Made dinner tonight!

B. and I (well, mostly me) cooked dinner tonight, and it was yummy. We had:

• pan-fried steak with morel mushroom sauce
• sauteed morel mushrooms
• stir-fried haricots verts (baby green beans) with garlic
• fresh white corn, microwaved
• whole wheat bread from the farmer’s market.

I’m quite proud of the morel sauce, as I made it up more or less on the spot and it came out very tasty–chop morels fine, mince an onion, saute together, add concentrated brown stock and a dash of red wine, simmer until nicely reduced. Came out tasting intensely of morel, a mushroom of which I am very fond. (The key to the sauce, in my opinion, is the brown stock–a good batch of it will add body to almost anything.)

But the entire meal was quite tasty, owing largely to fresh ingredients. I’m a big fan of the farmer’s markets, and like to go around to every vendor, tasting at every booth, until I find the vendor who I feel has the best ____ in town. Then I buy only from that vendor.

I can be pretty fanatical about it–for five or six years I drove from Palo Alto/Menlo Park to San Francisco (a 75-mile round trip) because my favorite peach vendor stopped coming to Mountain View, and he has SUCH wonderful peaches that it was worth the drive. I may drive down to Mountain View from San Francisco this year for seedless muscat grapes, wonderfully fruity in an era where grapes have been reduced to so much sugar. I love good food, and I practically roll in it whenever I have a chance. So it is with great pleasure that I see the summer fruits coming in: cherries, peaches, nectarines, strawberries, white corn, and so on. It’s going to be a very tasty summer.

Off to bed now–I’ve been neglecting poor B. while I write this, and we need to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. Tomorrow is the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, which is probably the biggest thing to happen in the city all year ’round, and I am riding in it!! I’ll be part of the AIDS Lifecycle contingent, which is usually the second contingent in the parade (after Dykes on Bikes, which has led the parade from time immemorial). I have pulled my best rainbow tutu out of the closet for the occasion. 🙂

(B. says it’s amusing that my rainbow tutu is “coming out of the closet” on Gay Pride Day. LOL!)

So if you’re watching the Pride Parade on TV, watch for me!