Sunday Supper: Navarro Wine Dinner!

Navarro Vineyard Wine Dinner!
Sunday, 11/22/09, 5pm
Mercedes Hair of the Dog Cantina
653 Commercial St, SF 94111

California Table welcomes Sarah Bennet of Navarro Vineyards for this month's Sunday Supper! So you guessed right~ a wine dinner centered around Navarro's wines. Out of their 18 wines available right now, we're pairing the perfect grapes to this dinner. Local wines, local food, local people. What more can you ask for?

The price of this prix-fixe dinner is $85 which includes 2 beginning appetizers, the 5-course meal, and of course, the wine pairing. A cash bar will also be available for you to purchase wine a la carte and also to buy bottles for the upcoming holidays! Check out the menu below and start blocking off November 22nd to enjoy this evening of gaiety!

Starters

Crispy Red Kuri Squash "Raviolis" Preserved Meyer Lemon Brown Butter

Gougeres

Family Style Dinner

Butter Lettuce Salad in a Tarragon-Créme Fraiche Dressing Breadcrumbs, Local Walnuts, Sieved Egg

Risotto with Crescenza & Wild Mushrooms Cooked in a Parmesan Broth

Lavender & Honey-Rubbed Leg of Lamb Sunchoke Pure, Grilled Chicories

Lamb Chopper Sheep's Cheese Fig Puré, Black Pepper Flatbread

Dessert

Pine Nut Tart House-Made Baked Apple Ice Cream

*Vegetarian option available

Cooking the Perfect Beans!

With bean season here in our beautiful Northern California fall, let's make sure we cook them successfully and deliciously.
Cannelinis, Navys, Gigantes, Garbanzos, Limas, Cranberry, Favas, Lentils, Flageolet, Great Northern, Mung, Pinto, Kidney… There’s definitely a bean for everyone. No matter what variety and/or recipe, there are a few important bean factors to take into consideration.

Soaking the beans over night may reduce your total cooking time but it’s not absolutely necessary. I’ve been cooking beans straight from their packaging for the past 6 years and never had a problem. Though rumor has it, soaking your bean and changing the water a few times cuts down on the flatulence-producing enzymes. Hmm, this will be for you to try and found out.
The common bean is made up of 22% protein, 61% carbohydrate, and 2% fat making these little legumes an all-around bundle of health. And some of us may remember learning in grade school what a bean is comprised of; the inner cotyledon, the embryo, and the outer seed coat. Why am I bringing up these lost memories of science class? Because in order to understand how to cook a bean properly it’s best to know how it works. The cell walls of beans will soften more readily in alkaline solutions, not acidic or salty. One of the most common mistakes people make when cooking these little buggers is adding salt to the liquid in the beginning of the process. This is the biggest no-no! Never, no matter how long you cook them, their skins, or shells, will never soften past a snappy crunch. Even veteran chili makers know that adding uncooked beans straight into their acidic and salty sauces will not speed up the process and absorption of flavor, but result in beans that seem to be uncooked. They will feel done and creamy in the middle, but still have a lingering rawness in the outside shell. But then we run across the problem of having beans that aren’t seasoned enough, or at all. So where does the salt come into play?? The solution to this problem all comes with the timing in the salting.
70%-80% done is a general rule of thumb when to add salt. I lean more toward the 80% side. How do you know when your beans have reached this level of done-ness? You can either bite into the bean to test the rawness of the core, or you can break open the bean and look into the middle. When a bean still has time left it will have a little white dot in the middle showing you your hot liquid has not permeated it yet. The amount of salt for your recipe depends on how many beans you’re working with and how much liquid. I generally salt the liquid until it tastes like a salty soup when there’s 20% time left.
Speaking of the bean liquid, it contains most of the ingredients of a veggie stock, so I always triple the amount of water to bean ratio, saving the excess liquid for stock with added starch (from the beans) for soups and braises. I simply ladle the excess liquid off the top of the bean pot and poor it through a strainer to leave out any little bits.
One more tip to creating the perfect beans is adding in olive oil to your water in the beginning of the cooking process. This results in a more velvety texture in the bean and the broth will taste richer.

Bean Recipe: For 5 pounds of dry beans

1 Carrot, peeled
2 Ribs of celery
¼ Yellow onion
4 Sprigs of thyme
3-4 Smashed cloves of garlic
3 Tb. Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Salt to taste

For 5 pounds of beans, use a 4-6 quart pot. Place the beans in the pot along with the remaining ingredients (except the salt). Add enough water to cover the beans by 3-4 inches. Bring the water to a light boil and then reduce to a simmer. Depending on what type of bean you’ve decided to cook, total cooking time will vary. Try checking the status of your bean in 30-minute intervals. Remember. Don’t add the salt until the beans are 80% done or add uncooked beans into acidic sauces!

SF Chronicle Article, Chef Liz Bills

This article is from the San Francisco Chronicle on February 21, 2007. If you want to check out the whole piece online, go here.

SEDUCED BY SUGO / Long-cooked Italian sauces captivate chefs and diners

Liz Bills stirs a pot of her Nine-Hour Bolognese at Nopa restaurant in San Francisco. It's served over creamy polenta on Sundays. Chronicle photo by Craig Lee

Though the word "bolognese" also has become a generic term for meat sauce, it has a much stricter definition within Italy, where the quintessential ragu, or ragu alla bolognese, comes from Bologna and its surrounding region, Emilia-Romagna. But even there, recipes vary greatly. Most do not have much in the way of tomatoes -- usually only a little tomato paste or puree -- and include milk or cream.

Regional differences often come down to the availability of agricultural products. Northern Italy has more access to meat, while the less prosperous south relies more on vegetables. This partly explains why a Neapolitan ragu contains more tomatoes and less meat than a bolognese, says Chronicle contributor Joyce Goldstein, author of "Italian Slow and Savory" (Chronicle Books, 2004).

At Nopa restaurant in San Francisco, cook Liz Bills developed a recipe for Nine-Hour Bolognese as a way to use up high-quality scraps of meat, both cooked and raw. The restaurant serves the sauce over creamy polenta on Sundays.

"One day we may sell out of our beef entree, and the next day hardly sell any at all," she says. "So my solution to utilize most, if not all, of our meat products was to produce this dish and cut down on waste."

Lengthy process

Bills will use lamb, pork, beef and pancetta or all of the above in the sauce, and she recommends doing the same at home with whatever you have in the refrigerator, be it leftover pork chops or a little hamburger meat.

The reason the sauce takes so long to cook is that Bills first adds milk to the sauteed vegetables and meat, and allows it to evaporate very slowly, up to three hours. She then adds wine and repeats this lengthy evaporation process, before adding the tomatoes. At this point, she lowers the heat even more for an additional three hours of gentle simmering.

The grand total is more like 10 hours, if you include all the chopping and sauteing that goes on in the beginning. But home cooks making smaller batches will find it takes less time to evaporate the milk and wine than it does in Nopa's industrial-size pots.

Top 11 Reasons to Buy Local

Everywhere we go food shopping these days we keep hearing about the importance of buying local foods. There are some obvious reasons an average everyday shopper can speculate to why, but what are really some of the reasons? I came across a cool site, Local Foods SF, where they stated their top reasons along with other important terms about farming.


1. Locally grown food tastes better. Food grown in your own community was probably picked within the past day or two. Produce flown or trucked in from other locations are quite understandably, much older. Several studies have shown that the average distance food travels from farm to plate is 1,500 miles.

2. Local produce is better for you. A recent study showed that fresh produce loses nutrients quickly. Food that is frozen or canned soon after harvest is actually more nutritious than some "fresh" produce that has been on the truck or supermarket shelf for a week. Locally grown food, purchased soon after harvest, retains its nutrients.


3. Local food does not require excessive use of our fossil fuels. Something as simple as buying tomatoes off season from Mexico is requiring an absurd amount of gasoline just to get it here. Shipping food across the country uses 17 times as much fossil fuel and emits 5 to 17 times as much carbon dioxide (the major greenhouse gas causing global warming) as distributing food within a local system.

4. Local food preserves genetic diversity. In the modern industrial agricultural system, varieties are chosen for their ability to ripen simultaneously and withstand harvesting equipment; for a tough skin that can survive packing and shipping; and for an ability to have a long shelf life in the store. Only a handful of hybrid varieties of each fruit and vegetable meet those rigorous demands, so there is little genetic diversity in the plants grown. Local farms, in contrast, grow a huge number of varieties to provide a long season of harvest, an array of eye-catching colors, and the best flavors. Many varieties are heirlooms, passed down from generation to generation, because they taste good. These old varieties contain genetic material from hundreds or even thousands of years of human selection; they may someday provide the genes needed to create varieties that will thrive in a changing climate.
This is Broccoli Romanesco grown on our farm in Hollister, CA.

5. Local food is GMO-free. Although biotechnology companies have been trying to commercialize genetically modified fruits and vegetables, they are currently licensing them only to large factory-style farms. Local farmers don't have access to genetically modified seed, and most of them wouldn't use it even if they could. A June 2001 survey by ABC News showed that 93% of Americans want labels on genetically modified food - most so that they can avoid it. If you are opposed to eating bioengineered food, you can rest assured that locally grown produce was bred the old-fashioned way, as nature intended.

6. Local food supports local farm families. With fewer than 1 million Americans now claiming farming as their primary occupation, farmers are a vanishing breed. And no wonder - commodity prices are at historic lows, often below the cost of production. The farmer now gets less than 10 cents of the retail food dollar. Local farmers who sell direct to consumers cut out the middleman and get full retail price for their food - which means farm families can afford to stay on the farm, doing the work they love.

7. Local food builds community. When you buy direct from the farmer, you are re-establishing a time-honored connection between the eater and the grower. Knowing the farmers gives you insight into the seasons, the weather, and the miracle of raising food.

8. Local food preserves open space. As the value of direct-marketed fruits and vegetables increases, selling farmland for development becomes less likely. You have probably enjoyed driving out into the country and appreciated the lush fields of crops, the meadows full of wildflowers, the picturesque red barns. That landscape will survive only as long as farms are financially viable. When you buy locally grown food, you are doing something proactive about preserving the agricultural landscape.

9. Local food keeps your taxes in check. Farms contribute more in taxes than they require in services, whereas suburban development costs more than it generates in taxes, according to several studies. On average, for every $1 in revenue raised by residential development, governments must spend $1.17 on services, thus requiring higher taxes of all taxpayers. For each dollar of revenue raised by farm, forest, or open space, governments spend 34 cents on services.

10. Local food supports a clean environment and benefits wildlife. A well-managed family farm is a place where the resources of fertile soil and clean water are valued. Good stewards of the land grow cover crops to prevent erosion and replace nutrients used by their crops. Cover crops also capture carbon emissions and help combat global warming. According to some estimates, farmers who practice conservation tillage could sequester 12-14% of the carbon emitted by vehicles and industry.

11. Local food is about the future. By supporting local farmers today, you can help ensure that there will be farms in your community tomorrow, and that future generations will have access to nourishing, flavorful, and abundant food. Buy local food. Sustain local farms.