I threw a little brunch for friends, with homemade bagels, salmon and trout I smoked over alder wood, gravlax cured by H, dry farmed early girl tomatoes (so good…), salted cucumbers, and other accoutrements. For the bagels, I mostly used the tried and true recipe, though I tried retarding the dough (letting it rise slowly in a cold place overnight) in both a typical 40°F fridge and a special 55°F fridge I had set up with a temperature controller for fermenting experiments. The 40° dough rose less, but then swelled up when baked (see left bagels below– perhaps I didn’t boil them long enough this time?) They still tasted good, like bagels– but the dough retarded at 55° had an especially nice crackling crust around a chewy bagel. I’ll keep playing around with rising times and temperatures… ...

Our first basil harvest put to good use on a summer evening.

Fried and braised a chorizo sausage to crumble, then scrambled some eggs w/ milk in the drippings. With homemade tortillas (Maseca, salt, water), quick-pickled carrots (cut thin, 20 minutes in vinegar) as a nice counterpoint to the fat, cheddar, and avocado.

It’s hard to believe I’ve brewed 30 beers (by the time I write this, 32) over the past few years. For this one I continued down the esoteric “sacred and healing herbal beers” route I’d started with the yarrow beer and brewed a gallon of beer with some wild mugwort foraged from the Oakland hills filling the role of the bitter, aromatic, antibacterial(?) herb instead of hops. It’s related to wormwood (used in absinthe) and has some hints of similarity in taste– and is almost unbearably bitter on its own. ...

Looking back on our Buenos Aires trip a year ago (a few days after La Huella), the most memorable lunch was at Don Carlos. After catching a cab across the city, we walked in to what felt like a casual family neighborhood cafe, empty except for two tables of older gentlemen chatting over food. The grey-haired owner strode over to our table and brusquely said in English “You Eat What I Cook?” ...

Another winter, another bounty of local California citrus to preserve. I’ve made some marmalade, but shrubs (juice/oils from fruit+vinegar+sugar, shelf-stable) are my preferred form. Makrut lime, yuzu-chipotle-anise, and bergamot shrubs, all made with mostly rice vinegar to leave the citrus as the focus: It was also a good excuse to strain, filter, and rebottle other shrubs from the past year with sediment that had settled out.

Excellent ramen– Tori Paitan– savory-umami rich broth from chicken bones with some fermented flavors, with pork and duck chashu and good toothy noodles. The Suntory Premium Malts on tap was good company. Worth waiting in line an hour.

Inspired by a recent vacation in Morocco, we made dinner for a group of friends (and, as with Iceland, ended up going a bit overboard with food). Beets with cumin, carrot and orange blossom salad, pepper-tomato jam, eggplant zaalouk: Fresh baked semolina bread: Pastilla / B’stilla (savory pastry pigeon pie with egg and almond and cinnamon– in this case made with chicken thighs for convenience): Lamb, olive, cardoon, and preserved lemon tagine with homemade couscous: ...

Making couscous from scratch (flour, water, mist, roll with palm, filter, steam, repeat) for a Moroccan-themed dinner party, inspired by this NYtimes article and the linked article. Hydrated at the end with saffron-infused water. A repetitive, satisfying, and successful process.

The annual family blind homebrew tasting (the righthand six are mine): They ran the gamut of beers (kit, extract, and whole-grain, traditional and not (aged-on-fruit, wild plants in lieu of hops)), and ciders (apple, pear, wild fermented and brewed with controlled ale yeasts). As usual, I had the strangest and lowest-rated brews (a punishingly bitter vaguely absinthe-like Mugwort ale) but also a few more pleasant ones (both takes on a Grisette were popular). My sister’s apple-pear cider made from a variety of roadside drops was my personal favorite. ...

How to cook thin ribeye steaks? Rub with salt, pepper, and juice from crushed garlic cloves, let sit 10 minutes, preheat a skillet over high heat with a little beef fat, then cook quickly (just over 1 minute per side), remove to a plate, and let rest under tented foil before slicing. Melting a pat of butter + goat cheese on top is optional. As is eating with lentils and romanesco in front of a roaring fire and jealous dog. ...

Unlike last year’s cidering from whole apples, this year I picked up six gallons of fresh-pressed cider (unpasteurized, of course) at a store in Philo. Split into two batches in sanitized bottles– one allowed to ferment with whatever wild yeast and bacteria were on the apples (what causes jugs of unpasterized cider to swell up if let sit), and the other dosed with crushed campden tablets for 48 hours to stun the wild yeast before adding Wyeast 4766. ...

During another rare heat wave in SF a few months back, I brewed a small batch of a new saison-like ale– this time a mix of pils, rye, and white wheat malts mashed at a lower temperature for fewer complex sugars, targeting a dry 4% ABV table beer (inspired by reading about Grisette, a miners’ beer from Wallonia), fermented with WLP590 French Saison Ale yeast. After primary fermentation I split the batch and decanted one gallon of it onto a few very ripe pluots from H’s back yard for another few weeks. ...

The result: Before hops became a key component of beer around the 14th century, beers were brewed with a range of herbs serving the roles of bittering agents and source of antibacterial / preservative compounds (a broad style, “gruit”, which has been enjoying a very minor revival). Inspired by a chapter in The Brewer’s Tale, I picked up Stephen Buhner’s book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, which touches on brewing with herbs of various potencies and effects, which in turn inspired me to look for bitter herbs growing wild along local trails (such as mugwort and yarrow pointed out by H). Time to brew a few very small batches with individual local herbs in lieu of hops (whether or not the result was a pleasant beer– I’d be happy with “interesting”…) ...

A few photos from an all-day preservation binge earlier this summer on a large quantity of Bing, Brooks, Rainier, and Tulare cherries: I’m deeply skeptical of all single-purpose kitchen utensils, but I will say the 6-cherry pitter was effective: Macerating some of them in sugar in preparation for shrubs. A few weeks later, the final bottled and labeled shrubs: Rainier cherries with fennel 5 cups pitted and chopped cherries macerated in 2 cups sugar with half a bulb of fennel for 24 hours, which drew juice out of the cherries, producing about 2 1/3 cups of juice, then strained and rinsed with 1 1/2 cups of champagne vinegar and 1/2 cup of cider vinegar and bottled (a roughly 2:1:1 chopped fruit to sugar to vinegar ratio) A mix of Tulare (less flavorful) and Bing (delicious!) cherries, macerated on sugar and rinsed and bottled with cider vinegar, in three different batches: Cherries with bay leaf and peppercorn (very subtle bay leaf, just tasted like cherries) Cherries with vanilla beans and pink peppercorns Cherries with fresh ginger ...