Those Oysters Ain’t from the Ocean – A Trip to Cody

I got behind on my posting last month and have to catch up, starting with the trip to Cody, Wyoming, Pat and I took at the beginning of June. We left San Francisco Friday morning on a 6:10AM Delta flight bound for Salt Lake City where we transferred for the hop to Cody. The trip got off to a rousing start when we boarded the flight at SFO to the crowing of roosters who were apparently just waking up in the cargo hold.

Our flight to Cody was smooth and on-schedule and Mom and Robert met us at the Cody airport.

A view of Cody - Cedar and Rattlesnake Mountains in the distance

As is our custom upon mid-day arrivals in Cody, we immediately headed downtown to the Proud Cut Saloon for our traditional “welcome to Cody” lunch of Rocky Mountain oysters and Big Sky BrewCo’s Moose Drool Brown Ale. As we later saw on another menu later during our stay:

“These oysters aren’t caught at sea pardner. These babies are from one angry steer!”

We then checked in at the Skyline Motor Inn and greeted the manager, Roger Bjornson, who sports quite an impressive beard to say the least!

Pat and I then headed over to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody where we spent the afternoon at the Center’s diverse exhibits of firearms (yikes – LOTS of them, plus many stuffed animal heads on the wall!), Plain Indian culture, Buffalo Bill memorabilia, and the Yellowstone ecosystem. Sadly the Center’s Whitney Gallery of Western Art was closed for renovations, although we may not have had the energy to do it justice in any case.

The weather report for the weekend was a bit threatening, and after some mulling we decided to try to drive into Yellowstone Park on Saturday. The weather did not look too promising as we started off to the Park’s East Gate, about 40 miles west of Cody, but by the time we got into the Park there were patches of blue sky.

After a stop at Fishing Bridge to warm up with some soup (even though it was June, there were a few snowflakes in the air!), we took a counter clock-wise loop through the heart of the Park that took us to Canyon Village and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Norris, Madison, Geyser Basin and Old Faithful and West Thumb, before heading back to Cody.

We were also able to see a variety of wildlife, including buffalo (actually bison) and elk. From the ominous warning we received about the buffalo at the Park entrance, it seems that a few people may have been getting to close recently.

That evening Pat and I headed over to Cassie’s Place, a restaurant and dance hall at the edge of Cody where, with the assistance of Levi, who may have been working his first night at Cassie’s, we had a couple of pretty good steaks.

When we stuck our head out the door at the Skyline on Sunday morning it was clear our decision to drive to Yellowstone on Saturday had been the right one -- about four inches of snow had fallen and it was chilly.

However, by the time we had walked over to Robert’s apartment and had finished our breakfast, the snow was melting pretty quickly so we decided to drive over to Powell, a town northeast of Cody. On the way back we stopped by the memorial for the Heart Mountain Relocation Center between Cody and Powell, one of the ten War Relocation Authority internment camps where Japanese-Americans – over 10,000 in the case of Heart Mountain - were interned during World War II. As you can see from this video I took, and the below shot taken of the camp during World War II, it is a wind-swept, bleak place, even in June much less in mid-winter.

After a lunch at Bubba’s in Cody, we stopped by the Cody Library where we heard a lecture by an author named Guy Gertsch, author of "Following Lewis & Clark: a 4,200 Mile Walk.” As described in the program announcement,

"Two hundred years after Lewis and Clark embarked on their 1804 adventure of western discovery, Guy Gertsch began walking the same path from Illinois to the Pacific Ocean, following the explorers as closely as the 21st century would permit. Gertsch, then 60, made the 4,200-mile trip alone and on foot. Gertsch tells the stories and shows photos of his two years trekking with the spirits of the Corps of Discovery."

Sadly, the announcement was a bit more interesting than the program.

For dinner we headed down to the Irma Hotel, once owned by Buffalo Bill Cody and named after one of his daughters (and the location of the famous Cherrywood Bar, made in France and a gift to Buffalo Bill from England's Queen Victoria). We had some very good bison.

On Monday morning, before heading to the airport, we headed down to Mom and Robert’s favorite breakfast spot, My Place. It did not disappoint.

We are already looking forward to our next visit!

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A Celebration of Connie and Andrew!

Sunday evening was the main course (in more ways than one) of our trip to LA – the opportunity to get together with Connie’s extended family, and Andrew and Connie’s friends, to celebrate Connie and Andrew's marriage last month. Happily on Saturday their marriage license had arrived in the mail so all was official!

A group of about 80 of us gathered at the Elite Restaurant in Monterey Park on Sunday evening. Unfortunately, Robert, Janet and Patrick were not able to make it, but Aunt Ellen joined us to bolster the Moyle ranks.

Cooper Carras, the wedding photographer who had accompanied Andrew and Connie to Buenos Aires last month, was also there to take more pictures. After a series of more formal family photographs we got down to the business of eating.

Even before we managed sit down at the tables and get to the formal menu, a roast pig arrived to tide us over during the reception.

The ears and snout were crispy and quite tempting (especially in light of my recent pig head adventure), but, keeping in mind the need to make a good impression on Connie’s side of the family, I managed to restrain myself.

Connie had planned a fabulous dinner of - OMG - THIRTEEN courses.

The dishes just kept coming throughout the evening as we whispered words of encouragement to each other and admonitions to “pace yourself”. Of course, it did not help that at our table we had a few extra dishes off the menu in light of the alergies Andrew and Alex have to certain seafoods!

Andrew and Connie circulated among the tables during the evening entertaining the gathering by periodically responding to the clinking of glasses with a kiss.

We are very lucky to have Connie as a member of our family and to joined with the Sung family.

I hope for more such dinners between our families in the future!

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Bergamot Station - Time Out for Some Culture in Santa Monica

We were in Santa Monica on Saturday visiting Andrew and Connie and, after a nice breakfast at a cozy diner named Snug Harbor, a short walk from their apartment (we somehow still had some room left notwithstanding the huge dinner at Carlitos Gardel the night before!), decided to check out Bergamot Station, a cluster of art galleries housed in a complex of industrial buildings just off the 10 Freeway in Santa Monica. The name, Bergamot Station, dates back to 1875 when the area was a stop for the Red Line trolley running from Los Angeles to the Santa Monica Pier.

Although we did not manage to visit all of the galleries, of those we did visit the exhibits I enjoyed the most were:

~ “The Last Iceberg,” an exhibit of beautiful photos taken by Camille Seaman at the Richard Heller Gallery [“one piece of a larger project entitled "Melting Away" which documents the polar regions of our planet, their environments, life forms, history of human exploration and the communities that work and live there.”]:

In addition to her photos of icebergs, I also found online a selection of some incredible photos from Seaman's new portfolio, "The Big Cloud".

~ An exhibit of paintings by Julie Heffernan at the Mark Moore Gallery (a beautiful set of paintings, each showing a great deal of work and attention to detail, although with a somewhat disturbing undertone -- I am not sure where I would hang one in our home):

Julie Heffernan - Self Portrait as Great Heap

The Sour Harvest blog has a very good overview of the show.

~ An exhibit of works by the Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo at the Latin American Masters gallery:

We also took a look around Hiromi Paper International which had some amazing Japanese and other paper products and really deserved more time.

Finally, we also stopped off at the Cafe for a late lunch.

Bergamot Station is well worth a visit.

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A Special Dinner at Carlitos Gardel - The Cuisine of Argentina in LA

On Friday we flew down to LA to spend the weekend celebrating the marriage last month of our oldest son, Andrew, to Connie Sung. Andrew and Connie had arranged a dinner for us with Connie’s family at Carlitos Gardel, a restaurant on Melrose featuring Argentine cuisine – a most appropriate choice since Andrew and Connie had spent the week following their marriage in Buenos Aries!

From a bit of research before dinner I learned that the restaurant was named after Carlos Gardel (“Carlitos” in the affectionate diminutive form), one of the most well-known figures in the history of tango, who wrote and performed many classic tangos prior to his tragic death in an airplane crash in 1935. Those include “Mi Buenos Aires querido” (“My Beloved Buenos Aires”) written the year before his death, which is the music that greets one on the restaurant’s website. Gardel also appeared in several movies – see clips of Gardel singing “Cuesta abajo” in the movie of the same name, and the well-known “Por una cabeza” in Tango Bar.

Carlitos Gardel is owned and operated by the Bozoghlian family who purchased the restaurant in 1996 a few years after they moved to the United States from Buenos Aires. We were greeted at the door by the matriarch of the family, Azniv Bozoghlian, who is also the restaurant’s executive chef. When I told her that in addition to Argentine cuisine, we were very interested in learning more about Argentine wines, she assured me we had come to the right place and introduced us immediately to her son, Carlos Maximiliano (“Max”), who is the restaurant’s sommelier.

Many of the pictures on the wall of the restaurant celebrate Gardel, but there was a beautiful painting on the wall above Connie and Andrew of a woman setting a table that I was enjoyed for the entire evening.

I asked Azniv about it and she said it had had been painted by a well-known artist named Aldo Luongo who had himself been born in Argentina before coming to the United States. The painting - entitled “Getting Ready at Gardel’s” – was a scene taken from the daily preparation at the restaurant.

Our dinner was fantastic. Marco, our waiter, who I learned is from Torino in the Piemonte, helped us with our selections which were all right on. We started with two appetizers:

~ Hongos Rellenos - mushroom caps stuffed with chicken, vegetables, garlic and parmesan cheese, and served in a red wine sauce; and

~ Papas Fritas Provenzal – Gardel’s signature dish of french fries lightly flavored with garlic and parsley.

Our party’s main course selections covered a wide range of the beef, lamb and fish dishes offered on the menu. At Marco’s suggestion I stuck with a traditional Argentine dish:

~ Ojo de Costilla a La Criolla – a grilled rib-eye steak, marinated in chimichurri sauce.

It was perfectly prepared. I am afraid I did not get any photos of our dishes at dinner, although I did find shots of the papas and ojo de costilla on a recent post on Spastic Synapse’s blog.

Max was very attentive to us throughout the evening and helped us to select two wonderful wines from an incredible wine list. We started with a white to accompany our appetizers:

~ 2008 Torrontés from the Domingo Molina winery in the Province of Salta in the northeastern corner of Argentina,

I had only tried a Torrontés wine (the Susana Balbo “Crios” label from Dominio del Plata) for the first time a couple of weeks ago and had really enjoyed its aromatic flavor which reminded me of lychees. I read a review that suggested that Torrontés “recalls the aromatic flamboyance of Muscat combined with the light crispness of Pinot Grigio” which I thought was a good comparison. The Domingo Molina was even better than the Susana Balbo – the same aromatic and clean quality, but a bit more restrained.

Then, with our main course we enjoyed an excellent Malbec:

~ 2005 Malbec Riserva, Lujan de Cuyo Single Vineyard, from Luigi Bosca, one of Mendoza’s oldest producers.

The Luigi Bosca was also one of Andrew and Connie’s favorites, having been the wine they had at dinner on their first night in Buenos Aries. It was very concentrated with a full body and a long finish. I also learned that Luigi Bosca is a producer that Max Bozoghlian has featured at a past tasting at Gardel.

Since I had enjoyed the Torrontés so, Marco suggested a glass of a Torrontés late harvest (“tardio”) with our desserts. I did not get the name of the producer, but it was a very nice still dessert wine, similar to a Moscato.

Here are a couple of pictures of our gang (the first taken by me and the second by Cass) in front of the restaurant, followed by one of Connie and Andrew taken last month on the cobblestone streets in the barrio of San Telmo in Buenos Aires on the day they took their marriage vows, juxtaposed next to another of Aldo Luongo’s works entitled “Tango and Cobblestones.”

It was a most memorable evening at Carlitos Gardel!

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Drawn by Lamb Necks - A Dinner at Sociale

At my “Butchery for Adults” class at Avedano’s last week, the instructor, Tia Harrison, who is also the chef at Sociale, mentioned that she was going to be adding braised lamb necks to the Sociale menu the very next day. I really enjoy a good lamb’s neck and it was not too hard to convince Nancy, Alex and Cass to join me for a dinner at Sociale last night.

Our friend, Cornelia, works at Sociale on the weekends and happily we were seated in her section on Saturday night. In addition to the things the four of us ordered, both Cornelia and Tia gave us a few additional things to sample (marked with a "#" below – which was a good thing since they ended up being some of our favorite dishes of the evening.

ANTIPASTI

~ Olives, stuffed with Fontina cheese, breaded and fried #
~ Lamb meatballs with pancetta #

PRIMI

~ Ravioli stuffed with wild boar and cinnamon braised in brown sage butter
~ Papparedelle with braised duck, peas and porcini mushrooms with truffle oil
~ Pici with pork, veal and venison Bolognese ragú #

SECONDI

~ Nancy: Pan-seared petrale sole with creamed corn and wilted spinach
~ Alex & Cass: Pan-roasted Berkshire pork chop with apple and endive
~ Mike: Braised lamb neck with Anson Mills polenta and oyster mushrooms
~ Arugula with pine nuts and lemon

DOLCI

~ Goat cheese cheesecake with lemon curd
~ Mini-beignets with chocolate sauce #

VINI

~ Prosecco Col Vetoraz #
~ Vino Nobile di Montepulciano Riserva – Fanetti - 2001
~ Moscato d’Asti “La Caudrina” – Dogliotti

My lamb neck was fantastic. I found a blog with a recipe for braised lamb necks which I hope to try sometime, especially since Tia allocated me the lamb neck (not to mention the pig's head) at our class at Avedano's (I think she has me figured out!).

However, in my view the most outstanding dish of the evening was the pici with the bolognese sauce. Pici are a rolled pasta which Nancy and I had last enjoyed during our trip to Italy in 2006 when we had them for the first and last time at a wonderful dinner at a small restaurant named Osteria La Porta in the small town of Monticchiello in central Toscana, between Montepulciano and Montalcino. We had been staying at Pamela Sheldon-Brown's Poggio Etrusco just outside of Montepulciano and she had highly recommended the restaurant.

Pici is a pasta similar to a fat spaghetti which is formed by rolling long strips of pasta dough. In the hand-rolled version the pasta is not uniform in size and has variations of thickness along its length which is part of its charm.


At our dinner at Osteria La Porta, Daria Cappelli, the owner, told us that an older woman came in to the restaurant every morning to make the pici for the day. I am not sure whether or not the pici we had at Sociale on Saturday night were hand-rolled, but they were certainly tasty and well cooked - just the right degree of chewy al dente-ness.

However, it was the sugo bolognese which was the real star of the dish at Sociale. It had a wonderful flavor as well as an excellent texture and maintained the integrity of each ingredient.

It was a great meal in a cozy spot with good company and surrounded by friends. We are already looking forward to our next visit.

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Adults Only!

Our friend, Cornelia, works at both our favorite wine bar (Wellington’s in Sausalito) and one of our favorite restaurants (Sociale, in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco). A couple of months ago, while I was boring Cornelia with a description of the latest Head to Tail Dinner at Incanto, she said: “What you really need to do is take Tia Harrison’s ‘Butchery for Adults’ class at Avedano’s!”

I had heard of Tia Harrison and knew that she was the co-owner and chef at Sociale. What I did not know was that she was also a co-owner of Avedano’s Holly Park Market in Bernal Heights and taught a monthly class there designed “to teach you the specifics of the art of home butchery and grant you knife-wielding dominion over your kitchen.”

Ever since I had read Bill Buford’s “Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany” and made the requisite pilgrimage to Dario Cecchini’s Antica Macelleria Cecchini in Panzano, south of Florence, I had been harboring an interest to learn more about butchery. This sounded like a great opportunity!


Initially our son Patrick, bound for vet school at Auburn in the Fall, was going to join me for the class (my thought was this would give him a head start on his anatomy lessons). However, unfortunately Pat ended up with a conflict so last Sunday afternoon I set out on my own for Avedano’s.

There were six of us in the class. Tia greeted us and then herded us into Avedano’s Udder Room where we suited up in butcher’s aprons. Tia passed out some basic instructions, including a description of some of the instruments we would be using – boning knife, hand saw, cleaver and bone scraper among them. It sounds like not too much has changed around the old butcher shop since the 16th century when Pieter Aertsen painted “The Meat Stall.”

First on the agenda for the afternoon was a pig and Tia went over the steps to “break down” a pig into its four “primals” – no euphemisms here. We then moved to the working area (I was pleased to see that Avedano’s did not stoop to asking us to sign insulting releases of the sort “I know that knives are dangerous....”). Tia went over to the meat locker and returned pulling a suckling pig dangling from a meat hook on an overhead trolley. I was in the first position so she turned to me and instructed me to lift it down off the hook, put it on the table and cut its head off. And away we went, each of us taking a turn to make a cut as Tia directed.




Although the two animals we worked on during the day had been completely gutted and were relatively blood-free, there is a very different feel about dismembering a relatively complete mammal. It certainly gets ones attention and gave me more respect for the animal and the task at hand.

After we had broken down the pig we took a break and returned to the Udder Room for some very tasty tacos. Then it was back to the work area and another trip to the meat locker to wheel out a sheep of about 80 pounds.

The sheep proved to be much harder work – obviously a bigger animal = bigger bones. Unlike modern slaughter houses which are constantly humming with electric band saws, Avedano’s does not use any electric cutting tools so everything was cut by hand using knives, cleavers and hand saws. We spent quite a bit of time breaking down the two forequarters of the animal.

Since our time was getting a bit short, Tia called in Dave Budworth, the resident expert butcher, who went to work on the hind quarters. It was a pleasure to watch Dave at work. I would not say that everything he did was completely effortless, but it was certainly considerably more so than the work of the students. This was butchery, but there was definitely a grace and elegance that Dave brought to the task – not to mention his cool metal knife holster dangling from a chain on his hip.


At the end of the day Tia divided up the cuts from the two animals among us and sent us on our ways. She had asked whether anyone wanted the pig’s head and when no one else jumped in I raised my hand. It seemed like a good idea at the time (I had been thinking about our recent Procededdu Arrustiu (roasted suckling pig) dinner at La Ciccia), but on the drive home I began to wonder. I decided that if I was going to do something with it at all I better do it that night since Nancy was coming home from her trip to Yellowstone on Tuesday.

After a bit of Googling I determined that 2 hours tented in tinfoil at 375° with an olive oil basting every 20 minutes would be my best shot. Luckily it turned out perfectly. When I took it out of the oven the sun was just setting and the late afternoon rays gave the roasted head some wonderful highlights on the dining room table.

As I settled in to dinner – just me and the head (use of knife and fork optional) – all I could think of was the scene from the Inferno of Dante’s encounter with Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri.

INFERNO (Canto XXXIII, ln. 70-73)

I saw two shades frozen in a single hole
packed so close, one head hooded the other one;
the way the starving devour their bread,
the soul above had clenched the other with his teeth,
where the brain meets the nape.

Butchery has been getting quite a bit of attention in the Bay Area in the recent past. A program – The Art of the Butcher – was presented at UC Berkeley in March at which Dave Budworth and Melanie Eisemann of Avedano’s participated, and MEATPAPER has done a couple of very interesting articles – "Pig Slaughter – Monterero Val Cocchiara" and "The Whole Animal Challenge." In addition to the Avedano’s classes, Ryan Farr, who participated in the Berkeley program, also gives butchery demonstrations as shown in this excellent set of photos.

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