The second big Asian grocery opening of 2009 in Concord CA was Seafood City. (The first was 99 Ranch back in September.)

Filipino in focus, you’ll find ample provisions for that cuisine. Like much of SE Asia, salt is usually found in fermented seafood. Here there are pastes and as well as fish sauce. The fish sauce is called patis: it tends to be much more aggressive and pronounced in its saltiness than the products from Thailand and Vietnam.

Lumpia, which are rolled, deep-fried pastries reminiscent of the more common eggroll, are plentiful. You can get the wrappers to make your own or choose from an entire freezer case of different varieties of ready-made:

And speaking of ready-made, Goldilocks, the local Filipino bakery, is featured. Think Entemann’s but with different stuff.

The store’s real strength, not surprisingly given its name, is seafood. More precisely: fresh fish.

Shellfish doesn’t make as strong a showing here as it does at Ranch 99, but the fish selection is fantastic. The first day we visited, there were 44 kinds of fish on offer, from blue anchovy to barracuda:

Like any good seafood counter, they will clean and gut your fish, fillet them, get rid of the heads and tails, as well as steam or deep fry them.

Along 99 Ranch, County Square Market and Las Montañas, Seafood City is yet another great ‘ethnic’ grocery here where we live.

Seafood City website

Concord location: 2030 Diamond Boulevard (in the old Circuit City)

Between going to work and caring for a very sick dog, there are still plenty of fall chores in the garden. In October, we start to get just a little bit tired of eating tomatoes so the surfeit of cherry tomatoes must be dealt with. A few days ago we harvested a lot of Black Cherry and Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes and laid them out in dehydrating trays.

I think drying in the sun dulls their color as well as invites infestation so we put a dehydrator in a far corner of the house away from traffic (they get pretty aromatic). An advantage to drying small cherry tomatoes versus, say, romas, is they’re ready to go into a dish or salad with no cutting required. After a couple of days, we wound up with these lovely jewels:

Once upon a time, there was the mother of all strip malls, the Concord Park and Shop. Here’s the humungous sign (they took down the letters but oddly decided to leave the tower behind, which still stands):

The Woolworth’s which you can just make out in the photo was gone by the time we moved here. In the 80s it was C. Markus Hardware and then Simon’s Hardware. As new homeowners we spent a lot of time and money since that location was the main game in town. Eventually Simon’s moved and Officemax slid in. Officemax slunk away, the old Woolworth’s space stood vacant for a couple of years until this morning, when 99 Ranch Market, a big Asian grocery, opened an outpost here in Concord.

Parking lot packed, lines stringing from the cash registers into the food aisles, it was a zoo.

Here’s a quick tour:

The excellent produce selection looks pretty fresh. Here the pig looks at bags of ong choy, a wonderful green that should be more widely known here. (One of these days I’ll put up a recipe.)		Many times, when “exotic” fruit shows up at a market, it looks wan and jet-lagged. Not so with this dragon fruit.
	This was a little puzzling…what exactly is “buddhist” duck? You’d think it was some tofu creation, then why are the head and feet attached?
The fish fryer is something I’ve been wanting to have nearby for a long time. It’s great to pick out a whole fresh fish, have it cleaned and fried and then to bring it home for a quick trip in the wok to finish it off.		And a place to go for roast duck is certainly a plus.
	I was hoping for a better selection of fish sauces, but it’s hard to argue with the array of soy sauce, which goes from the pig all the back to where Tom is standing.
Not everything is impressive, but I guess somebody has to be eating this stuff.		The bakery is tasty-looking and it’s fun to watch the cakes being decorated before being whisked into the display cases. This one is a black forest cake.

A hand basket was all we could manage in the crush of people so we came away with just a few things. Just a couple of hours after the official opening, so much had been sold that the register tape needed refilling on our aisle. I guess they’re doing well.

Seriously though, the freshness and variety of the produce and proteins is going to have a big effect on the way we cook.

If you’re in the neighborhood, scoot over to Willow Pass when you get off of 242. Otherwise, you can check their website for other locations:

all locations of 99 Ranch

Later this fall, a Filipino-leaning supermarket called Seafood City, is going into the old Circuit City building on Diamond. Better yet, it’s bringing a Jollibee with it.

Yum.

No-knead sourdough bread is in the regular baking rotation at our house so I thought I’d share a couple of solutions to things that come up. (A little background on no-knead bread is here.)

First, there’s the matter of burnt bottom crusts. Putting the dough into a very well-heated vessel in a very hot oven can yield a dark and bitter crust once in a while. This has to do with the bottom of the pot getting hit with the greatest heat first and throughout the baking time. I’ve tried taking the bread out of its pot after 40 minutes and finishing it in the open air of the oven: it does work, but takes away from the simplicity of the no-knead method. (If you have a convection oven, this might not ever be an issue.)

Playing around with our ceramic cooker outside, which can sail up past 600 degrees, the necessity of a heat diffuser for anything that’s on the grill for more than a couple of minutes gave me an idea. If you slide a cooking sheet on a rack beneath the bread in its pot, the heat won’t hit the bottom full force. I have yet to see a bad crust this way.

The other thing can come up during very hot summer weather: the dough becomes floppier and harder to handle. Anyone working with artisan bread is familiar with wet and floppy dough. However, too much is too much. Adding more flour to stiffen it up drastically changes the character of the bread. A simple solution is to chill the dough in the fridge when you turn the oven on. It takes 30-40 minutes for our oven to heat the ceramic cast iron pot sufficiently. That’s perfect for cooling down the dough enough so that it naturally is easier to handle. (By the way, I’ve found putting fully-risen dough in the fridge until I can get back to it can be baked without returning it to room temperature.)

Having made the pilgrimage, I agree. It was one of the best meals we’ve ever had and included some of the most delicious dishes I’ve ever eaten.

If you follow on after the break, you can see the procession of courses.

Cyrus offers either a five- or eight-course tasting menu in both vegetarian and non-vegetarian formats. (À la carte is served at the bar.) We opted for the eight-course menu with a couple of choices along the way.

Once that big decision was made, out came the amuse-bouche, a 3-tiered presentation of the 5 flavors: salty, bitter, sweet, sour and savory. The uppermost tier represented salty and bitter. The most amazing was bitter which was portrayed in a “beer bubble”, an example of molecular gastronomy. Once you brave its slightly eyeball-like appearance, the bubble bursts in the mouth releasing the bitter and hoppy beer.

Then, came another amuse-bouche, this time standing in for the salad course. Two slices of peach which had been compressed and concentrated in a cryovac stood beside a salad of microgreens and impossibly-thin shaved onions. This vacuum-sealing technique is something I’m looking forward to playing with here at home.

Little entertainments out of the way, we went on to the first course, spot prawns prepared two ways. The sorry little creature had been rent in half, one part fried tempura-style with a crackling crust on top of a compressed spear of cucumber. The other half was sashimi with cucumber gelée and melon seeds. It was funny to look around the dining room and see how many people were squeamish about eating a shrimp head. Also kind of neat were the silver tongs for picking them up which came from another very famous restaurant, El Bulli, in Spain. A nice tip of the hat.

Next, Tom had a salt-encrusted torchon of foie gras (sorry, no pictures of his dishes). My dish was potato gnocchi with morels and peas. Words do no justice to the actual dish:

There’s a kind of poetic journey if the dish is read, left to right. The potato foam starts as essence of flavor, just an idea of a potato. Next came a fresh peapod and a single perfectly cooked morel. Everything came together with the feathery-light potato gnocchi in a soup of morels and pureed peas, topped by sautéed pea shoots.

The next dish entered the pantheon of the best things I have ever eaten: spectacular moist, poached halibut in a sauce of corn, lemon verbena, scallions and Australian truffle. On top was a chiffonade of scallions, more truffle, shaved and a roasted ear of baby corn. Just looking this picture brings back a wonderful taste memory.

The entire meal was like this..very distinct, concentrated flavors, which still blended into a harmonious whole.

The sommelier-suggested wines were perfect foils for the food. That rosé champagne before the break was a Paul Bara Grand Cru, from Bouzy. Accompanying the white courses was a crisp Grüner Veltliner from Kamptal, in Austria.  From this point forward, I drank an old-vine Saint-Joseph syrah, among the best wines ever for me. They did offer wine pairings for each course but I declined because sensory overload ensues with so much going on during a meal.

For the first red meat course, Tom surprisingly went vegetarian instead and had a fried squash blossom stuffed with ricotta and accompanied by haricots verts. I had a sesame-encrusted duck breast bok choy and asparagus. The two smears in the photo are (I think) asparagus puree and sesame-xiao xing sauce.

Before the final savory course, they brought out palate-cleansing mango-lime popsicles. Just the thing to make way for the lamb roulade with pickled ramps (not something you see every day), black olive, a (bolete?) mushroom and fava beans.

Tom’s choice was wagyu beef on a platform of bamboo shoot sticks, with shiso and oxtail umeshu consommé. He doesn’t often rave about food, but he did this time. We were both skeptical when our first server said the wagyu beef was so tender it would melt in your mouth. We were wrong. It did.

Heathens that we are, we thought we might not appreciate the cheese course, but with their assistance, we were thoroughly entertained by the contrast of mild and pungent, soft and hard, and so on. With the cheeses came spiced nuts, bread and naan, dried apricots and panforte.  My favorites were a very soft sheep’s milk cheese curdled not with rennet, but with milk thistle, and an ash-encrusted goat milk cheese from France.

Now, believe it or not, dessert came in five stages! As a birthday (mine) surprise, they had a show dish: warm chocolate chip cookies under glass on a lighted alabaster pedestal. To the base was attached a metal valve and to that was attached an inflated gold balloon. When the valve was turned, the balloon deflated sending a shower of chocolate dust through the glass dome. This was served with a Valhrona chocolate egg cream. (I’m so sorry I didn’t get a picture of the presentation, but it was flabbergasting and I forgot.)

Next came a cherry and pistachio ice cream sandwich, with cardamom streusel, whole pistachios, pistachio foam and pistachio nut butter.

Tom opted for an intense pairing of chocolate cake and watermelon. I had a strawberry rhubarb bread pudding. Also on the plate were poached rhubarb and strawberry sorbet.

At this point we thought, surely we must be done. Nope. A cart of mignardises rolled up to the table and we were encouraged to sample the pastry staff’s creations. I particularly liked a calamonsi fruit gelée and a passion-fruit chocolate. (The lollipop was Tom’s.)

The restaurant sent us home, sated and happy, with a box of chocolate brownies and a printout of our chosen menus.

I have sometimes left a tasting menu entertained, but vaguely dissatisfied. Not at Cyrus: each dish was masterly, climaxing in that poached halibut. It was clear than genius was at work in the kitchen. Portions were neither paltry nor excessive…we were just full at the end. The plentiful staff (we had at least 6 servers one of whom we didn’t see until we were almost done) was thoroughly professional and yet still warm and friendly. The dining room was quiet and streamlined, the right environment for food of this magnitude. (I also appreciated being permitted to photograph my food discreetly.)

If you have the resources (it is très cher), Cyrus will provide a memorable experience.

As for us, we trundled off to our private little cottage at Madrona Manor. But that’s another story.

(Thanks to Tom for this half of a fantastic birthday present!)

On one of the very last official days of spring, we found some beautiful locally-harvested morels at the Monterey Market in Berkeley. Once home, we pulled a couple of heads of green garlic…

Et voilà, dinner.

Here’s a little recipe:

For each person:

1/4 – 1/3 lb fresh morels

1/4 lb pencil-thin asparagus

1/2 head of green garlic

1 medium shallot, finely minced

2 oz pappardelle

fresh herbs: a little oregano, thyme, (chervil if you have it), and a few basil leaves

butter

vermouth

salt & pepper

grated parmesan

1. Put a big pot of water on to boil. Pappardelle take about 10-12 minutes to cook, during which you should be able to do the rest of the recipe. Put on a small pot of water for the asparagus. You’ll also need a sauté pan for cooking the mushrooms.

2. Prepare the morels: gently wipe the mushrooms with a damp paper towel. Don’t soak them in water as that will mute their flavor and is useless anyway. Cut the larger morels in half.

3. Prepare the garlic: Cut off the hard neck, cut the head of garlic in two, remove the outer skin, and pull out what remains of the hard neck in the center of the head. Place both halves (if making this dish for two) cut-side down and slice across the cloves as thinly as possible, stopping before the roots.

3. Prepare the asparagus: starting from the tip, cut 1-1/2” sections, ending before where the woody part of the stalk starts. Cook in simmering water for 2-4 minutes just until the green brightens up and the asparagus is still slightly crunchy. Rinse under cold water.

4. Prepare the herbs: finely mince the herbs. Tear the basil leaves into pieces.

5. In a tablespoon of butter, sauté garlic and shallot over medium-high heat for a moment. Add the morels and, shaking the pan, continue to cook until the morels still have some crunch and they have given up some liquid. (Note: unlike button mushrooms, don’t cook until the morel juice has evaporated…the juice is the sauce in this dish.) This should take 4 or 5 minutes. Add a splash of vermouth, cook for a minute longer. Salt & pepper to taste.

6. Drain the pasta and put on your plate. Spread the cooked morels over the top, sprinkle with the herbs and a little parmesan. Enjoy.

By the way, when you’re at Monterey Market and want a snack, you couldn’t do better than Gioia Pizzeria just up the block. While there a couple of pizza palaces I have yet to visit (Pizzaiolo in Oakland and Pyzano’s in Castro Valley), Gioia has, by a long shot, my favorite pizza in the Bay Area. De-li-cious. (The slices in the picture are half-sized because Tom and I were sharing.)

Monterey Market

Gioia Pizzeria

Pizzaiolo

Pizano

Last night I made a Thai red curry with chicken and pumpkin which turned out rather pretty if I do say so myself. Two kinds of basil, tomatoes, cilantro, red chilies and kaffir lime leaves are strewn on the surface.

Also on the menu were Chinese morning glory (ong choy) and white jasmine rice.

If you were to ask me the best memories of the twelve-odd summers I was playing in Graz, Austria, a top contender surely would be garlic soup at Stainzerbauer restaurant. I don’t think it was ever on the menu but it was a favorite of us musicians and whenever we sat down to eat, a bowl or two would reliably appear.

At one point, I talked the chef into giving me some of his recipes, but, as they were written on the back of a napkin, I lost track of them over the years.

So it was really wonderful to find Austrian-style garlic soup discussed on some food blogs. Every country has a good garlic soup recipe, but I’m partial to this one: creamy, with an abundance of garlic and chewy croutons on top.

The best of the recipes I found was a post from 2006 on the Tea & Cookies blog. Making it tonight, Tom and I agreed it was pretty much what we remember.  Here’s Tea’s recipe:

3 tbs unsalted butter
10 cloves garlic
1/4 cup sifted flour
3/4 cup milk
1 1/2 cup chicken (or vegetable) stock
2 tbs chopped parsley, plus additional for garnish
2 slices crusty bread

 

Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan, preferably with a rounded bottom (easier for whisking). Keep the butter on a low heat and add the garlic, finely minced or squeezed through a garlic press. Sauté gradually, on low heat, making sure the garlic does not brown.

 

When the garlic has softened (5-10 minutes), begin whisking in the flour so that it forms a thick paste. Add the milk, in a slow stream, whisking constantly (standard roux technique). When the milk has been fully incorporated, begin whisking in the chicken stock. Allow the soup to bubble and thicken, and add more stock if needed.

 

Chop the parsley and stir into the soup. Cut the bread into medium cubes and toast in an oven or toaster oven. Garnish with extra parsley and the bread cubes (you could use pre-made croutons, but I prefer toasted bread as it is a bit more chewy).

A couple of my observations:

• keep the butter on a very low heat. when the garlic hits the melted butter it should not in any way sizzle. The activity should seem more like liquid evaporating off than the garlic being sauteed.
• if you keep the heat low and add only a little liquid at a time, you can still get a smooth soup with a spoon instead of a whisk (less things to clean up). raise the heat again to cook the soup.
• remember that a roux-thickened dish like this will get even thicker as it cools on the table. So what you should do is get the consistency you want on the stove and then add more stock so it’s a little thinner than that.

Guten appetit!

thanks to Tea & Cookies

New to me, this webpage from  March 08 has pictures of sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, and always bizarre sculpted food. They have several besides the one below of an egg shell transformed into a baby carriage carrying its yolk, which manages to be both amusing and disturbing at once.

A google search reveals that a lot of people have this unusual hobby. Here’s another one I really liked: frogview

More pictures to look at:

• Wacky Archives
• frogview

We went to the city today for a meal at Yank Sing. The very first dish we were offered was a basket of soup dumplings, aka juicy buns aka xiao long bao aka Shanghai dumplings. These were as good as I’ve ever had, the skin only just strong enough to contain the soup and dumpling inside.

A lot more dim sum goodness followed. The last dish was a great execution of don tat (egg custard tart). Look at that flaky flaky pastry!