Sanguini (Blood Orange) Marmalade with Orange Blossom Water.

It's easy to get used to nice things, and so hard to do without them once you have. Homemade jam is such a thing. I remember I used to buy jam in the store, and I even remember it being pretty good. But when you start having your own, there's no going back. It's not as great of a commitment as it sounds. Small batch urban canning is spontaneous, fun, simple, and gives out a huge payoff of seeming virtuous- that's the sanguine part. Actually, it's just cooking up some fruit and some sugar, one of the simpler lifestyle upgrades. The scent fills your home.

Stone fruits and berries follow one simple ratio that works for them all. Oranges, on the other hand, need a lot of water and a little finesse. This is only logical- they are complicated fruits with zest, pith, membrane, flesh, pits. They also have a complicated personality- sweet, tangy, and- what makes them so special for jam- bitter.

Blood oranges- sanguini in many languages- have plenty of zing and make for very beautiful rosy marmalade. To round out the bitter-tangy-sweet, we added some floral- a spoonful of orange blossom water at the end. Ethereal, with some depth.

We will need:

500 g / 1 lb small blood oranges (4 or 5 )

800 ml/ 3 generous C water

600 g/3 C sugar

a little lemon juice

1 spoonful of orange blossom water

Scrub the oranges well. Cut them in half, place the cut side down on a board, cut lengthwise in half again, then, holding the two halves together, slice crosswise into thin, quarter-round slices. A serrated bread knife works well for this. 

Your cutting board will get a pinkish stain by the time you are done.

Cover the slices with water, put a plate on the bowl, and keep overnight. This will let the peel soften. Put three small white plates in the freezer so you don;t forget the next day- these are for testing to see when the jam is done.

The next day, pour the orange slices with their now very flavorful water into a large tall pot, bring to a boil, and add the sugar.In the meantime, have ready a couple of sterilized jars and lids ready. this will make enough for 2 or 3 300 - 400 g jars.  Keep boiling the fruit, stirring most of the time. after abut 15 minutes, there will be less froth, the bubbles will be larger, and you will hear the jam stickingtothe bottom of the pan. Turn it down if you are worried, and stir constantly. It seems to take forever, but once is starts to thicken, it thickens very quickly. as soon as it looks syrupy, put a small amount on one o the frozen plates. Let it cool a moment, and run your finger through it. If the trail of your finger remains for the mos part. it is done. We are not looking for a clean trail that does not close at all- that will be too dense once it sets. 

The splotch in the middle is perfect.
By the time I added the lemon juice and stirred to taste,
I had the splotch on the left- too clean.
It is delicious none the less, but try not to over do it.

When it is nearly done, add a squeeze of lemon juice if it seems too sweet. Then add as much orange blossom water as you like- I used a full teaspoon, and might have used more. 

Ladle it carefully into the jars. It is a lot less stressful to just let it cool and keep it refrigerated, but if you would like to keep it longer, or if  you have doubled the recipe and have simply too much, follow the simple instructions for canning included here.

Greece's Sparkling Gems of Winter.

Urban Canning, Chet Baker, and Nectarine Jam.

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Fig and Date Bars with Orange Blossom Water- Nice to Share.

These rich bars with just five ingredients can be made easily in any quantity you need. They are perfect for sharing with as many people as possible, and in this case hopefully for leaving a sweet taste of Greece in the mouths of those coming through here under very difficult circumstances. One of the five ingredients is packaged cookies (!) it saved a lot of time. We want quantity, and our petite Euro-sized oven would hold us back. 

We were hoping to make something that feels like a treat but provides more than purely aesthetic sustenance. These are nothing but dried figs and dates and some sesame seeds, bound with the beautiful perfume of orange blossom water, and held together by a layer of crushed cookies on the top and bottom to make them tidy to eat, and a dusting of powdered sugar so they look more like a confection than a hunk of dried fruits and seeds. Pretty on the outside, healthy on the inside.

This is a recipe that can be incorporated into a weekly schedule and our weekly budget, and that can be doubled or quadrupled, to keep giving throughout the season. It also makes a nice project for small children, combining two of their favorite things- being kind to others, and getting their hands dirty. In our case I have my daughter Mei Mei and her friends to wrap them during study breaks (the are all in high school) and deliver to organizations that can pass them along to the border. 

For each large pan (42 X 28 cm), we will need:

1 package of plain square cookies- we used the double ones
1 K/ 7 C dried figs, cut up
500 g/ 4 C dates, pitted
120 g/ 1 C sesame seeds
2 tsp. orange blossom water
some powdered sugar for dusting

1. Crush the cookies. Line a large pan with non-stick paper and oil it very lightly, and spread half of the cookie crumbs evenly on it:

2. Pit the dates- this is very easy. Oil a pair of kitchen scissors and use them to cut the dates into rough pieces, removing the tough nub of stem at the top:

3. If the dates and figs seem too dry to be pulsed into a rough paste in the food processor, you can steam them very lightly- put just a spoonful or two of water into a pot, add the figs, and turn it on to high, covered. As soon as it boils (almost instantly) turn off the heat and let them steam for just a moment.

4. Put half of the dates and half of the figs and half of the sesame seeds into the food processor together with a teaspoon of orange blossom water and pulse until a coarse paste forms. Put into a bowl and pulse the other half and more orange blossom water, then mix the two halves gently so the texture is uniform.

5. The dense paste is not very spreadable, particularly on the crumbs sliding around loose on the non-stick paper. What we will do is take handfuls of the paste, pat them into slabs between our palms, and lay them over the crumbs, working toward the middle and filling in gaps like a puzzle. It is not at all difficult:

6. Coat the top with the rest of the crumbled cookies, pressing them into the fruit mixture. Set it somewhere to dry out a little:

7. Cut into bars large enough to be satisfying, roll in powdered sugar, and wrap them or put them into individual bags to stay clean and fresh.

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Summer Cake for 13.

Welcome September, season of excess! We have so many rosy jars of glittering homemade jam that our cupboard suggests we might also stockpile Spam (and ammunition). Why the excess? Lust for sugar and beauty, of course, but also the last three times I was trying to leave the weekly laiki (farmer's market), cart and bags heavy, some guy had filled plastic sacks to bulging with the rest of his nectarines, plums, or peaches, maybe 5 kilos, for a euro, and it seems irresponsible to not get them. We're perpetually in some phase of eating them fresh, like chain smokers always pre- or post- cigarette, and each is tastier than the last. We keep making jam (more on urban canning soon- it's a delight), and there are also plenty for this cake.

When the girls were little, we spent summers in Chania (Crete), in a quirky shanty-like apartment a few steps from the sea. It had a fan and a small television we would watch late at night while eating chilled wrapped cakes (the kind given out as favors at Orthodox baptisms) in our underwear. The apartment had a gas burner, a small free-standing and very emotional oven, and an equally emotional refrigerator. I made up several recipes that would not tax the dear kitchen and could be made with only a pot, a pan, a small paring knife, and bare hands, which was all we had in the kitchen. We loved scaling back to this elemental lifestyle; rather than outfit the kitchen, we had this cake, tomatoes and myzythra and paximadi (the Cretan salad), rice pudding with cream, boiled baby zucchini with oil and lemon, Marcella Hazan's butter-tomato sauce (with fresh tomatoes) on pasta, and chocolate zucchini cake. It was a clean break from the elaborate way we go about things in our main house, a more monastic sumptuousness. If I make this cake in the big house now, the girls say "Oh! Summer cake!"

We just had another dozen people in, film students making a movie Charlene is directing, and I made this twice. (Some days I made them the other summer cake- chcoclate/zucchini.) This is rich with the taste of butter, tangy and luscious with fruit. 

The Cake:

300 g/ 2 1/2 C flour

300 g/ 1 1/2 C sugar

4 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

- mix with your hands, and then blend in with your fingertips:

125 g/ 1/2 C butter, until it looks crumbly and there are a few small pieces of butter throughout:

Add:

2 eggs

3 C fruit in small pieces- here, a mix of nectarines and plums

1/2 tsp. bitter almond essence* 

1 tsp vanilla (homemade here)

mix the vanilla and bitter almond in with the fruit and blend the fruit and the eggs in with your hands, gathering the dry ingredients from the bottom of the bowl and lifting them to the surface. As soon as no streaks of dry flour/sugar remain, put the batter into a *large pan- ours was 25 x 28 cm (11" x 12"), lined with baking paper if you like. Cover with:

3 or 4 tablespoons demarara sugar (coarse)

Bake at 170 C/ 350 F for quite a long time- 30 to 40 minutes- it is wet with fruit (yet the cake portion bakes up very light). Prick a mainly cake area with a toothpick- if it comes out clean the cake is ready.

The sugar makes a crisp crust with plenty of sparkle, shattering and giving way to a tender crumb and fat chunks of fruit. The almond essence tweaks the fruit tremendously- all the stone fruits take to it (as the butter takes to the salt). If you were using apples, cinnamon and nutmeg would be the classic choice. With pears, a little pear williams or a shot of whiskey. Cherries (frozen pitted sour cherries in winter), bitter almond again (ideal pairing). The cake is fragile and moist, even gooey on the bottom, and makes for inelegant pieces. No one will mind at all. It was not eaten so much as inhaled. The recipe was much asked for and I was very happy sharing it as nothing could be better suited to the novice cook and the student kitchen.

(It was gone so quickly that the second day I scaled it up by fifty percent- half again as much of everything, and made it in the largest pan that fits in our oven, 28 x 42 cm. It could also be scaled down- using one egg,150 g flour, etc. and a 20 x 20 pan.)

*In a makeshift kitchen, use whatever is at hand- a shot of liquor or liqueur, some lemon zest, cinnamon, or nothing at all.

Let us eat Cake!

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Buona Figura

What's better than Black Coffee?
The frozen fish guy playing Nina Simone singing "Black Coffee" at 9:30.

"Oh... no. She'll want to go to the market with you so you show her the best stands." I have only one housewife friend- Kiki. She perceives the intricacies of the situation at once. The possible damage to my relationships at the weekly market would elude my other friends (who though lack for no savoir vivre in night life, where the guidelines are actually roughly similar). My mother-in-law is moving to our neighborhood and this- this out of a dozen possible foreboding musings- is the first thing out of her mouth. "She's going to bother your vendors...."

The thing is, to keep up a buona figura in the market you need to be ruthless, and charming. You have to be vigilant about quality, but you also have to be happy to spend to get it. Ruthless she is- I remember the first time I went with her- this is more than 20 years ago. She reaches into a bag that has been padded by the vendor (another piece or two he adds to round up to an even kilo or two) and pulls out a piece- "were you selling this as a tomato?" She was right, of course. But this is not the whole story.

She does good sometimes- for instance (this is also some 20 years ago) it's the third day in a row that the bakery in Chania (Crete)- one with an enormous wood oven turning out not just dark thick-crusted loaves loaves but also baking the meals of the neighborhood*- has given me bread still gummy in the middle. The first day it could be a fluke. The second day, my mother-in-law said- "Maybe they know foreigners eat softer bread, you know like that packaged, squishy bread we saw in the States." The third day, she marched me over to meet her former kindergarten classmate, the latest generation to run the family bakery. The woman said "Ah." She gave me an unabashed glance up and down, to register who I am. "We thought she was a tourist."- this by way of a completely reasonable explanation for giving me the last choice of loaf. Of course, it never happened again. And suddenly, I didn't wait in line so much either. It's like when the bouncer unhooks the velvet rope at a club everyone wants to get in to just for you, but much more important. I could live the rest of my life without seeing the inside of another club. But the right loaf of bread? That matters.

Instant gratification- cheerfully stocked shelves.
These are at a bodega on 24th street in Mission, SF.

When you're buying packaged food, who you are is not so important. It's a uniform product, sitting on a shelf, and it takes no discernment to select it, no charm to get the best one. It makes for an easy purchase, and at heart an unsatisfying one. But most of the things we have in our kitchens- our loaves and our fishes- are not uniform, and who you are is in fact very important, or at least it is in this part of the world.

Building your figura in the marketplace takes a little time. There are a lot of shoppers- experienced ones- matrons armed with metal carts- and you need to distinguish yourself over the course of several visits. It's not too difficult- the matrons are often pretty vicious. A smile, a little admiration, really stand out.

The Buona Figura comes more easily to some.

This goes both ways- you're not just distinguishing yourself, but also sizing up the vendors. Over the course of months and years, you'll have a routine of regular stalls. Along the way, you will necessarily have discarded several vendors- cheapness, wiliness, poor manners. It's important to be decisive about this. There are a lot of fish in the sea, and being ruthless about character is not so much a right as it is an obligation. These people are there for hours every week, same spot, they know who buys from who, and they know why. This is, after all, the agora**... the stage of public life; you've got to play your part.

Once you have your routine though, you can free up the charm a little. The people selling you this very important stuff have been up for hours and hours, doing backbreaking work while you were still too drowsy to think even about making yourself a cup of tea. Market originally is only for producers- farmers selling their produce, beekeepers, poultry guys, etc. Many stands are still run by producers, and a little connoisseurship never goes unappreciated. Admire. Apart from getting the best stuff, it is this that makes market a really satisfying experience. 

Kosma- a farmer with a small selection of
organic produce (the only one), with his:

"Κολοκυθάκια" = zucchini. "Παραγωγός" = producer (farmer).
They'll be a Boureki later in the week (Cretan dish). 

Many of the vendors you keep will sell the same goods. For instance, I have only one pumpkin lady, but several tomato vendors. I spread out my custom in an informal rotation, based on what looks best. Then I always greet the others. One of the tomato guys has this exquisite variety from late April (when it costs more than fish, and I'm happy to pay) until June, when the variety finishes. He comes to both markets so I see him twice a week during that season, and I buy heavily. To not stop by until the next April, that would just be tacky- like only dating a guy when he can borrow his dad's car.

Pretty Argyro, with fat melons...

and creamy luscious squash:

And when I buy, I buy fair- getting a representation of what is on offer. No rotten peaches, but not just the biggest peaches either. You can't be greedy. You also can't be cowed by the other shoppers: it's fine to admonish them charmingly for hogging the bin. I may pick carefully, but I pick swiftly as well and- this is important- no unseemly squishing and groping. Sometimes I tell the vendor "you know best." I get things nicer than I would pick out on my own***. They do know best, and they never unload the substandard stuff on a respectful customer. And if I don't need all perfect, I say so- no sense taking only his pretty salad tomatoes if I'm going to grate half of them into a pulp an hour later. Fair play brings out the vendors' generosity. It also ensures you always get first pick when you need it, and- most importantly of all perhaps- that none of the lovely things go to waste. Lastly, if you like having something special available, then you have to buy that thing. Only one vendor sells thyme and tarragon, so I get them, whether I think I need them or not. They always find their way into something in the course of the week.

The practiced hand of an elderly gentleman samples some tarragon.
That's his wife, getting out her wallet.

What do I get out of this? Well, the contact is nice. These people have a huge impact on my family's week, on the beauty of the table. And they know it- if something went over big, I tell them about it the next week. They also know how to get the best out of their goods- preparation tips, storage tips. The beet greens someone else had cut off always get stuffed into my bags as a parting gift, along with big handfuls of samples. Then of course there's the vip room of produce- items in limited supply they keep back in the truck and don't put out for just anyone. I get this stuff.

Babbis and his boys- beautiful produce, great service.

A buona figura is also an insurance policy. It's not just getting the best of everything and a friendly exchange; it's the vendors not treating you like everyone else. My head was recently turned by a very fine price on some small red mullets. As I looked back at them over my right shoulder, the fishmonger caught my eye, then glanced quickly upward - the Eastern Mediterranean's subtle gesture of 'no.' "Those aren't for you, my girl..." he said under his breath, then continued to hawk.

Pavlos, who sold me the bass in Rich Catch of Fish.
That's his daughter smiling in the background.

*this is a charming thing- mostly of the past but still going on- bakeries with large wood-burning ovens will bake alongside their loaves your homemade meal- your stuffed tomatoes, your leg of lamb with potatoes, etc- and you pick it up a couple hours later. How heavy those hot sheet pans laden with food are as you carry them not to the table but down the street and around the corner in the midday sun! But the smell- it smells so much nicer than it would from your electric oven- full of woodsmoke, plus whispers of your neighbors' dinners was roasting next to it.  They charge little for this valuable community hearth.

**Agora means marketplace- think of our word 'agoraphobia'.

***If the produce is artfully stacked, avoid this. Glancing behind the facade of the pyramid, one often finds considerably less appealing pieces- much smaller, blemished, unripe, overripe, etc. These beguiling structures are often the tools of the wily vendor.

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Summer Stone Fruit Galette (at last!)

After that go-round with the apricot cake that had started out as a galette I couldn't get them out of my mind, galettes. I've always loved our American-style fruit pies in a pie dish, and I have a pie dish, and like doing a lattice. But the thinness of the galette seems to ensure 2 of the most important characteristics of a fine pie- a bottom crust that has some crispness, and an ample surface area for the thickened and intensified juices of the fruit to spill over and gum up nicely.

We're still working on that one week's shopping, albeit slowly (Boutique Shopping a la Ellinka post)- enough of the fruit in the pyramid has gone nice and ripe.

In the heat, they perfume the veranda

While I was in San Francisco my mother laid a newspaper clipping on the counter (we keep them later in manila folders and randomly pull things out) of a picture perfect blueberry pie and there was a little cornmeal in the crust and I used the crust for a galette not of blueberries but of rhubarb- brief of season and so beguilingly, mysteriously astringent with a little whisper of bitter (and unknown in Greece). It was truly ideal. Now my mother can't find the clipping and key words are not producing it online, but it was easy enough to remember: 

In the bowl of the food processor I put a generous cup and a half of flour, a tablespoon or two of sugar, 1/3 C of yellow cornmeal and 3/4 of a C (180 g) of salted butter (had it not been salted I'd have added a small spoonful of salt). when we blend this with a pastry blender. Common wisdom says to aim for pieces the size of small peas, but as we will add the water later pulse by pulse, the butter will continue to get cut up smaller and smaller, so I pulse until the butter is the size of large lima beans. This is where I was too hasty before- the ice water (Really, it is not so much trouble, It's worth getting out a couple of ice cubes to cool it down- cold crust made of cold things stays more crispy and is much easier to work with). I just needed about 3 Tablespoons (40-45 ml), drizzled in while pulsing on and off. It will look crumbly and like it is too dry to hold together, but pinch a little and you'll see that it does just fine.

See how it still looks a little dry?

I gathered the dough into a small disc and wrapped it in plastic and set it in the refrigerator to chill while I set about preparing the fruit. I simply gathered everything that was getting soft (perhaps some 20 pieces- nectarines and apricots in a mix), cut the fruit off the pit directly over a bowl so as to not let the juices go to waste. There were about 4 or 5 cups of fruit pieces, to which I added 3 or 4 large spoonfuls of flour, then sugar to taste (half a cup/100g?). I find vanilla extract is alluring and delicious with stone fruits, bringing out the essence of their floral beginning. Bitter almond is also a good choice- this to conjure the essence of the seeds inside the apricot pits. Or try hard liquor- dark rum is lovely with any fruit and leaves such a rich aftertaste. Soon we'll want to ready a hot oven- 200 C/400 F.

I shook a little handful of flour between my fingers over the counter top and rolled out the cold dough quickly, lifting it with a dough

A marble rolling pin stays nice and cool.

scraper or spatula to make sure it isn't sticking and adding more flour where it was sticking. The result is a lopsided round of dough with jagged edges- perfect for our purposes. I did not roll it too thin- it needs to be sturdy enough to transfer to the baking sheet and to contain the heavy fruit. I folded the (again very well-floured) dough in half, then half again to make a quarter of a round which is easier to move to the parchment lined baking sheet. There,  just unfold it, and pile the fruit into the middle:

Our spontaneous, casual summer pie, all crisp ragged edges and oozy fruit

You can see how rough the sides are- no matter at all- this adds to its charm. I then folded the edges over the filling, repairing large holes with scraps of dough. For me, an indispensable final touch is to wet the dough with water (not the fruit juices!- the will turn black and bitter as tar in the oven), and throw sugar over it in large spoonfuls here and there. The natural large-crystalled brown sugar is ideal for this- it is coarse enough to keep some sparkle in the hot oven, and has a delicate but very definite flavor. It bakes very hot until it takes on a lovely color- half an hour or more? They need a bit of watching. The kitchen swells with its butter and fruit fragrance.

This is not the galette I have been writing about- see it is red- it's the rhubarb galette from California. See the sugar crystals though? That's just regular white table sugar. With the other sugar I mentioned it's even sparklier and more mellow tasting. The galette you saw here before baking went into a pastry box just minutes after coming from the oven, and was taken to the beach, where it was refrigerated and dug into with forks straight out of the box the next day, very un-photogenic but not less delicious.

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Boutique Shopping, a la Ellinika

Just as the idea of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) was really catching on in New York, we left and came here to Greece. Not a bad trade, because if you want to, you can stick to the same basic premise- support your local agriculture, and love what nature gives us. Loving what you have and making the very best out of it happens everywhere in life- we don't pick our parents or genetically engineer our children, weather seems hard to control.... Endless choice on the other hand is not always so liberating. Imagine two choices- you can be in kitchen with nothing in it and a big stack of money and you can make anything you want- anything that exists in the whole wide world. It sounds great but when you think it through it's really just panic and frenzy, with a little gluttony thrown in. Or- you can see what the season gives you and use this as a focus for your inspiration. he birth of basically any classic thing we like to eat.was this- ingenuity, hunger, and not least, gratitude for the beautiful tasty things of the earth and the sea; it comes from someplace real.

I always thought the chief challenge of seasonal living was not so much the deprivation of unseasonal luxuries but of ingenious use of the bounty, sometimes of the glut of one single thing. More than once I have read of residents of a small town joking that the only reason people lock their cars in the night is to prevent someone from putting zucchini in them. Our "zucchini" is fresh anchovies- when they are running, they're 1 or 2 euros a kilo (that's 2.2 pounds!)- it seems thankless to pass on such an inexpensive and delicious protein. We enjoy them fried (and eaten) whole, then as boquerones, then boned, filleted and fried up to be put up en saor (this is so delicious).... If they weren't so plentiful, I'd not have had the fun of thinking of so many things to do with them.

To share the fun of this approach, I took this picture of everything I brought home from the Monday outdoor market, where I went with nothing in view save buying whatever was bountiful and perfect. Price was of course another factor (the real purpose of this series of thoughts is to share the beauty and dignity of good living when means are very limited), and, rather than being a limitation, was the most helpful guide to flavor and quality. When something is cheap it's often because there is a lot of it, and if there is a lot of it, that's because it is at its peak. But once you have identified what is at peak, then go ahead and spend a little: find the cheapest thing (apricots! tomatoes!), but buy the best (and maybe most expensive) of it. I tried for a mix of vegetables, fruits, and herbs, and this is what I came home with:

(That's a bowl of firm eggplants there at the back, and a nice stack of thin cucumbers is hidden behind the fennel and mint.) 

It isn't only for sharing with you that I arranged my haul on the outdoor table- I actually usually do this, to sort things (firm tomatoes from soft tomatoes for sauce, nectarines that need to ripen from those to eat today....), day-dream about what to make with them, and, well, to sigh and gloat. I don't remember the last time I bought fresh flowers- it would be unfair to put them next to that tower of glowing glorious fruit.

After day-dreaming, I think the still life on the table will probably become the following dishes:

Stuffed peppers (the peppers and the firmest tomatoes and the fennel and parsley and basil) (see Gene Kelley and the Perfect Week)

Tabbouleh (tomatoes, mint, parsley, cucumbers) (see A Love Like Salt)

Tzatziki (cucumbers and dill)

Eggplant Parmesan (the eggplant, the softest of the tomatoes, and the basil)

Acqua cotta

Panzanella (the super-sweet cherry tomatoes and the old bread I know i have) OR

Gazpacho (same, plus some cucumbers)

Galette of red nectarines and apricots

Cherries on their own (but if they get a little worn I will pit them and make a cobbler)

More cherries poached in syrup with a vanilla bean

White nectarines on their own, day by day as they yield to a gentle squeeze- these are the queen of summer fruits for me.

To be fair, they won't become those things on their own. We'll also need these:

(Olive oil, day-old bread, three-day-old bread, flour, cornmeal, salt, arborio rice, butter, onions, garlic, cracked wheat, and some zucchini left over from last week)

And we'll need some cheeses too but I haven't bought them yet. The pantry items are mostly inexpensive, and all easy to find. It's an astonishing number of dishes for such a modest cost and such an enjoyable spree.

(Of course, Greece offers unbelievable produce for a unbelievable price. That is one of the chief reasons I live here- this everyday beauty. Everything on the table cost me 17 euros. But you can do this anywhere: sure you can have something in mind about what you want to BUY or cook, just make sure you look at what is already around- plentiful, fresh, and well-priced. I do this same thing when I am not in Greece. In Oakland, California, I shop with my mother at the 99 cent store first- they have nice seasonal surprises like 99 cent bundles of asparagus or 99 cent bags of little red and yellow peppers, etc. We get what's fun, then we so over to Mi Tierra, the Mexican supermarket on San Pablo Avenue, to get whatever else is fun and fresh, then we go to across the street to the cheeseboard and splurge on a delicious local cheese, which we don't feel so bad about since we started out our day at the 99 cent store. We go home, invent something inspired from the haul- a grand mixed salad with cheeses and nuts, a vegetable galette or pasta, etc. Then we drink wine and watch Mr. Selfridge.)

I'll make the dishes and share them with you- I fell behind this week but there was all this fabulous produce then all the excitement with the World cup match.

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