Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m glad you’re here!
Last weekend, my best girlfriend and I headed to the beach for a girls’ weekend. It was hot–90* in Carmel-by-the-Sea, which–trust me–is unheard of, especially in the month of March, which should be cool and cloudy. Instead, we had bright sunshine, hot sand and cold waves!
But it was gorgeous and we talked and talked and we walked and walked and we ate and ate. And we had a few glasses of wine along the way, too 😉
My friend is an exercise fanatic and what I thought were going to be nice, gentle walks on the beach, turned out to be 4-mile daily marches in the hot sun and sand. It was really fun, but we built up quite an appetite by dinnertime! I volunteered to cook so we wouldn’t have to drive anywhere. My friend is vegetarian and so it was a great chance for me to pull out my last jar of sweet basil pesto from the freezer and go to town.
While making lunch and dinner, my friend indulged my chatter about California Cuisine, and being a vegetarian, she stressed the importance of having extremely fresh ingredients to work with, and how lucky we are to live in a place where gorgeously fresh ingredients are plentiful. It is true that we have access to great ingredients, but it’s also the preparation of those great ingredients that really gives California Cuisine its luster: less is more and the lighter the touch, the better to let those ingredients really shine.
My friend quizzed me about the sauces of California Cuisine, emphasizing the difference between French Cuisine, which relies heavily on sauces and the relative absence of them in California Cuisine. This is a true statement. While traditional French Cuisine tends toward richer dishes and preparation with sauces that include lots of butter and cream, California Cuisine relies on the freshness of the ingredients with minimal preparation for best flavors; the sauces in California Cuisine are there to enhance the flavors of the ingredients rather than cover them up.
I used some of the pesto to make us my now-famous super-veggie sandwich with pesto mayonnaise:
And for dinner, we had this fabulous pesto, zucchini and pine nut pizza, plus a big salad with a fresh, basic vinaigrette dressing:
This pizza is so good and so easy that it makes not only an elegant main, especially when served with a big salad, but a really fun appetizer for a crowd. But more than that, these dishes are excellent examples of the sauces enhancing the flavors of the fresh ingredients, rather than covering them up. They are also all very healthy and feature olive oil and fresh herbs rather than butter and cream.
Join me tomorrow when I will share my recipe for spinach, pecan and thyme pesto!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
