in praise of sardines

In praise of Spanish oil-packed anchovies

It's time I debunk the notion that salt-packed anchovies are better than oil-packed anchovies. It simply isn't true.

The other day, I was flipping through one of my favorite cookbooks, the award-winning The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, when I came across the following passage: "We use commercial salt-packed anchovies extensively.... They are far more delicate than most commercial oil-packed fillets.... Commercial oil-packed anchovy fillets are usually quite salty and sometimes taste metallic, bitter, or muddy, or all three. The oil they are packed in generally starts out or becomes dreadful tasting."

How often have I heard and read that familiar refrain?

As recent as 10 years ago, this assertion was true regarding the paltry state of anchovies imported into the United States, most of which came from Italy. Alice Waters has specified salt-packed anchovies in all her cookbooks since her first, published in 1982. And before that, Marcella Hazan touted them in her first cookbook in 1973. However, when Judy Rodgers, a chef I hold in high esteem (and whose signature recipe for house-cured anchovies is flawless), published her cookbook in 2002, the anti-oil-packed anchovy orthodoxy was outdated.

The best anchovies in the world come from the Iberian peninsula, particularly from L'Escala on the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia, where the little fish are known as anxovas, and from the region of Cantabria on the Bay of Biscay west of the Basque region, where the fish are called bocartes. The best examples from these regions are invariably filleted and packed in extra virgin olive oil.

The good news is you can find these fine anchovies in many gourmet stores in the U.S. (I buy mine locally at the amazing Bi-Rite Market, and they can be purchased from many online sources including  The Spanish Table and Tienda).

If you have never liked the taste of anchovies, the bocarte or anchoa del Cantábrico, more widely available than those from L'Escala, will be a revelation. It is the José Carreras of anchovies. Its rich, bold flavor expands across your tongue just as the Catalonian tenor's notes fill an opera house. These anchovies are not for the meek.

The little fish cannot hide the fact that it cured for months in sea salt before being filleted and packed in olive oil. The resulting texture is meaty and salty, reminiscent of that other Spanish favorite, jamón ibérico de bellota, the incomparable ham made from black-hoofed pigs fed on acorns. But, unlike its tainted cousins that have sullied far too many of America's pizzas, this oil-packed anchovy's salinity is balanced by a kaleidoscope of toasted hazelnuts, caviar, Gorgonzola, country ham, Cuban cigar and sea air. It is pure umami.

The Spanish anchovies are also far superior to the Sicilian salt-packed anchovies, whose big blue and white cans labeled Acciughe Salate line the pantry of every Chez Panisse acolyte in the Bay Area (heck, I bet even that rebel Daniel Patterson uses them on occasion). Not only are the flavor and texture noticeably better, comparable to the difference between Normandy butter and Parkay margarine, but they are far more convenient to use.

That bears repeating: these oil-packed anchovies are already filleted. Even if you have never had to soak, eviscerate and debone a 1-kilo can of salt-packed anchovies as I have (many times), you will still appreciate being liberated from this rather disgusting task. Best of all, if you buy the Ortiz brand (pictured above, available from Tienda), it comes with that cute little two-pronged fork to spear the tasty morsels from the jar.

Be forewarned that fish of superior quality and ease of use come at a premium price. A 3.5 ounce/95 gram jar (with only 2 ounces/55 grams of anchovies) cost about $11. When purchased at Club de Gourmet of El Corte Inglés, the best quality anchovies are just as expensive in their native country, starting at 8€. They may be expensive (although they're less than the price of 3 Starbucks double cappuccinos), but even for the most rabid anchoviholic, a jar should provide a month's worth of pleasure.

Also, be aware that the jar or can must be stored in the refrigerator and used by the expiration date, which is approximately 1 year after the fish are packaged.

These anchovies are so good that I often eat them naked (the fish is naked, not me), adorned with no more than a few drops of extra virgin olive oil. Another favorite is to lay one anchoa fillet beside one fillet of a boquerón, the white anchovy marinated in vinegar, on top of a thin slice of toasted baguette. The combination of crunchy bread, salt, sour and umami is outrageous!

In my next entry, I will share another surprising recipe that features these tasty little fish.

Food|and Drink|Spain|Fish|Anchovies|San Francisco

Ducking Thanksgiving (recipes included)

I don't know about you, but I'm thankful that Thanksgiving week is finally over.

The funny thing is, I barely even celebrated it this year.

No, turkeys had no reason to fear me. I yawned at the sight of yet another golden roasted bird on the cover of each and every November magazine and Wednesday food section (and felt sympathy for those poor writers who have to feign enthusiasm for yet another story on the proper way to bake a pumpkin pie, the perils of improperly defrosted birds, or the absurd notion that there is any wine that can stand up to sticky cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes). I decided I wanted none of that, so I (and my blog) took a holiday this year from the topic of traditional Thanksgiving foods.

With N swamped by graduate school and parent-teacher conferences and me searching hopelessly for some sane way to make a living, this was the ideal year to resolve to skip Thanksgiving. Some of our friends went out of town, and we declined invitations to join the celebrations of others. Even my brother, visiting from San Diego, sought his dose of dry white meat drowned in lumpy gravy at someone else's house.

My defenses began to show weaknesses Tuesday morning, however. A plan hatched spontaneously in my mind to go to the farmers market that afternoon in Berkeley, perhaps my favorite outdoor market in the Bay Area. My anti-Thanksgiving resolve completely withered at the sight of multi-hued pumpkins, freshly dug potatoes, wet kale, and soft persimmons illuminated by the market's kerosene lanterns as dusk fell.

Before I knew it, my inner Scrooge, fully (and properly) thawed, was phoning the butcher to order not a goose for the Cratchits and Tiny Tim, but a Liberty duck for N and myself. Alas, there would after all be a meal that, in appearance, somewhat resembled Thanksgiving.

After a fireside dinner of succulent slow-roasted duck and a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin (a French pinot noir from Burgundy), I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to the temperamental oversized American bird that needs to be brined, heavily salted, massaged with butter and caressed with spices just to taste reasonably good.

I discovered that no flour-thickened gravy can compete with a sauce made from caramelized duck bones (see recipe below). Nor can the embarrassing avalanche of stuffing, mashed potatoes, and sweet potato casserole compare with the austere simplicity of turnips and carrots roasted beneath the duck in its luxurious fat.

As for pumpkin pie, I'll take mine any other autumn day in the afternoon with a cup of Darjeeling, thank you. I have never understood its allure after that orgy of butter, cream, sugar and tryptophan we call Thanksgiving. So after our duck dinner, we savored a moist slice of Lyndsey Shere's cakey pudding made from soft hachiya persimmons purchased at the Berkeley market.

If you're looking for a reminder of how wonderful roasted poultry can be, I've included my recipe for slow roasted duck, an adaptation of Paula Wolfert's recipe that appeared in her book The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. Unlike the typical roast duck, this one will not explode like a fat bomb in your oven.

In the morning, I cut my duck in half, slid it into the oven on a bed of vegetables, covered it after 10 minutes, and then forgot about it for nearly 4 hours. The oven's gentle 275˚F (135˚C) heat worked its magic, melting the fat into the meat so that it became as juicy and tender as a good confit. Then, when I was ready to eat, I chose the pieces I wanted, lay them skin side down in a hot cast iron pan and slowly crisped the skin. When the skin released easily from the pan, after about 10 minutes, it was ready. The skin was so crisp, it shattered like glass under the pressure of my fork.

One 5-pound Pekin duck yielded 2 dinners for 2, the breasts one night and the legs another. Believe me, you won't want to go back to dry turkey again.

Autumn vegetables: discovering cardoons

A couple of weeks ago, I saw whole rosettes of cardoons for the first time at our local farmers market.  Although one farm has sold large, more mature stalks of this celery doppelgänger individually (for a dollar a piece) for a number of years, last month Mariquita Farm started selling younger, more tender bunches of cardoons at a more reasonable price. Mariquita's Andy Griffin has sold these to his restaurant customers for a long time, but has now thankfully made them available to us.

Admittedly, the first thing that flashed in my mind at the sight of the oversized, spiky leafed stalks was anguish. I remembered the stressful day I was first introduced to the cardoon. I toiled for hours in a corner of one restaurant's kitchen, even skipping lunch, trying to finish peeling cases upon cases of this troublesome member of the thistle family, its bitter juices staining my fingers black. I learned intimately that the cardoon, like its cousin the artichoke, needs to be lavished with lots of love and attention to coax out its subtle herbaceous sweetness. But I suppose that's true of most of the best things in life, isn't it?

Realizing, with an immodest amount of smug elation, that I only have to cook for two chez moi, I decided to buy a single bunch. I sought out the smallest, liveliest looking bunch, because younger cardoons generally are more tender and require less preparation. Firm, solid stalks are more desirable, too, so I avoided any bunches with hollow, stringy stalks.

When I arrived home with my prize, N inquired with her usual tact, "What the f@#$ happened to that sorry-looking bunch of celery?"

Not surprisingly, she had never seen cardoons, which are rarely eaten outside of southern Europe. In Italy, Spain and France, where they are very popular during the holiday season, they are considered a colder season vegetable. According to Chez Panisse Vegetables, however, they are in season in California from the spring to the fall. I appreciate that Mariquita seems to be following the European tradition.

To prepare my bounty, I set up a bowl of acidulated water, which is a fancy term for water with lemon juice squeezed into it. I also put a pot of heavily salted water on the stove to boil. Then I cut off the base of the cardoon bunch, freeing the individual stalks. One at a time, I used my paring knife to trim off any jagged edges or leaves from each stalk. Then I peeled off the tough strings as best as I could (pictured left), just as you might string a stalk of celery. After I was done peeling each stalk, I cut it into 3- or 4-inch pieces and dropped them into my bowl of acidulated water to prevent them from turning brown.

When I was done prepping all the stalks, I dropped them into the pot of boiling water and simmered them until tender, about 15 to 20 minutes. They can take as long as 30 or even 45 minutes to reach tenderness, depending on the size and age of the cardoons.

My bunch of Mariquita's cardoons, which weighed about two pounds, yielded enough cooked stalks to make 4 healthy-sized appetizer or side-dish portions.

Now that my cardoons were ready to use, I had to decide how to serve them. A Spanish recipe for cardoons with almond sauce that I had seen in Janet Mendel's My Kitchen in Spain came to mind, as did lots of variations of Italian recipes for frying, gratinéeing or braising the stalks.

In the end, though, I opted for the familiar, the way I first learned to love this thistle. One of the longtime chefs at Chez Panisse Café, Russell Moore, taught me to simply cut the tender boiled stalks at an angle (on the bias, as we say in the kitchen), dress them with an assertive vinaigrette made from anchovies, garlic, lemon, a touch of red wine vinegar, and olive oil, and shower them with chopped hard-boiled eggs.

The eggs and olive oil add much needed creaminess to the otherwise naked cardoons, while the anchovies and lemon juice highlight rather than overwhelm the natural sweetness of the vegetable. A truly spectacular start to any autumnal meal.

With cardoons finally so readily available, I have a feeling they're going to make a frequent appearance at our dinner table this autumn and winter.

This post, by the way, is my entry for this week's Weekend Herb Blogging, sponsored by Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen. Although, of course, cardoons are not an herb, any plant or vegetable is apparently an acceptable topic.

Food|and Drink|Recipes|Vegetables|Weekend Herb Blogging

Joy of wood-burning ovens and a review of Pizzaiolo

As a cook, I never understood the allure of working the mesquite grill in a restaurant. You might as well be a chimney sweep or a coal miner.

Before you can start to cook, you have to sweep up the ashes from the previous night's dinner service. Then, you drag a 50-pound bag of mesquite charcoal to your work area and dump or scoop some of it into the grill. Despite your best efforts, you inevitably breathe in clouds of the black dust. It is a constant battle to light and then maintain the fire at the ideal temperature throughout the night, while simultaneously cooking and plating dozens of meals. By the end of the night, your fingernails, ears, eyes and snot are encrusted with black soot and you cannot avoid coming home smelling like bacon. What's good for the steak is not necessarily good for the cook!

Wood-burning ovens are a different story. With a degree equal in intensity to my hatred of working the grill, I adore using wood-burning ovens to cook. Enclosed brick ovens are far more efficient than open restaurant grills, using a fraction of the wood. Hardwood logs, usually oak, fuel the fire, so there is no black charcoal soot to fill your lungs. Best of all, the majority of the smoke rises up the oven's flue rather than your nose.

I am not alone here. At those rare restaurants fortunate to be equipped with one, all the line cooks inevitably dream of working the brick oven, especially if there are pizzas on the menu.

Cooks easily become addicted to the tactile pleasure of poking and stretching the delicate, yet playfully elastic dough; sliding and twisting the pies in the oven with a skillful flip of the pizza peel; watching the yeast bubbles blossom and scorch on the crust in the glow of the inferno. You feel a connection to an artisanal tradition, for pizza making is an art, or more accurately, a craft.

It's no wonder, then, that upscale pizzerias are mushrooming all over the Bay Area. Chefs miss the fun of working the pizza station!

It's a boon to Bay Area diners, too, who have suffered for years without a access to a decent slice or pie. On my last visit to New York, I didn't feel compelled to get that fix that, in the past, I have always craved.

Tuesday, N and I visited one of the newest of this wave of pizzerias, Pizzaiolo in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland. In the interest of complete disclosure, I am acquainted with the chef, Charlie Hallowell, from his days at the Chez Panisse Café where I volunteered once a week for a year while I was sous chef at a nearby restaurant.

Recipe: Salsa de Romesco

After a week of culinary classes in Catalonia this past summer, I began to believe the "healthy Mediterranean Diet" was a marketing ruse. A fantasy. A bald-faced lie.

Having devoured quantities of food, wine and olive oil that would have made the Emperor Caligula blanch, my stomach decided to go on a temporary strike. The last morsel of food I recall consuming, between glasses of black Priorat wine, was duck braised in red wine with duck prosciutto, porcinis and prunes. Mediterranean diet indeed!

In hindsight, the most dire consequence of this unanticipated one-day fast was my absence for the lesson on making romesco (the o is pronounced more like a u, so it should be pronounced ru-mes-cu). Fortunately, my chef-instructor and hostess for the week, Alicia Juanpere, had the foresight to save me a taste (and recipe) for the next day, when my stomach lay down its picket signs and I had fully recovered.

The dominant toasted nuttiness of Alicia's recipe for salsa de romesco come from hazelnuts, almonds and bread that are fried in olive oil. She encourages you to pound them in a ceramic mortar with a wooden pestle to form the base of the sauce, but you would get good results in a food processor. Roasted tomatoes and dried nyora (spelled ñora in Castillian Spanish) peppers reconstituted in red wine vinegar contribute acidity, fruitiness and their vermilion color. The combination of roasted and raw garlic adds complexity, while cayenne adds a hint of heat. Extra virgin olive oil (the more, the better) gives the sauce an unctuous consistency. The goal, as in any dish, is to balance the contrasting flavors so that they form a symphony without any one player taking over.

With those alluring flavors firmly planted in my taste memory (the most reliable and active part of my gray matter), I used Alicia's detailed instructions to recreate the meal that I had so unfortunately missed: roast lamb with romesco sauce (pictured above, left).

I substituted one local dried red chile from my friend Lee at Tierra Vegetables for two imported nyora peppers, which are expensive. In appearance and flavor, Tierra's peppers resemble the true romesco peppers used in Tarragona, the birthplace of salsa de romesco, much more than the nyora peppers that Alicia used, which are more available throughout Spain (and online). Easier to find ancho chiles also yield excellent results.

In the goal of achieving the most authentic result, I highly recommend seeking out an olive oil from the region where the sauce originates. The olive oil from this region, a special government protected "denominación de origen" called Siurana, comes from the arbequina olive. The oil from this region, which spans most of southern Catalonia and northern Valencia, is the best I have tasted. Its characteristic after taste of almonds never fails to intoxicate me. An excellent domestic alternative to the Siurana oils are the arbequina olive oils produced by the California Olive Ranch.

My romesco sauce came out so well, that I used it later in the week to sauce a pan-fried ling cod (pictured right) and then as a piquant spread in an untraditional toasted panino (Italian-style grilled cheese sandwich) that featured smoky Basque Idiazabal cheese and Melissa's recipe for membrillo, Spanish quince paste. You could also use leftover sauce as the base for a voluptuous Catalan seafood stew by thinning it with the addition of fish or chicken stock, or, thin it with more olive oil and use it as a vinaigrette for a hearty salad of frisée, escarole and salt cod known in Catalonia as xató (pronounced like château).

For more details and background on salsa de romesco, see my earlier post describing my visit to Tarragona, where I dined at Barquet, the restaurant owned by the chef and author of the most authoritative book (in Catalan) on romesco, David Solé i Torné.

When life gives you a case of tomatoes....

With my computer up and running again, I can once again join my friends in the food blogging community. So, what have I been up to in my computer-free spare time? I went Amish.

Last week at the farmers market, I was surprised to see Joe at Dirty Girl selling his luscious dry-farmed early girl tomatoes in November. I plucked a blood red wedge off the sample plate. With juices running down my wrist, I popped it in my greedy mouth and audibly gasped as its mid-summer sweetness exploded across my tongue. If only I could bottle that taste....

In that split second, my stomach staged a bloodless coup, momentarily overthrowing the more rational and obviously weaker part of my brain known as self-restraint. "You can bottle that summer goodness," it whispered hungrily to the easily duped, and no doubt dormant, part of my cerebral cortex, the left frontal lobe, the decision-maker that mistakenly believes it holds the purse strings.

Before I knew it, I arrived home with a 20-pound case of tomatoes in my trunk.

After many hours of cutting, peeling, chopping, puréeing, stewing, cleaning, bottling and freezing, I now possess two gallons of sublime tomato sauce, enough to introduce a little bit of sunlight into the cold dark months that lay ahead.

As the days grow shorter, I seem to be unconsciously preparing for the hibernation of the winter rainy season. You'd think I lived on a farm in snowy Minnesota or rural Missouri (perhaps a part of me does).

With two dozen jars of "Dirty Girl Late Early Girl Tomato Sauce" secure in my freezer, I figured why not attempt to bottle every bit of sunshine I can? I scanned the contents of my fridge in search of the next victim to embalm. By now, I was deeply in touch with the Luddite, Pennsylvania Dutch roots on my father's side of the gene pool.

First, I whiled away an hour or two pickling a few pounds of Joe's crispy yellow wax beans. In a week, they will make the ideal tart counterpunch to a rich creamy duck liver terrine.

Today I'm putting up a batch of red pepper confiture that my friend Alicia taught me how to make in Catalonia this past summer. Cook together cut up red peppers (including a hot chile or two) and sugar in the proportion of two parts peppers to one part sugar, a lemon (inner flesh only, all peel and seeds removed) and a vanilla bean until soft. Then remove the vanilla bean and purée the whole mess, adding salt to taste. It is unbeatable with sheep's milk cheese on crackers with the morning cuppa or as an aperitif with a glass of Cava later in the evening.

Food|and Drink|Recipes|Vegetables|Market

Making sugar skulls on El Día de los Muertos

Every day of this week has been a special holiday. Halloween fell on Monday, Diwali on Tuesday, El Día de los Muertos on Wednesday and Eid ul-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, on Thursday.

I become especially sentimental during the Aztec/Mexican El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

Every year, I join thousands of San Franciscans in remembering our deceased loved ones by participating in a lively, musical night-time procession through the streets of the Mission District. Cradling a candle in my hands, I relish being surrounded by the joyous, raucous revelers, dancing skeletons, blaring trumpets and beating drums. I savor the sweet smell of burning sage and the explosion of fiery orange marigolds on altars. What a welcome contrast to the denial that surrounds death in the dominant American culture!

Although I've lived in the city a dozen years, I joined the parade for the first time just three years ago, a few months after my mother passed away. That year, I particularly found solace in having a celebratory day dedicated to honoring our ancestors and loved ones. I enjoyed the thrill of being squeezed and jostled through the dark alleyways enveloped by colorful graffiti, sweaty skeleton-painted faces and deafening samba music, as if descending into Hades. Then came the release of opening onto a spacious park full of altars strewn with sparkling candles and bright marigolds. No place could have been more comforting to me that year. I knew viscerally that my experience of loss was not unique.

On Wednesday, I journeyed to the Mission District to gather marigolds and pan del muerte, the traditional, sugar-coated round egg bread decorated with crossed bones, for the altar N and I now set up annually in our home to honor our ancestors.

With the good fortune that comes with living in a rich, multicultural city, I stumbled across an artisan making sugar skulls, another traditional addition to altars, on 24th Street. I watched with awe as Emilio Quintana poured hot sugar syrup into 150-year old clay skull molds, just as his ancestors had for the past five generations. Mr. Quintana has been traveling to San Francisco from Puebla, Mexico, for the last 18 years to sell and demonstrate the art of making these candy skulls.

To see how he made these surprisingly hollow sugar skulls, which took just a few minutes, click on the picture above to be taken to my Flickr slideshow of the process.

WBW #15: Samsara, Verna's Vineyard Syrah 2004

There's good news and bad news about my entry for this month's Wine Blogging Wednesday, hosted by my pomegranate-loving fellow Bay Area blogger Fatemeh of Gatronomie. Fatemeh urged us to discover a wine with such a small production that only 250 cases or less were produced.

First, the good news. The sales people at Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant led me to a beautiful syrah made in southern California's Santa Barbara County. There were only 60 cases of this wine made.

The name of the winery, Samsara, could not be more appropriate, as today is El Día de los Muertos, the Aztec/Mexican day to remember the deceased . In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, samsara refers to the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth that humans are stuck in until they manage to free themselves and attain enlightenment. The word samsara, then, tends to have a slightly negative connotation, unless of course you are marketing perfume or, apparently, syrah.

But anyway, back to the wine. This specific bottling of Samsara came from the 2004 vintage. Winemaker Chad Melville used syrah grapes from Verna's Vineyard, which is tended by his brother Brent. He then blended them with a small portion of white viognier grapes (8%), let the grape juice ferment naturally, aged it in 30% new French oak and bottled it unfiltered.

Yes, yes. What is the nose, the body, the finish? What aria do you hear playing upon the first sip? For God sakes, just tell us what this limited production beauty tastes like?*

Did I mention there was bad news? The wine was just released yesterday. I, ever the procrastinator, saw it at the wine shop this afternoon.

I struggled with the quandary of whether I really wanted to plunk down 36 bucks for a California syrah from last year's vintage that weighs in at 15.2% alcohol, rush home, pop the cork, pour myself a glass, snap a photo, write some drivel about how it could use about 5 to 10 more years of age and press "publish."

After a long, ponderous 2 minutes of deliberation, I decided to give it a pass.

I consider myself a connoisseur of cheap wines, by which I mean interesting and unusual wines from lesser known appellations that retail for, at most, $25. In my experience, most of the wines that fit that description come from Europe, not California.

In addition, as a chef and home cook, I prefer wines that pair well with food. For the Mediterranean style cuisine I typically cook, this means I prefer wines with good acidity and moderate (i.e. normal, reasonable) levels of alcohol. Although I did not sample the Samsara syrah, I view its relatively high level of alcohol as a red flag (yes, I am aware that there are many syrahs on the market that top 16% alcohol, and 15.2% is not that high for a California syrah).

But it really boiled down to one question. Why would I risk $36 on a California syrah when I know that for a comparable sum of money I could have a bottle of Vieux Télégraphe Châteauneuf-du-Pape or a Domaine Tempier Bandol from the amazing 2003 vintage, either of which will dance with my grilled lamb or rib-eye like Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers?

*According to one taster, the wine "literally coated [his] glass and intense aromas of blackberry, spice, iodine, and savage notes jumped from the glass. A very structured wine with plenty of firm acidity." Sounds good. I probably would like it, especially with another 5 or 10 years of age.

Unexpected food discoveries lead to a tasty Halloween and Diwali

There are few things that get me more excited than discovering something new to eat. In the name of unearthing an unusual and original taste, I will scour local markets, steal tastes at farm stands, pilfer fruit from neighbor's trees or wild bushes. I will endure excruciating heat, verbal abuse, gastrointestinal discomfort, endless hours of searching, even potential jail time.

Of course, the joy multiplies tenfold when new products practically jump into my undeserving hands, which is exactly what happened not once but twice over the weekend at our local farmers market.

Making my usual rounds, my blood hound mind was distracted by every aroma and shiny object. I paused here to sample a glistening pear, there to sniff the rose geraniums. I was as insatiable as Condoleeza Rice at Ferragamo.

The sight of a giant bee out of the corner of my eye momentarily yanked me out of my reverie. Once my reptilian brain relaxed, I realized the over five-foot tall bee was actually Helene Marshall of Marshall's Farm Natural Honey dressed as a bee, a la John Belushi.

Having my foot swell to the size of a basketball after stepping on a bee when I was a toddler didn't dampen my enthusiasm for honey. Neither did the discovery that the liquid amber is essentially bee vomit. I adore the sweet nectar.

In the Bay Area, the folks at Marshall's are the ambassadors of the bee kingdom. Their selection of dozens of varieties range in color from pale gold to dark chocolate and in flavor from floral to bittersweet. I decided to veer from my usual favorite "star thistle" and sample their seasonally changing collection of sticky wares.

After licking enough samples to send a dozen diabetics into shock, my clear favorite was endearingly named "Haunted Honey." Made from the pollen of pumpkin blossoms, this bright orange syrup has distinct undertones of roasted butternut squash and butterscotch.

Haunted Honey for Halloween. How appropriate. Unbelievably, I next stumbled upon a product worthy of Diwali, the Indian festival of lights which takes place today.

This time, I spied a product that stopped me in my tracks - a local version of an Italian cheese that some readers know I am inordinately fond of. While I paused to take a picture of the sheep's milk cheese, another cheese grabbed my attention.

Apparently a month or two ago, the local cheesemakers at Cowgirl Creamery teamed up with noted Indian food expert Niloufer Ichaporia King (whose cookbook I am excitedly awaiting) to create a creamy "Parsi style" version of panir (also spelled paneer). The Cowgirl version of this cow's milk farmer's cheese tastes like a smoother, saltier version of fresh ricotta, remarkably similar to a fresh cheese I often enjoyed in Catalonia called mató.

And guess what! Mató is almost always paired with honey* as a light and refreshing end to a Catalan meal. So I married my Halloween honey with my Diwali panir, added a few toasted California walnuts, and ended up miraculously with the best version of mel i mató I have had outside of Spain. Kismet.

Happy (belated) Halloween! Happy Diwali! And, most of all, happy tummy!

*Thanks also to the brilliant NS of San Francisco Gourmet San Francisco Gourmet who just a month ago reminded us all what a simple yet wonderful combination fresh ricotta-style cheese is when drizzled with a flavorful honey.

Food|and Drink|Recipes|Cheese|Desserts