About the Masthead Photos…
The glassy silver sea at the top of my homepage this week was glimpsed just beyond my favorite sandstone cliffs. Nests of the beautiful cepphus colomba are now stocked with aerobatic babies there. Smell the salt air?
Riviera Dining
Frutti di mare – “fruit of the sea” – Italian really does have a zesty way of describing the world. Well, seafood – especially calamari, octopus and shrimps – was on every menu I found during my trip to Genoa and the Italian Riviera last week. The first night, I staked out my local enoteca, I Tre Merli (“the three blackbirds”) and in addition to several fine meals on my own, I brought new friends from the International Dickens Conference there to sample robust Barberas and feast on prosciutto, seafood-stuffed ravioli, focaccia stuffed with melted cheese, pesto and the regional specialty, tissue-thin lasagna sauced with a supple puree of chestnuts and pesto. Outrageous. And all served inside a 16th century room with 20 foot vaulted ceilings. This is not precious cuisine, it is seaside cucina rustica with hints of nearby Sardinia, Sicily and Morocco in the spicing. Mint, saffron and nuts found their way into many of the dishes I tried — but I couldn’t get a bad, or even a mediocre meal, even at little hole-in-the-wall tavole calda.
The salumi and pescattoria shops, where cured meats and fresh seafood were sold to housewives and chefs, looked exactly like sets from a Fellini film.
At I Tre Merli I feasted one noon on a plate of salume mista, organized by my waiter, so that I could sample the house specialties. In addition to notably un-greasy salame, the plate was laden with Parma ham, wild boar prosciutto, duck prosciutto and cured hog’s belly. The latter was exactly like a slice of delicious bacon with a thick sleeve of fat. Admittedly not a vegan dish, it was heavenly with a salad of arugula and a glass of Barbera d’Alba.
First Thoughts on Genoa
It will take another week to sort through all of my tasting notes from the recent week in Genoa, but I can state my case in a single word — pesto. Here on the beyond beautiful Ligurian coast of Italy, pesto isn’t remotely like the rather tedious glop of green-tinged cheese we foist upon tourists here in California. Pesto is poetry composed of the tiniest, infant leaves of fresh basil, combined in harmonic proportions with lusty regional olive oil, roasted pine nuts, grana cheese and garlic. It is light, almost minty in its freshness, and highly addictive. If Genoa had produced only this one culinary icon, it would live on in perpetual renown. But of course it also managed to give us sublime salumi, a profusion of palazzi, sensuous seafood and a man named Christopher Columbus. [Pictured here is a plate of pasta, twisted into a local dialect, and bathed in the finest pesto I’ve ever tasted – at a jewel of a dining room called Zeffirino. Frank Sinatra’s father dined here often.]
Yes, Portofino is as beautiful as
you’ve always thought. Think of the most beautiful piece of California coastline. Now compress it, steepen the hillsides, intensify the blue-green of the water, add truly tasteful shops and a scattering of outdoor cafes. A castle on one overlook, a chapel on another. Sprinkle liberally with Lombardy cypresses, yellow and pink palazzi and turn up the temperature to exactly 80 degrees. You’re there. Rod Stewart was enjoying his sixth honeymoon at the local Hotel Splendido the day we toured. Details at eleven. Ciao!
Sculpting a Plan for Peace
The Rosecrans Project Art Exhibit, is the work of San Diego-based sculptor Brad Burkhart, whose inspiration for the project is the process of envisioning a post-war world. The opening reception is this Friday, June 29, at 6pm at Louden Nelson Center.
It began when Burkhart was visiting the Rosecrans National Military Cemetery in 2003, where soldiers from every major US conflict are buried. After sitting alongside the graves of those soldiers – including the first American to die in the current Iraq war — Burkhart’s creative response was a series of bas-relief sculptures, entitled The Rosecrans Project.†(more…)
Inside the Flame
A book of sensory adventure: The rituals, passions and discoveries of an engaged life.