Cheese fritters–the new and undisputed heavyweight champ of the mozzarella stick weight-class–with genovese basil from our garden and hot fra diavolo for dunking.

Ant the extra crispy cobb salad, which contains all the required ingredients, then some twice-fried chicken wings.

The bar menu has been a little stagnant lately–over the winter, we were changing 2-3 items per week, but lately our focus has been more on dinner.  So it’s time to come back to the often messy food we want to devour with a cold beer or a glass of wine.  These two are a step in the right direction.  And some bar items just belong there and are impossible to budge–if there was room on the menu and in the kitchen, we’d have thirty items.

I spoke to the crowd before dinner, as i always do at this event, and . . . it was a table of thirty friends.  Everyone was a solbar regular, a solage member, or a close friend thereof; the setting sun shone through the willow trellis, onto the lawn and the flowers and sycamores; the table was laid with beautiful linen and positively forested with wineglasses . . . I hope SOMEbody was taking pictures, because the scene was an absolute idyll.

In telling them how lucky I was to cook for Kelly’s wines and for all of them tonight, I related a conversation told to me by yet another winemaker, and solbar regular, with a friend of his:

Winemaker:  ”Have you been up to eat at solbar lately?”

Friend:  ”Yeah, we go pretty often.”

WM:  ”Good, huh?”

F:  ”Yeah, and now St. Helena’s the new Calistoga.”

Which–not to seem too regionalistic or hoity-toity (hey, I live in St. Helena, after all) or any of that–I have been waiting for three years to have someone think, much less say.  A simple sentence that is meaningless and bursting with implications.

We finished off the dinner with chocolate glazed creampuffs, black mission figs with pine bud syrup and grated pistachio, and creme fraiche sorbet with fresh nectarines and cracked almonds.  When I snuck out, the Meet the Maker party was still going strong, the bar in solbar was packed, and I got called over by two separate groups on the solbar patio who spotted me in my civvies and wanted to say Hello.

So while Yountville may not be the new Calistoga anytime soon, in the immortal words of McManus, “There’s nothing that can’t be done.”

Young leeks, tender and aromatic;

Some crazy, black-green summer squash whose name no one could remember;

And ripe red padron peppers (not pictured–instead, someone to watch over me), which we plan to smoke and hang to dry, then use this fall in dried chile applications.

Check in at solbar for the smoked beef shortrib entree at dinner: butterbeans galore, plus the biggest, baddest, beer-batteredest Vidalia onion west of Rome (Georgia).  If everyone ate this dish, the world’d be a happier place.  And if ifs were skiffs, we could all go fishin’.  And if ifs were fifths, we’d all be drunk.  And if ifs were tiffs, we’d have bloody noses, &etc, you get the idea.  Such is Louisianian verse.

The process goes something like this: the sous chef(s) and I talk about new ingredients, focusing on upcoming produce to drive the flavor profile of the menu item, while also knowing that, if we’re considering an entree, the “main” item on the plate, at least as it reads on the menu, will be the protein. We order samples of everything to taste, then compose the dish over a day or two, jotting down amounts and techniques as we go, all in the middle of our regular prep and service duties.

When the first version is done, we taste it with as many kitchen managers as are present and all give our feedback. For instance, the first version of tonight’s chicken dish had romesco sauce instead of salsa diablo on it, but the oil in the romesco kept the sauce from adhering well enough to the chicken; Ryder suggested something thicker and water-based. We have plenty of overripe heirloom tomatoes on hand just now, so I made a tomato gravy with fresh rosemary from out the back door, white wine, onion, garlic and lots of chili flakes–thus diablo. I brought it down till it was quite thick, then stirred in some chunks of stale bread and let it rest fifteen minutes. That bread soaked up any remaining moisture, so when I passed the sauce through the food mill, I ended up with the thick, spicy, hugely tomatoey puree that the first draft of the dish was missing.

That was the fun part. The onerous part is the ordering, changing of order lists and reprinting, changing of prep lists and reprinting, composition and printing of recipes . . . all the mundane work that translates into reproducibility and consistency.  The prep cooks are trained on the new recipes, the line cooks are trained on the new mise en place and pickup.

New verbiage for the menu item, as well as a long-paragraph description for the servers, who all taste the dish in pre-shift lineup for a couple of days running. At last, the first new chicken or sole leaves the kitchen for a paying guest in the dining room, and the work of the past few days or week is dropped like rocket boosters.

SO when our guests tell me they wish I would change the menu more often, well, so do I. But it’s a busy kitchen, and as the man said, I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

We’ve been waiting a LONG time for ripe heirloom tomatoes, which finally came around this week.  Barney’s tomatoes from Forni-Brown Gardens are killer, and he has a new varietal called a Great White.  (There are so many evocative, comic-book names [Yellow Taxi, Black Krim, Purple Cherokee, Marvel Striper, Boxcar Willie] of heirloom tomatoes that I just tell servers to make them up at the table when asked what we’re serving tonight).  Anyway, Ryder came up with an amazing, and vegan, tomato salad with flying serpent cucumbers and glice-infused olive oil that is absolutely stunning and went on the menu tonight, but that’s enough about that because I’m the one writing and I created a fig salad.

I often tell a true story about why I cook in California:  growing up in North Carolina, I never had a fresh fig.  Figs came from Fig Newtons, and were spoken of in Sunday school.  When I moved left to work at The French Laundry after graduating from the CIA, I ate my first fresh fig, and it was an epiphany.  Till-then-dormant synapses fired, taste buds were shaken from their slumbers . . . and the rest is long and boring.

Figs never arrive at the restaurant at same state of ripeness when purchased in bulk, and figs that are underripe will not ripen off the tree, but of course they cost as much as the ripe ones, and must be put to good use . . . so the ripe ones are sliced thick and seasoned with a pinch of sea salt and fresh lemon juice.  The underripes are stemmed and quartered, then bathed in a hot, a-la-a-la-grecque (that’s right) solution of shallots, white wine, lemon juice and zest, salt, sugar, chili flakes, and olive oil.  The figs are served together over a fennel soubise enriched with parmigiano-reggiano and chilled, and accompanied by cracked salted almonds, strips of smoky-sweet piquillo peppers, a drizzle of saba, black pepper, and arugula leaves shiny with olive oil and lemon.

As pretentious, or as pure, or as narrow, or as impossible as it sounds, I cook in the hope that our guests will bite into something again for the first time, like I did with that fig.

Here’s where the deep fryer works its magic:  a small piece of realtively lean protein can be cooked quickly, yet insulated from the direct heat, so it gets crispy, gets cooked, and stays moist.  Its crunchy exterior is a perfect contrast to the creaminess of the (Anson Mills antebellum-style) cheese grits.  The black-eyed peas are BRIGHT GREEN, even more so after they’ve been blanched, something I never once saw in the South.  The ham hocks have been poached and picked, and the resulting cuisson is used to flavor the red-eye gravy.  The pickled watermelon rind is a sweet, sour, and cool counterpoint to the heat, spice and richness of the rest of the components.

As with most Southern food, it’s best enjoyed with sweet tea, cold beer, or pink champagne.

Dry-heat cookery includes roasting, baking, grilling, saute, and, yes, deep-frying.  I got into an argument with a culinary school instructor about this, and I still maintain that frying is a dry-heat method:  very high heat (almost always above 350); oil is the medium, just as with broiling or saute; a crispy exterior to the protein can be achieved, which is impossible in moist-heat cooking.

Deep-frying has a bad rap, no doubt about it.  Kentucky Fried Chicken is now KFC; a diner at solbar suggested I rechristen the “deep-fried cherry pie” so as not to scare other guests away from ordering it.  Like everything in one’s diet, fried food should certainly be eaten in moderation, but it certainly shouldn’t be shunned.  No other technique produces food as consistent, as popular, and as texturally exciting as deep-frying.  Come to solbar on tuesday nights for the buttermilk fried chicken–I’ll be shocked if you disagree.

Or so (almost) goes “One More Saturday Night”.  Far Niente threw their a 125th birthday bash last Saturday night and invited me, along with 14 other chefs, to cook for their 800 guests.  The crowd was hip and excited, the music was festive, the Cirque du Soleil dancers were out there.  You can see a better picture of, and read about, the soiree here.

I finally regained the ability to upload photos back on the blog, so here are a few from our garden at Fisher Vineyards.  Greg should be back next week and he’s already got some things started for the fall.

As you can see, the tomatoes are still tiny and green.  I hope they’re ready by Labor Day . . . .

smoke andouille

smoke eggplant

smoke shortribs

smoke pork ribs

All of which is small potatoes to a pit master with a smokehouse at his disposal, but what we have is a Horizon smoker with a 48-inch chamber, a 24-inch firebox, and a lot of non-smoking responsibilities in and out of the kitchen.  So this is about a full day of smoking, given that I had 12 eggplants, 30# of andouille, a case of pork ribs, and 40# of shortribs to smoke.

Napa Valley grapes owe their excellence in large part to the weather–hot hot days and cool nights.  When the grapes cool down, their acids develop, and in the afternoon, the heat ripens them, bringing forth the fructose.  Our day is hottest at 3-4pm, and in the mornings, it’s still cool and often overcast–perfect for cold-smoking, which is what the shortribs and eggplant required (plus a pan of ice because my fire was too big).  Smoke with no heat, smoke as seasoning.

When the day heated up and the shorties and berenjena were done (the shorties would be braised Friday morning), I built the fire up to a good bed of coals (we use Lazzari mesquite charcoal and wood chips) and got the temp in the smoking chamber up to about 180, the pork ribs went in for about 3 hours.  After rotating them several times, they then went into a 300-degree oven to finish.  Mmm!  Impossible not to pick at when they come out of the oven and that first wave of pork-smoke-steam permeates the kitchen.  You tend to see mirages of sweet tea, coleslaw, baked beans, and cornbread.  Or at least I do.

Meanwhile, a huge dose of charcoal went onto the coals to get the heat up to 200 degrees.  In went the big coils of andouille, and MAN did they smell good when I opened the smoker.  Fatty, spicy, porky, uh-huh.

We don’t smoke that much food during the winter, and to me it’s fascinating how not just ingredients, but techniques themselves, possess seasonality.  No one in my neighborhood grills in winter, and we sure don’t feature a lot of braised meats on our July menu.  Just another way of letting the ingredients speak for themselves.

We brine the whole rack of pork with salt, brown sugar, rosemary snipped from the bushes outside the kitchen, and apple cider.  Good start.  Because it’s summer, and because it’s a massive double-cut chop, we keep the accompaniments minimal, as described above.  It’s Southern food at heart, and for once on the right day (wordpress works on central time, so this will appear as July 4, but it’s only 11:56pm in California) I remembered . . .

RIP James Douglas Morrison, died July 3 in I think 1971.  One day short of statesmanship, no?  (A statesman is “a dead politician, and Lord knows, we need more statesmen,” as Berkeley Breathed has observed.)  A few minutes of that anniversary are left.  As a poet, Jim Morrison had occasional moments of lucidity.  Here’s one that comes to mind often when I’m tapping my foot at the expediter’s station, waiting for the first dinner tickets to come in, waiting for service to unfold:

The night is young
& full of rest
I can’t describe the
way she’s dress’d
She’ll pander to some strange
requests
Anything that you suggest
Anything to please her guest

Best not think too deeply on that one.  Hopefully, our guests in solbar experience moments of poetic bliss, but kitchen work is most definitely done in prose.  Choppy, bilingual, hortatory prose, often with terrible grammar . . . tonight a cook claimed that I once told him, “______, your pizzas may not be pretty, but they sure do take a long time.”  Which claim remains an allegation only, but perhaps we should add “sarcastic” to my description of the kitchen lingua franca.