Strawberry caprese in Ashland, Oregon

This is the first time I've ever had a caprese salad with anything but the traditional ingredients. And while I thought this one—made with strawberries, fried basil leaves, very fresh buffalo mozzarella, and a sticky balsamic reduction sauce—was better suited as a dessert than an appetizer, I really liked that it was both novel and well done. If I do make it as dessert in the future, I'd try using marscapone and might marinate the strawberries in port first.

But back to the photo. Yes, maybe the combination of balsamic and balsamic squirt-bottle pattern is making you flash back to 1997, but I think balsamic has survived its heyday and ensuing culinary nadir and has reemerged as a perfectly respectable classic.

I had the strawberry caprese in Ashland, Oregon, last week when I was there with Joel and his parents. Based on all the food I ate there, and all the menus I looked at, I think that Ashland really has its own thing going on with food. I knew ahead of time that it had an absurd number of restaurants for the size of the population (100 restaurants; 20,000 people), but I figured it would be expensive without being exceptional (or possibly even good).

Now maybe it's because all the chefs are actually frustrated actors trying to find new creative outlets, but there is some pretty successful free-thinking going on in restaurants there. I wish I'd written down some of the examples I came across, but I was busy trying to record sounds for an upcoming podcast. Without many examples, the best way to describe the phenomenon is to say I found myself reading menus and saying, "Huh, I never would have thought of that together, but it sounds good," pretty often. Not all the time, of course, but way more than I usually do. And it doesn't seem to have much to do with other current food trends. There wasn't a lot of Salumi bragging; they really seemed to be doing their own thing, just sort of riffing on interesting and unexpected combinations without losing sight of that all important endpoint of pleasing taste.

Sauteed balsamic figs

My parents have this giant fig tree in their backyard, and for the first 26 years they lived in their house no one ate the figs when they ripened in mid-summer. Well, for a brief period my Grandpa ate them, but he was really the only one. The rest of us, I guess, were used to purple figs, and so figs that started out green and stayed green upon ripening were suspect. The birds, however, were in on the secret and happy enough to have them all to themselves.

But a few years ago, my mom caught on to the fact that the figs were not only edible but delicious, and so now we all (or at least she and I) look forward to the summertime fig harvest.

And, even though I now know how the figs are supposed to feel when they're ripe enough to pick, I always play dumb so that my mom will say, "They should feel like balls." My mom is from Michigan, but I'm not sure that explains the accent she has pronouncing certain words, "balls" being foremost among them. She pronounces it more like "bawls," as if she's hung out with my Brooklyn dad for too many years.

My favorite thing to do with the figs is to wash them, slice them in half lengthwise, melt butter in a pan, add the figs open-side-down, add some salt and pepper, and saute them until they're warm. Then I flip them over, add a dash more salt and pepper, and saute them until the green skin gets a few golden patches. Then I add a tablespoon or two of balsamic, flip the figs back over (so that they soak up the vinegar a bit), and wait about 20 seconds (for small batches) until the balsamic vinegar thickens into a sauce.

If I'm feeling fancy, I'll slice some Prosciutto ribbons to put over it, but most of the time I just eat them alone. They're nice appetizers, too, though I'll also eat them for breakfast.

Tacos: Cactus

Welcome to the first installment of the Taco Comparison Project. I will be eating tacos (preferably crispy, some soft) and reporting on my findings.

First up: Cactus Taqueria

To me, this is what a taco should taste like. They take the corn tortilla, stuff it with chicken and cheese, and deep fry it. Then when the chicken and the tortilla are all delicious and crispy and the cheese is melted, they take it out, drain it, and stuff the empty space full of guacamole, lettuce, and pico de gallo. At this point, the crispy taco is passed to me, and I squeeze lime on it, ready myself with four to five napkins per three taco plate, and take that first perfectly crunchy, hot and cool bite.

You know how according to research, you stop being able to taste the true flavor of whatever food you're eating after three or four bites because your taste buds have acclimated to the textures and flavors? This taco is designed to combat that phenomenon. The collection of textures (rich and creamy guacamole, crispy lettuce, crunchy taco shell, melted cheese, and hot grilled then fried chicken) and flavors (just reread that last parenthetical) makes every bite a revelation. And the lime, ah the lime, dare I call it the salt of the taco, bringing out the flavors but also lending a citric lightness to the whole thing.

After years of extensive research, I have determined that the Cactus on Solano is superior to the Cactus on College, at least as far as the crispy tacos and the chocolate chip cookies go. The College Cactus churns out food, while the Solano Cactus prepares individual dishes, and you can taste the difference.

Another great thing about Cactus is that they use better meat options: Sonoma Select chicken, I think, and Niman Ranch beef and pork.

The Atget project

Ever since I was a history-of-photography-obsessed college kid, I've loved Eugene Atget's work. He took a city that was already iconic and captured a rare version of it. He brought out the ghost in a heavily civilized place. He took a loud city and made it quiet.

He was often the last person to look, really look, at entire neighborhoods before they were destroyed to make way for the new Haussmannian Paris. He would go out with his camera just after dawn, when the city was still mostly asleep, and capture a last look.

His photography was a generous act, but also a morbid one. He stripped these moments in architecture of all distractions and said, through his photographs, "Just look." And then, just as you're almost finished looking, comes the whisper: "This is already gone."

So that's the main reason I love his work. But he did this other thing that I like to. He obsessively documented groups of things. Hundreds of horse-drawn carriages, of stairways, of courtyards, and so on.

I'd like to do something way less cool, but somewhat structurally similar. As an exercise in eating, comparing, and organizing information, I'm going to choose a particular food (everything from tacos to croissants), eat a whole bunch of it from different places, and then write about it.

Mint Julep ice cream

I'm pretty sure it's a great idea. The bourbon ice cream was great. The fresh mint ice cream was great. Will the combination translate as well as its individual parts do? I think it might.

Garlicky (and oniony) greens

Here's a photo of the garlicky greens (red chard, purple goosefoot orach, and lamb's quarters) with onion detailed below.

I promise I'll stop talking about ice cream as soon as summer is over

...or at least that I'll stop talking about ice cream so much. But I'll probably talk about soup and maybe chocolate croissant bread pudding way more.

To celebrate the first day of the Tour de France, I invited cycling enthusiasts over and made bourbon ice cream. Here's the thing about bourbon ice cream: it's really, really good. I'm not a huge fan of bourbon; I don't have the palate and I'm not into pretending to be in a 70s political-intrigue movie, nor am I an Aaron Sorkin character. But as it turns out, if you add bourbon to a creamy custard and then freeze it, well then I love it.

Some of the smokiness remains, but the sweet cream somehow expands the flavor upwards and outwards. The only way I can describe it is that I experience bourbon mostly as a lead marble being dropped into a bucket, but that bourbon ice cream is more like a wide raft with a sail. Probably not helpful, but it's the best I can do.

I made little langue du chats (langues du chat?) as disks and then shaped them into tiny bowls in which to serve the ice cream. The only problem was that there was a slight storage miscommunication, and in an attempt to hide the cookies from the animals while we were out of the house, Joel refrigerated them, which made it so they never crisped properly.

I used the Eagle Rare Single Barrel Bourbon that Jerm and Liz brought to the housewarming and the bourbon ice cream recipe from Chez Panisse Desserts. Sadly, tomorrow I have to return all the cookbooks, as their owners are arriving back home.