers, because the short distance it travels to your plate requires less gasoline -- but plenty of people have written well-researched and passionate books on the subject, so I won't try to do that here. If you're interested in local food, you might pick up Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, or Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (more about the U.S. industrial food system than about local food, but the connection is significant), both of which I've enjoyed reading in the past year, or check out The 100-Mile Diet. The term "locavore," meaning a person who seeks out locally produced food, was coined in 2005 and selected in 2007 as The New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year.


Not that we necessarily qualify. I'd be embarassed to admit the number of meals we eat at Chili's, and we don't have the space or time to buy a quarter of a locally-raised pig or grow our own salad greens. We do grow cherry tomatoes, jalapeno peppers and herbs in pots on our patio (see pictures above), and buy West coast seafood and local, free-range chicken from Race Street Market, down the street from our apartment. We buy olive oil from Stonehouse and The Olive Press, both of which use California olives; most of the wine we drink comes from Santa Cruz or Sonoma Counties. And we do get almost all of our fruits and vegetables these days from Farm Fresh To You, an organic produce delivery service that operates out of Capay, 115 miles from us (doesn't quite make the 100-mile mark, but not bad). This isn't our first experience with CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), either. In Massachusetts, we participated in farm shares with Parker Farm in Lunenburg and The Food Project in Concord. But farm shares in the Northeast are more limited than in California: the seasons are longer here, the land supports a greater variety of plants (including fruit, which I rarely got in Massachusetts farm shares), and, in many cases, we can opt in and opt out as often as we like, rather than making a season-long commitment. Every Thursday, Farm Fresh To You delivers a box of fruits and vegetables to our apartment. Here's what we got last week, and how we used it.

2 lb Starkrimson pears

These are gorgeous. I ate one and poached the other four, using a recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (a modern classic, we think). Red wine (local, from Healdsburg), sliced lemon (not quite local, from an organic orchard in San Diego county), cinnamon stick and whole cloves (emphatically not local, packaged by McCormick in Maryland and probably grown in Asia), and sugar (don't ask).


I was inspired to make them because we had some leftover mascarpone cheese (from Wisconsin -- oh well), which I happen to know makes an excellent topping for poached pears. And it did.


1 lb slicing tomatoes

A couple of these went into BATs (Bacon, Arugula and Tomato sandwiches) on Sunday with arugula left over from the previous week's delivery. We don't normally keep bacon around, so this was a rare treat.

1.5 lb butterball potatoes

Stacey boiled these until tender, then sliced about half of them to add to a pizza with Parmigiano Reggiano, truffled cheese, and chopped rosemary from our patio. It was delicious, and the leftovers made a fantastic breakfast the next day, topped with a fried egg (local and cage-free, from Ripon, the self-proclaimed Almond Capital of the World, a "small community whose Quality of Life shines like a small jewel in the . . . San Joaquin valley." I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried). You should really try to get Stacey to make you a pizza sometime. She's a master.

I decided to use the leftover potatoes to make Crash Hot Potatoes, a recipe I saw on a food blog called The Pioneer Woman Cooks (not quite as, um, historical as it sounds). We ate them with roasted Sonoma County chicken and roasted green beans left over from the previous week's delivery.

1 bunch radishes and 12 oz. baby lettuce

Salad on Wednesday, with broccoli from the previous week and the rest of this week's slicing tomatoes.

1.5 lb crimson grapes

I brought a bag of these to work with me most days to snack on. Except for Concord grapes, I had never had local grapes before we moved to California. These are great.

1 lb yellow onions

Sauteed with the previous week's peppers for pork fajitas.

1.5 lb Gala apples

I've been snacking on these all week. New England apples are better, but I'm biased.

1 pint cherry tomatoes

By Sunday these were a bit worse for the wear, so I made a cherry tomato confit using garlic from a previous delivery and rosemary from the patio. This recipe from the New York Times is really simple. We ate it over linguine.

2 acorn squashes

To be decided. Stacey wants to make them into a soup.

It's Thursday again, and more fruits and veggies have arrived. Much of the same, but we did get two kinds of pears this week, Fuji instead of Gala apples (I'm glad), some garlic and our first head of Napa cabbage. It's a long weekend, and I'm hoping I'll have some time to use that cabbage to make Mommy's Meatballs, a recipe from my friend Lisa's mother, who lives in Taiwan. I've never made it before, but I have an approximate recipe and a memory of watching Lisa make it, so I'm game.

Oh, and we got two more acorn squashes, so we better get cracking on that soup.