Blackberry, Peach, and Corn Cobbler, and 24 hours in Sacramento

This past weekend, I took some time off to head north to Sacramento and visit foodwriter Garrett McCord of Vanilla Garlic and Melt fame. Garrett's been trying to get me to visit, and finally thanks to the flexibility of summertime, our schedules synced up. I've also been meaning to check out Sacramento for some time now, since recently its food and arts scene has sort of been exploding. Of course, it's always been the California state capital and home of some awesome Gold Rush era sights that I visited on school field trips as a little kid, but other than that, in the past while I was growing up in the Bay Area, Sacramento as a town was never particularly a destination (especially to us snottier SF Bay folks). But all that has been changing recently, and after hearing so much buzz about the town, I was really excited to be able to see it for myself. And Garrett, who knows the food/arts scene there really well, was the perfect guide. I was only in Sac for about 24 hours, but I already can't wait to go back again.

I kicked off the weekend by doing some cafe writing at Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters (waiting for Garrett to get off of work) so that I could try the new "nitro coffee" craze. Nitro coffee is cold coffee served out of a tap, and it has this ultra clean taste with tiny bubbles. It's not at all bitter and doesn't have any of that deep roastedness that regular coffee has, and it was an interesting experience to drink coffee that texturally felt like beer. Then, Garrett took Sabrina of The Tomato Tart and me to this amazing Thai restaurant called Thai Basil for dinner (pictured below). It takes a lot to impress me with good Thai food because there's so much of it where I live, but Thai Basil did not disappoint at all. There's this amazing seasonal menu that had dishes I've never seen before at a Thai restaurant, like this nam prik ong dipping platter, of ultra fresh veggies and rice crackers, with a meaty, tomato, chili-y sauce. So. Good. We rounded off the night at B Street Theatre, watching the current production of The Explorers' Club, which has this awesome mix of high society British colonialization comedy and unexpected slapstick. We sat in the dark, popping Andy's Candy chocolate-covered salted caramels in our mouths between laughing, and all in all having pretty rollicking good time.

The next day, I spent quite some time hanging out with Garrett's adorable menagerie of pets. I travel too much to have animals of my own, so I try to spoil my friends' pets with all the love and affection (and camera stalking) that I can whenever I get the chance. ♥

Then, we headed to the farmers' market to pick up some ingredients for a potluck that we were attending that afternoon. Garrett and I waffled back and forth about what we wanted to make...a salad? a dessert? It had to be something that would be delicious and simple but stand up well in the heat outside. And it also had to be something that struck the right balance between light and heavy, since no one would be wanting to eat a triple-layered cake in 100 degree weather under the afternoon sun on a dusty, drought-parched hillside. Finally, inspired by what looked best that day at the market, we settled on a blackberry, peach, & corn cobbler.

Garrett has a beautiful section of thyme in his garden, and so I chose some silver thyme, which has bright lemony overtones to throw in with the sweet yellow peaches and inky, midnight-black berries. For the biscuit topping on the cobbler, we added plump kernels of fresh yellow corn for a natural sweetness and gritty cornmeal for extra texture, and used sour cream instead of butter for a lighter tang to the biscuits. The overall cobbler was not very sweet at all, and allowed all of the market-fresh summer flavors to shine through in their unadulturated glory.

(Also, may I say that I am now sooo lusting after Garrett's beautiful Le Creuset oval baker that we used.)

The cobbler was a hit at the potluck. Someone else brought orange blossom meringue cookies, and we discovered that in breaking up some of the sugary sweet, floral meringue cookies and mixing them in with our rustic, fruity, earthy cobbler upon serving, together they made an even better dessert. It was like the best of potluck kismet.

Thanks once again to Garrett for the wonderful (and naturally, delicious) Sacramento weekend!


Read on for recipe...

Boysenberry and Plum Cobbler, for which I wax poetic.

The insides of peaches

are the color of sunrise

The outsides of plums

are the color of dusk

-- from Robert Hass's "The Beginning of September" in The Apple Trees at Olema

I often lament that the romance of the leisurely reading of poetry is lost in this current era: too few people, myself included, will curl up and unwind with a book of poetry as we might with the latest trashy novel. And those who do crack open poetry every now and then for "fun" reading are regarded by the general population as some sort of horrible combination of pricks, snobs, posers, or just really weird old cat ladies. Where are the days (maybe they were fictional to begin with) when reading out-loud a passage of completely engaging poetry was a commonplace feature of conversations and general "hanging out"? Why is it that I now have to enjoy poetry alone, in secret, with no one to share a particularly funny or well-written or beautiful line with?

Take my most recent adoration of Robert Hass's poetry, for example. Hass is a well-respected poet of our current time, and he is a professor in the same department from which I received one of my undergraduate degrees five years ago. Regrettably though, while I was still at Berkeley, I never took a course with him, and even more regrettably, (despite the fact that I study language in poetry) I'd never even read a single one of his poems until years after I'd moved to another university. It wasn't until Saveur printed a poem by Hass that I first encountered his work, and from that first poem, I was instantly hooked.

While he writes about so many different subjects, what I love most about Hass are his writings on California and of food. There's something about the way he captures the essence of the Bay Area experience that is so perfect and so charming: he's the one person I've found who is able to put the character, beauty, and mood that I try so hard to convey with images (because I can't find the words) into actual, precise words on a page. And I love the pithiness and brevity in the way he does it -- the entirety of one stanza of the poem "The Beginning of September" consists of merely two words:

ripe blackberries

...and such perfect words they are.

The plum tree in my backyard has been filling the sky with purple dots everywhere, making me think of Hass's lines about plums every time I look outside my window. I didn't have ripe blackberries around, but I did have a few punnets of boysenberries, which are like blackberries, except more so bursting with tiny nuggets of sweet juice. So this boysenberry and plum cobbler is my version of an edible sunset at dusk. Topped with fistfuls of flaky and lightly salty scone dough, the alternating tartness of plums and sweetness of boysenberries create a tenderly complex fruit compote beneath the cobbler crust. It's what I sat around eating during the sunset yesterday, spooning fruit and scone into my mouth, looking out the window, and thinking about whether Hass was right about my plum tree's movements:

Each thing moves its own way

in the wind. Bamboo flickers,

the plum tree waves, and the loquat

is shaken.

--from Robert Hass's "The Beginning of September"

[top recipe: click on photo for a larger image]

Read on for recipe....