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As much as I love food, I've always held a grudge against Los Angeles restaurants. Actually, that's incorrect. I've always held a grudge against fancy L.A. restaurants. The food might be good, but often it's in competition with the hard-to-get to location, chi-chi atmosphere, and ridiculous prices. I'm making a really gross generalization here, but I don't often get that sense of craft and sincerity that comes with dining in Portland or San Francisco (maybe my two favorite dining towns). (Full disclosure: part of the reason I don't love L.A. restaurants is that in L.A. I get to eat at my parents' house, which pretty much beats the pants off most restaurants anyway). But, luckily, this past weekend, while spending a really wonderful weekend with my parents, I visited Palate Food + Wine in Glendale, CA.
Palate is a really exciting restaurant that celebrates great wine and delicious, seasonal foods. The menu when I visited this past weekend really reflected the cusp-of-spring: citrus, peas, quail, spring onions, parsnips, and spinach were well-represented on the menu.
We started off, however, with the Porkfolio, a selection of wonderful pig cuts with thin toasts and mustard on the side. I've had La Quercia proscuitto many times, and each time it's really wonderful. But at Palate, I fell in love all over again with Mortadella, a moist and fatty Italian sausage that, at Palate, has a very subtle rosemary and coriander taste to it (I like to call Mortadella "upscale balogna," much to everyone's dismay).
And though I'm normally a little freaked out by pickles (I know, I know), I really adored the picked spring onions, which were perfectly tart and salty all at once.
For dinner, I had the quail with bacon, wheat berries, pine nuts, golden raisins, and artichokes. This dish just called my name--every single thing on the plate makes my list of "top 20 foods of all time." Yeah, I like wheat berries that much. And it definitely delivered--the quail was so so perfect (and large--sometimes you get quail that's more bone than meat, but this one was perfectly-sized) that I definitely picked the meat off the tiny drumstick with my teeth. In a fancy restaurant. Sigh. ** When you eat at Palate, you have all sorts of seating choices. The front of the restaurant is a sort of classic L.A. restaurant space (pink lights, sexy booths). The back of the restaurant is a little more exciting--there's a room for large parties, a room that doubles as a wine store/tasting bar, and the "in between room" (where we were) where guests sit at high tables sandwiched between the cheese room and a beautiful refrigerated cellar.
I thought this seating would be strange, but it was actually a lot of fun to be in the middle of the action--we had a fantastic view of the cheese room, and, although we couldn't hear them, we were totally charmed by how much fun the two chefs inside the room were having. When we were ready for dessert, we decided to just walk in (they saw us peeking and encouraged us) to pick our cheeses. They were extremely helpful with suggestions, and we wound up with three wonderful cheeses--a blue cheese, a sheep's milk cheese, and a goat cheese.
Part of our emboldened excursion to the cheese room was thanks to two wonderful bottles of wine: a 2007 Testarossa Pinot Noir Palazzio and a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Brix Vineyards. They were recommended by our server and proved absolutely lovely.
Have I eaten at Ubuntu? Unfortunately not. Do I want to? Hell yes. I used to work the early Wednesday morning shift at Reed College's Paradox Café, the only major of perk of which was reading the NY Times food section. At the time, Frank Bruni was doing his coast-to-coast tour of new "Restaurants that Matter," and I was following along mostly because he liked one of my personal Portalnd favorites, Le Pigeon.
So I was kind of blown away to read this, Frank Bruni's review of Napa Valley's Ubuntu, a vegetarian restaurant and yoga studio. It's not like I don't love vegetables and yoga. It's just that the restaurant seemed to embody all sorts of clichés, something that Bruni acknowledges. And yet it's good. Because, of course, you can make great vegetarian food (and yoga is pretty great too).
This was before I sort of had a vegetable "revelation." In college, I was way too busy to hit up the Farmer's Market every weekend, and Trader Joe's was way too convenient to my house. But, living in San Francisco now, I actually have time to take advantage of the amazing produce we have year around. So I've gone a little crazy with tons and tons of fresh vegetables--which is just fine, right? I mean, no one's going to tell me to eat fewer vegetables, so I think I'm doing okay.
This all brings me back to Ubuntu. It's on my list of places to go, but I probably won't get out there for awhile. So when this month's Food and Wine showed up and there were a couple of Ubuntu recipes? Yeah, I'm making those.
Up first is the Carrot Macaroni and Cheese recipe. This recipe called to me because a) carrots are cheap and delicious b) I love macaroni and cheese. I actually love macaroni and cheese out of the box (Annie's) and my favorite homemade macaroni and cheese is possibly the richest, most fattening macaroni and cheese ever (heya, cream!). So I was open to changing it up and making my macaroni and cheese a little more well-rounded.
First things first: at the Farmer's Market I went on a hunt for carrots with the tops on. Carrots last forever with the leaves off--if you think about it, the leaves are the first thing to show signs of age (wilting, etc), so who knows how old those carrots without their tops are? Surprisingly, the only stall at the Civic Center Farmer's market that had carrots with their leaves still attached was also the same stall that I usually avoid because it's a little pricey. But this time, the prices were fair and the guy behind the stall threw in a free head of garlic. Which is always welcome in my kitchen.
gratuitous shot of my kiwi knife in action
check out the tops!
So, with my carrots, I acquired a navel orange (to be zested and juiced) and basil. The recipe calls for tarragon, but of course I completely forgot and just used basil because that's what I always pick up on the weekends. Tasted delicious, of course. On the non-produce front, I used a pretty generic brand of penne and a very nice cheddar cheese from Say Cheese in Cole Valley.
the recipe called for the zest to be peeled in strips--makes sense, since it's used to infuse the carrots with orangey-ness
mmm..cheesy cheese.
Of course, since it's macaroni and cheese, we both slathered it in hot sauce (I'm a fan of Melinda's, since I used an entire Costco-sized bottle of Cholulua up recently. He's on a rotating schedule of hot sauces, but right now it's a Belizean Heat). Is it sacreligious to cover your healthy Ubuntu macaroni and cheese with hot sauce? I'm going to say no.
the finished product! delicious!
We started off, however, with the Porkfolio, a selection of wonderful pig cuts with thin toasts and mustard on the side. I've had La Quercia proscuitto many times, and each time it's really wonderful. But at Palate, I fell in love all over again with Mortadella, a moist and fatty Italian sausage that, at Palate, has a very subtle rosemary and coriander taste to it (I like to call Mortadella "upscale balogna," much to everyone's dismay).
And though I'm normally a little freaked out by pickles (I know, I know), I really adored the picked spring onions, which were perfectly tart and salty all at once.
I thought this seating would be strange, but it was actually a lot of fun to be in the middle of the action--we had a fantastic view of the cheese room, and, although we couldn't hear them, we were totally charmed by how much fun the two chefs inside the room were having. When we were ready for dessert, we decided to just walk in (they saw us peeking and encouraged us) to pick our cheeses. They were extremely helpful with suggestions, and we wound up with three wonderful cheeses--a blue cheese, a sheep's milk cheese, and a goat cheese.
Part of our emboldened excursion to the cheese room was thanks to two wonderful bottles of wine: a 2007 Testarossa Pinot Noir Palazzio and a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Brix Vineyards. They were recommended by our server and proved absolutely lovely.
