Jesse Frost

May 3

Dinner last night started in Estancia’s Bodega Wine Bar. I was told to go there and have a cocktail, and I’d be met by the property’s executive chef, Jesse Frost. I decided to take my instructions literally and had a cocktail instead of a glass of wine. Being near the Mexican border, I had a Margarita.
I showed up just as the bar was in the middle of a little rush. It seemed that everyone in the hotel wanted a pre-dinner drink.
The bar rush ended as fast as it had begun and soon the bartender and I were practically alone.
Soon enough, Jesse came out and we had a chat. He’s an interesting guy. His father is a New Yorker from Queens (Astoria), who ended up working for Pepsi and was stationed in Mexico City, where Jesse spent the first ten years of his life. He later studied cooking in the San Francisco area and then came down to the San Diego area. He has been at Estancia for about three years.
His favorite color is the earth-tone red that is so prevalent in the terrain of the Southwest.
A note at the bottom of the menu requests that guests not use cellular devices because the ultra-high frequencies interfere with chef jesse’s sauces.
His food isn’t as precious as that — it is Southwestern enough to remind us of where we are without hitting us over the head with that fact. Still it’s a cute note.
I was taken next door to Adobe El Restaurante, and this is what I ate and drank:

Jesse started out by bringing me an oblong plate with eight indentations in it. In each one was a little amuse-bouche:
poached lobster with heirloom tomato and citrus crème fraîche
red pepper and white bean hummus with toasted lavosh
saffron poached prawns with silken mayonnaise (made with tofu)
salt roasted beets with olive oil and sea salt
tomato-raisin compote with a tempura croquette of confit pork belly
ahi tuna pastrami with haricots verts and Madras curry emulsion
roasted pecans with cabrales cheese, pears and endive
tequila-cured foie gra with blackberry compote and sourdough wafer

With that I drank a 2006 Campalou Vouvray

I continued drinking that with seared scallops with orange-onion marmalade, lemon beurre blanc, a sweet onion tartlet, corn-crayfish salsa, balsamic vinegar and fried caperberries

Then Jesse sent out a Kobe beef flat iron, topped with a bordelaise sauce and served with a short rib tamale, fried lotus root chips, pumpkin seeds, red pepper purée and chive oil over Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccolini.
It turns out the beef was actually a Wagyu-Black Angus hybrid from Texas. To go with it they poured a 2004 Arrendell Vineyards Pinot Noir (Russian River)

With dessert, a pineapple upside-down cake with toasted coconut, pineapple sorbet and a chile-spiked tuile, they poured a surprisingly raisiny 2000 Freemark Abbey Edelweis Gold late harvest Johannesberg Riesling

It’s easy being green

May 3

A few months ago, our information technology department sent an e-mail to everyone in the company saying that Lebhar-Friedman, the parent company of Nation’s Restaurant News, was now a green company as they had developed a little green dingbat — a picture of a tree in front of a lawn and a winding river. We were to paste that dingbat on the bottom of all of our e-mails along with the words “Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.”
Our IT department is loaded with bright and capable people, and the statement that developing a dingbat made us green was tongue-in-cheek, I think, but it could have come with great sincerity from any of a number of PR firms, telling me about a new restaurant or company that had changed its light bulbs or was recycling its paper or turning down its thermostats in the winter and was therefore now environmentally sound and worthy of our attention. I get e-mails like that every day. I consider the environment and don’t print them.
It’s 2008. I was born in 1967 and was potty-trained in cloth diapers because my mother didn't want to contribute to disposable diapers clogging landfills. She wouldn’t start the dishwasher if there was still room for a shot-glass in there. Our thermostat in the winter hovered around 58 (we were encouraged to wear sweaters). My parents saved their paper and aluminum and took it to the supermarket the one day a month that recyclable materials were accepted there. That's just the way it was. I was raised to pay attention to the environmental impact of my actions.
My parents were ahead of their time (they still are), but they were hardly revolutionary. Where has everyone been for the past 40 years? A former vice president makes a movie and all of a sudden everyone’s making token gestures. They’re suddenly realizing, now that gasoline is approaching $4 a gallon, that maybe they shouldn’t have been driving those SUVs throughout the 1990s.
Do people really print e-mails without considering the environment? Is our company really green now that we tell everyone else how to behave? Will the addition of that line at the bottom of our e-mails possibly push our messages over the edge of one page, so that if their recipients do decide to go ahead and print them anyway they'll end up printing two pages instead of one?
These thoughts were on my mind yesterday as I landed in San Diego. The National Pork Board’s annual Taste of Elegance is being held here, starting on Sunday. I’m in town a couple of days early, because I’ve never been to San Diego before and it makes sense to check out some of the food here.
As a New Yorker, I can be a smug environmentalist. I can shake a disapproving head at southern Californians and say “I don’t even own a car.”
But of course in New York, I don’t need a car. I have access to the country’s best mass transit system.
But in San Diego I need a car, so I rented a hybrid.
Of course, not driving a car at all is better for the environment than driving a hybrid, so once I arrived at Estancia La Jolla, where I’m staying, I handed the weird non-key starter device to a valet and headed inside, turning off some of the lamps in my room, as well as the machine that was making theoretically calming ocean sounds.
I would have dinner in the hotel.

Chard Pies - Fatayer bil Sili'- فطائر بالسلق

In this recipe I am not gonna give exact serving ingredients because it depends on the amount of dough made or the size of the pies. I made each pie size enough for 1 person this time, I made 3 big pies with this filling. If you have a crowd or a party it's better to make the pies smaller so they can be served as appetizers.

Ingredients:
Ready dough mix (follow instructions on the box)
For the filling:
1 cup of onions, finely chopped
3 cups of chopped swiss chards leaves
4 tablespoons of olive oil
A handful of pine nuts
1 teaspoon of sumac spice (found in Middle Eastern stores or online)
2 tablespoons of lemon juice
Salt & pepper to taste.

While the dough is rising, in a pan, add onions, olive oil and the pine nuts and cook for 1 minute then add the chards, once they start wilting, add the sumac spice, salt and pepper. After they cook, add the lemon juice and set aside to cool off.
When the dough is ready, roll to about 1/8 inch thick and cut into rounds (the size you want) place the filling in the middle and fold 3 sides over the filling to obtain the shape of a triangle. Secure your triangle by pressing on the edges that you folded to secure the triangle from openings.
Bake in a 425 degrees oven until it's golden brown. They can be served hot or cold.

PS: You can substitute the chards with spinach. Also the sumac is optional if it can't be found. You can add more lemon juice in this case to substitute the taste.

RED CHILLI GARLIC CHUTNEY

Ingredients:

Fresh red chillies ............ 15

Garlic................................ 1 pod

Tomato puree ................ 2 tbsp.

Vinegar ............................ 1 tbsp.

Salt to taste

Oil

Method:

Wash and cut the red chillies. Grind all the ingredients to a smooth paste.

Heat about 2-3 tbsp. of oil and fry the chutney. Simmer for 3-4 mins.

It stays good for 8-10 days in the refrigerator.You can also freeze it.

“healthy”

May 1

I got a blurb from a publicist today about a new soda.

“It's an organic, healthy, energy drink made with Açaí and other Rainforest fruits and botanicals — absolutely nothing artificial! [This drink, whose name I have deleted out of the goodness of my heart] tastes and makes you feel great, and it’s perfect for all those energy drink lovers out there that are looking for something that actually tastes good and is good for you.”

Healthy? Good for me?
So I asked for the nutritional information.

Here are its ingredients: Carbonated water, organic evaporated cane juice, organic clarified açaí juice, organic acerola juice (water, organic acerola concentrate), natural flavors, citirc acid, organic guarana extract, yerba mate extract, green tea extract, and fruit and vegetable juice for color.

Its first ingredient is carbonated water, it’s second is sugar. I know it says it’s organic evaporated cane juice, but chemically that’s the same thing as sugar.

Here are the ingredients of a popular cola: carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine.

The cola (per 12 ounces): 140 calories, 39 grams of sugar.
The “healthy organic energy drink”: 120 calories, 30 grams of sugar (or possibly 28.5 grams — a serving size is listed as 8 fluid ounces, which has 19 grams, but did they round up or down?).
So it’s a little better for you than soda. But does that make it healthy? It's still sweetened water, and don’t let the “organic evaporated cane juice” line fool you. Fructose does break down a teeny, tiny bit faster than sucrose, which is the sugar in sugar cane, so it might have a slightly different effect on your metabolism if you happen to be diabetic (although probably not enough for even a diabetic to notice) but nutritionists have pointed out to me that the difference between the monosaccharide fructose and the disaccharide sucrose is precisely one molecular bond, and chances are pretty good that, after being in liquid suspension (a can of soda, for example) that bond is likely broken anyway.

But what really burns me up is the gall, the unmitigated gall, of a soda company pretending that its product is good for you, and obfuscating the details of what’s actually in its product. “Organic evaporated cane juice” is accurate, but what kind of cane do you suppose it is, rattan? Bamboo? Of course not, it’s sugar cane. Why not just call it that?

The new product also has 750 percent of the U.S. recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C, which is useless. Excess Vitamin C is merely flushed out of our system, thrown away, a waste of our precious rainforest resources.

I also got a press release about a premium ice cream from down under being launched in the United States. Everything in it is “natural,” a word that doesn’t mean what most people think it does. In fact, it doesn’t really mean anything concrete — just “of or pertaining to nature,” and what, exactly, is nature?
Still, it’s a good marketing buzz-word and I’d let it go. But then there’s this line in the release: “Customers are able to enjoy a healthy, premium ice cream without having to compromise on the exceptional taste and texture that are as natural and clean as the pristine land they come from.”

Healthy? Really?

Ice cream by definition is made from cream, which is loaded with saturated fat, and sugar. Is it evil to eat ice cream? Of course not. Do I recommend that people eat it? Sure, if they like it. Is it good for you? Perhaps in a spiritual sense — it makes you feel good, it makes you happy. But healthy? It's full of artery-clogging saturated fat and the tooth-rotting, empty energy of sugar. Eat it, enjoy it, but don’t believe for a second that it’s healthful.