Sardinia and bottarga

  For years, one of the things I’d smuggle back or ask friends to bring me from Italy was bottarga di muggine, pressed dried roe of gray mullet from Sardinia. It looks something like a pair of twin flattened sausages, and it's usually sold vacuum-packed. Good-quality bottarga tastes like the very essence of the sea and it can quickly escalate to a craving.

That's why I found myself on a couple of occasions tramping all over Milan hours before my plane was to leave, looking for some bottarga to take home with me. Now, though, you can find it at La Bottega Marino in West Los Angeles (310) 477-7777. Whew!

In this country, the fish roe is mostly served in spaghetti alla bottarga, shaved over warm, buttery spaghetti. That’s a fabulous simple dish and I’d be happy to use the last of my bottarga making it. But recently, I picked up a new Sardinian cookbook, the only one I’ve found that deals exclusively with the cooking of Italy’s second-largest island, and discovered more uses for bottarga in its pages. That alone is worth the price of “Sweet Myrtle & Bitter Honey” (Rizzoli, 2007, $39.95) from Sardinian-born chef Efisio Farris of Arcodoro in Houston.

Tomatoes are still hanging in there at the farmers market, so it’s not too late to make his bottarga with celery and tomatoes.  The recipe is easy, but the flavors together are magic. Basically, you take a celery stalk, slice it thinly on the diagonal, mix with a big handful of halved cherry tomatoes, some tender chopped celery leaves, a couple of tablespoons extra virgin olive oil and a generous spoonful of grated bottarga. Season with salt and pepper, divide onto individual plates and garnish with bottarga shavings and a drizzle of olive oil.

More ideas from his book: calamari stuffed with ricotta and bottarga, fennel and crabmeat salad with bottarga, fettuccine with zucchini, zucchini blossoms and bottarga, bottarga and raw artichokes . . .

I think I'm going to have myself a bottarga fest.

-- S. Irene Virbila

Photo by S. Irene Virbila

Chocolate salon in Pasadena

"Twenty dollars for that?" huffed a visitor as she left the first Los Angeles International Chocolate Salon, held Sunday in a little building east of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

Well, $20 did seem a little steep for an event with 23 booths, where just over a dozen were giving out tastes of chocolate. (On the other hand, three booths provided samples of wines they figured go well with chocolate, and that might improve one's mood.) And it's a little hard to sell an event as top-drawer to people who've just had to wander through a quarter of a mile of ragged construction sites to reach the building. But there were things to appreciate.

The idea was that this event, sister to a salon held in San Francisco, would introduce you to high-quality chocolates you might not know. In truth, not all the names were quite new -- if you're into chocolate at all, you're very familiar with Guittard. But that company did offer a few new wrinkles. Who knew the San Francisco old-timer was making its own single-origin chocolates, from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Madagascar? It's also going for the extreme chocolate market with a 91% bar that was too bitter even for a lot of chocoholics.

It was also selling chocolate wafers (pistoles) for baking. A lot of the attendees were home bakers and candy makers, to judge from the brisk business being done by a booth selling antique chocolate molds.

L'Artisan du Chocolat and Mignon Chocolate were the top classical chocolatiers at the event. L'Artisan has a more polished French style -- everything really looks exquisite -- but both were clearly using top-quality ingredients. (Mignon has the more interesting history, having started out 93 years ago in the Ukraine and relocating to Tehran after the owner survived four years in a Siberian labor camp. Its new home is Glendale.)

For unusual, Venezuelan chocolates, you could go to Chuao Chocolatier, a Carlsbad-based company that considers a chile-spiked chocolate bar to be its signature product. Well, it didn't do that much for this cowpoke, but I really liked Chinita Nibs, a bar to which caramelized cacao nibs and nutmeg gave a very appealing crunch and perfume.

The most unusual were at Decadent Tastes, a Monterey outfit which splits its efforts between wine fillings and Asian fusion fillings based on candied ginger. I found the ginger refreshing in the same way as mint chocolates, and the ginger-lemon grass version was the chocolate I'll remember longest from this event.

The jolliest-looking display belonged to the Chocolate Covered Company, which specializes in dipped fruits for corporate gifts. It was the only one to have a seasonal tree and snow motif.

E. Guittard Chocolate Company, (800) 468-2462; L'Artisan du Chocolat, (310) 880-9396; Mignon Chocolate, (877) 9-MIGNON; Chuao Chocolatier, (888) 635-1444; Decadent Tastes, (831) 643-0908; Chocolate Covered Company, (877) DIPPED-2

-- Charles Perry

Photo by Charles Perry

Counting crosnes

The crosnes are back at Weiser Family Farms. But don’t count on being able to buy any until after the first of the year. Because of a very late, very small crop, the first harvest will be going only to restaurants, and even they will have to order them in advance to ensure getting any.

Little corkscrew-shaped tubers, crosnes are very popular among French chefs. Raw, they taste a little bland and crunchy — kind of like a miniature jicama. But they really shine when sautéed briefly, revealing a bittersweet edge that perfectly complements butter’s sweet, nutty flavor.

The Weisers planted them at the pleading of chef Alain Giraud, and last year's first harvest created quite a ruckus when it appeared at the Santa Monica farmers market in early October. This year's harvest is just now showing up. What happened?

So far, the Weisers are the only farmers in California —and one of only a handful in the nation — who are growing crosnes. So any ripple in their supply spreads quickly. And this year there was more than a ripple. First of all, Alex Weiser says, they concentrated the entire crop in their Lucerne Valley farm rather than spreading it into Tehachapi, which naturally made them somewhat later. And then there was this year’s extended warm fall. Since the crosnes form the edible tubers only when the plants start to go dormant, this delayed the crop even more.

And then there were the rabbits. While the Weisers were distracted harvesting an extremely abundant fall potato harvest in Lucerne, the little varmints dug under the fences around the crosnes field and feasted on the plants’ green tops, further delaying the forming of the tubers.

“I’m going to get a shirt made up that says ‘Farming Happens,’ ” says Weiser. “But I promise we’ll have them on time next year. I’ve already made plans. Of course, I say that every year.”

-- Russ Parsons

Photo by Wally Skalij

Little Flower Candy to open shop

Anyone who haunts Surfas, EuroPane or the Cheesestore of Silverlake probably knows the wonderful cellophane-wrapped caramels and marshmallows made by the Little Flower Candy Co.  They've probably also noticed that, for most of the last year, the candies have been absent from the shelves. Owner and candy maker Christine Moore, we were told, was on maternity leave; she'd also, it turns out, lost the lease on the Hollywood kitchen where she'd been making her confections. Well, her candies are back, and not only in specialty stores and online, but as of this weekend, they'll have shelves of their own. Moore is opening her own shop in Pasadena this Saturday morning, she says, at 7 a.m. I went by to check it out, after finally finding her sea salt caramels (they operate like hard currency in my house) at the Cheesestore and calling the number on Moore's website. The painter was still stenciling the sign, everyone was wrapping caramels like mad and Moore -- happy, overwhelmed -- was scrambling to organize a business in a space she'd found only six weeks before.

It'll be a "super soft, almost underground" opening, says Moore, but there will be espresso drinks (City Bean coffee), house-made pastries -- and plenty of Moore's signature candies. Moore hopes to turn the shop (a 1938 building that used to house Bee's Knees Bakery, tucked midway between Old Town Pasadena and Eagle Rock) into a neighborhood deli eventually, though at the moment she doesn't even have plates. But she's good at improvising: She trained as a pastry chef, not a candy maker, and started making sea salt caramels at home after she quit work (Campanile, Les Deux Cafes) to stay home with her first child (she now has three). With a highchair in her new office, coloring books piled on the cafe furniture she just bought off Craigslist and newly made caramels wrapped in pretty bow-tied bundles all over the kitchen, Moore's new shop already has a welcoming feel. Tomorrow morning, we're all welcome.

Little Flower Candy Co., 1424 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 304-4800. (Click on the website for contact information for other stores that carry the candies, including EuroPane.)

-- Amy Scattergood

Photos by Amy Scattergood

Indonesian snacking in Duarte

Last summer the Northridge Thai Temple had to stop hosting food stalls on weekends because neighbors complained about parking problems. But there's another place around here that sponsors Southeast Asian food stands, in Duarte.

It's a much smaller operation, only five or six stands, but the quality of the food is very high -- for example, very tender sates with a sort of spiced sugar crust, topped with a dab of peanut sauce, and empanadas (called pastels) that come with their own little cup of spicy coconut sauce. (Yes, one place does make that concentrated meat dish rendang, but it seems to sell out early.)

There are even things you might not have seen at an Indonesian restaurant, such as Dutch sausage rolls or little quail-egg-sized buns with a bit of pineapple in the middle. Sometimes there's a Balinese stand where you can get, say, spicy beef, a sweet hard-boiled egg (cooked with jackfruit), a chewy corn pancake and yellow coconut rice for $6.

If you don't know what to order, just stand around looking puzzled and somebody will probably come up and offer to explain everything. It's a very friendly, relaxed crowd. However, since this is a small operation, tables can fill up and you might want to order your food to go.

Unlike the Thai Temple, this operation is in a business area, so it hasn't had to face parking complaints from any neighbors. It's held in the parking lot of the Duarte Inn, down at the end of a driveway that's also the parking lot of a mini-mall. (You pass an Indonesian import shop and an Indonesian restaurant on the way.)

Indonesian hawker stands, Duarte Inn, 1200 Huntington Drive, Duarte; Saturdays, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

-- Charles Perry

Photo by Charles Perry

Going blue in Iowa

On a short visit to Iowa last week (20-degree temps, Huckabee and Hillary and Obama bumper stickers, horizontal universe) I took a detour off I-80 to tiny Newton, home of the Maytag Dairy Farms. If you look (very) closely at the picture on the right, you can see a gray hillock behind the farm; underneath it are the cheese caves the dairy built in 1941 to make its famed blue cheese.

The dairy was started in 1919 by E.H. Maytag, son of the appliance company founder -- the appliance company and the dairy have always been separately owned and operated -- who owned a herd of prize-winning Holstein-Friesian cows. After Iowa State University in Ames began experimenting with making blue cheese with homogenized cow's milk (instead of sheep's milk), Maytag decided to build a plant to make blue cheese at his dairy. (Midwesterners take a very pragmatic approach to their hobbies.)

The cheese is made the same way now as it was then: handmade in small batches, the wheels salted and punched with little holes so the distinctive mold can grow, then aged for six months in the caves. After aging, the wheels are trimmed and cut using the same wedge-cutter the dairy's used for the last 65 years. (A local engineer made the cutter; he came back a few years ago and had his picture taken with it.) Though the cows were sold in 1991, the dairy (which is still owned by the Maytag family) uses locally produced milk for its blue cheese, the only cheese now made by the company. (It once made Cheddar and Edam too.) Dense and creamy, mellow yet intense, it made a terrific snack with a few water crackers. And with the Iowa caucuses only a month away, it seemed as though it might even be an omen of more blue to come. 

Maytag blue cheese, Maytag Dairy Farms, P.O. Box 806, Newton, Iowa, (800) 247-2458.

-- Amy Scattergood

Photos by Amy Scattergood

Hey, wait: That's my Napkin of Shame

"Ask not for whom the Napkin of Shame comes. Sooner or later, it will come for you."

I don't know how this Nov. 20 item by Frank Bruni on the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog got by me (especially because it was blogged to death by other food bloggers), but once I saw it, I was riveted in the way only authorial pride can rivet. "I suppose I knew it already," Bruni wrote, "but a recent visit to the restaurant Fiamma in SoHo hammered home this lesson: Ask not for whom the Napkin of Shame comes. Sooner or later, it will come for you.

"What in the world am I talking about?" Bruni continued. "What’s up with this upper case Napkin and why is it a badge of uppercase Shame? Excellent questions, with answers that have nothing to do with keyboard problems.The Napkin of Shame, as I have come to think of it, is part of a fancy-restaurant ritual I’ve never made peace with. The Napkin of Shame is what a server carries to a table on which a section of the cloth has been splashed with sauce or speckled with wine. A server unfurls the Napkin of Shame and stretches it over the soiled terrain, a bit of patchwork that makes the table look clean again."

Very nicely said, Mr. Bruni. But that's my Napkin of Shame. At least I wrote about it, upper case and all, in my 1999 book "American Appetite." OK, so the book is out of print, so it won't be so easy for you to check it out. Touché. Anyway, it's right there on page 266. I included it as part of an anecdote about my husband being made to borrow a restaurant tie at Bouley in New York. "And there's nothing more embarrassing," I concluded, "than a restaurant tie, unless it's receiving the Napkin of Shame." (Note the use of upper case.) Then there's a footnote, explaining what it is.

Yes, I know that ideas are out there in the collective unconscious, and that the same idea can occur to dozens of people at once. That's why I expected that if I Googled the phrase, I'd get a grillion hits. But I didn't -- I just got 423, and almost all of them referred to Bruni's item. (One leads to a blog called Ashkeling, on which an undated entry recounts a visit to El Bulli in which the Napkin of Shame is called upon to cover up some kind of basil foam incident. Another refers to an Amazon reader review of my book -- see! I'm not making it up.) I'm not suggesting Mr. Bruni ever read my book -- hardly anyone did, or it wouldn't be out of print! But you have to admit, that's some coincidence.

It's probably my own fault, because here's a confession: It's my mom who first conjured the phrase, years before "American Appetite" was published. Yes, Mom, I should have attributed it to you. As penance, next time I'm in a white-tablecloth restaurant, I'll purposely spill my wine and suffer the Napkin of Shame as penance. Until then, I think it belongs to Frank Bruni.

-- Leslie Brenner

Games foodies play

Holidays mean lots of family time, and this year a couple of board games for food lovers are just the thing.

Modeled after Trivial Pursuit with some Pictionary thrown in, "What's Cooking" is moderately fun -- especially the "What's a Spatula?" category, in which you have to draw a kitchen tool specified on a card and your team has to guess what it is ("shrimp deveiner," "tea kettle"). The "Foodie First" category asks you to name as many items as you can in 30 seconds (traditional Mexican dishes, foods that begin with the letter O, etc.). "Melting Pot" wants to know in what country a particular dish originated; "Renowned Restaurants" asks where you find particular restaurants. Finally, the "What's Cookin'?" category lists ingredients, and you have to name the dish it makes. It's in this category that the game loses a bit of its "foodie" cred. To wit: "4 c. tart cherries, 1 1/2 c. granulated sugar, 4 Tbsp. cornstarch, 1/4 Tbsp. almond extract, 2 pre-made pie crusts, 1 1/2 Tbsp. butter" is the question; "Cherry pie" is the answer. Oh, please! Pre-made pie crusts? 4 tablespoons cornstarch? And what's with those weirdo abbreviations?

"Foodie Fight" blows "What's Cookin'?" out of the water. The questions, which are much sharper, are more fun for food geeks. For instance, a question that starts "What tiny songbird ... " separates the gastro-know-it-alls from the pikers. (The pikers have to wait to hear the rest of the question to attempt an answer; the know-it-alls will shout out "ortolan" right away.) There are smart food and wine pairing questions, real cooks' questions like "Which is the preferred cooking method for tougher cuts of meat -- dry-heat methods or moist-heat methods?"; and just plain silly stuff: "What did James Cagney smash into the face of actress Mae Clarke during a breakfast scene in the gangster film "The Public Enemy" (1931)?" (Again, serious types shouldn't need more than the first five words.)

So while "What's Cookin'?" would more likely appeal to your big extended family, "Foodie Fight" appeals to more dedicated foodists, with plenty of inside-baseball-type questions like "What sausage company founder writes award-winning, meat-focused cookbooks?" And the author, Joyce Lock, seems to have seriously good taste. Take the question whose answer is "Food blogs": "What are 'Gastropoda' and 'Chocolate and Zucchini'?" The latter, of course, is the popular blog that spawned a cookbook. And the former? It's the blog from Regina Schrambling, the Food section's New York correspondent. How cool is that?

"What's Cookin'?," $24.98 at amazon.com; "Foodie Fight," $18.95 at surlatable.com.

-- Leslie Brenner

Photo by Leslie Brenner