I can’t believe we’ve done 50 of these dinners! We started ESC in early fall 2023, so that means it’s been 2.5 years with an average of a dinner every 3 weeks. Pretty cool. To celebrate we decided to rent a house in the Russian River valley for the weekend, near Guerneville, and enjoy hanging out near the river, shopping in the cute towns and farmers’ markets, and playing on the beach together. And of course, cooking together. I brought my Foodie Dice, which we rolled on Friday night to see what ingredients we’d have to concoct our dishes for dinner on Saturday night. We rolled 3 times, one for each course (we let Tobie & Ian’s girls do dessert however they liked), and we let ourselves pull out one die and re-roll another die if we didn’t think it fit (for instance, we pulled the “protein” die out of the side dish roll, and we re-rolled “garlic” if we felt there was already a lot of garlic). Then, we split into teams to shop and cook the courses. I went all over: Santa Rosa farmers’ market for the vegetables; Sonoma County Meat for the pork belly and ground pork for my dish; and, a couple little Asian groceries. On the way back, I picked up some ranunculus at Zannah Farms. The day prior, I had already swung by one of my favorite vineyards (Russian River is my favorite Californian wine region), Dutton-Goldfield to pick up a couple of bottles to go with dinner: I got a minimal-oak Chardonnay and a Ghost vineyard Pinot Noir—both of which went really well with the dishes we made, which were as follows:
This was the Barton-Clayton team’s appetizer. They rolled bacon, polenta, asparagus, shallots, and basil, and they made these delightful little sautéed tarts.
I was on the main, and I just happened to roll the perfect ingredients for Bun Cha Hanoi, a north-Vietnamese take on one of my favorite dishes from that cuisine. Not pictured are the quick radish and carrot pickles and the toasted cashew nuts for garnish—I snapped too soon!
Our side was perfectly roasted potatoes with more bacon, spinach, basil and garlic. Team Moradmand–Heenan was on this one. Dessert was a couple of different flavors of ice cream, like vanilla and pistachio, with a lovely cherry and thyme sauce that the girls cooked up. Overall, an amazing weekend!
The Rookery 