It's been a while since I've blogged and it's not that I haven't had things to write about, or a desire to do it, rather time has been precious. Business wise it's been a tough year and as the owner I'm the only one that can work for free and so my labor has been in high demand. But there still has been time to cook in the outdoors and visit some of our favorite farmers and farms.
This years farm tour began in Tehachapi at Weiser Family Farms where we cooked a dinner for 18 people in the foothills of the Sierras. Alex Weiser and his family supply us with lots of great produce from potatoes to the wonderful melons we are featuring now on our menus be it Sunday Brunch at Eastbluff to the Scallops at the Coast. The dinner was a wonderful get together and featured beets, sweet bermuda onions, zucchinis and squashes, tomatoes, carrots, lettuces, strawberries and grassfed ribeyes and sausages from the J&J Beef ranchers as well as interesting wines and beer.
There were two small grills and a few picnic tables and wine and beer and the setting was memorable. Cooking dinners in situations like this allow us to be less than perfect because the environment of the dinner alone makes for an unforgettable evening. Fortunately we were able to pull off a wonderful dinner in the rustic style I have practiced for years. One dish that really stood out was a grilled little gem lettuce salad with roast garlic vinaigrette made from the Weiser's green garlic. This was garnished with shaved parmesan cheese and crostinis made from a roast garlic and asiago cheese bread. The dinner finished with a strawberry shortbread dessert and the revelation that I didn't have to camp out, but was able to get a room at the nearby Best Western.
A few weeks later we rolled onto our yearly trip to Coleman Farms and our Outstanding in the Field dinner. This was our third dinner with Jim Denevan and his roving farm dinner series. It was a Sunday night, the summer solstice, father's day and Romeo Coleman's birhtday. Joe Davis was bringing his wines and this year we had great draft beer from a local brewery Telgraph ( the left over hops and such go into the compost pile at Coleman farms) and my friends from the Spanish River Kitchen in Florida, Henry and Michelle joined us in cooking the meal. We developed the menus for these dinners trying to source out everything within a hundred mile radius of the farm or in some cases our restaurant. While the dinner is alot of work for us, 150 people eating at one long table family style on the farm, it is also rewarding in that it gives the people that travel with us to the farm a chance to better understand what I am trying to do at the restaurant.
This year's dinner began with grilled pizzas. We had been experimenting with these and they turned out great, vegetables from the farm, burrata cheese, an heirloom tomato jam we created for the dinner a few years ago and some of the sausages made from the grassfed beef from the J&J ranch.
Next, after everyone sat down, was a "shooter of sea urchin" with sweet onions, persian cucumbers,cilantro and a yuzu vinaigrette with a little kick. The Sea Urchins were caught off the Ventura coast and the vegies were from our friends the farmers at the Santa Monica Farmers Market.
The real deal meal started with a dish which came about because we had 50lbs. of Santa Barbara Spot Prawns and needed to make a dish that would allow us to serve them in the shell (we didn't want to clean them all ourselves). Steve Moore supplied the prawns and they were alive and squirming when we started cooking on Sunday. The dish consisted of a tomato water steeped with verbena and then simmerred with shrimp heads, local white sea bass poached in the liquid, an herb polenta, chopped Italin Parseley and a nice exta virgin olive oil all garnished by fried prawn heads in a tribute to Bill Coleman's Phillipino heritage. Lots of bread to sop up the liquid.
Next came pig. We had a great wood burning barbecue to finish the pigs in a chipotle glaze with a pinot jus and our grilled corn and zucchini salad with slow cooked greens. This turned out better than we practiced and made me wish I had a reason to buy a grill like the one we were using.
Finally more grassfed beef. This was going with a porter beer and a syrah. We marinated the beef in beer, garlic, mustard and herbs. The cut of beef was a sirloin and we wanted to grill it and cut it relatively thin to make sure it wouldn't be hard to eat. We served it with our grilled little gem lettuce salad, this time with a hard sheeps milk cheese from Rinconada farms, which we perfected after our dinner at Weiser farms, and roasted sweet Bermuda onions-- wonderfully carmelized.
Dessert was macerated Pudwill farms berries, and a skillet blueberry corn cake with a sweet vanilla cream. The dessert was served as the sun set and then dinner was finished. As always it was a great time, the setting was spectacular and hopefully everyone had a great dinner.
The trip itself was highlighted by the lunch we share with Colemans where Dehlia makes her "soul" food which always brings me back to meals my mom made when we were kids always with big servings of rice. The cold beer and wine we shared while we're cooking the dinner. The feeling of finishing a dinner which you can plan over and over in your head but need to finish it in order for people to see and feel the picture. And finally there was the trip to La Super Rico Taco in Santa Barbara before we drove back.
The farm tour continues this summer with a trip to McGrath Farms in Oxnard to cook with their great produce for their customer appreciation day and then finally another farm dinner on September 12th, this one closer, in San Juan Capistrano at South Coast Farms to help raise funds for the Ecology Center. Look for our Santa Barbara fisherman's soup and grilled pizzas as well as some new dishes we are creating to utilize the summer vegetables from the farm.
We hope to see you soon so you can share some of the dishes we've perfected this summer as well as others we're still working on.
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