Kimberley Lovato: A Feast For Many Reasons

I first met Kimberley when I asked her to sign her award winning cookbook Walnut WIne & Truffle Groves. Since then we have corresponded more than a few times -- kindred spirits in our love of Provence, food, writing and the good life.

Today she wrote and article in her popular blog that is so much more than a review of my book A Feast at the Beach - it is a moving glimpse at her own childhood, grandparents and love of St. Tropez and Provence. I suggest you give it a read. I think you'll enjoy it.

A Feast for Many Reasons

A la votre,
Le Capitaine

A recipe through an Open Window

As many of you know my book A Feast at the Beach was published late last year and has had, and continues to get (thankfully!) quite a few wonderful reviews.

But recently I discovered a wonderful blog called Open Window that posted one of the recipes (with multiple pictures) from the book and was tickled pink at how much they liked it, and have also enjoyed the comments from others who have tried the recipe as well or who plan to.

Give it a read: Open Window

Bon appetit,
Le Capitaine

Provençal Style Sandwich

Photo by Tiare Ferrari

I’ve been thinking about a Provençal style sandwich I made on the fourth. It was quite good. You might want to give it a try. It’s not hard…

Provençal Style Sandwich

I’ve left the exact proportions out because this is not complicated and you should be able to adjust depending on how many people you are feeding, but for purposes of shopping you can figure loosely, per-person you will need:

1 sausage, 1/2 a red bell pepper, 1/2 a small hot red pepper, a quarter sweet yellow onion, and a tablespoon of Provençal aioli.

Alor, la preparation:

Slice the large red bell peppers into wide strips, taking the seeds out.

Do the same with the small, ripe, hot red peppers.

Follow with slicing the onion into big fat slices.

In separate bowls marinate each in just balsamic vinegar and olive oil – basically a very simple vinaigrette drizzled over them.

While they marinate, whip up a bowl of Provençal aioli. You can find this recipe in my book A Feast at the Beach.

Lay the peppers (large and small) and the onion slices on the BBQ grill. Reserve the marinating bowls and the vinaigrette left in the bowls.

Roast the peppers until they blacken about 30% on both sides (yes, you will need to flip them).

Grill the onions, flipping and stirring as needed, until they soften and start to brown.

Return each ingredient into its original bowl and toss them lightly with the leftover vinaigrette.

Put some fat sausages on the grill. On the fourth I made a variety for the different guests, including mild chicken Italian, hot pork Italian, and a pork bratwurst. I liked the bratwurst best, but all were good.

When the sausages are ready, slice open a baguette length wise four fifths of the way through so that it makes a V.  Slather both sides of the cut bread with aioli, drop a sausage into it then stuff with some of the sweet roasted bell peppers, a couple slices of the roasted hot peppers, and good bunch of the grilled onions.

Eat accompanied with your favorite Rhone or Provençal wine (red or rose).

Warning, it may be a bit messy, but in a good way.

If you give it a try, tell me what you thought.

Bon apetit,

Le Capitaine

Exquisite Tastes

At the corner of Bodega Highway and Bohemian Highway, in the tiny town of Freestone are two of my favorite stops in West Sonoma.

The first is a very small store called Enduring Comforts.

I don’t usually go for roadside nick-knack stores. Over perfumed gift shops filled with frilly things that often really have no use and despite the country location sport a Made in China sticker on the bottom.

Enduring Comforts is not like that at all.

First off the owner has exquisite taste. I don’t say this lightly. She has rare and beautiful items that you’ll want to own crammed into her tiny store. Even better Enduring Comforts has the best collection of hats I’ve ever seen. The collection is so good that almost every time I’m in the neighborhood I stop in… and buy another hat. My collection at this point is made up almost exclusively of hats I’ve picked up there.

Yours truly, the owner and her son. Photo by Tiaré Ferrari.

 

 

And then there are all the items my Lady has picked up there too, from scarves to bonnets to earrings. You would think with all this shopping we would have spent a fortune. Nope. In addition to exquisite taste come reasonable prices. That doesn’t mean everything is cheap. Solid silver carving knives or hand carved bone corkscrews don’t come cheap, but nothing I saw was ever over priced.

The best thing about Enduring Comforts is the owner and her son, who helps run the shop. They are the nicest people you can hope to meet in a roadside store. They give solid advice – they won’t tell you a hat looks good on you if it doesn’t – and they’ll make you feel comfortable shopping. Never rushing you and willing to give you background on any item or just talk about the weather.

Stop in, tell them I sent you.

~~~

Next door to Enduring Comforts is Wild Flour Bakery.

Young interns cuts butter  the old fashion way.

They make great breads from scratch using organic flours, all hand kneaded out in the open and baked in a wood fired oven.

An intern mixes dough by hand.

The ladies behind the counter at Wild Flour are always ready to smile, maybe tease you a bit, and load you up with delicious breads.

As nice as all that is, it’s not the reason I stop in whenever I can. I go to Wild Flour for the biscotti. They make the absolute best biscotti I’ve ever had. My favorite being the hazelnut chocolate biscotti. Basically a bunch of hazelnuts held together with a little flour and some chocolate.

Good God are they good.

Je vous souhaite de bonnes routes et le beau temps

Le Capitaine

P30

There’s this restaurant on a stretch of road called Bodega Highway, just as you head west out of Sebastopol, heading towards the ocean. I’d past it a couple times thinking it was some sort of coffee house because they had a sandwhichboard sign out front saying they had cappuccinos.

Then some friends invited us to dinner there.

What a nice surprise!

It’s small and intimate, and on a Friday or Saturday night you had better have reservations.
The kitchen is open – always a good sign. The staff was quite friendly, not pretentious at all, and skewed young. Almost like they were playing at “fancy restaurant” but having too much fun to take it seriously.

For appetizers we had beet salad (good) and these little cornbreads with rosemary butter that were inhaled quickly they were so good.

We brought our own bottle of wine because when you are in this part of the country the chances of getting any French wine in a place are fairly slim – even in so called French restaurants. So along came a 2001 Croze Hermitage. The waitress happily decanted it without comment (I’ve had waiters in Northern California do the nose in air sniff of disdain when they see I’ve brought a bottle of French wine).

The menu is eclectic and not very long. We had chicken and waffles, which I only sniffed (smelled very good) as my lady guarded them carefully. It was not a large portion, but no bigger then it really needed to be. I had steak frites because I was in the mood, and while the steak was well seasoned I have to admit it was a solid medium rather than the rare I’d asked for, but I was so distracted by the absolutely amazing frites that I failed to mention it. The frites are skin on and definitely have a little something added to the oil.

For dessert we had a most interesting lemon pot au crème, and a very unusual caramel bacon ice crème cookie thingy that I had to try and could not make up my mind if I truly liked. It was good, but I kept finding myself with bacon bits in my mouth after a bite and wondering, “Do these belong here?” I was grateful for the opportunity to explore this unusual concept.

The quality of food and service far exceeded the prices charged.

Which may have lead to this…

I was planning on returning again soon, until I discovered that they closed as of January 31st and are desperately seeking a buyer. So if you are looking for a turn key restaurant that has a name, menu, staff, its own private organic gardens, and built in following included take a look at the P30 website.

You see, I want to go back and try the waffles and fried chicken!

A bientôt,
Le Capitaine

P30 Restaurant web site

A bit remiss...

Yes, I’ve been remiss updating this blog. Sorry. The thing is, a lot has been happening.

Sharon Stone wants her copy of the book signed,
but first she'd like to discuss a few things...

Gendarme, the wonderful Lisa Kudrow, 
and yours truly at  the Beverly Hills 
book release event.

Doing a reading for an intimate audience
at the Merryvale Winery, in St. Helena,
Napa, California.

For one, my novel A Feast at the Beach was published, with a wonderful celebrity filled release party, as well as print, radio and television interviews and the like.
The release party was by invitation only, hosted by the Honorable David Martinon, Consul General of France at the official residence in Beverly Hills. There was live music, food prepared by 5 top French chefs, a bar hosted by St. Germain, speeches, an emotional reading, gifts bags, celebrities and diplomats and a lot of books signed.
It has been quite an adventure, one that continues as I do signings and the book continues to get media exposure.
I have been honored with some rather incredible reviews. Here are some links in case you’re interested:
San Francisco Book Review
The Provencal Post
Zimbio photo essay
A Feast At The Beach reviews page

Another thing that has taken some time and attention is that we’ve moved from the City of Lost Angels to the City by the Bay. The upside of this is a plethora of restaurants to investigate! I’ve already started, so you’ll see some reviews soon.

Until then, may I suggest you pick up a copy of my book A Feast at the Beach. I do believe you will enjoy it. Just click here:
Amazon.com

A bientôt,
Le Capitaine

Church & State at Industrial & Mateo

I went to Church & State with my good buddy BC to see and taste what the hype is all about and I must admit it was an experience. Church & State is a restaurant smack in the Los Angeles industrial/art loft/underbelly district East of Downtown by the river. Just getting there is an adventure. Heck wandering too far from the well-lit front of the place will cause you to shift into an alert defensive frame of mind. But the location can play into the adventure of the evening too. You’re not just going out to dinner; you are going to distant dark and potentially dangerous lands. OK, not really very dangerous, but work with me here.

Church & State has its own quirky personality. It is trying very hard to have a New York hipster in-the-know vibe, which it does a good job of mimicking. It is a loud, well designed post industrial looking restaurant filled with young suits from downtown, girls in tight fitting dresses, the occasional apparently successful artist, and a good sprinkling of affluent out-of-town tourists there to have “the experience.”

Big, loud, post-industrial, crowded, and yes, kind of fun.

What’s French here? Just the menu. Nobody in this place speaks or seems to have any connection to France other than via food. (They are not even trying to pretend to be anything close to French, which I kind of like, because I really hate it when non-French staff speak with a fake accent then have to embarrass themselves when you talk to them in French and they have to admit they're from Texas and have no idea what you just said.) The lack of French ambiance is totally OK because the surprisingly impressive French menu has items you just don’t see very often, such as Mœlle de Bœuf (Roasted marrow bone) – the last time I had this was in Paris. We enjoined a number of appetizers including the Mœlle, foie gras served in a jar of duck fat with 3 different homemade jams (oooh yes), a delicate anchovy pastry (wow!), a well-varied assiette de charcuterie, and more.  Too many appetizers really, and all of them were good to sublime. The disappointment only came when the entree we ordered and planed on sharing came. It was suppose to be a classic choucroute d'alsace and instead was some funky nouvelle cuisine thing with almost zero choucroute and mediocre associated meats. It was really the only thing we could complain about. Note: The menu changes regularly -- visit the website to see what’s serving this week.

The service from the waiter was good though not extraordinary, but the host was quite pleasant, making sure we were happy, stopping by at just the right moments, recommending drinks and basically making us feel special – which really is the sign of a good host.

This is not a cheap night out. Expect to easily spend $75 to $100 per person. And I recommend you do so by just ordering 3 or 4 great appetizers per person and sharing.  Also, I suggest you get your reservations in early. When I went to make our reservations for a Saturday night 3 days before, everything between 6 and 8pm was already booked, and for the 3.5 hours we were there, rarely an  empty table to be seen until after 11pm. Another plus: they held our table for us, which I appreciate. Some places consider a reservation simply to mean you get to go to the top of the list when you arrive.

Church & State = a French Menu + New York atmosphere + industrial downtown Los Angeles location. Yeah, like I said, it’s an adventure, but a good one.

A vos amour,Le Capitaine

The restaurant's website: Church & State