I was on Cloud 9 on Saturday night…or rather, I was *at* Cloud 9 (A Comedy of Multiple Organisms), Caryl Churchill’s 1978 two-act play dealing with preconceptions of gender and sexuality. Act I and II are 25 years apart based on the characters’ ages, but in a wonderful twist, the first act is set in colonial Africa as an allegory of the repressive attitudes of the 1950s, and the second act is set in the late 1970s, which was current day at the time that the play was written (although the dialog was pretty timeless, and could be today). Furthermore, the same seven actors play different characters in each of the two acts, regardless of gender or race: the character of Betty, for example, is played by Evan Buliung in the first act (he was magnificent in the white dress and garters) and by Ann-Marie MacDonald in the second act. Add to this that two of the actors – Megan Follows and Ann-Marie MacDonald – are well known even to me, a cultural cretin who has to be invited to events like this by my more artsy friends.

The interesting thing about this Toronto production of Cloud 9 is how they’ve made the production transparent through the use of social media. CBC’s Spark podcast had a clip on this (starting at around 40 minutes into the January 24th/26th podcast) featuring the director, Alisa Palmer, discussing how they put information about the play, casting, characters, staging, rehearsals and behind-the-scenes comments online before the play ever opened: something rare in the somewhat secretive world of pre-opening-night theatre. Rose Plotek, the assistant director, wrote many of the blogs posts on the main site (cross-posted to their Facebook page), but there are also very candid contributions from actors Blair Williams and Ann-Marie MacDonald, as well as video clips of rehearsals and interviews:

Cloud 9 is playing at the Panasonic Theatre until February 21st. Great script, excellent actors and fabulous costumes make for a fun night out.

I spent this afternoon at the initial planning meeting of CrisisCampTO, the Toronto manifestation of Crisis Commons. Although this is happening here and now in response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti 12 days ago, Crisis Commons has a broader mandate:

We are an international volunteer network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world

We’re here today to work on anything that can be done to help, in collaboration with other Crisis Commons teams all over the world, on the various projects that have been defined by Crisis Commons based on requests from NGOs to fill a need that they have. The bulk of the projects fall under the category of software development, but there are also teams for social media, logistics and more general duties.

Our first goal today is to find a development project for the bulk of the Toronto team to get involved with, and learn how to plug into other Crisis Commons groups around the world. There is quite a bit of infrastructure already in place to connect up, including IRC channels (retro, I will definitely need a refresher course) and voice conference lines, plus a rapidly growing wiki.

I have a pretty broad range of skills to apply here: although I don’t really write code any more – unless I’m really inspired – I can do all the other stuff around development (requirements, testing, documentation). I also do a lot of social media stuff, and have attended more unconferences than you can shake a stick at, so can help with the local social media efforts such as wiki gardening, Facebook and Twitter updates, and more.

The main goal of today is to get ready for next Saturday’s CrisisCampTO (time and venue to be announced shortly), by getting some basic team structure in place and selecting one or more projects to which we will be contributing. That way, when newbies show up next week, they can start contributing immediately.

One of the things that we learned about today is Sahana, an open source disaster management system that was created in response to the Sri Lanka tsunami in 2004. There’s a Sahana instance set up just for Haiti, although it still needs a lot of content added, and possibly some development to add specific requested functionality. We also saw OpenMRS, an open source medical records system, and Ushahidi, an SMS-to-web service that accepts requests for assistance sent by text message to a specific shortcode, and makes them available to aid agencies. If you check the feed from Haiti, you can see requests for food, water and medical assistance that have been received, translated if required, and logged for followup. In summary, there are a ton of free, open source projects that can be applied to the Haiti disaster; some of them as is, others requiring some customization. This is were we all come in.

This is cross-posted from my business blog, since I couldn’t decide where it belonged.

After spending the summer and part of the fall as a volunteer at the local St. Andrew’s farmer’s market, I thought that I’d seen the last of that great group of people – the farmers, the Farmers’ Market Ontario team and the other volunteers – until next year, but I didn’t count on the year-end review, celebration and luncheon hosted by FMO to bring us all together one last time in 2009. The purpose of the day is to review the progress of each of the markets this year, and bring together some ideas of what worked and didn’t work at the markets. Oh yeah, and we got to start the day with Angela Russo’s fresh-baked fruit muffins!

I especially like that they had assigned seats that mixed up the market volunteers, farmers and others so that we didn’t just clump together in our cliques: I was seated with two farmers and a volunteer from another market, none of whom I had met previously, and had great discussions with them.

There are five MyMarkets, each of which is certified by FMO to include only vendors who grow their own produce: East Lynn Park, Sick Kids Hospital, Bloor • Borden, Liberty Village, and Historic St. Andrew’s. The volunteers and/or market manager for each market gave a short presentation:

• East Lynn Park, taking place on Thursdays from 3-7pm: they’re a big-ish market with 15 vendors, drawing 18,000 shoppers over the entire season, which is roughly the same as last year. They were impacted by the city workers’ strike since some people were under the impression that the market was cancelled during that time; the lack of city-run facilities such as the wading pool meant that less people came out to the park and ended up as accidental shoppers. Since they block off the street during the market, they have issues with moving and setting up barricades; since they’re in a lower-density residential area, they also have more issues with parking for shoppers. They had some good ideas for next years, such as improving the MyMarket website to link to the individual market websites and other social media sites (I’m obviously in big agreement with that); since they don’t have any local restaurants giving cooking demos such as happens at other markets, they’d like to get that started as well. They also see the need for prepared food at the market to make it more of a destination for people. They have great community support, and involve local children’s groups and artists as well as providing community service opportunities for youths to do setup and teardown at the market each week. They also had a partnership with a local food bank, where food that would have probably been thrown out by the farmers at the end of the day went to the food bank. They had a number of green initiatives, such as Not Far From The Tree, handing out information. They also had a lot of child and family-oriented events such as face painting; obviously, this doesn’t work in all locations (such as ours) where the demographics are radically different, but lots of good ideas at work here.
• Sick Kids Hospital, taking place on Tuesdays 9am-2pm: this was the first hospital in Canada that allowed a farmers’ market to be held on its grounds, driven by their director of nutrition and food services. They just finished their second year; in 2008, they had 10,300 customers over the season, increasing to 12,000 in 2009. They obviously had a lot of traffic from the hospital staff, not just of Sick Kids but of the two other hospitals and many other businesses along University Avenue in the same area. They obviously have some different logistics issues than the rest of the markets, and have to be very cognizant of the fact that they’re set up in front of a very busy, fully functioning hospital, situated on a busy thoroughfare. They have a difficult time hosting events because of the location and the low numbers of volunteers.
• Bloor • Borden, taking place on Wednesdays 3-7pm. They see this a key community event that takes place in their neighbourhood, where the locals can come out and see their neighbours participating as volunteers, driven by three fairly active neighbourhood associations and supported by two of the local business associations. Just finished their second year, they had spent a lot of money in their first year on print, but found that word of mouth was most effective, as well as the cards that were mailed to homes or placed in local businesses. They combined this with on-the-street volunteers handing out fruit samples and the market cards to remind people that the market is back at the beginning of the season. They had a great idea for their weekly draws: “market bucks”, where the winner of the draw received four $5 vouchers to be spent at any vendor in the market. They also reorganized their layout to have a central social area with a coffee/tea stand run by a not-for-profit organization. They had several product feature days, some of them combined with cooking demos by local chefs, but some as simple as corn roasts or apples and honey. They had 12-13,000 customers throughout the 2009 season.They also took the food leftovers to a local charity, an idea that we should all be thinking about.
• Liberty Village, taking place on Sundays 9am-2pm. In its 3rd year, this is the probably the largest of the markets with 18 vendors including meat and cheese, as well as several local businesses and restaurants who did demonstrations or otherwise participated, although their attendance is lower than some others at about 9.500 for the year. However, they have less neighbourhood involvement since the residential area in Liberty Village is still growing and likely a very young (and single) demographic that are unlikely to be involved in volunteer activities. The area, however, is growing rapidly which is likely to ensure continued success for the market.
• Historic St. Andrew’s (that’s us!), taking place on Saturdays 9am-1pm. Colin Mooers, who was instrumental in getting the market starting and current heads up our volunteer committee, gave a presentation with me about our market:

To wrap up the morning, we had a session on what worked and didn’t work at the markets this year. Here’s some of the ideas that came up from everyone:

We stayed for a delicious lunch, including Angela Russo’s incomparable apple pie, but skipped out on the afternoon session on “innovative marketing made easy” featuring Lori Colborne.

All in all, a great day that generated a lot of great ideas.

I’m a strong believer that technology can be a way up for those in financially disadvantaged circumstances: without some computer skills, kids can’t compete in school, and don’t meet the minimum requirements for many jobs. One way that I can help – and probably many of you reading this – is to donate to programs that provide access to computers and training to people who can’t afford to buy them. There are a number of ways to do this: you can give money, you can give used computer equipment, you can give your time, and you can promote the programs to others who might do the same.

This week, I replaced my mother’s old computer, and was left with a working (although underpowered, by today’s standards) computer with keyboard and mouse. I immediately thought of Little Geeks, a program that refurbishes old computers, provides them for free to kids in need, along with 12 months of internet access and some training on how to use it. They use reBOOT Canada as their drop-off depot; reBOOT is a charitable organization that “provides computer hardware, training and technical service to other charities, non-profit organizations and individuals with limited access to technology”. I headed off to reBOOT yesterday to drop off the computer, and had a chat with Nicholas (I believe this was Nicholas Brinckman, the Executive Director). He mentioned that they’re trying to get funding from the Aviva Community Fund to build 50 learning centres across Canada, in partnership with community centres and schools.

If you support this idea, go to the reBOOT project page on the Aviva Community Fund site and vote for their project (registration required). You can vote once per day until this round of voting ends in 11 days, and I encourage you to drop in there daily to cast your vote if you believe that this is an important initiative. They make it easy to link to the page on Twitter and Facebook, so use your social network for good. You can also help out by dropping off your old computer equipment – and encouraging your employer to do the same when they sunset old computers, printers and other equipment – or volunteering some of your time to help with computer refurbishment.

Cross-posted to my business blog.

Sometimes, you just have to treat yourself, especially at the end of an extravagant birthday week. I traveled a lot last year, and racked up a lot of Aeroplan points. When it came time to make a trip to Germany for a conference this month, I decided to burn up some of those points and book a first class ticket. Air Canada does business class to Frankfurt, which is nice: they have the business class “pods” in the Boeing 777. I was too late to get a business class flight on the long weekend, so decided to book Lufthansa first class to Dusseldorf instead. Air Canada only has two classes of service, but Lufthansa has three: coach, business and first. I have to say, Lufthansa First is really wonderful.

Lars was pretty much my own personal flight attendant: there were only 4 of us in first class, and he had part-time help from the purser and another flight attendant, so I didn’t want for anything. He was so adorable, I wanted to tuck him into my bag and take him with me. As I got on the plane, he was there to greet me by name, put my bag overhead, give me pyjamas, slippers and a ladies toiletries bag, and bring me a drink and a dish of macadamia nuts. He served me Piper-Heidsieck champagne, talked me into having the caviar as an appetizer as he walked me through my dinner order, and when I accused him of being a bad influence by offering me dessert, he said “I am here to seduce you” (I’m quite sure that the literal German translation of that is less innuendo-laden than the English).

Although the food was obviously prepared ahead of time, it was expertly plated and quite good: as good as many restaurants that I’ve been to. An amuse bouche of a seared scallop with mango salsa and a dollop of avocado; then the caviar accompanied by finely chopped egg, chopped onion, sour cream and toast. Technically the caviar was one of the appetizers, but I had also ordered the roast guinea fowl, which was a few slices of quite moist (cold) meat on a bed of thinly sliced beets with hazelnuts scattered around. The main was salmon steamed with ginger, a bit overcooked but to be expected for food that was prepared at least an hour before, with quite good rice and bok choy. And of course, Lars remembered to bring my fish knife. I washed that down with a glass of a German white burgundy, then had a taste of a muscat dessert wine with a slice of Cambazola and a few grapes.

I never sleep well on planes, and this was no exception. Although the seat lies completely flat, it’s a bit hard and lumpy – I think the lumbar support sticks up in the wrong place if you sleep on your side. However, dozing for a couple of hours does take the edge off an overnight flight, and the afternoon departure from Toronto meant that it was only midnight in my brain when we arrived in Dusseldorf at 6am. I’m completely looking forward to the return flight, which will be in daylight so that I can enjoy the excellent service even more.

If money were no object, I’d travel like this all the time. Instead, I do it every 10 years or so, on points – I think that the last time I did a long haul first class flight was going to Australia in 2001, also on points. That makes it an especially nice treat when it does happen, but does make it hard to go back to cattle class the rest of the time.

First class on the ICE train from Dusseldorf to Ulm, on the other hand, was a big disappointment: probably the most uncomfortable premium class seats ever, very shallow, lacking about 3-4 inches of support under my legs. No power at the seats (although with the magnificent HP Mini, I didn’t need it for the 3-1/2 hour trip) and no wifi. The tray table didn’t reach far enough out to put the computer on and type for anyone with arms less than three feet long, which meant having the netbook on my lap. To be fair, it was on time, fast and efficient; but I’m not going to miss the train ride if I end up driving back up to Dusseldorf.

Another great recipe from Chris Zielinski from last week’s cooking demo

Ingredients

1 Quebec duck breast (magret from moulard duck)
Sea salt
Extra Virgin Olive oil
2 ripe peaches
Coriander seedlings

I [Chris] like to serve this recipe over an arugula salad with candied walnuts in summer or root vegetable barley in the fall. A nice accompanying sauce can be made by pouring off excess fat after cooking the duck and deglazing the pan with fig balsamic vinegar and add a couple dabs of cold butter to thicken before pouring over the duck.

To prepare the duck, turn breast over and remove duck filet. Gently remove small piece of silver skin with boning knife. (This step is no necessary but it does keep the breast from curling up when cooking.) Turn back over and lightly score skin to allow fat to render more quickly. Heat a thick bottomed or cast iron pan. Season duck breast with salt and pepper on all sides. Place breast skin side down in pan and cook over low heat to evenly brown and crisp skin while allowing fat to render off. You made need to pour the fat out of the pans a couple of times during cooking. After about 8- 10 minutes, skin should be thin and crisp. Turn over and cook for about 5 more minutes on very low heat. Remove from heat and allow to rest 7 minutes before cutting. Slice peaches in the mean time. Slice duck as thinly as possible. Layer slices of duck with peaches. Top with coriander seedlings and extra virgin olive oil.

Serves 2 as a main course, 3 as an appetizer

Here’s the recipe from last week’s cooking demo

Ingredients

6 boneless Lake Erie Pickerel filets
1 tbsp butter
1tbsp olive oil

3 ripe Ontario peaches
1 heirloom or vine ripe tomato
2 jalapeno peppers
½ tsp ginger
1 clove garlic
12 thai basil leaves
12 mint leaves
2 sliced scallions
Juice of 2 limes
1 tbsp white balsamic vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
Pinch sugar
Salt to taste

Dice peaches and tomatoes approximately ½ cm dice. Cut jalapeno peppers in half lengthwise. Discard seeds and stem. Fine dice jalapeno. Chop ginger and garlic fine. Coarsely chop Thai basil, scallions and mint. Place all chopped ingredients in bowl and gently mix. Mix all remaining ingredients in a separate bowl to create dressing. Pour over chopped mixture and season with salt if necessary. Salsa will taste better if it sits for at least 15 minutes before using. Salsa tastes better if it is made the same day as it’s being used.

Preheat a frying pan over medium heat. Add oil and butter. Season pickerel with salt and place flesh down in hot oil. Cook on one side for 3 minutes until light brown in color. Flip over and lower heat to crisp up skin and continue cooking until cooked through. Serve immediately topped with salsa.

Serves 6

Considering that I live a 7 minute walk away, it’s amazing that I’ve never been to Blowfish restaurant and sake bar. Never until last night, that is, when my neighbour Irene invited me out for birthday drinks and appetizers (I love my birthday week: with a lot of foodie friends, I eat very well this time of year).

We went fairly early, a bit after 6pm, so it wasn’t busy at all and the service was very attentive. Also, it was a Tuesday night, probably not their busiest night. I think that they changed our plates 3 times during the meal, and even came over and lowered the window blinds when the setting sun had Irene full in the eyes.

Before ordering, we decided on cocktails. I had a “chilli berries” saketini, made with sake, vodka, cassis, Thai chili, fresh mixed berries, lime juice and simple syrup to sweeten it slightly. Delicious, not too sweet, and with a bit of the chili heat as a finish. Irene opted for the “chilly breeze”, which was tequila, X-rated liqueur, sage, Thai chili, vanilla bean, lemongrass, thyme, black peppercorn, watermelon and lime juice. The tequila taste predominated, although nice complexity in the mix of fruit and spices until Irene accidentally bit into a black peppercorn, thinking it was a berry.

The food was, not to put too fine a point on it, great. Here’s what we had:

• We each had a Blowfish giant ebi shooter, which is a hand roll stuffed with an enormous (cooked) tiger prawn, mango, avocado, cucumber, lettuce, daikon sprout, tempura bits, spicy kewpie (Japanese mayonnaise) and tobiko (flying fish roe). Interestingly, the wrap was a very light and edible soy paper instead of nori (seaweed), each in different colours, that tasted very slightly sweet but did not detract from the filling. The best part is that it was served propped in what could only be described as an oversized shooter glass, which I assume is where the name came from. I will go back to Blowfish just for a drink and one of these in the future.
• We shared an order of steamed lobster dumplings, which looked just like the har gow that you would have at dim sum, but stuffed with lobster. Each one was nestled in a little pool of spicy tobanjan sauce, seated in a Chinese soup spoon. The server was thoughtful enough to ask, when we ordered, if we wanted an extra dumpling: the standard serving is three dumplings, and we agreed to the fourth so that we didn’t have to fight over the last one. Perfectly steamed and a nice complement of flavours, although it was easy to scoop up too much of the spicy sauce and overpower the lobster.
• We shared a spicy tuna roll, filled with (raw) tuna, negi (green onion), and spicy kewpie; this was done in a classic roll style with nori and sushi rice, rolled with the rice side out, then rolled in tempura bits. Six pieces to share, and very tasty. I like their use of tempura bits as a garnish: this showed up in the shooter hand roll as well, and gives a nice crunch.
• For our last shared plate, we had roasted miso-marinated black cod, a very generous portion of two pieces, served with asparagus spears. The flavour of the fish was amazing, the cod definitely coming through the complexity of the miso marinade. It was also incredibly rich, and I don’t think that I could have eaten the whole plate on my own.

We accompanied all of this with a Lillypilly Sauvignon Blanc; the acidity was a good complement to the richness of the dishes.

To finish, I indulged in the ginger creme brulee, and we both had the Lillypilly Noble Blend dessert wine, a botrytis-affected blend that approaches an ice wine in sweetness but with a fresh acidity and some complex fruit character.

For something that was originally proposed as “drinks and appetizers”, it turned into quite a splendid pre-birthday dinner.

I knew that I would like the people behind the Chicken Farmers of Canada social media the minute that I saw their Twitter bio:

And how can you not like a group that organizes a free Toronto Food Bloggers Meetup with an interesting panel of speakers at Edward Levesque’s Kitchen, complete with tasty chicken appetizers and free-flowing wine?

The topic of the evening was the decline of home cooking: hosted by Theresa Albert, nutritionist and cookbook author, and including Anna Withrow, food writer and founder of the LIVERight awards,  Amanda Laird, food blogger, and Ryan Anderson, Web strategist and PR blogger. Theresa started by passing around a copy of the recent NYT article by Michael Pollan (author of several books including The Omnivore’s Dilemma), “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”, contrasting the rise of food-related TV shows that fetishize cooking with the decline of anyone actually doing it. His article points out that the average American spends 27 minutes per day on food preparation, which is less than half the time required to watch one episode of most of the hugely popular shows on the Food Network; what’s wrong with this picture? Even the word “cooking” these days can mean opening a few cans and heating something in the microwave, rather than actual cooking from scratch: food researcher Henry Balzer said that washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it is considered cooking by most Americans (and probably Canadians) these days. Food TV has jump-started interest in food and cooking, but also created has fearfulness about the complexity: if someone can’t even figure out what the ingredients are or where to buy them, it stifles any adventurous nature that they might have had. And how do movies like “Julie and Julia” impact our popular culture around food? Cooking has shifted from being a matter of survival to an art form.

This shift to more prepared and processed foods has a health impact, too: typically, you’ll find more bad stuff such as fat, salt and weird chemicals in processed foods, and less good stuff such as fiber and vitamins. A few years ago, Damir and I switched to a mostly macrobiotic diet – which eschews processed foods – for several months, and I never felt so good: I lost some weight (which was not my primary goal) and had a lot more energy. Some of those eating habits stayed with us, resulting in almost no processed foods at home, lots of whole grains and raw vegetables, and semi-vegetarian eating habits; today for lunch, for example, we had brown rice with toasted sesame seeds and raw sunflower shoots, which was delicious. People on non-standard diets, whether macrobiotic, vegetarian or vegan, tend to cook more and eat better, although there always exceptions, like one vegetarian I know who lives on take-out cheese pizza.

Getting back to last night’s panel, Theresa opened with some words about food as the “center of our universe”, related to both health and culture. She realizes that what she shows to an audience is limited as a Food Network chef; as she put it, “I stand up there and chop shit…the producers decide what you see”, and related a story of the producers cutting out a segment because you could hear the bone crunching when she spatchcocked a chicken: an indication of how disconnected we have become from how food is created. Anna agreed, saying that we need to recreate that connection with the nutrients, and how packaged and fast food has separated us from that. Unlike the research shown in the NYT article, she doesn’t consider mixing fresh ingredients into prepared food to be “cooking”, but admits that it’s better than just using prepared food. She has canning parties with her friends, which shows a greater dedication to being aware of what you eat than many of us have.

Ryan and his girlfriend have embarked on an interesting culinary experiment: for a month (which they are halfway through), they are cooking everything from scratch. And by “scratch”, he means making everything from tortillas to butter. He said that he didn’t realize that he was that good of a cook until he started cooking with friends, and contrasted his skills with theirs; what we might consider basics such as making a chicken stock or a roux is intimidating to others.

Amanda discussed the influence of coming from a family where there was a home-cooked meal on the table every night: she follows recipes fairly religiously, and plans ahead for meals five nights each week to avoid becoming overwhelmed and ending up eating take-out junk. I’m not nearly that organized, but I also rarely use recipes so my cooking can usually accommodate whatever happens to be in the fridge. She also mentioned some good starter cooking tips on Pretty Savvy, including her suggestion to make YouTube your sous chef.

The three competing factors in food today are cost, health and time: you’re usually trading off on at least one of these, whether you’re eating at McDonalds (bad for your health), buying gourmet prepared foods at Whole Foods (your pocketbook suffers), or cooking meals from scratch at home (if you have the time). With a greater awareness of health issues – thanks to Super Size Me and a raft of other information sources – many of us are only making the cost/time tradeoff, and with the economy in the toilet, lots of people are okay with spending more time if it costs less. Theresa pointed out that there are a lot of ways to save a lot of time while still cooking good food from scratch. For one, start using your oven again; food TV is biased towards stovetop cooking, which typically takes constant attention, but most things cooked in the oven are tossed in there are left on their own for a while, freeing you up for other activities. The same is true of slow cookers: she suggested that a student heading off to university could be equipped with a slow cooker, a rice cooker and a few basic recipes, and eat healthily all semester without spending a lot of time in preparation.

The panel seemed in agreement that if we lose the ability to cook, we become dysfunctional in many ways in our life. I also concur: in my experience, cooking what we eat isn’t just about eating better, it’s about making a house into a home.

A few weeks ago, Chef Alida Solomon from Tutti Matti gave a cooking demo at our local St. Andrew’s Market, where she cooked baby heirloom tomatoes with garlic, olive oil, salt and fresh basil to make a delicious sauce for pasta. The fates conspired against getting a large pot of water to the boil that day at the market and we weren’t able to enjoy it on pasta, but she served it in small cups with a dollop of ricotta mixed with fresh herbs. Since then, I’ve recreated her recipe at home with delicious results: very easy, and very reliant on the tastes of the fresh ingredients.

I haven’t been in Tutti Matti for a long time, probably since just after it first opened, and her demo reminded me of a great Tuscan restaurant in the neighbourhood with which I should become reacquainted. Luckily, my sister Betty and friend Pat read my blog, and decided to take me there for a pre-birthday dinner last night. It wasn’t at all busy on a Saturday night at 7pm; it did pick up by the time that we left, and I think that they draw a bigger crowd during the week from all the office around there.

The food was divine: we started with their speciality appetizer of the evening, “prosciutto four ways”: the classic prosciutto-wrapped melon, prosciutto wrapped around figs and then grilled, the same treatment for peaches, and a fourth way that completely escapes me right now because the grilled prosciutto-wrapped peaches were so freaking good that I was completely transported to another dimension. This would be so easy to do at home: firm, largish pieces of freestone peaches, probably almost a quarter peach, wrapped in prosciutto then grilled until it starts to crisp on the outside, which means that the peach is starting to caramelize a bit inside. We also shared the carpaccio affumicato, which paired smoked duck and smoked venison each with complementary garnishes: orange and pecorino for the duck, and figs, pine nuts and arugula for the venison. The third appetizer, which I know that we ordered from the menu but is not on the version on their website, was thinly sliced roasted pork with a tuna sauce, which sounds a bit weird but was incredible: the sauce had sufficient acidity to perfectly offset the sweetness of the pork.

For the mains, Betty and Pat both had the pasta special, a lobster ravioli with fresh peas; I tried a taste, and it was lovely. All their pastas are made in-house, and the quality really shows. I had the pappardelle con stracotto, which is wide, hand-cut noodles with pulled brisket, cherry tomatoes, garlic and fresh herbs. The flavour was wonderfully rich and complex, the perfect meal for the cool evening that we were having. I’ve had pappardelle with cinghiale (wild boar) in Italy, a very typical Tuscan dish, and this was reminiscent of that in all the right ways; I notice that she has tagliatelle con cinghiale on the lunch menu, which definitely motivates me to head over there for a long lunch some day. We accompanied this with a nice – and nicely priced – Chianti Classico Reservi.

We had skipped the secondi (meat or fish course) in order to save room for dessert; for that, we shared a selection of biscotti (including seriously decadent dark chocolate cookies) and a cheese plate, washed down with vin santo. All excellent.

The service was perfect: our main server was there when we needed him, offered friendly advice when asked, kept the water glasses full and generally seemed to enjoy talking to us. Chef Alida came by near the end of our meal and chatted; I know her from the market, although this didn’t seem to be special treatment for us: she was checking in at most tables to make sure that everyone was enjoying their evening. We were not rushed at all, and spent a leisurely 3 hours or so at dinner.

Open for dinner every day except Sunday, and open for lunch on weekdays. Although their website doesn’t mention it (so you should call to check before showing up with bottle in hand), BringMyWine states that they allow BYOW Monday-Thursday for a $30/bottle corkage – pricey, but worth it if you have an expensive bottle at home that you want to have with your meal.