Organic Spinach and Blue Cheese Salad at Stillwater Bar and Grill in Pebble Beach, California by Ruth Paget
My husband Laurent, daughter Florence Paget, and I decided to eat Sunday lunch at the newly re-opened Lodge at Pebble Beach, California.
Our restaurant choice was the Stillwater Bar and Grill, which has large windows that look out over the Pacific and the 18th (5-par) hole on the golf course. The Stillwater serves American food with a great selection of seafood.
What I really wanted on the fall day we went, though, was a salad.
Monterey County grows delicious organic produce, so I celebrated fall with a “feel-good” salad as people in Detroit where I grew up were wont to say about the Greek salads we consumed in abundance during winter months to stay healthy. Stillwater’s “feel-good” salad is the California Coastal Spinach Salad is a lacto-ovo vegetarian’s dream. (Lacto-ovo vegetarians eat eggs and dairy in addition to produce.)
This vitamin-rich salad contains:
-baby spinach
-frisée lettuce
-magenta-colored endive
-corn kernals
-red grape halves
-cherry tomato halves
-small cucumber slices
-chunks of avocado
-chunks of Port Reyes blue cheese
-toasted and sliced almonds
The blue cheese dressing ties all these rather sweet ingredients together and adds additional protein and calcium to the blue cheese that is already in the salad. Blue cheese also contains iodine and selenium, which provide several health benefits as well.
Along with this delicious salad, I ate grilled baguette slices that had been stuffed with slices of Brie cheese and mushroom slices. The baguette slices were buttered, and the grilling gave them a golden, crunchy crust. The Brie cheese inside the baguette melted around the mushrooms, making each bite an oozing bite of deliciousness.
Laurent and Florence both ate a seared sole fillet with baby vegetables and drank a Tiefenbrunner pinot grigio from Italy’s northeastern Alto-Adige region, which borders Austria. (This region has also been called the Sud Tyrol.) Both Laurent and Florence said the fish and wine together were a nice way to begin celebrating the holidays.
For dessert, Florence and Laurent shared the Valrhona chocolate cake. I ate the toasted walnut cake that was loaded with caramelized milk whip and came with candied walnuts that were flavored with lavender. The desserts completed the meal and made me skip dinner.
The meal was just wonderful and filling.
The Stillwater Bar and Grill in Pebble Beach, California is a nice spot for weekend lunches with family (several came in while we were there) and gatherings for the holidays. The Lodge has private rooms and catering facilities for large events as well.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
