It's the Cheese: Lugano Swiss Bistro Still Shows What Life is All About - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

It’s the Cheese: Lugano Swiss Bistro Still Shows What Life is All About - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The editors at the Monterey County (CA) Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) knew they had a treasure house of multicultural restaurants in a community each time I queried for an article with about five restaurant suggestions along with international dishes they served and distinctive herbs and ingredients used in the cuisine.

I loved Carmel’s Swiss Restaurant Lugano for its gemüchlikeit German charm in the German side of the restaurant and dolce vita charm in the Italian side of the restaurant. 

The editors of the Monterey County Weekly asked me to review Lugano and sample more than fondue despite its being excellent.  (They knew my mother’s family was from Wisconsin.)  My article follows:

It’s the Cheese

When my husband Laurent and I yearned for some Old World charm on our recent anniversary, we headed out to Lugano Swiss Bistro in the Barnyard in Carmel, California.

We used to sit on the German side of the restaurant enjoying its carved wood and beer tankard decorations, but now we prefer the Italian side with its painted street scenes of gelati vendors and florists.

The night of our anniversary, we ordered Swiss onion soup and original Swiss fondue.  Swiss onion soup tastes like French onion soup.  They both use beef broth and excellent gruyère cheese in their making.

We continued our cheese fest with fondue, a dish said to have originated in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.  The creamy texture made from bubbling gruyère, emmenthal, and appenzellar cheese makes it tempting to drop bread cubes into Lugano’s fondue and just fish them out with spoons of cheese. 

The penalty for doing something like this according to A Little Swiss Cookbook (ISBN – 0-86281-271-2 published by Appletree Press) by Jacqueline Martinet is to buy another bottle of white wine like Fendant du Valais for your party.

Laurent's favorite wine, though, for fondue at Lugano’s is Père Patriarche.  This slightly sour wine perfectly cuts the rich cheese flavors of the fondue and aids in digestion.

After my dinner with Laurent, I went to dinner with one of my writing group friends, who was looking for restaurants with “locals” menus during slow times during the week.

We went on a Tuesday night and started our meal with a Swiss specialty called Bunderfleisch, air-dried beef.  These are slices of beef that taste like a meaty prosciutto, but not as delicate. 

This was the first time I ate bunderfleisch, and I liked it.  Usually, bunderfleisch is served before fondue or another cheese specialty called raclette, which is cheese that melts out of cheese crust onto plates for spreading.  You eat sweet cornichon pickles with that cheese fest.

End of Part 1.

To be continued.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Hors d'Oeuvres and Appetizers Book Review by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Hors d’Oeuvres and Appetizers Book Review by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Williams-Sonoma along with Gourmet magazine does informative short books for holiday entertaining almost every year.

One of my favorite information-packed cookbooks for planning “cocktail parties” of any kind of “rallye” is 108 pages long and is entitled Hors d’Oeuvres and Appetizers published by the Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library.

Special features of this cookbook include:

-a 2-page spread on cooking equipment

-4 basic recipes for other recipes in the book: tart pastry, puffball pastry, pizza dough, and yogurt quick bread

-4-page glossary describing Mediterranean ingredients and their usage

-index of 4 basic recipes and 42 cocktail dishes

Each of the 42 recipes has a photo of the completed dish and ingredients separated out from the step-by-step method (without numbers)

The 42 recipes feature American and international dishes such as:

-cheese puffs

-mixed Mediterranean vegetable terrine

-eggplant caviar

-marinated button mushrooms

-gravlax – sweet and salty smoked salmon from Scandinavia

-tandoori chicken from the Punjab

I use this 108-page cookbook as a reference for ordering catering as well as for cooking the items in it myself.

Williams-Sonoma makes many of these books every year, but you can distinguish between books with the same title by looking at the ISBN Number when ordering.

The book has an ISBN of 0-7835-0218-4 for easy ordering.

Happy sampling!!!!

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Seascape Art Books Compiled by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Seascape Art Books Compiled by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

The following books and audio books or similar ones often allow visitors to better draw, paint, and appreciate landscapes and seascapes:

1-Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice by Mitchell Albala

2-Painting Beautiful Watercolor Landscapes:  Transform Ordinary Places into Extraordinary Scenes by Joyce Hicks

3-Panting Pastel Landscapes by Jeremy Ford

4-How to Draw Animals:  40 Step-by-Step Drawing Projects by Alisa Calder

5-The Oil Painting Course You’ve Always Wanted:  Guided Lessons for Beginners and Experienced Artists by Kathleen Staiger

6-How to Draw Wildflowers in Simple Steps by Janet Whittle

7-20 Ways to Draw a Tree and 44 Other Nifty Things from Nature:  A Sketch Book for Artists, Designers, and Doodlers by Eloise Renoff

8-A Field Guide to Bird Songs:  Eastern and Central North America (Peterson’s Field Guide, CD and Audiobook) by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology by Roger Tory Peterson

9-A Field Guide to Bird Songs: Western North America (Peterson’s Field Guides) by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology by Roger Tory Peterson

10-Painting Skies and Seascapes by Peter Rush

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Domo Arigato: Meals at Michi Cafe - Part 2 - Reviewed by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Domo Arigato: Meals at Michi Café – Part 2 – Reviewed by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After a little research in a Buddhist temple cookbook called The Legacy of the Japanese in Hawaii, I found a recipe for the salad dressing made with rice vinegar, sugar, and a little soy sauce.

A mound of lightly, fried shrimp, eggplant, green beans, and turnips came with one of my friend’s grilled teriyaki chicken dish, making me think he ended up with the best value for his money.

The Japanese got the idea for deep frying foods during the 16^th century from the Portuguese, on of the first nation to have contact with Japan.

Tempura shrimp stay nice and long when you cut along their underside.  I like the way the Japanese fry chicken with the skin on to keep them moist, but other people take the skin off.

My daughter Florence liked the beef teriyaki she ordered and said it was “juicy and tender.”  I like the way Yamato serves it teriyaki sauce on the side, if you ask them.

Teriyaki can be too sweet for some people.  It is a syrupy sauce make from soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar.

One of my friends complimented me on exposing my daughter to so many different cuisines.

I laughed and said she liked beef in various forms – Korean bulgogi, Mexican carne asada, and Japanese beef teriyaki.

We all tried the breaded pork cutlets that one of my friends ordered and loved the.  This dish is called tonkatsu and was adopted from the Dutch.  A spicy sauce accompanied the dish, but she said the cutlets were so juicy that they did not need any sauce.

The eel I ordered came over rice with thick, soy sauce in an orange-lidded box with flowers on it.  I had never eaten eel.  The flesh was fatty, but tasted good. 

Green tea-flavored ice cream came with our meal as dessert. 

Article end

The real sweet ending to this article is that you can buy green tea ice cream in Asian markets now.

The following cookbooks can help readers become familiar with Japanese menu items and cooking methods:

Japanese Soul Cooking:  Ramen, Tonkatsu, Tempura, and more from the Streets and Kitchens of Tokyo and Beyond by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat

Washoku:  Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen by Elizabeth Andoh

Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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