The Chef Apprentice

Feeling wistful, I stopped by Oliveto the other week. I only wanted to stay long enough to chat with friends, clear out my locker and depart with my shoes and my knife bag.

But when I entered the kitchen, I wasn't ready for any abrupt goodbyes. And so I decided to grab a white jacket and an apron, and work for a few more hours.

My first task, assigned by chef de cuisine Paul Berglund, was to peel and finely mince four heads of garlic for a beef ragu he was preparing.

The garlic didn't take long - perhaps 20 minutes. When I started at Oliveto, such a task might have taken an hour or more.

After that was done, Berglund assigned me to slow-roast a few trays of Early Girl tomatoes. This was a moment of culinary convergence.

At home, my wife and I had accumulated a bumper crop of homegrown Early Girls and Brandywines. Roasting them had come to mind.

But until my serendipitous locker-clearing visit to Oliveto, I had never learned the restaurant's technique for slow-roasted tomatoes.

My visit provided further evidence that hanging around a kitchen can be a transformative experience.

Slow-roasting is a fine way to process tomatoes at the end of the season.

The caramelized, shrunken tomatoes exude the intensity of Italian sun-dried tomatoes or the finest imported tomato paste.

Here's the basic technique: Take 6 to 8 pounds of tomatoes and cut them into uniform sizes. If you have Early Girls, you can slice them in half. Bigger tomatoes, such as Brandywines, must be cut into quarters or eighths.

Heat your oven to 350 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment, and lay the tomatoes skin-side down on it. Sprinkle the pieces with sugar, then salt, then olive oil, then sprigs of fresh thyme, as you see to the left.

Place your tray in the oven. Leave it there for 30 minutes, then check. If your tomatoes are dry, like some Early Girls, you might need to add a bit of water. Turn the temperature down to 275 degrees.

Continue to roast until the tomatoes have collapsed on themselves and their sweet-salty juices have reduced to the consistency of a light syrup. This might take an hour. Pull from the oven and allow to cool. When done, they will look like those in the pan above to the right.

Serve roasted tomatoes in a salad, or use them as a base for pasta sauce. You may also can them or freeze them - to be reminded of summer, even in the coldest of months.

The photo at top shows simple roasted tomatoes with ricotta salata, olive oil and sprigs of thyme.

Grilling peaches and plums sounds easy, and it is, with the right heat and equipment.

The goal is to sear the flat side of the split fruits at just the right temperature, so their sugars caramelize but don't burn.

Then you flip the flat side over, apply a glaze to it and leave the fruit halves on the heat long enough to set the glaze, without burning the skin side (bottom) of the fruit.

I'm hardly an expert, since I have done it a total of once. On the other hand, I grilled a few hundred split peaches and plums in my single experience, so I know more than many cooks.

You have a few choices here. If you are using a charcoal or gas grill, you can sear the fruits right on the grill, or put a cast iron skillet on the grill and sear the fruits in the skillet. I would recommend the latter.

Alternately, you can sear the fruits right on your stove, using the pan of your choice. I'm sure it would work fine, and allow you to control the heat better. On the other hand, the smoky flavor of the fire goes well with peaches, and there is something mystical and primordial about the open flame.

Grilled stonefruits

Ingredients (serves 20 or so)

About 20 peaches or plums, halved, pits removed

1/2 cup of peach jam, preferably homemade

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Spanish sherry vinegar, water and sugar to taste

Olive oil

Preparation

Before splitting fruits, make your glaze. Liquify your jam in a blender, and add water, a few tablespoons at a time, until it blended, but still coats a spoon. Add cinnamon and then sugar, salt and vinegar until you get a taste you prefer - slightly tangy, but still peachy and not too thin.

Split your fruits with a paring knife, remove pits and lay on a sheet pan. Heat a grill or skillet to medium heat. Brush halves with oil. Place on grill. Leave there 3 to 5 minutes, checking frequently with tongs or a spatula.

You will surely have hot spots on your grill or skillet. Adjust heat and move fruits around so they sear evenly. When caramelized but not burnt, flip over, apply glaze with a brush and push to the sides of the heat so the glaze sets, but the bottoms don't burn.

When ready (in a minute or two) place on serving platters and enjoy.

Before working at Oliveto, I developed my own recipe for panzanella, a tomato and bread salad that has multiple versions throughout central Italy.

Stuart's version? Take slices of frozen sliced bread from the ridge, toast them and rub them with a half a clove of garlic. Then mix together wine vinegar, olive oil, basil, onions and other ingredients, and fold in sliced tomatoes and the bread.

It's a pretty tasty dish if you eat it immediately, but the bread can get soggy quickly -- not the best technique for a dinner party.

At Oliveto, the chefs have a more elegant approach. They prepare golden croutons of bread, toasted in olive oil. They toss the croutons with the salad at the last moment, adding a nice crunch. And since there is plenty of olive oil in the croutons, there's no need to add any to the dressing.

My recommendation? If you are going to make croutons, make a mess of them, using one or two loafs of bread. Then freeze the remainder. They freeze very well and are delicious with soups and salads.

Panzanella (serves 8)

Ingredients
One half loaf Pugliese bread, such as Acme or Bella Bru
2 red onions
1 cucumber
6-8 tomatoes, preferably of varying colors and textures.
1 small bunch basil
3/4 cup olive oil
1/3 cup to 1/2 cup red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper

Equipment:
Bowls, sheet trays lined with parchment

Preparation
Pour 1/2 cup of olive oil into a large bowl. Add half the basil, removed from stems. Let sit.
 
Cut crusts off of bread. To do this, cut loaf in half, creating a flat surface on which the half loaf can rest on your cutting board. Then use a serrated knife to carefully cut off crusts. (Reserved crusts can be saved, frozen, toasted, and ground up for bread crumbs.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Using your fingers, tear bread into chunks the size of a quarter. Toss in bowl with olive oil. Add more oil, if needed, to thoroughly coat.

Spread bread pieces on one or two parchment-lined sheet pans. Remove basil leaves and reserve. Place in oven. Check and stir after 10 minutes. Croutons are done when pieces are uniformly golden, but not dark brown, as seen to the left. (Croutons can be prepared a day, or several hours, in advance.)

Prepare onions into thin slices (a half julienne) and toss into a bowl. Add 1/3 cup vinegar and a generous sprinkle of salt.

Peel skins off of cucumber and slice it in half lengthwise. Then slice into half moons about 3/16 of an inch thick. Add to bowl along with reserved basil leaves.

Slice tomatoes into uniform wedges, about the size of ping-pong balls, and place in a bowl.

When ready to serve, mix tomatoes with the marinated onions and cucumber and fold in the croutons. Add remaining basil leaves, torn in pieces. Adjust salt, and add black pepper to taste. Arrange on plates. Serve.

Variations: Feel free to add or substitute green beans, capers, green onions or other seasonal ingredients. The tomatoes are the most important part - they must be fresh and ripe, bursting with flavor. 

If you've visited the farmers markets lately, you've probably noticed a dazzling array of gypsy peppers, red bell peppers and Italian frying peppers.

Most of the year, sweet peppers cost $4 a pound or more and come from Mexico or elsewhere. By comparison, the current local crop costs one fourth of that price. The flavors are incomparable.

In other words, now is the time to have a pepper party.

Before interning at Oliveto, I had never fried any sweet peppers. My usual technique was to char them on the grill, remove their skins and then add them to a dish - a labor intensive process.

But at Oliveto, the chefs have shown me a time-honored method for frying these summer gems. In recent weeks, I became the pepper prep cook. Day after day, my job was to cut up boxes of peppers, blister them in hot pans and then finish them with a dramatic deglazing of balsamic vinegar and fresh basil.

The end result was sweet and tangy -- a dish that goes well with lamb, grilled fowl or fish. The high heat caramelizes the sugars in the peppers, and the balsamic vinegar and basil give the dish a final flavor punch.

Warning: If you prepare this dish at home, there's a high likelihood you will make a mess of your stove top or splatter yourself with hot oil. So be careful. But be bold. These peppers fit that description.

Keep reading for the recipe.

A summer gratin? Most people have never heard of such a thing.

In our household, a gratin usually means slices of russet potatoes, baked in herb-soaked milk and aged Gruyere cheese. It's simple and elegant fare, but its a winter dish. Gratins are for winter, right?

Wrong. There are other forms of gratin -- such as tian, a Provencal mix of summer vegetables. At Oliveto, the chefs have recently been preparing platters of tians for the cafe and restaurant.

If you are looking for ways to marry and intensify the flavors of tomato, eggplant, peppers, squash or zucchini, this is a recipe to try. The basic technique is to prepare a rosette of sliced fresh tomatoes, alternated with other vegetables that have been cooked or grilled. The photo above shows the result before baking.

Superlative food sometimes springs from serendipity.

It unlikely, for instance, that someone set out to create the first wine or the first vinegar. All were accidents involving grape juice.

That brings me to this week's topic - throw-together pasta.

Throw-together pasta is just as its name implies - it is serendipitous, done in a hurry. In my college days, throw-together pasta consisted of spaghetti, butter and Kraft Parmesan cheese. I've since graduated to higher levels of experimentation.

Last week, my wife celebrated her birthday. After working a long shift at the restaurant, I took the train home knowing that she deserved - and was expecting - a dinner worthy of this day.

In the refrigerator was a chunk of pancetta, a chunk of pecorino cheese, and many, many chunks of roasted summer squash.

In our larder sat several pounds of homegrown tomatoes, along with red onions, olive oil and imported conchiglie (pasta shells).

From my experience at Oliveto, I knew that all of these could be married together. So for Micaela's birthday dinner, we enjoyed some throw-together pasta.

For the full recipe, go here.

Many of you out there likely grew up spooning canned tomato soup into your little mouths. (I did.)

Possibly, you liked it, or liked it initially. (I did.) But then, after your twentieth or so lunch of this canned potage, you slammed your spoon down on the table and told mom or dad: "No more tomato soup!"

What a shame.

Tomato soup, made fresh and in season, is a real treat. You can serve it straight up, cold or warm, or make it an elegant starter for a meal with any number of herbs, cheeses, croutons or garnishes.

To the left you see a cold soup of Brandywine tomatoes, served with a swirl of sweet pepper cream.
 
Best of all, tomato soup is an easy way to take care of scads of tomatoes that are now hanging off your plants or in market.

How do you turn them into soup? No problem.

All you need are the right tools for removing seeds or skin after you briefly cook the tomatoes. A food mill or conical strainer (also known in restaurants as as China cap) is essential.
A blender is also helpful if you want a silky smooth texture.

A recent posting on the Food Blog Alliance site urged writers not to use overused adjectives such as "nice," "wonderful" or "delicious" when writing about food.

Since I tend to dislike edicts even more than clichés, let me say this about the lentil soup recipe I am about to offer:

It is wonderful. It would be nice for you to try it. And if you did, you'd find this soup to be delicious.

Okay, maybe I could work harder in describing why a mere lentil soup deserves the forbidden D-word.

But believe me, it does. There is something about slow cooking of dried porcini mushrooms, wine and lentils that leads to magic. If you properly execute this dish, throwing in generous amounts of finely diced vegetables and finely chopped herbs, you will have a soup that is as complex and brooding as Caravaggio painting.

To read the rest of this posting, with a full recipe, go here:

Just like Popeye, the Chef Apprentice is in love with Olive Oil.

So today, in my column for The Bee, I offer summaries of three Oliveto sauces and salsas that make creative use of this staple of the Italian kitchen.

I promised you recipes, and so here they are:

One is an herbaceous marinade for fresh mozzarella balls, like the ones you see in the photo.


You can find the recipe here.

Another summarizes the Oliveto method of making aioli and other variants, which the Italians call maionese.

You can find that here.

The last is a salsa rustica, a mix of olive oil, herbs, cornichons and hard boiled eggs that you can drizzle over roast meats and other dishes.

(Yes, you could try it on your breakfast cereal, but I wouldn't advise it.)

Before I started interning at Oliveto, I didn't know beans about cooking green vegetables.

Generally, I would steam veggies such as broccoli, green beans and chard, with mixed results. Far too often I would let them steam too long, or cut them up irregularly so that not all pieces cooked evenly.

Rule #1 at Oliveto: Cut or sort your vegetables into uniform sizes.

Rule #2: Blanch vegetables in boiling salted water.

Rule #3: Remove vegetables just before they are done, drain and spread them out on a sheet of parchment to cool quickly.

Yesterday, I blanched some green beans for a salad that included rice, garbanzo beans, red onion, pine nuts, tomato and basil. Here's a basic recipe, which you can modify based on what's in your fridge:

If you are like me, you are always in search of old and new ways to use tomatoes at this time of year.

At Oliveto last week, we served up slices with a soft, herby and slightly tangy mix of marinated fresh mozzarella cheese, capers, and cucumbers.

This dish is so easy that even an intern could pull it off.

Just be careful in chopping all those herbs.

(And no, you cannot just throw them in the food processor. If you do, please don't tell me about it.)

For months, I've watched cooks at Oliveto turn their arms blue as they whipped up batches of aioli.

Yesterday it was my turn.

Aioli, which tops many a salad and fish dish at the restaurant, refers to an emulsified mix of oil, garlic and egg yolks. Traditionally, aioli didn't include egg. Mustard, garlic and even potato was used to achieve the desired emulsion.

Our recipe Friday was a more modern version. It called for four egg yolks, four cloves of mortared garlic, salt, two cups each of mixed olive oil and grape seed oil and a splash or two of red wine vinegar.

The initial whisking of eggs and addition of olive oil is the most crucial part of the process. "This is where you can make or break an aioli," said Canales.

Some cooks, he said, add too much oil at first or don't whisk quickly enough. As he said this, the whisk in his right hand was a blur.

Then he gave the whisk to me. It was my job to keep whipping the aioli with my right hand while drizzling a steady -- not shaky -- stream of oil into the bowl with a ladle in my left hand.

At one point, I changed hands and started whisking with my left. That was an utter failure.

To my surprise, Canales added a few tablespooons of water at a couple of points in the process. That prevented the aioli from seizing up and getting too thick.

After many minutes of whisking, our aioli was done. We added some chopped olives, and the aioli was ready for service.

That night, it was married with a frito misto of battered and fried peppers, beans and onions. A vegetarian's delight.

So now the veil has been lifted on another mystery of sauce making. I will now do some aioli experimentation in my home kitchen, and report back with recipes.

In my column today, I swoon about a pepper cream sauce that Brian Murphy, a sous chef at Oliveto, whipped up effortlessly last week.

Actually, it was only effortless for him. I did all the prep work.

But I'm glad I did. The final product was well worth it.

Blended with a mix of red and yellow peppers, this sauce is smooth and velvety, rich with the sweetness of summer. Yet it also offers a slight kick at the end - a tinge of hotness that comes from garlic and red pepper flakes.

As promised in the column, here is a home version I whipped up the other night and served to some friends at a dinner party:

If you are a fan of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, you probably buy chunks of it. You grate them and devour them.

Eventually you are left with rinds that are too small to grate, but too precious to throw away. If you are like me, these rinds pile up in the cheese bin of the fridge.

At $16 a pound or more, how could you possibly throw them away?

Then the time comes to utilize these rinds. Tossing them in a stock or soup is a time-honored tradition. So is simmering them with fresh tomatoes for a pasta sauce.

Yet there are other ways to utilize these rinds. Here's a method I learned from a line chef at Oliveto, after I asked him about pasta recipes for a dinner party.

To read the rest of this post, with a recipe and more photos, go here.

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth

In my column today in The Bee, I express sympathy with home gardeners who get stuck with a bottomless bounty of squash. I also summarize Oliveto's basic approach to dealing with this bounty -- roasting the squash into golden nuggets, which are then baked in creamy gratin.

Yet there are other possibilities. One preventative method is to pick the blossoms from the squash plant, batter them and fry them. To the right, you see fried squash blossoms filled with Primosalle Siciliano sheep's milk cheese, a simple and satisfying way to slow down your plant's production.

If a gratin seems too fussy, there are other ways to deploy roast squash. Here is a basic recipe I threw together last weekend, inspired by pasta-cooking techniques at Oliveto:

Sausage, tomato and squash fettuccine (serves 3-4)

Ingredients

1/3 pound Italian pork sausage, preferably without fennel
Two large ripe tomatoes
1/4 red onion, cut into thin slivers
11/2 cups roasted squash
6 large leaves of fresh basil, chopped
1/3 pound fettuccine or other pasta
Olive oil
Kosher salt
Pecorino cheese

Preparation

Bring water to boil in a stock pot. While water is heating, saute marble-size chunks of sausage in a large skillet until done. Remove meat from pan and drain on paper towels. Add onions to skillet and a tablespoon of oil, if needed, and saute until tender on medium heat. When water in stock pot reaches boil, add tomatoes for one minute. Remove with a slotted spoon, cool, remove skins and slice into quarter inch cubes. Add salt and pasta to boiling water.

As pasta is cooking, add tomatoes and sausage to skillet and cook on medium high heat until sauce thickens. Add squash. When pasta is done, add to skillet along with a half cup of pasta water. Cook at high heat, mixing sauce into the pasta.

When sauce and pasta are melded together and emulsified, check seasoning and add salt if necessary. Use tongs to arrange on plates and top with Pecorino cheese and basil. Serve.

Sometimes it's best not to tell your dinner guests what you are about to serve them.

Sometimes you should just watch their eyes light up as they try that first bite, and then reveal what you've prepared.

This is one of those dishes.

Tonnato, otherwise known as tuna sauce, is a classic summer dish from the Piedmont of Italy, the northwestern part of the boot.

The Piemontese have been making tuna sauces for centuries. Sophisticated food lovers flock to the Piedmont every year, partly to try distinct regional dishes such as vitello tonnato (veal with tuna sauce).

Yet if you were to tell your dinner guests that you were serving whipped tuna and anchovies as part of an appetizer, some of them might be tempted to say, "Can we just move onto the entree?"

Read the rest of this posting, with a full recipe, here.

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth

Readers of this blog may assume I'm a lush, because I sometimes offer up a cocktail recipe on Mondays, a working day for most folks.

Just to be clear, Monday is one of my two days off.

A chef-in-training is entitled to refine his cocktail recipes on a day off, no?

This one is a classic: To the right you see my version of a mojito, made with the same type of mint that is used in Cuba - yerba buena.

As it happens, I have yerba buena growing in my herb garden. We use it for teas and marinades. If you don't have a patch, grow one. Or find this mint at a good Latino market or, possibly, growing in the wild.

Yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii) has a much more subtle flavor than fresh spearmint or peppermint, which is commonly used in mojitos.

My mojito recipe is less sweet, and more robust with rum, than many of the versions you find in bars. Keep reading for the recipe. 

Just a few days from now, millions of Americans will fire up the grill for the Fourth of July, and many will cook pork ribs.

Please excuse this act of treason, but I've come to the conclusion that barbecuing ribs is not the best method for preparing them.

Ribs need slow cooking, and in my experience it is difficult to control the heat on either a charcoal grill or a gas grill. A smoker or grill will produce ribs with an intense, smoky taste, but again - excuse the treason - I'd rather taste my pork ribs without the smokiness.

Everyone has different tastes. Mine point me to the oven. An oven, particularly a convection oven, keeps the ribs moist and succulent. And if you follow my technique on a spice rub for the ribs, you will get the smoky flavor you seek without the smoke.

To read the full recipe, click here.

If you are feeling bored about your life, your job or your marriage, it's probably because you are not taking chances.

You are not challenging yourself to break out of your rut, and no one is challenging you.

The same thing can happen with cooking. Many home cooks and restaurant chefs make the same food over and over. They play it safe. If a dish is easy to make and popular with family or customers, why mess with success?

After nearly three months at Oliveto, I've been forced to challenge my food sensibilities. I've tried and savored dishes I'd never considered before, such as sea urchin flan.

And I'm pushing myself at the marketplace.

The other day, I stood in the freezer section of a discount grocery, looking at a package of frozen squid. While I've long enjoyed calamari and other squid dishes in restaurants, I had never prepared them at home. Why? I don't know. So I bought the squid.

As it happened, Mark Bittman had just published a recipe in the New York Times for sautéed squid with garlic, chili flakes and bread crumbs. I decided to give it a try.

Bittman's version -- which you can find here, scroll down to the third recipe -- was a stand-alone dish. I decided to marry it with pasta. So I increased the amount of garlic and chili flakes in his recipe, substituted fresh oregano for basil, and added pasta water to emulsify the sauce.

The result was delicious and so easy to make. 

To read the full recipe, go here.

I've been making meat sauces for years, but only now - after two months as an apprentice at Oliveto - have I learned some of the secrets behind a superlative ragu.

A ragu is a basic meat sauce for pasta. The first authentic version I tried was years ago, in Emilia-Romagna, the region of Italy that invented the classic Bolognese sauce.

That first ragu was bold and brooding - much like a Pavarotti opera. The sauce was entangled in a nest of perfectly cooked tagliatelle, with the flavor infused into the noodle.

Numerous cookbooks offer suggestions on making a Bolognese sauce and other forms of ragu. Yet nearly all of these recipes, in my opinion, are flawed. Most suggest cooking a mixture of diced onion, carrots and celery before adding your meat to brown it. The sauce that results tends to be lifeless or, even worse, infused with chunks of burnt vegetables.

At Oliveto, the chefs have reversed the sequence. First they brown the meat and then allow the vegetables to steam, or "sweat," on top of the meat. This process produces a dark layer of caramelized meat solids at the bottom of the pan -- a foundation of flavor. This foundation, or "fond" as the chefs call it, is then deglazed by the natural juices of the vegetables when added on top. This is allowed to cook down so the fond is rebuilt and deglazed two or three times.

Paul Bertolli, the former head chef at Oliveto, describes the technique in his 2003 book, "Cooking By Hand." Bertolli's successor, Paul Canales, who had a role in developing this technique, has continued to refine and perfect it since becoming executive chef.

Cooking a ragu in this manner is not difficult, but it cannot be whipped out in an hour or two. A ragu is truly slow food -- time-tested and refined by Italian grandmothers over many centuries.

For a recipe and more photos, go here.

We now interrupt our ongoing coverage of Oliveto's Oceanic Dinners to sing the praises of Corti Brothers, Sacramento's beloved Italian grocery.

Corti's has the city's best butcher shop, and I frequent it regularly. I especially like the lesser-known cuts of beef they offer, such as hanger steak and skirt steak.

In the photo you see a Corti skirt steak I grilled at medium heat for 5 minutes on each side. All I did was salt and drizzle olive oil on the steak before grilling. It needed nothing more.

You can buy cheaper skirt steaks elsewhere, but even at $7.99 a pound, the Corti's version is a bargain. I've never found another so flavorful and tender, yet capable of holding together on the grill.

The accompaniment was some steamed Yukon gold potatoes tossed with olive oil, tarragon vinegar and fresh tarragon from the garden. The green stuff? Beet greens sauteed with some minced green garlic.

This meal took about 15 minutes. This is the kind of food my wife Micaela and I make at home - simple, straight-forward fare.

Fancy stuff? Heck, I can get that at the restaurant.

With any luck, the Chef Apprentice has challenged and broadened your palate with entries about goat sugos, green sauces and ancient Venetian fish dishes.

In that same spirit, I offer you a Torta di Verdura - a sweet tart made with chard and spinach.

Hold on, you say - leafy vegetables in a dessert? Is this a sneaky way to get kids to eat their greens?

Perhaps. Or maybe it's just an inventive use of chard and spinach. Torta di Verdura originated in Lucca, a proud and picturesque town in western Tuscany. Carol Field, author of "Italy in Small Bites" and other books, writes that this is a ubiquitous pastry in Lucca, and for good reason.

Torta di Verdura has a sumptuous texture and flavor, with a filling that includes pine nuts, candied fruit, cooked rice, eggs, sugar, Parmesan cheese, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and, of course, the greens that powered Popeye.

It is also popular in the Oliveto Cafe. Pastry chef Jenny Raven brought it my attention when, in an act of sympathy, she brought me a slice while I was slaving away. My taste buds and energy levels were quickly supercharged.

"Can I have the recipe?" I asked, and she soon produced a photocopied page from Carol Field's "Small Bites" cookbook, a followup to "The Italian Baker."

Go to the jump to read my version of this torta, which I modified based on ingredients in my home pantry. Instead of currants and pine nuts, I used Sultana raisins and walnuts. Instead of candied orange peel, I used Meyer lemon peel. And I reduced the sugar overall, to suit my taste in desserts.

This may come as a shock to you, but chefs have been known to enjoy a cocktail or two in their off-hours.

Being creative people, they sometimes invent cocktails or rediscover old ones. And sometimes those cocktails are so good they end up on the Oliveto menu.

To the right, you can see a bay leaf and lime martini, courtesy of Curtis Di Fede, a sous chef at Oliveto.

Curtis' cocktail is easy to prepare, with some advance planning.

Drop a fresh bay leaf into a mason jar filled with vodka, and wait at least three hours. Squeeze some fresh lime juice into a cocktail shaker (1/4 to 1/2 of a lime will do). Add two shots of vodka and a small drizzle of Cointreau. If you have a sweet tooth, add a half shot of simple syrup. (2 to 1 hot water and sugar.) Fill with ice. Shake, strain into a martini glass and serve with a lime peel.

As Curtis notes, "It's kind of like a margarita with vodka and bay leaf."

And it's delicious. If you get the right balance, there's a strong hint of bay leaf, a hint of lime and a tinge of orange liqueur lurking in the background.

When he is not cooking incredible food, engaging in kitchen pranks or making plans for his new restaurant in Napa, Curtis is also focused on one of his pet projects.

For the last four years, he's been collecting rubber bands from asparagus bundles at Oliveto, and turning them into a an ever-growing rubber band ball.

He is very proud of this ball, as you can see from the photo. Unfortunately, Chef Paul Canales is not equally excited. So Curtis only works on this project in the back pantry kitchen, out of sight of the chef.

Photos by Stuart Leavenworth

In my column today in The Bee, I lay out the procedure for making shaved asparagus -- a dish that requires no cooking, just some tender spears, fine slicing and the finest Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

This dish is a regular on the menu at Oliveto. Last night, I prepared it at home with some Riverdog Farm asparagus. It accompanied roast chicken and potatoes with rosemary.

This is what it the salad looked like -- at least for a few seconds.

Then it was gone.

On the jump is the text of my column, in case you have trouble finding it on The Bee's Web site.

It's springtime. The hills are green. Herbs and leafy vegetables are abundant in the markets, and so a chef wants to paint from a seasonal palate.

The photo to the right shows what Oliveto calls a "chlorophyll sauce." Not the prettiest of names, but an apt description of a sauce made from herbs and fish stock.

It's actually fairly easy to make, and beautiful to behold. It also has a wondrous complexity that goes well with many kinds of seafood, such as scallops or halibut. Read on for instructions, which I've adapted from a restaurant-size recipe that was demonstrated to me by Oliveto's Paul Berglund:

The Chef Apprentice has now graduated to fish preparations at Oliveto. This week I prepared, from start to finish, an ancient Venetian fish dish known as a saor.

A saor is similar to a marinade, except that you add it to the fish after it has been cooked. The marinade is slightly sweet, savory and sour -- hence the name, saor.

The Venetians developed saor as a fish preservation technique, similar in concept (but not taste) to pickled herring. Handled with care, a saor is a sumptuous compliment to a delicate flat fish such as petrale sole.

Most recipes for saor, including this one by Mario Batali, use vinegar for the acid in the dish. At Oliveto, Chef Paul Canales likes to tweak with tradition. The saor we prepared featured grapefruits - ruby red grapefruits. Read on to learn how we made it.

Here's a way to rebel against misleading media reports that eating pork can lead to swine flu. Make yourself a homemade sugo -- an Italian meat sauce -- to go with your pork chop.

A sugo is a rustic and intense meat sauce that is regularly spooned on meat dishes at Oliveto, the restaurant where I am interning. Executive Chef Paul Canales developed this version for home cooks.

The recipe involves a lot of work and time, but the payoff is huge. The final sauce can be frozen in ice-cube trays and used for months. Try it on pork scallopine, pork chops or roast pork. If you don't like pork, make it with other cuts of meat, such as scraps of lamb or goat.

To read the full recipe, go here.


Photo of Paul Canales by Stuart Leavenworth.

So am I sick of food now that I work with it five days a week?

No way. I still maintain a garden plot. It is currently producing peas, broccoli, arugula, parsley, spinach, onions and strawberries that keep me busy. I also hit the Sacramento farmers market this morning, where, on a lark, I purchased some Medjool dates.

Dates are the fruits of a desert palm, Phoenix dactylifera. According to Harold McGee, author of "On Food and Cooking," farmers in the Middle East and Africa began irrigating and pollinating these date palms more than 5,000 years ago.

The dates I purchased today came from a more local artificial oasis. They were grown in the Imperial Valley, where water from the Colorado River has transformed the desert into a vast farming region.

So what did I do with my Southern Calfornia dates? I married them with a Northern California goat cheese. On the jump are photos and a recipe for California Medjool dates stuffed with goat cheese, pistachios, lemon and rosemary.