Artful Eating

Art pros chew the fat on fall foods

By Gretchen Giles

While a recent New York Times style section article breathlessly ran on about how laid-off young Manhattan investment bankers are turning down scarcely available jobs so that they can instead remain free to party away their severance checks on Monday nights, arts professionals generally spend more time around the kitchen table than the restaurant cloth. Utilizing the kind of supply-side economics taught at the Wharton School, visual and performing artists understand one simple truth: It’s cheaper to eat at home. And given their proclivity for handiwork and style, it’s often better food.

Inspired by that autumnal change in the weather that demands a hot, buttery swoon of fall comfort foods, we once again abuse the telephone system by calling up art makers and asking them what’s for dinner this season.

Cazadero sculptor Pamela Holmes doesn’t quite have as many Monday night restaurant options as a New York MBA, living–as she and her family do–way up in the middle of a beautiful nowhere.

A former caterer, Holmes in fact admits that she’s “cooked [herself] out of cooking.” But even she softens toward the terrible demands of a daily dinner this time of year, preparing a baked dish that she used to favor as a caterer. “Take a winter squash,” she instructs, “and chop it up into chunks and steam it. Sauté chopped onions and garlic with lots and lots of herbs–oregano and thyme and parsley and any other nice herb you’ve got–and then place the squash in a baking pan and cover it with the herbs and onions and cook at 350 degrees for about an hour.”

As for what she will be cooking that night (an unfortunate question aimed at all of our kind respondents), she sighs. “Halibut. Halibut is a fall season fish. It’s the only time they fish for it around here in Bodega Bay.”

Just fish, nothing else?

“Basmati rice,” she laughs gamely, compiling her dinner menu on demand at 10am, “and sweet potatoes and something green–OK, a spinach salad.”

This time of the year, Sebastopol painter William O’Keeffe favors the beef and Guinness stew of his Irish homeland. “Flour beef chunks and sauté them lightly to seal them,” he advises. “Chop up lots of onions and caramelize those in butter with fines herbes. Place the whole lot in a nice heavy pot, add a can of draft Guinness–never use Guinness stout in a bottle, it’s too bitter. I generally use a can and a half and then drink the rest. Bring the whole lot to a boil, let it simmer until the meat is tender. Then add a teaspoon of dry English mustard like Coleman’s and a pinch of sugar to taste. Let it simmer. Then prepare a massive pan of mashed potatoes with no cream; they have to be dry, because the liquid from the stew is what softens them, and serve over the potatoes.”

Can there be, he is meekly asked, a vegetable present?

“No veg,” he retorts, “you never have veg with it.”

And for that day’s dinner table? “A cauliflower cheese in individual pots,” he says.

Again, the notion of something green that once grew from the ground is mildly introduced. “Can you have a veg?” he snorts with rhetoric disdain. “No, you can’t. Fresh bread–a ciabbata. And,” he relents, “there can be a salad.” Professional integrity dictates that this reporter indeed report that she her lonesome self will be making (and eating) the salad, for she shares the dinner table with Mr. O’Keeffe.

West County printmaker Micah Schwaberow may do well to take an insurance policy out on O’Keeffe, as he’s bound to outlive him. The approaching chill reminds Schwaberow of the traditional Oden stew that he enjoyed while living for a year in Japan. “Take a big pot of water, start it boiling, and put some mirin in it–that’s a cheap cooking sake,” he recites. “Chop some onions, add some carrots for color, and some kabocha–it’s a sweet orange squash with a thin green skin. If you don’t have that, sweet potatoes are good. The kabocha should be cooked in advance and added at the end–if you throw them in the pot, which I do because I’m lazy, they lose their shape. Chop up some potatoes and some firm tofu, add some shitake mushrooms because they’re good for you, some daikon, and a bunch of wakame, it’s a kind of seaweed.

“Boil it for a while,” Schwaberow continues. “Scoop [some of the broth out] into a measuring cup and throw in some big spoonfuls of red miso. Stir it all around in the measuring cup and then stir it back in, otherwise the miso would lump all up in the big pot. Taste it. What you want is for the miso to give it a hearty flavor without being too salty. Serve with brown rice and a cucumber salad so that you have a little crunch. It will make everyone be healthy for the winter.”

Sounds wonderful. And what’s on for his evening meal? “We have a friend from Fiji staying with us,” he says, “and he’s promised to make us a Fijian dal.”

Like an Indian dal but from Fiji? “Like an Indian dal but from Fiji,” he repeats reasonably, as if it were the most ordinary dinner served in the States.

Professional storyteller Georgia Churchill also cooks in the realm of the exotic. “I love to know what people eat from wherever I tell stories because food is important to me, and because it helps people get deeper into the tales, so I often weave in the flavors of foods when I tell stories.”

Churchill then tells this story, a recipe from the Eastern European country of Georgia: “Take chunks of boneless lamb and brown them with a whole bunch of chopped onions, and then sprinkle it with cinnamon and put in just a little bit of broth and let it cook over low heat until tender. Then,” she says, pausing for effect, “squeeze half a lemon over it. Meanwhile, in a side pan, brown slices of apple with butter. You join them all together and eat with rice.

“The Georgian people are very fussy with their rice and how it’s cooked,” she continues, noting that they only cook the rice halfway and then place it over raw pasta dough in a pan. “Cover it and cook until [the rice and pasta dough are] done over a low heat. The noodle dough becomes like a bread that you eat on the side.”

This description sends up peals of near-erotic laughter as Churchill and the reporter contemplate such carbohydrate loveliness.

Composure regained, Churchill is asked about the more immediate meal. “I’m going to cook sand dabs tonight,” she confides. “They have such a sweet delicate flavor. I might make sweet potato French fries in the oven. I just got fresh pimientos that I might roast and peel, with a little olive oil and those delicious niçoise olives and a little lettuce. It’s so good!”

Sonoma County Repertory Theatre director Jim dePriest confirms that food is his “second passion.” He’s already dusted off his slow cooker for the season and has made big pots of soup. “I haven’t purchased any winter squash yet,” he says, “but I love to bake it with a little brown sugar and a little butter, and that will hold me for a whole dinner. I try to cook at home as often as I can, depending on where I am in a production.”

With Wait until Dark now playing at his Main Street Theatre, dePriest admits that his “diet these last few days [has been] pretty bad.” But he’ll be preparing short ribs with herbs for dinner. “I don’t do anything magical with them,” he assures. “I cook them forever on top of the stove, and I just load it down with vegetables because we’re so lucky with the abundance here.”

Now thoroughly ravenous, the questioning for Natasha Boas, the executive director of the Sonoma County Museum, goes straight to dinner. “Lamb chops seasoned with lavender salt,” she replies. “Various purées. I love to roast beets and eat those with goat cheese and a walnut salad.”

Yes, please. And for autumn cooking overall?

“I’m hopelessly French when it comes to po au feu,” Boas, who was raised between the United States and France, says. “And I always have a soup on the stove in the fall–a lentil soup or a carrot soup. I love pears and aged bleu cheeses. Boeuf aux carrottes. You sauté the carrots in olive oil,” she begins to explain and then stops. “OK, I’ll tell you: my mother makes it for me and brings it over.”

Confession accepted. What else?

“I do lots of puréed root vegetables seasoned with fresh herbs and lots of butter. Lots of chestnuts roasted in the oven and pumpkin seeds for snacking. I used to, when I had more time, make bread, but that’s not in my life right now. And of course, lots of good red wine is always flowing here.”

Sounding uncharacteristically girlish, Boas finally proclaims, “It’s fun to eat in the winter time!”

It’s certainly fun to talk about.

From the October 31-November 6, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

A Vine Design: Owner Phaedra DiBono displays Twisted Vines’ cheese plate.

Twisted, Sister

Swanky yet comfy, Twisted Vines is a great place to go and a good place to eat

By Sara Bir

Twisted Vines is a challenging restaurant, and not in the “pushing the envelope” sense. If you are oblivious to locations the way I am, it’s challenging to find, but it’s worth it. It’s down a lane inside the Landmark Building in downtown Petaluma on Kentucky Street.

Amie du Jour, luckily, was waiting outside to meet me. Inside, a couple sat at the bar, talking and sipping wine contentedly, and about a third of the tables boasted diners–not bad for Petaluma on a low-key Tuesday night.

Twisted Vines is more or less the same Twisted Vines that diners and drinkers have come to know since the venue first opened in 1996, but new owners Joeseph and Phaedra DiBono have implemented a few strategic changes. First: the decor, now with rust-and-clay-toned paintings and walls that cast a warm, red hue, evokes a well-kept wine cellar–which is what Twisted Vines is, in a sense.

All along the long side of the galleylike dining area (key word: “intimate”) stand racks of bottles. You can buy a bottle for home drinking or with dinner there (the corkage is now included in the sticker price, another change). The DiBonos have also added international wines to their list, which before consisted entirely of California wines.

The Beblenheim Pinot Gris from Alsace ($5.75 glass; $2.75 taste) was steely and bone-dry, with an up-front barrage of green apple quickly giving way to a soft mineral quality. It’s a great sipping wine for an aperitif. The versatile 100 percent syrah Côtes du Rhône ($5.25 glass; $2 taste) was smooth and mellow, with muted red fruit and a playful level of tannins.

There’s a gussied-up bistro Americano flair to chef Gary King’s menu: lamb T-bones, 40-cloves-of-garlic chicken, cheese plates, the California cuisine entry of seared Hawaiian fish–that sort of thing. We started off with fig tapanade ($8.50), which came with grilled bread, goat cheese, and walnuts. Adding figs to the traditional olive-caper-anchovy-garlic equation is a novel idea that tempers the salty concoction. The sweetness of the figs brightened the spread, and the meatiness of the olives took a back seat, making for a much less tapanadey experience.

A presentation of goat-cheese buttons rolled in herbs or ground black pepper would have been more elegant than a rough scoop of goat cheese, though that wouldn’t be in keeping with the casual, munchy spirit of the presentation. I wound up dipping the walnuts in the goat cheese and then drizzling them with the wonderful hazelnutty olive oil from the cruets on the table. Perhaps it is not the classiest thing in the world to create your own stoner food when eating out, but it speaks to Twisted Vines’ comfort factor that you can feel liberated enough to mess around with your starters in such an enjoyably tactless way.

The house salad was perfect; it was a salad with integrity, which most house salads are not. Twisted Vines’ house salad, nothing more than a lovely bed of mesclun greens tossed with thinly sliced red onion, cucumber, and a barely sweet balsamic dressing, is a minimalist medley. I could have eaten just a great big huge house salad and bread (from San Francisco’s Pan-O-Rama, and it’s excellent) with that wonderful olive oil and been very, very happy.

A half order of poor man’s lobster (that’s fancy food-industry talk for monkfish) and rock shrimp ravioli brought five generous ravioli burrowed in a rrrich pool of strikingly yellow spicy lobster cream sauce. Scattered across the top was a small handful of shaved parmesan, which was just too much. Gilding the lily!

After a meltingly intense first bite that rang of lobster the way a good bisque does, the sauce became cloyingly rich and parchingly salty. Monkfish, whose flesh is stringier and less meaty than lobster, couldn’t hold its own in the filling under the sauce and noticeably undercooked sheets of pasta. Maybe this was just not ravioli’s night. Minus the parm and the surplus salt in the sauce, and plus a minute and a half more pasta cooking time, this dish would have sung.

One of Twisted Vines’ biggest plusses is the flexible nature of its menu. There are enough small plates to facilitate socializing over wine and snacks at the bar; the salads and half orders of risotto and the ravioli are perfect for a lighter dinner; and the full-blown entrées like rib eye with demi-glace and mashed potatoes and the Liberty duck breast with green peppercorn sauce, basmati rice, and vegetables ($18) are suited to a special-event dinner.

Plated without a grain of rice out of place, the duck breast–Twisted Vines’ signature dish–looked grand. But the green peppercorn sauce was just kind of there, adding moisture but no flavor. The pretty little vegetable medley–carrots, zucchini, green beans, and red cabbage–flirted with the raw side of doneness just one degree too much (though Amie du Jour likes it that way).

As for the duck breast itself, it had the pinkish hue of a perfect medium rare but lacked that gamey duck taste. I suspect that the flavors of the whole plate were lurking in there somewhere, waiting to be released by a more attentive application of salt.

Decorated with random elementary school photos circa 1983, the dessert menus are more playful on the outside than the inside, which is fine. You can get unfussy treats like fruit crisp, rum raisin bread pudding, and apple spice cake with caramel sauce, which Pheadra herself makes.

Amie du Jour and I had our eyes on the eponymous Phaedra au chocolat (chocolate mousse layered with lady fingers), which was not available the night we went. Our unprofessional, contrarian natures led us to allow no substitutions, so no dessert reviews for you, dear reader! (Please address angry letters to le*****@******an.com.)

Twisted Vines has a good thing going. It’s stylish, casual, and comfortable. For easygoing wine lovers, it’s a great place to just hang out and relax. All it needs is a kitchen that keeps better tabs on its salt.

Twisted Vines, 16 Kentucky St., Petaluma. 707.766.8162. Dinner Monday-Saturday, from 5:30pm (wine bar opens at 4:30pm).

From the October 24-30, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.