It's been four years since we left the Bay Area, so the list of restaurants we need to try has gotten ridiculously long. We don't get down there as much as we should (our friends can vouch for that!). So when an opportunity to try Dominique Crenn's "poetic culinaria" came up at Matt's in the Market, it was hard to pass up. Except we did, because I thought, well, we can't do these dinners two weeks in a row. It'll be too much. But then, after a wonderful meal with Andy Ricker, we went for it, got on the waiting list and hoped for the best.
Not only was it a chance to try Chef Crenn’s modernist cuisine outside her home turf in the Bay Area, but it would be interesting to see how the two chefs -- Chef Crenn and Matt's Chef Chester Gerl -- would develop a menu of complements. In six courses, it was inventive, it was sometimes challenging, it was beautiful.
The first weeks of the farmers market in Washington always feel like everyone's still trying to wake up from hibernating all winter. We get a relatively late start, opening up in April, but by then, the tulips are in full force. On an otherwise gray day, there's nothing like a burst of color to get you out of the blahs. Those are double tulips, by the way. They almost look like peonies, my other favorite flower.
Sometimes a salad is born of necessity, like when I ordered pizza on Tuesday night and then peeked in the fridge for a salad to go along with...and nothing really looked like a salad, including those two bunches of celery in the crisper.
Celery rarely has a starring role. It's part of an ensemble on a crudite platter, it's a chaser (afterthought?) to buffalo wings, it's passed over on the salad bar for grated carrot, or jicama. Even when it does star, as in cream of celery soup, it's probably just going to end up in a casserole. But, last night, it was time to let celery be a star.
