The Fuzzy Chef & Friends

Portugal Day, celebrating Portuguese independence from Spain with parades, dancers and lots of terrific Iberian food, is tommorrow, June 11th.  It takes place in San Jose History park, which is fun on its own.  Portugal Day is probably the best ethnic food festival in the Bay Area, at least from a food perspective.

Above is a plate of grilled sardines, potatoes and Portuguese bread -- $9 at last year's festival.

See you there!

Eggs Benedict, or "Benedicts", or "Bennies", in their many variations, are quite popular restaurant brunch items here in California.   This is probably because they fall into that class of food which is easy for a restaurant to make, but both annoying and too decadent to make at home.  Today, you can order dozens of different "benedicts" which none of the various Benedict families would recognize, including Florentine (sauteed spinach), Cajun (chile-cream sauce and bacon), New York (smoked salmon and tomato), and the Northwestern paragon, the Dungeness Crab Cake Benedict.

This "benedict" aims to be quintessentially California, simple and easy to make at home, and comparatively healthful.  The secret is in the organic free-range extra virgin heirloom handmade ingredients. Hence I christen it the "Cal-Bennie".  Recipe follows ...

For my and Lisa's birthdays (they're about a week apart) we took off Memorial Day for a weekend in the California Gold Country.  This weekend was the Rocks & Rhones event at some of the wineries there, plus we thought we'd get some hiking and other fun in.

First thing: Snow?  In May?  In California?  This Global Climate Thrash thing is getting out of hand.

We did get to go wine tasting though, even though the hiking didn't happen.  Click through for a review of some of the wineries you probably haven't heard of before ... 

I fell in love with ceviche when my family moved to South Texas when I was 10 years old.  I suppose that I already liked all kinds of seafood from the previous four years in Florida.  I still adore ceviche today, and am very happy that San Francisco has several Peruvian restaurants which specialize in it.

Since it was nice and warm today and I spend the day working in the garden, I decided to make some ceviche for myself.  Based on what Gus the Grumpy Greek Grocer had available (shop Haight Street Market!), I decided to make mango-tuna ceviche, and was very happy with the result.   This is not the fiercely acidic, otherwise flavorless whitefish ceviche of your local burrito joint.  Here, the tuna and avocado give you a fatty unctousness, punctuated by the citrus bursts of mango.  Click more for the recipe.

We've had a truly astonishing asparagus season in California this year.  Our grocer has been selling coffee-straw thin Delta asparagus for $0.99/lbs for two weeks and I've had to be creative to keep coming up with recipes for it.

Here I'm combining it with Chinese fermented black beans.  These are not Cuban black beans.  Instead, they are a type of soybean, salted heavily and fermented for months.  The kind you want are sold in blocks, dried; they'll keep more-or-less indefinitely in the back of your fridge (the ones I used were over a year old).