California olive oil has held a place of honor in my pantry ever since I attended my first olive oil tasting in 2006 and discovered an emerging community of producers in the Golden State.  It’s a key  ingredient in this great quinoa, pistachio and cherry salad, which I’ll get to later.

Five years ago, the best-known California oils were produced by small growers raising Tuscan varieties for artisanal oils with high prices.   I saved them for special dishes and salad dressings.  For everyday cooking, I still relied on supermarket brands of extra virgin oils from Italy.

That changed when I tasted my first mass produced oil from a large California grower that uses modern methods of harvesting and pressing. Here was a fruity, fresh tasting oil at a price low enough for everyday use.  Imported oils were banished from my shelves.  Most probably don’t meet strict international standards for extra virgin oil, anyway, according to a University of California, Davis study released last year.

My olive oil education took another step forward last week, when I was invited to experience the harvest at California Olive Ranch in Artois, nearly 100 miles north of the state capital in the heart of the Sacramento Valley.  The Ranch was a pioneer in the U.S. when it planted its first high-density orchards of semi-dwarf olive trees on 75 acres near Oroville in 1999.  It followed a modern Spanish model for planting trees along trellises and harvesting them mechanically, similar to the way wine grapes are handled.

Today, the company is the biggest olive oil producer in the nation and its moderately-priced oils are sold in supermarkets and specialty grocers from coast to coast.  It grows Spanish and Greek varieties of olives on three ranches with a total of 5,000 acres in addition to contracting with other farmers for fruit grown on more than 5,000 acres.  Its olives go from tree to extra virgin oil in a few hours, thanks to high tech mills. Every truckload is tracked from ranch to bottle.

I jumped at the opportunity to tour the orchards and see those mechanical harvesters in action — not to mention taste oil fresh off the tree.  The harvest starts in early October, when the olives begin to hit their peak oil content, and continues into November most years.

From a distance, the Artois orchard looks like rows of neatly trimmed hedges stretching toward the horizon.  Only when you get closer is it apparent that the hedges are actually closely planted trees, their tops trimmed flat at about seven feet tall, arranged in rows about five feet apart. Some 650 trees are planted per acre compared with 125 in traditional planting patterns.

Ungainly yellow harvesters, looking for all the world like sheds on wheels, roll up and down the rows at the pace of a brisk walker.  As they pass over the rows, the machines squeeze and shake the trees, harvesting all but a few olives without breaking the branches.

As a treat, ranch manager Adam Englehardt offered five other bloggers and me a chance to ride on one of the harvesters.  It was noisy, dusty and great fun to watch the olives collect in bins then move up a conveyor belt to be dumped in a trailer traveling alongside in the next row.

“It’s still a pretty new technology and it’s still being refined,” says Englehardt, who notes that only three varieties are suitable for this process now.  They’re the Spanish Arbequina and Arbosana varieties and the Greek Koroneiki.

Once they’re picked, the olives are rushed to the nearby mill, where they’re washed, sorted and pressed.  The oil emerges from the press in a brilliant green stream before being piped to 55-foot tall stainless steel tanks, where it settles before bottling.  It’s never filtered.

Much of the oil is blended into the company’s Everyday California Extra Virgin Olive Oil or the Miller’s Blend, which won best of class in the Armonia Olive Oil competition in Italy.  The rest goes into single variety Arbequina or Arbosana oils.

The majority of the olive oil pressed last week won’t see market shelves until next March.  The exception is a small Limited Reserve bottling of new oil—the olio nuovo prized by Italians — that will be shipped later this month.   In our tasting, the new Arbequina oil was grassy and fresh with a nicely aggressive pungency — that tingling sensation you sometimes get at the back of the throat when you taste extra virgin oil straight up.  If you’d like to try it, you can sign up for the waiting list.

My favorite of the standard bottles is the Arbosana, a complex oil with citrus undertones and a peppery kick.  It was perfect for the salad, pictured above, that I was tipped to by Kirsten Wanket, the California Olive Ranch’s marketing manager.

The recipe comes from Fran Gage’s “The New American Olive Oil” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2009) and it more than lives up to Kirsten’s billing.   Gage toasts the quinoa before cooking, which brings out layers of flavor I’d never before found in the tiny South American grain.  My only change was substituting the dried cherries I had on hand for the dried cranberries in the original.  Both bring a bright, tart note to a salad that only gets better as it sits in the refrigerator for a day or so.

Most Oktoberfest menus are pretty predictable — oceans of beer, mountains of sausage, sauerkraut, and maybe freshly baked pretzels.

Santa Cruz, though, takes pride in leaning off-center.  The music at Santa Cruz Mountain Brewery’s fifth annual Sausagefest last weekend was country.  Frauleins sported elaborate tattoos with their flirty barmaid drindls.  And the popular Penny Ice Creamery served beer ice cream.

There weren’t a lot of takers  for the Devout Stout-flavored ice cream early in the evening, but I couldn’t resist.  A scoop in a pint jar with a little of the same beer was the best thing I had all night.  It was thick, creamy and lightly sweet with flavors of coffee, caramel and a pleasantly bitter hint of burnt sugar.  Even before I left, I knew I was going to have to try to make it at home.

It turns out that beer ice cream isn’t that rare.  Mentions can be found all over the Internet.  Most of the recipes don’t sound very appealing, however.  Some don’t bother to cook the eggs.  Others add molasses or chocolate to round out the beer flavors.

I decided to riff off a basic French-style vanilla ice cream.  First, I reduced some good dark beer with a little brown sugar to make a syrup and cook off most of the alcohol.  Then I substituted the beer syrup for some of the cream in the formula.  It turned out even better than I hoped.

The secret to good beer ice cream, of course, is good beer.  A can of Bud just won’t do. But any well-crafted stout or porter is worth a try.

The artisan Devout Stout is a wonderful, dark and deeply flavored brew.  I would have used it if we could have found any in all the usual places.  When we didn’t, I turned to that reliable supermarket standby, Guiness Extra Stout, for the first batch.

It was very nice although a little rough around the edges.  If I hadn’t tasted the Devout Stout ice cream, I would have declared it a winner.

Still, I knew the ice cream could be better.  So I snagged some Black Butte Porter, my husband’s favorite, for the next try.  Smoother and more nuanced, it was just right.

The only thing better than this ice cream is a float made with the same beer.  Give it a try. You’ll be amazed.

As soon as we started planning the camping trip we took to Death Valley last month, I began thinking about flat breads.  There aren’t many places to buy fresh supplies in the desert and I’m pretty picky about bread.

I wanted to be able to make my own.  But I wanted to keep it simple — no rising, no rolling, no oven.

The more I looked for traditional flat bread recipes to cook in a skillet, though, the more frustrated I became.  After all, we wanted to spend our time in Death Valley marveling at the incredible landscape and perhaps spotting a few wildflowers, not waiting around for bread to rise.

Bad Water, at 282 feet below sea level, in Death Valley National Park

Inspiration finally came from an old copy of “Joy of Cooking,” where I found a recipe for the Johnnycakes that travelers carried in their rucksacks as long ago as the mid-18th century.  Also known as journey cakes and hoe cakes, these corny flat breads sounded a bit austere, though, and my eye was drawn to the corn flapjacks on the same page.

Why couldn’t I dress the flapjacks up with some chiles, sun-dried tomatoes and green onions to create an Americanized version of the  uttapam made with a lentil and rice batter?  The result was an extremely tasty cross between a Mexican tortilla and a spicy Indian street snack.

I tweaked the the flapjack recipe to use powdered buttermilk and mixed the dry ingredients together at home.  In camp, I stirred in water, olive oil, and an egg. Then I poured a spoonful of batter into a hot skillet and sprinkled each cake with jalapeños, sun-dried tomatoes and scallions while the first side cooked, before flipping it over to finish.

The batter was thin and the cornmeal quickly settled to the bottom, so it had to be stirred before dropping each spoonful onto the hot skillet. But that was the extent of the special effort.   The corn cakes were super simple to prepare and we had fresh, hot bread in no time.

The cakes were great warm with a big bowl of chili.  They were even nice a couple of hours later, after they had cooled.

And we had plenty of time left to look for those elusive desert wildflowers.

I had been meaning to make Irish soda bread in honor of St. Patrick this week when an offhand note in the recipe sent me off in a new direction.

In the introduction to his Irish soda bread recipe in “Home Baking” (Artisan, 2003), food writer and world traveler Jeffrey Alford mentions making scones at the impromptu boarding house he once ran in Ireland. The buns sounded like much more fun than the traditional loaf. There’s nothing I like better than scones for breakfast and these were packed with whole grains.

They come together quickly and cook much faster than loaves, too. While you’re still waiting for a loaf to come out of the oven, you could be munching on a hot scone slathered in melting butter. Add a little jam and life is very good, indeed.

Alford offered no instructions for making the scones, aside from adding a little extra sweetener to the dough.  So I had to wing it.  First, I cut the recipe by a third to make a more manageable batch.  Then I cut the salt, increased the sugar, substituted buttermilk for the soured milk, and added a cup of plump currants.  I glazed them with an egg wash, sprinkled a little more sugar over the top and popped them into the oven.

The resulting scones were substantial but flaky and tender — unlike the rocks passed off as scones at coffee shops across America.  With whole wheat and oatmeal, they offered more flavor and texture, too.  (I used whole wheat pastry flour because I had some on hand, but Alford calls for regular whole wheat.)  With butter, they were heavenly.

The little bit of oatmeal seems to keep them moist longer than usual, too.  They were still quite good the next day.

Although I like these scones slightly sweet for breakfast, a savory variation would be good for supper as well.  If you’d like to serve some with your corned beef and cabbage on St. Paddy’s Day, just cut the sugar down to 2 tablespoons and leave out the currants.  Skip the dusting of sugar on top, too.

Of course, you could just make it into a loaf and bake it for about an hour.  But I’ll stick to the scones and thank the Irish for one of the simple pleasures in life.

As much as I’d love to, I’ve never been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.  The memory of  the great food I ate on my one trip to the Big Easy still lingers, though.

About this time of year, I always start thinking about celebrating Mardi Gras at home with some of those unforgettable flavors. There’s no way I can hope to recreate the fabulous Gulf Coast seafood where I live, of course.  But it’s not that difficult to approximate  the savory satisfaction of the muffuletta sandwiches made legendary by Central Grocery in the French quarter near the turn of the last century.

The sandwich takes its name from a large, rather soft loaf of Sicilian bread dusted with sesame seeds. Afficionados insist you can’t make a muffuletta without it.

The bread is not widely available, however, and I’m not that fond of squishy bread anyway.  As far as I’m concerned, the irresistible element of a muffuletta is the briny olive salad tucked inside with good salumi and cheese. The salad is simple to make with olives, capers and the pickled mix of vegetables Italians call giardiniera.

To mix things up a little, I’ve turned the muffuletta into a miniature sandwich perfect for a picnic or a party platter at any time of the year.  I took some along on a hike recently and my friends were as enthusiastic as I am.

These little sandwiches can be made on ordinary sourdough dinner rolls.  Just be sure the crust is not too hard to bite through easily.  Use the best meat and cheese you can find and make the olive salad a day ahead to allow the flavors to meld.

If you can’t make it to New Orleans either this year,  mini muffulettas will take you there in spirit.

As much fun as it is to watch the pros race from pantry to stove on shows like Top Chef, I have no desire to emulate them during the holidays.

Thanksgiving is hard enough with more people than usual in the house—all wanting to help, chat with the cook, or just stand around the kitchen.   (Did I mention how small my kitchen is?)  I’d plummet right over the edge if I tried to cook everything from scratch on the big day.

That’s why I look for side dishes that can be prepared ahead and finished off with just a few touches at the last minute.  A beautiful salad that can be handed off to a helpful guest for final assembly is a real lifesaver when you’re trying to get the turkey out of the oven, the gravy made, the potatoes mashed and the rolls heated all at the same time.

This year, I’ll be serving this extraordinary beet salad with goat cheese, pecans and a  balsamic vinaigrette.   It’s a takeoff on a recipe I ran across in “Kitchen Seasons,” by Australian food writer Ross Dobson (Ryland Peters & Small, 2007).

This salad hits all the right notes:  crisp baby greens, sweet roasted beets, soft goat cheese for tang and toasted pecans for crunch.

The dressing is based on excellent  balsamic vinegar, bringing a complex blend of sweet and tart flavors to the dish. If all you have in your cupboard is decent commercial balsamic, however, you can produce an acceptable substitute by boiling half a cup of the vinegar with a teaspoon of brown sugar and reducing the volume by half.

The beets are roasted, peeled and cut up a day or two ahead of time.  The greens are washed and spun dry and the pecans toasted the day before.  The dressing can be whisked together in the morning.  Assemble it all decoratively on the plates just before serving, drizzle with dressing and it’s ready for prime time.

If only the whole meal were this easy.

Pumpkin season is upon us.  From the first jack-o-lantern on the porch to the last slice of Thanksgiving pie, no vegetable is more closely identified with fall than the many varieties of Cucurbita pepo.

I’ve always loved the complex, spicy flavor of pumpkin baked with a heady blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. This year, however, I was ready for a change. I craved  a light and tender cupcake with little more than a lively undercurrent of fresh ginger to highlight the pumpkin’s natural flavor.  It had to taste as clean and fresh as a fall morning, not too sweet and not too spicy.  Why should children get all the treats at Halloween?

Yet search as I might, I couldn’t find a recipe that matched my requirements.  The pumpkin cakes in my baking books were either too heavy with spices or  swimming in oil.  And even though I’m a fan of  Michael Ruhlman’s “Ratio” (Scribner, 2009), no basic  formula was going to solve my problem.  Adding pumpkin to a cake shifts the chemistry and I needed more guidance.

Finally, I spotted a pumpkin spice cake recipe in “The Art and Soul of Baking,” by Cindy Mushet (Andrews McMeel, 2008). It called for butter rather than oil and I was on my way.  This cake was more delicate than most, with an amazingly light texture and just the right balance of pumpkin and sugar.  By substituting freshly grated ginger for the spices, I hit the mark on the first try.

The maple cream cheese frosting I put on the cupcakes is hardly original.  But the flavor combination is a classic and so good I couldn’t bring my self to abandon it.

This recipe works with either canned or homemade pumpkin puree.  It may be a little harder to find canned pumpkin this year, though. A shortage from last year means processors have been rushing to get this year’s harvest on the shelves in time for peak baking season.  Some stores ran out earlier this month.

To make your own puree: Cut the top off a pie-sized pumpkin (about 4 pounds), scoop out the seeds and slice into large pieces.  Place pieces on a baking sheet and roast in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes, or until the flesh is soft and easily pierced with a small sharp knife.  Remove from oven and let pieces cool until easy to handle.  Scrape the flesh from the rind and whirl in a food processor or blender until smooth.  Discard rind.

Blame the rain, the 45 mph winds and the power outage that spread across two days.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I live among the redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  When the weather is great, it’s a glorious place to be.  When it’s bad, it’s miserable.  This week, the electricity went out just as I was preparing to publish this post on my desktop Mac.  So I’m later than usual.  My apologies.

Grapes called to me at the farmers market for weeks as I contemplated schiacciata all’uva, a Tuscan variation on foccacia, liberally studded with dark, juicy grapes and dusted with a blanket of sugar.

I’d been holding off on baking, though, hoping that wine grapes—perhaps some spicy zinfandels—would show up in one of the stalls.  Italians, after all, make this sweet bread with the same Sangiovese grapes they press for Chianti.

Yet every week crates of the Central Valley grape growers who come to Santa Cruz markets were piled high with the same ordinary Red Flame and Thompson seedless table grapes.  Once in a while there would be some dark purple grapes the sellers just called black seedless.  All were crisp and refreshing eaten out of hand but not as deep in flavor as I had hoped.  Still, when nothing more interesting showed up, I decided to go with what was at hand.  I started with the darkest, fattest grapes I could find, the black seedless.

What a surprise!  They were wonderful baked in the schiacciata.  The heat of the oven concentrated the flavors and the juice turned thick and syrupy.  Who would believe they were the merely pleasant table grapes I had sampled at the market.   Later, I found that Red Flames also were transformed by their time in a hot oven.

This dish is so simple it’s brilliant — pizza dough, grapes, sugar and perhaps some lemon zest for extra flavor.   You don’t even have to make your own dough.  Although I prefer the yeasty flavor of homemade dough, Trader Joe’s refrigerated pizza dough worked just fine.  If you don’t have a favorite pizza dough recipe, try this one I posted last year.

There’s plenty of time left to bake your own.  Growers say they’re likely to have several varieties of grapes into December and as late as January.

The moral here, of course, is not to be too quick to dismiss the ordinary.  Those old familiar varieties may prove truly extraordinary when picked ripe and showcased in the right recipe.

For years, I avoided  figs at all cost.  My childhood memories of throwing rotten fruit that had fallen from the tree in my best friend’s yard tainted any thoughts of actually eating one.  As far as I was concerned, figs were gushy, sticky and positively repulsive.

Then, as an adult and a food writer at that, I felt compelled to at least try one of these fruits that so many others had described as utterly ambrosial.  Plucked right off the tree, it was perfectly ripe and felt like a miniature water balloon in my hand.

I was a convert at first bite.  The flavor was mild and sweet as honey with faint undertones of vanilla.  The pink inner flesh glowed like a jewel.  It was silky and soft, all but melting in my mouth, and the seeds popped between my teeth like caviar.

It’s amazing how much difference it makes to eat fruit in its time.

Now I know why some people suggest the forbidden fruit Eve nibbled in the Garden of Eden really was a fig.  Few fruits are as sensual.

As irresistible as ripe figs are eaten out of hand, they lend themselves beautifully to cooking.   Figs wrapped in prosciutto and grilled have become a fall classic on Bay Area restaurant menus.  I particularly like them in this tart, where bright raspberries play counterpoint to luxuriously rich figs set against a background of custard spiked with cognac.  The almond inflected crust is tender and flaky.

Although it looks complicated, the dough comes together quickly in a food processor. And you can divide the work into steps, making the crust one day and the custard another.

One trick I picked up from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Pie and Pastry Bible” (Scribner, 1998) for transferring the rolled dough smoothly to the tart pan is to use an 8-inch cake pan.  Turn the cake pan bottom up and drape the dough, still between sheets of plastic wrap, centered over the pan.  Peel off the upper layer of plastic and invert the tart pan over the dough.  Holding the cake pan and tart pan together, quickly flip them over.  Ta da!  The dough is is in the tart pan without tearing.  Carefully remove the remaining layer of plastic and you’re ready to trim and chill.

I used the green-skinned Kadota figs now in season for this tart, but you’ll probably find black Mission figs in the market, too. Brown Turkey figs could be available into November if the weather stays warm.  We Californians are lucky that most of the U.S. crop is grown within the Golden State.

When you’re picking the fruit, remember that ripe figs are not all beautiful from the outside.  They tend to be a little wrinkly, maybe with a few splits on the sides.  They should be soft and heavy and there may be a little drop of thick juice at the end.   Just avoid those with a sour smell or any signs of molding or bruising.

If your figs are still slightly under-ripe, you can soften them slightly by placing them on a plate on the kitchen counter, out of direct sun, for a day or so.  Ripe fresh figs, though, should be stored, covered, in the refrigerator on a plate lined with paper towels. Eat within two or three days.

Before we left on our recent trip to Alaska, I compiled a collection of recipes that I thought might work for car camping.  They had to be simple — based on ingredients we could find at most any grocery store —and require a minimum of pots and pans.  One skillet would be ideal.

At the same time, I wanted fresh flavors and appealing textures.  Canned goods and pantry items soon lose their charm when you’re traveling for six weeks.

Our favorite quick and easy meal turned out to be an updated version of Joe’s Special, the venerable San Francisco dish made with spinach, eggs, onions and ground meat.  Think of it as a deconstructed fritatta.  It takes a bit of chopping but it comes together fairly quickly and tastes terrific.

I’ve substituted ground turkey for the original hamburger and thrown in sliced mushrooms for meaty flavor.  What makes this dish so easy and fresh tasting is the baby spinach now available washed and bagged at all but the smallest supermarkets.  Bagged spinach holds up nicely in an ice chest for several days.

Throw in some good Parmesan, chopped pimentos and dried oregano and you have a very tasty one-dish meal.  Just be sure not to cook the spinach and eggs too long.  The dish should be moist and each ingredient identifiable when it’s served.

We liked this dish so much, it’s going into our emergency dinner repertoire for those nights when we’re just too bushed to attempt anything more ambitious.  A food processor would cut the work to almost nothing.