Make the Most of It

Summer produce eats up my farmers market funds like nothing else.

This time of year, there seems to be something newly in season at the market every week, and we end up bringing more and more home with us.

This Saturday’s haul included corn, nectarines, peaches, cherries, strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, snap peas, squash blossoms, avocados, radishes, lettuce, potatoes, fresh shallots, and English peas.

I still didn’t leave with everything that I’d wanted to buy. I skipped the raspberries, blueberries, apricots, and the late season fava beans.

Every week I assume we’ve overdone it, that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, but this time of year, we eat nearly everything we buy. We often end up back at the Ferry Building for the smaller Tuesday farmers market just to replenish our supplies.

Summer foods are just so wonderfully easy to eat. So much of what we get at the market is perfect just as it is — a ripe peach, a handful of cherries, a Persian cucumber, sugar snap peas. A snack is as simple as walking through the kitchen.

Meals feel particularly effortless this time of year, too, since most of what’s in season needs nothing more than a quick sautee. Our dinners lately are really just side dishes. We had stuffed squash blossoms for dinner one night, along with a bright salad of English peas, radishes and feta cheese. One night we made a fresh salsa and guacamole thinking it would be a snack, but it ended up as dinner, with a side of sauteed corn.

When the weather participates, we’re likely to skip cooking altogether. One warm night a week or two ago, we brought a loaf of Tartine’s bread and a tupperware of sliced tomatoes and mozzarella to Dolores Park.

I’m particularly appreciating the simplicity of summer this year, since our return from 2 weeks on vacation. It’s so easy to drop back into our daily routines and take on too much, but summer brings a reminder to do less, to spend less time cooking and more time outside, to bring a little taste of vacation into our daily lives.

Before They Turn the Summer into Dust

In San Francisco, seasons come in spurts, a few sunny days here, a few foggy days there. I wore a sweater and a wool scarf on Tuesday. I’m in a sundress today.

Eating seasonally can be strange when you live somewhere that doesn’t have typical seasons. It doesn’t bother me as much in the winter. We tend to get a handful of summery days in February — just in time to make fresh lemonade with all the local lemons. Summer is harder for me. I associate summer produce with warm weather and San Francisco isn’t exactly known for its summers.

Last Saturday, we arrived home from the farmers market laden with summer produce. After four straight days of sunshine, we looked forward to making ice cream over the weekend. We’d bought strawberries that morning and I planned to bake shortcakes to go with them.

But the City remained coated in a thick fog and ice cream and strawberry shortcake lost their appeal.

You’d think that after nine years in SF, I’d be used to its abrupt weather reversals, but I was still disappointed by this 59 degree June weather. Even Mr. WholeHog, who normally prefers cooler temps, is bothered by it this year. “Is this January or June?,” he grumbled the other day, zipping up his jacket

So last weekend, instead of ice cream, I made granola.

I started making granola this winter, using the recipe for “Killer Granola” from The Cheeseboard: Collective Works — one of my most trusted cookbooks. It’s surprisingly easy to make and uses ingredients that I usually have on hand: butter, nuts, sugar, honey, vanilla and oats. (The recipe calls for coconut flakes and sesame seeds, but I don’t want those in my granola).

Even without the coconut and sesame seeds, the granola is really delicious. I now double the recipe because I often end up eating for breakfast and also for a snack. When the warm weather unexpectedly hits, I like it with yogurt and fresh summer fruit.

Although our wintery weather lingered on through Sunday, I decided not to let the fog keep me from having my strawberry shortcake. The shortcakes weren’t my best effort. But paired with freshly whipped cream and ultra-ripe strawberries, they made for a decadent Sunday night dessert. We ate them on the couch, in our sweaters and warm socks, and pretended that it was summer.

You Might Think That I’m A Fanatic

The first thing I missed about Italy on our return was gelato. We had gelato in nearly every town we visited. We stopped for gelato when we felt hungry or when we just needed a reason to take a break. The flavors were endless.

A list of the gelato flavors I tried in the two weeks we spent in Italy:

• Stracciatella (sort of like a chocolate chip)
• nocciola (hazelnut)
• zucca e canella (pumpkin and cinnamon)
• limone (lemon)
• melone (melon)
• a special “Vernazza” flavor which was basically french vanilla with cherries
• canella (cinnamon)
• bacio (hazelnut and chocolate)
• extra-dark chocolate
• torroncino (nougat!)
• chocolate and chili
• panforte
• licorice

Old School Flavor

To eat well in Italy, we just followed the snail.

The snail is the symbol of Slow Food, an organization that encourages people to think about where their food comes from, to eat locally, and value food traditions.

In many ways, Slow Food is what many of us associate with Italy — leisurely meals made from recipes that have been passed on from generation to generation, handmade pastas, a sauce that has been cooking all day long, and an Italian grandmother behind the stove.

We didn’t plan to go on a Slow Food Tour of Italy. I always travel with a list of restaurant suggestions and, for this trip, we also had recommendations from some of our favorite farmers market vendors. And I knew that Slow Food isn’t always on target since its founder, Carlo Petrini, published a completely inaccurate account of my local San Francisco farmers market. (Hey Carlo, at least our farmers don’t smoke over their produce).

But Slow Food proved to be a reliable resource on our travels. While there were a few duds among our Slow Food adventures, and a few terrific meals that weren’t Slow Food certified, many of the best things we ate in Italy were snail-approved.

My Favorite Slow Food Finds

Coffee

Terzi
via Oberdan, 10, Bologna
Terzi is no Blue Bottle, but it was the only place we encountered in two weeks that had us choose what beans we wanted when we ordered our espressos and then freshly ground those beans. Everywhere else we went used pre-ground beans.

Focaccia

Il Frantoio
Via Goberti, 1, Monterosso
One of the most delicious and cheap meals we had: 2 euro buys a slice of truly transcendent focaccia. Our favorites were pesto e pomodoro (pesto and tomato) and the formaggio (cheese). We ate that focaccia twice in one day and made a special trip back the following morning for more. The nearby view of the Mediterranean is pretty nice, too.

Gelato

il Gelatauro
San Vitale, 98/b Bologna
One of the best things I ate in Bologna was a pistachio cookie here (you’ll find pictures of the kumiri cookies here). But it is primarily a gelato shop. I had zucca e canella (pumpkin and cinnamon). Mr. WholeHog had some crazy bergamot flavor.

Grom
All over Italy (and now in NYC!)
Seriously intense flavors – their extra dark chocolate is really over the top. But I loved the unexpected and surprisingly successful flavors like licorice or nougat (torroncino).

Restaurant

Hosteria Il Carroccio
Via Casata di Sotto 32, Siena
I wonder if I would have liked Siena so much if we hadn’t had such a tremendous lunch at this small restaurant near the Piazza del Campo. Everything we had here was simple and delicious: ribollita, a “green bean torte” (basically mashed potatoes, green beans, and a spectacular tomato sauce – one of the many Italian dishes that were much more than the sum of its parts), wild boar, and grilled pork with pistachio, radicchio, and pecorino.

Mr. WholeHog started on the maiale (pork) while I finished the ribolitta and the look on his face after the first bite told me just how good it tasted.

Best Meal (Ever?)

Solociccia
Via Chiantigiana 5, ingresso da via XX luglio
Panzano in Chianti Firenze

I never saw the Slow Food snail at Solociccia (“only meat”), but it was easily the slowest meal we had — and the most leisurely at 2 hours. Dario Cecchini comes from a long line of butchers, and at Solociccia, he serves his family’s recipes. He states online and on the menus that the food is “thoroughly Tuscan”. Believe me, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

My favorite of the six absolutely incredible meat courses we were served was the simple, perfect slices of roast beef. Mr. WholeHog loved the “ramerino in culo” (beef skewered on branches of rosemary).

Not Slow But Good

Trattoria Sabatino (Florence) was a mere half block from the apartment we rented in the San Frediano area of Florence. It was frighteningly cheap and quite good. We particularly loved the polenta with sugo. Tables can be communal which I liked because we got to see what the Italians ordered.

You Never Do Arrive

The hardest part of travel for me is … me.

I don’t sleep easily in a new place, not to mention a new time zone. So my first few days in Italy, I was bleary and cranky from sleep deprivation.

Travel also proves that I am an incorrigible creature of habit. While I tried to adapt to Italian breakfasts of espresso and too-sweet pastries, I missed strong coffee and eggs.

I have a truly ridiculous habit of comparing anywhere new (like Italy) with something more familiar (like California). So when I first saw the startling color of the Mediterranean, my first thought wasn’t “Wow!” or “How beautiful!” but rather, “We have water that color at Tahoe!”.

Since this was my first trip to Italy, I also brought along my movie-inspired ideas of what Italy was like and the reality wasn’t always what I’d imagined. I’d expected all of the Renaissance art, but not the graffiti. I knew Italy was a popular destination, but the sheer number of tourists was astounding.

But incredibly, despite the lack of sleep and coffee, travel works. It gets to you eventually. Even with my bad habits and expectations, I arrived back in San Francisco charmed by our two weeks in Italy.

We arrived where we needed to be (even with an initial train strike). I slept some. What the country ultimately lacked in caffeine, it more than made up in gelato.

We visited places that even I had to admit were unlike anything in California. The Napa Valley is lovely, but it’s nothing like the endless green hills of Chianti. I can get delicious pizza in San Francisco and great pastas in New York City, but the incredible 2 hour meal we had at Solociccia is impossible to find anywhere outside of Panzano.

In many ways, the reality of Italy was so much more than I could have expected. I’d read about Dario Cecchini, but his personality can’t adequately be described on paper. There is probably no happier person in the whole world.

In the Cinque Terre, we asked in our meager Italian to rent a room and were rewarded with a huge, two bedroom apartment with terrace that looked out on the Mediterranean and a kitchen that looked out on the terraced vineyards. That night as we cooked dinner in the kitchen, I looked out on the vineyards and thought to myself, “Now this is Italy”.

Police Blotters – May 2008

My online source for small town police blotters changed while we were in Italy so I wasn’t able to go through the two weeks we missed.

Here’s the strangest and funniest entries I was able to find last month:

• 8:22 a.m. – A caller reported a man dressed in red was flashing “gang signs” to kids walking to school.
• 8:33 a.m. – A woman called to report the possible theft of Christmas decorations. She said she saw some reindeer that looked like hers in her neighbor’s backyard.
• A caller reported “something just went down” around the corner from her house and would like an officer to look into it.
• 5:13 p.m. – A caller reported an emu was in the road. Police chased the emu and cornered it until Animal Control responded and took the emu into custody.
• 5:46 p.m. – A woman called to report her husband shoved her several times during a fight and threw raw chicken in her face.