Dinner tonight consisted of (for the main dish) Chilean Sea Bass and Shitake mushrooms braised in a sauce of fresh diced tomatoes simmered for 40 minutes with water, and a little salt and pepper. I’ve made this dish a couple of times this summer: it is light, flavorful and completely correct both according to UCSF’s neuro-oncology dept. and the UCSF Osher Integrative (aka ‘alternative’) Medicine Center.
After dinner, I sat and finished sipping a Marsannay Pinot Noir Rosé that Linda and I picked up at K&L today and thought, for a change, about the good things that have happened in the past 11 months. One of the best, it occurs to me, was the trip to France that Linda put together last May.
When we got to Paris, it was clear that every good bistro and restaurant was focused on tomato tastes. Cuisine, especially in Paris, is a bit like the French fashion scene – news of this season’s la mode travels fast. Almost everywhere we ate, light, fresh, flavorful tomato flavors were apparent.
Back in the U.S., the New York Times and S.F. Chronicle’s culinary pages were soon full of tomato stories and recipes. It’s been fun this summer trying those, and creating a few of our own, especially with the fresh, flavorful tomatoes from Dotcom Garden.
The tomato, BTW, is a completely different creature in France and the US: no one in France will touch a tomato that doesn’t taste great. Americans buy tomatoes that look good (but are often near-flavorless). I think the French have the equation right.
So the trip to France was a great idea, even though I was a bit apprehensive about my first long trip since the cancer cropped up. Linda was smart about things like hiring cars to get us from airport to hotel: we would have sniffed at a hundred-Euro charge in the past and taken public transport, but now that makes a lot more sense, given circumstances…
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