Restaurant Review: Seagrass

Recently, my boyfriend David turned twenty-seven years old. I decided to give him exactly what I would have wanted if I were trying to celebrate a milestone on the road to becoming old and decrepit: a scavenger hunt! Nobody loves scavenger hunts more than I do… including David.

I should remind you that birthdays are kind of a big deal in my family. So you can imagine my horror when David told me that all he wanted for his birthday was to relax and play violent, war-themed video games in his boxer shorts. Obviously, this man had no idea what having a birthday even meant. Lucky for him, he’s dating someone who does.

So I went about crafting intricate clues to go along with little gifts for him to discover throughout the day, painstakingly handwriting each clue in impeccable calligraphy. As I worked long into the night, I thought about how lucky David was that I knew what a real birthday entailed. He was going to have such fun.

When the day arrived, I enlisted the help of his good friend and colleague to help distract David (who, hilariously, believed I had canceled our lunch date for no good reason) as I tiptoed around planting clues, feeling clever. The scavenger hunt went off without a hitch until the last clue, which I handed to him while we were having pre-dinner drinks at a bar downtown:

Dinner’s on me!
For the first time, let’s try
The ocean
+
Something you’d smoke to get high

The answer was, of course, Seagrass. This “sustainable, organic, and local” restaurant is owned by the Perez family, all of whom participate in its operation. Chef Robert Perez’s older son, Ruben Richard, is the wine director; Robert’s wife, Marianna, manages the aesthetics of the space; and their younger son Ruben’s life partner, Erin Gailsdaughter, also works at the restaurant.

The Perez-Gailsdaughter family; Richard not pictured

A member of the Ty Warner Sea Center’s Sustainable Seafood Program, Seagrass acquires all its local fish and shellfish from Kanaloa Seafood and Santa Barbara Fish Market. Most of their produce comes from bi-weekly shopping trips to the farmers market.

They had recently offered a Groupon deal for their dinner tasting menu, and of course I’d jumped on that deal quicker than you can say, “The ocean + Something you’d smoke to get high.” And that brings me back to the clue… which was going nowhere, slowly.

“Sea… weed?!” David guessed for the hundredth time, furrowing his brow. “Atlantic… crack? No. Pacific meth!” Our bartender chuckled and rolled her eyes. I didn’t know whether to chuckle or to be concerned that David had such an extensive mental list of things you could smoke to get high.

I guess nobody uses the word “grass” anymore. But after much coaxing, I finally got David to say the words, “Sea… grass?! Seagrass. Oh, Seagrass!” and we were on our way.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the restaurant was how dark it was inside; heavy maroon drapes kept out any of the night’s remaining natural light and the interior lighting was decidedly dim. The understated décor was punctuated by large seashell fixtures and little green specks of light projected onto the ceiling, perhaps meant to represent moonlight filtered through ocean water or the light at the end of a dock.

But if I stared at the green lights for too long, I found myself longing for dreams just beyond my grasp, all Gatsby-like, so I focused on the delicious food instead.

The tasting menu included two options for each course, so we tried both and shared them. The abyss of darkness in which we were dining made photographing the dishes in a flattering way quite impossible. Using the flash resulting in something horrible like this:

The lighting does not flatter this smoked salmon dish.

So you’ll just have to take my word for it that these dishes looked as good as they sound. To start, I got the little gem salad with blue cheese, bacon, and cherry tomatoes. “Little gem,” also called “sucrine,” tastes like a combination of Butter and Romaine lettuce. It is flavorful as far as lettuces go, which is admittedly not very far. David got the smoked Scottish salmon with greens, emulsified olive oil, and capers, pictured unflatteringly above.

For the main course, I got the pan-seared, oven-baked sea bass on roasted eggplant with a possibly magical veal reduction. David’s maple duck was also pan-seared and oven-baked, served with summer vegetables.

The tasting menu included dessert (phew!), and I gobbled up my chocolate mousse with salted caramel and Chantilly cream almost as fast as David devoured his toasted vanilla bean ice cream. Yes, toasted ice cream, the classy older cousin of the deep-fried ice cream you always see on menus at Japanese restaurants but are too afraid to order.

The whole meal was beyond satisfying. With every course, we had one of those moments in which you shove a forkful of your food at your dining partner, repeating over and over, “You just have to try this!” And try it we did.

I was happy to have demonstrated to David how joyful birthdays can be. David was happy to have made it to the end of his incredibly exhausting fun scavenger hunt. Seagrass was a huge success, and we’ll be back – during the day, though, so as not to be lured by those beckoning green lights.

Lemon Cucumber Caprese Salad: Size Doesn't Matter

The farmers market is always a place of discovery for me. Vegetables I’ve never seen before, mutant fruit, a curmudgeonly lady playing the didgeridoo – anything you can think of, I’ve encountered it at the Santa Barbara farmers market. Well, not anything you can think of. Be reasonable.

My newest discovery came before a dinner date with my friend Sasha. We were perusing the market for ingredients to make a tasty meal when we found what looked like a cross between a summer squash and a pumpkin.

Lemon cucumbers at the Milliken Farm stand

Turns out, these little nuggets are neither of the above: they’re cucumbers! Lemon cucumbers, to be exact. Despite what their name suggests, lemon cucumbers are not the creation of a mad scientist who wondered what would happen if a lemon and a cucumber had a mutant baby. They’re just stout, yellow cucumbers that are kind of shaped like a lemon and grow during the summer.

Lemon cucumbers have a sweeter flavor than regular cucumbers, but have the same crisp texture. They’re also called apple cucumbers, since some people apparently have trouble distinguishing between lemons and apples.

The Milliken Farm stand was selling them for $2.50 a pound, so I bought a few. I’ve been feeling kind of anti-traditional-salad lately, but I couldn’t think of another way to use these midget cukes in a meal.

Then I saw the fresh mozzarella at the Spring Hill Jersey Cheese stand. They only had one package of it left, so I snatched it up quicker than you can say “mozzarella-ella-ella-ey-ey-ey.” I was going Caprese style on these cukes.

Caprese salad is usually just sliced tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and basil drizzled with balsamic dressing and olive oil. It’s a refreshing, filling twist on a traditional salad and I basically subsist on it whenever I’m pretending to be in Italy.

So Sasha and I trekked home from the market and got to work slicing up fresh heirloom tomatoes, the Spring Hill mozzarella cheese, and the Lilliputian cucumbers:

The fresh ingredients

I layered the slices with basil from my mason jar herb garden and drizzled some balsamic vinegar and olive oil on top:

Yum! The cucumbers added a crunchy texture to the traditional Caprese salad. The difference in flavor from regular old cucumbers was just barely noticeable. So when it comes to cucumbers, does size matter? It depends on what you’re going to do with that cucumber.

I am assuming you’re going to put it in a salad, so the answer is nope! Size doesn’t matter. These pocket-sized little guys do the job just as well as their more common green cousins.

Meghan Gets Crafty: Mason Jar Herb Garden

 

Since moving into a new downtown apartment I can barely afford on my graduate-student salary, I’ve become quite crafty. And I don’t mean crafty like sly, manipulative, getting-what-I-want-when-I-want-it. I mean crafty like I’m too poor to buy new clothes so I make them myself out of old curtains.

Well, I would, if I could sew. Since I’m not Maria von Trapp (much to my constant chagrin), I have to stick to more manageable crafts.

For example, I like to think that my sad excuse for a kitchen presents a great opportunity for craftiness. Some people might look at my kitchen and laugh at the idea that it could even be called a kitchen. It’s more of a corner of my living room, designated by its unfortunate 1970s-era linoleum, a 3/4-size refrigerator that is barely large enough to fit a carton of eggs and a half-gallon of milk at the same time, and one row of cabinets above the stove. I like to call it a nook, since I think that word connotes coziness rather than destitution.

Since there is not enough space for all my food in my kitchen nook, I store some things in mason jars with cute little chalkboard labels, displayed on a bookcase. That way, I can pretend to myself that I actually prefer the lack of cabinet space – otherwise, there would be no reason for chalkboard labels and no one would know where I kept my quinoa.

My boyfriend David is generally a bit skeptical of my crafting ways. He’s seen the show Hoarders, and he worries that “Don’t throw out that old pair of jeans – I could turn it into a purse!” might lead to, “Don’t throw out that old diaper! I could add it to my growing pile of health-code violations!” somewhere down the road. Frankly, it’s not a completely irrational concern.

But in a recent bout of supportive craftiness, he surprised me with an afternoon project. It doesn’t get much more local than herbs grown in your own backyard, so David purchased the supplies to make a backyard herb garden. Since most of the ground space in my backyard is dominated by cacti and other local succulent plants, and since I have a love for mason jars that defies reason, my herbs would live adorably in hanging mason jars on my back porch.

First things first: wine.

Mason jars and wine! My two favorite inanimate things. One day, I will drink wine out of a mason jar and my life will be complete. Don’t worry, I’ll blog about it.

After the wine was poured, we got started on the hanging herb garden. Here’s what we used:

Two slabs of wood
Chalkboard pain
8 adjustable round brackets
Gold leaf paint
8 mason jars
Various screws
A power drill

First, we used a ruler to divide the slabs of wood into four equal parts. I measured a one-inch section at the bottom of each the four parts and painted it with chalkboard paint; that would be the label for each herb:

Then I used the gold leaf paint on the brackets for no reason other than that it looked pretty:

While I painted, David pulled a Tim The-Tool-Man Taylor and used the power drill to attach the brackets to the wood slabs. He attached the bottom three at an angle, so the herbs could grow diagonally upward without hitting the bottom of the next mason jar.

Once the brackets were attached, the mason jars could slide right in. We put the herbs in the mason jars before attaching them to the wood slabs: rosemary, thyme, cilantro, basil, parsley, and mint.

There were eight mason jars and only six herbs, so we put flowers in the top-most mason jars. I used colored chalk to label the herbs and voila! An adorable herb garden hanging right on my porch:

Unfortunately, like most beautiful things, this hanging herb garden is quite impractical. A quick online search about how to care for these herbs revealed to me that there are three things most herbs need: sunlight, water, and drainage.

Two out of three ain’t bad, right? No. Wrong. They get plenty of sunlight on my porch and I make sure to water them often. The problem is that mason jars don’t drain. So all these herbs will surely die, unless I replace the mason jars with more practical pots.

But what will I do with all those mason jars? I’m thinking something crafty like lanterns with tea lights… or utensil holders… or individual Barbie jacuzzi tubs… the possibilities are endless.

Honey, Honey, How You Thrill Me

If you know me, you know I like to sing. Heck, even if you don’t know me, you probably know I like to sing. Especially if you happen to live in my apartment complex, in which case you might know me as “that girl who sings I Have Confidence in Sunshine on her way back from the laundry room, swinging around a jug of detergent as if it’s a guitar case and trying to master the jump-and-heel-click move. That girl.”

Sometimes people even pay me to sing. So in order to keep those people happy (as well as my sleepless and resentful friendly and adoring apartment complex neighbors), I drink a lot of tea and honey to soothe my throat. Every singer has a different remedy for a sore throat (including cortisone shots to the jugular – I kid you not), but mine has always been chamomile tea sweetened with a tablespoon of honey.

Obviously, when I switched to a vegan diet a year and a half ago, I had to kick my honey habit. But now that I’ve reintroduced animal products into my diet, I’m back on the good stuff.

My honey provider of choice is San Marcos Farms, with locations in Santa Ynez (distance from me: 30 miles), Ojai (distance from me: 33 miles), and Santa Barbara. Owners Dan and Anne Cole were some of the first farmers to participate in local farmers markets in the 1980s. Now they sell honey and honey products at markets all over the Santa Barbara area and in local grocery stores.

My favorite variety is sage honey from Santa Ynez. I’ve even been substituting it for sugar in my coffee; it’s delicious. San Marcos Farms also produces orange blossom honey in Ojai and avocado and wildflower honey here in Santa Barbara.

The Coles make sure their bees have all the honey and pollen they need, extracting only the excess honey during the harvest. Compared to commercial honey, which is shipped to industrial honey packers in 650-pound barrels, this local stuff tastes incredible.

Sage honey in my coffee.

But their bees, like many, are victims of CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). CCD might be the result of mite infestations, viral and bacterial diseases, and/or new systemic pesticides. It’s bad news not just for bees and beekeepers, but for farmers who depend on honey bees to pollinate their fruits and vegetables.

The only way I can think of to fight CCD from my end is to keep supporting San Marcos Farms and other local honey producers, so they have the funds to keep their bees alive and healthy.

Meanwhile, I’ll be going all Winnie-the-Pooh-style on my sage honey, stuffing my mouth, nose, and chin into the biggest jar I can get my hands on and gulping it down.

Unfortunately, it’s a little tricky to sing in that position.

But don’t worry, neighbors! Once I emerge, I will don my light-blue, impossibly unflattering spandex jumpsuit and serenade you with my favorite honey-themed song and the inspiration for the title of this post:

Anti-Gay Chick-Fil-A: Another Reason to Eat Local

When it comes to parting with my hard-earned cash in exchange for food, I’m all for knowing as much as possible about where my money is going to end up. Now people who buy a meal at Chick-Fil-A know that their money is going toward the obstruction of gay rights.

Photo: blogs.phillymag.com

There have been reports of the company’s donations to anti-gay organizations for years, but now president and COO Dan Cathy is officially out of the proverbial closet. In a July 16th interview with the Baptist Press (a Christian news organization that must be given credit for its delightfully punny catchphrase: “We have GOOD NEWS!”), Cathy discussed details of the company’s WinShape Foundation.

First of all: WinShape? Oh, you’re shaping people to become winners, are you? Well, my unshapely windows want their portmanteau back.

According to Cathy, WinShape began as a college scholarship and has somehow “morphed into a marriage program in conjunction with national marriage ministries.” He continues, “We are very much supportive of the family - the biblical definition of the family unit.”

Oh, goodie! Finally, a place to buy chicken that supports my father’s right to trade me for the severed foreskins of two hundred dead Philistines:

Therefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full measure to the king, that he might be the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter for a wife. 1 Samuel 18:27

Well, two hundred foreskins might be pushing it, in my case. My dad would probably just get a few scraggly-looking chickens in exchange for me. At least then he wouldn’t have to eat at Chick-Fil-A.

After coming out (!) as an anti-gay rights organization, Chick-Fil-A lost the support of the Muppets (because… duh) and Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino, among others. Soon after the fallout, Cathy released a statement that “going forward, our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena.”

That’s fine. But now we all know that when we give Chick-Fil-A our money, we’re financially supporting anti-gay marriage groups like the Family Research Council and the Marriage & Family Foundation.

Of course, local farms can use their profits to support whatever they want, too. So do the research. Where can you buy free-range chicken from a farm in your area? What will your money ultimately go toward? Check out Eat Wild, a resource with maps and information about pasture-raised meat and poultry near you.

It’s not like I ate at Chick-Fil-A in the first place, to be honest. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a Chick-Fil-A in real life, though I have certainly chuckled to myself over that ad campaign in which a cow standing on its hind legs encourages us to “Eat Mor Chikin.”

Because everyone knows that while cows apparently have the language economy of Hemingway and the dexterity to wield Sharpie markers, they can’t spell for sh*t.

Highway to Health

Are you going on a road trip? Prepare to lie to your Weight Watchers journal. Because I can't think of many places with fewer healthful food options than highway rest stops. Maybe the circus, or a county fair in middle America.

Last week, I was driving my sister back to her hippie-dippie 'hood on the western edge if Massachusetts - it wasn't quite a road trip, but we had to stop for a bathroom break.

We were on the Mass Pike - Route 90 - which, for the uninitiated, is a toll road that runs east to west across the state of Massachusetts (and, eventually, across the border into the randomness of upstate New York). You can take "the Pike" to get to Worcester, Leicester, and other towns whose names you can't pronounce.

Well, we pulled into the rest stop in Charlton, expecting to use the restroom (as the name "rest stop" implies one ought to do) and maybe grab some almonds from a vending machine.

Then what to my wondering eyes should appear... but a miniature farmers market! And eight tiny reindeer. (Just kidding about the reindeer.)

There on the side of the highway stood a small collection of farm stands, looking as out of place as a scone on the middle tier of a curate stand at afternoon tea. I mean, really.

As it turns out, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) has reserved space for local farmers to sell their goods at rest stops since 2000. Not many vendors have taken advantage of this opportunity, but those who have are glad: Darlene at the Gilmore farm stand (the farm is in the same city as the rest stop, Charlton) said she gets so much business at the rest stop, she doesn't need to sell at any other markets.

My sister eats fruit like most people breathe air: she inhales it, and she doesn't think much about doing it. So she bought a crate of blueberries from Gilmore Farm and ate pretty much the entire thing before we reached our destination.

I was looking for a more substantial snack, so I went over to chat with Kevin at the Berkshire Grain stand. All his granolas are kosher, made with unrefined sugar, and have fun names. For instance, the Tangleberry mix (named for the Tanglewood summer music festival in Lenox, where Berkshire Grain is based) is "child-friendly," meaning it does not contain nuts.

(Side note: why are so many kids allergic to nuts these days? Remind me to ask a stand-up comic; I'm sure they'll have an answer.)

Kevin gave me a sample bag of the cranberry pecan granola, and it really hit the spot. I felt it was an appropriately earthy crunchy item to snack on as I continued on the drive to Northampton, Massachusetts, conservative Republican population: negative a billion.

In Defense of Locavorism: Let's Cultivate Our Garden

In The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, a controversial response to Michael Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pierre Desrochers and Hiroku Shimizu take a stance against the locavore movement. Yesterday, The Daily Beast promoted The Locavore’s Dilemma in a post entitled, “Why Locavorism Doesn’t Make Us Happier, Healthier, or Safer.”

Desrochers’ and Shimizu’s main argument is against the idea of “food miles,” or the distance between the farm and the consumer’s plate, as a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions. Citing many Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies, they point out that:

As American researchers have documented, in their country the “food miles” segment (from producer to retailer) contributes only about 4 percent of total emissions related to what Americans take home in their grocery bags, while 83 percent of households’ carbon dioxide footprint for food consumption can be traced back to the production stages.

Since “food miles” aren’t traversed in a vacuum, other environmental factors have to be taken into consideration when making dietary decisions. Unsurprisingly, certain climates are more suitable for the production of certain foods (fruits, for example). So building a greenhouse where you can grow peaches during winter in New England is less environmentally sound than just transporting those peaches from across the country. I think that would make sense to most locavores.

The Locavore’s Dilemma is well-researched and well-written, and I’m glad it exists. Locavorism is one of those ideas that seem to make sense on a gut level, and ideas like that always deserve to be challenged.

But I take issue with the book on many fronts, including its understanding of most locavores’ motivation. Desrochers and Shimizu assume people who value eating locally produced food over food that has traveled long distances want to impose their dietary habits on everyone on the planet, at the expense of social and economic logic.

Do I think a financially struggling person living in Santa Barbara should attempt to maintain a vegetable garden rather than buy cheap meals at a fast food chain? Yes. Do I think starving families in Haiti should refuse food drops from the U.S. because of the carbon emissions of the planes that delivered them? No. Is it time to stop employing the overused rhetorical device of asking myself questions with obvious answers? Probably.

But the most problematic implication of The Locavore’s Dilemma is evident in The Daily Beast’s defense of it. That is the argument that the food production/consumption situation that exists today is better than any imagined alternative simply because it is what exists today. Huge factory farms have beat out small, family-run farms largely due to government subsidies; presumably, by virtue of that economic victory, they are better for the world we live in today.

That Panglossian mindset strikes me as a grand excuse to be lazy. For all his faults, Voltaire seems to have had at least one thing right: we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. So let’s cultivate our garden.