What’s Good? by Peter Hoffman inspired me to be more curious about favorite ingredients. I adapted a recipe from the book using oven-roasted Early Girl tomatoes and eggplant and paired it with 3 sustainable Merlots.

The wines and book in this post were provided as media samples. No other compensation was received and all opinions are my own.

A recent read, What’s Good?: A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients by Peter Hoffman, has gotten me thinking about the ingredients I use and is encouraging me to be more curious about them. Of course, I regularly try to look into the wines I drink and how they’re made and share those explorations on this blog, so I see many tie-ins there. I also try to regularly buy organic produce and meats and shop at the farmer’s market to support local farmers, but adding an extra element of curiosity can add layers to the experience.

The book is a unique look at the world of food and of the world through food. Over the course of the book, Hoffman not only shares with us his personal story and a look inside his now bygone restaurants Savoy and Back Forty, but also takes us on explorations of our foodways by digging deep into some of his favorite ingredients. He takes us along to tap trees at a maple syrup operation, inside seafood and meat systems, and shows us a view of the world from the point of view of various fruits and vegetables. He also examines the challenges facing those in the food world wanting to support sustainable practices and choose varieties of plants bred for flavor. Along the way, he also shares what the items mean to him and introduces us to some of his favorite producers as well. I love that he shows how interdisciplinary food can be. In short, food geeks have many journeys waiting for them in this read.

These explorations the book takes inspired me to be more inquisitive about the foods I buy, and I thought I’d start by taking a closer look at one item I’ve been regularly buying to get to know it better.

Early Girls

Name: Pasta alla Norma (Oven-roasted Variation)
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 60 min
Total time: 1 h 19 min
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 2 Japanese eggplants (each about 9 inches/20 to 25 cm long) sliced into ½-inch/12 mm rings (If rings are large, slice in half or in quarters); 1 to 1.5 lbs (454 to 567 g) of tomatoes, sliced in half or quartered (Early Girls were used here, Canestrinos recommended in the original recipe); 3 dried chile peppers, such as guajillo, Thai, or arbol chiles, chopped up (If you desire a less spicy sauce, remove the seeds before breaking up the chiles.); 4 cloves of garlic, minced; ½ cup loosely packed basil, roughly chopped; 1-16 oz (455g) package of dried pasta of your choosing; 4 ounces, ricotta salata; Olive oil; Salt, as needed; Pepper, as needed

In one chapter of the book, Hoffman shares his love for Canestrino tomatoes, an heirloom variety he loves for their density and exceptional flavor. While they’re a hybrid and not an heirloom variety, I have been bringing home pounds and pounds of Early Girl tomatoes every week from the farmer’s market these past few weeks, as seems to be the case at certain times of the year the last few years. You might notice that it’s nearly November right now, which might lead you to say “Really, tomatoes? Right now?” Well, I am in California, and here in the Bay Area it does tend to stay warm until late in the fall, and with global warming, that seems to get further extended every year. So yeah, there are tons of tomatoes at the market right now.

Early Girls tend to be round and range from golf ball to tennis ball sizes (although I generally find more of the former. They’re like little bright red globes. They’re juicy, sweet, and have a good concentration of flavor. They’re a dependable variety that ripens early and they continue to ripen and set fruit throughout the season, probably one of the reasons I’m seeing so many of them late into the fall. I learned that this characteristic of growing new fruit throughout the season makes them an “indeterminate” variety of tomato, which yields a slow and steady supply, rather than one big harvest. It can withstand large temperature shifts, and they do particularly well when dry-farmed (the ones I buy are dry-farmed) which forces these vines to develop deeper roots and produces more concentrated flavors –– much like with wine grapes! This attribute makes them particularly attractive for areas like California that are experiencing more and more drought conditions. We’re definitely water-conscious around here.

This variety was brought to the US in the 1970s by horticulturalist Joe Howland. He discovered this tasty, early-season variety developed in France. He served as chairman of Pan American Seed Company and on the board of directors for PetoSeed Company, and he secured the rights to sell the seed in the US, nicknaming it the “Early Girl.” Some modifications have been made by US seed breeders, and the tomato has been gaining in popularity ever since. So while not an heirloom, this tomato has a lot to recommend it from sustainability, economic, and flavor standpoints, with many people finding the flavor to be on par or even surpassing that of some beloved heirloom varieties. These gals are winners on many levels.

They’re also super versatile. These tomatoes are considered slicing tomatoes, so they’re great on salads and in sandwiches. However, because they’re juicy and sweet, I really like to roast them, which further concentrates the flavor and makes them jammy or slightly candied and oven-dried depending how long you let them go. They’re great like that to use as a topping, or I then use them for sauces and soup. I’ve been buying up tons of these, roasting them, and will be storing them in the freezer to use during the winter.

In the book, Hoffman combines the Canestrinos with eggplant for Pasta all a Norma, and I thought these would be perfect in that dish. I switched up the techniques slightly from the recipe he shared by roasting both the eggplant and tomatoes. This creates a few more dishes, but means you don’t have to stand by the stove for as long, and seems appropriate during this time period here that is half summer and half fall. It worked out beautifully and we got a delicious and hearty vegetarian dish where we didn’t miss the meat for a second.

The Wines: A Trio of Merlot

As it’s #MerlotMe month, I have quite a few bottles of Merlot about and the plummy red fruit flavors and moderate tannins of many make this variety a good candidate to pair with a dish like this. However, this pasta has a couple of wild card elements. First, tomatoes can be tricky to pair at times because they’re high in acid which can flatten the flavors of wine that’s less acidic. However, eggplant is pretty low in acid and can mitigate the effect. The bigger variable is the spiciness of the chile peppers in the sauce, which can also cause pairing problems. The fruitiness of New World Merlots stand a good chance of mitigating the heat, but of course, individual cuvées will vary. We had 3 bottles that I received as samples to play against to see what worked. All three are made sustainably, which only seems appropriate to pair with a recipe inspired by a book that deals so closely with issues of sustainability.

Matanzas Creek Merlot Alexander Valley 2018

Blend: Merlot | ABV: 13.8% | Price: $40

Matanzas Creek was founded in 1977 on the site of a retired dairy farm in the Bennett Valley region of Sonoma County. All of the winery’s fruit is sustainably grown, certified under the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. They focus primarily on Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc, although they do also make some limited quantities of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Bordeaux-style reds. In addition, to their grapes, they also have fields of lavender gardens. Matanzas Creek is a part of the Jackson Family portfolio of wines.

Winemaking: The grapes for this wine were picked sourced from 14 blocks in mountains and benchland areas. (86% from Alexander Valley, 14% Bennett Valley) The wine was cold-soaked for five days and then fermented on skins for an average of 15 days. Élevage occurred over 533 Days in 32% new French oak. Additional information can be found here.

Tasting Notes: Aromas of black cherry, red plum, and black tea hit on the nose and then continue on the palate, along with flavors of sour cherry, a touch of chocolate, a little bit of pencil led, and cinnamon. The wine had medium+ body with moderate, smooth tannins, and plenty of brightness.

How it Worked: This was our favorite of the three wines with the Pasta alla Norma. It was the most red fruited of the three, which matched nicely with the flavors in the food, and it had the most moderate tannins and the medium body worked well with the weight of the dish. It also worked the best with the spiciness in the sauce, and it become more savory and more peppery in the pairing.

Seavey Vineyard Merlot Napa Valley 2018

Blend: Merlot | ABV: 14.5% | Price: $65

Seavey Vineyard’s history goes back to the 1870s when it was commonly known as the Franco-Swiss Farming Company. After about thirty years of producing great wines, the dual punches of a phylloxera infestation and Prohibition led the company to fold. The land was used to raise cattle and for growing grains for the next half-century until Bill and Mary Seavey acquired the land in 1979 and began to revive the original vineyards. Vines are planted on steep, rocky, south-facing hillsides in Conn Valley near Lake Hennessey. They only produce estate wines from their 40 planted acres. The grapes are farmed sustainably, certified under Napa Green as well as by Fish Friendly Farming. You can find more information on their sustainability practices here.

Winemaking: Grapes from each vineyard block were harvested and vinified separately. Grapes were harvested in the morning and promptly de-stemmed and the uncrushed berries were gently transferred into fermentation tanks to carefully manage the tannins and resulting wine texture. Following whole-berry fermentation, the wine was aged in 100% French oak barrels (35% new) for 20 months before bottling in June 2020. Additional information can be found here.

Tasting Notes: This wine showed darker fruit notes, with black plums, blackberry, and cherry on the nose. Chocolate, a touch of iron, and licorice joined in on the palate and led into a savory finish. The wine was a touch more structured than the last, and had a fuller body and showed a little more grip on the finish, and still had plenty of acidity.

How it Worked: This was our next favorite with the food. The tannins and fuller body competed a little bit with the weight and spice of the dish, but in general, it made a very good match.

L'Ecole No. 41 Estate Merlot Walla Walla Valley 2018

Blend: 84% Merlot, 12% Cabernet Franc, 4% Cabernet Sauvignon | ABV: 14.5%| Price: $36

L’Ecole No. 41 has made several appearances on the blog before. They’re a third-generation family-owned winery and the third oldest winery in Walla Walla Valley. The winery gets its name from the historic Frenchtown School building in which the winery is located. Marty Clubb is L’Ecole N° 41’s Managing Winemaker and co-owns the winery with his wife Megan. Megan’s parents, Jean and Baker Ferguson, founded the winery in 1983. L’Ecole has been at the forefront of leading the way on sustainability in Washington. They are certified by VINEA as well as Salmon-Safe. You can find more info on their sustainability and farming practices here.

Winemaking: The grapes for this wine come from the winery’s estate vineyards in Walla Wallas, split evenly between their Ferguson Vineyard with fractured basalt soils, and their Seven Hills Vineyard with wind-blown loess soils. Each lot was hand-harvested and gently crushed into 1.5 ton stainless steel fermenters. Then the wine was cleanly racked to small French oak barrels, 35% new, with four rackings over 18 months. Additional information can be found here.

Tasting Note: This wine showed notes of dark cherry, black plum black tea, and savory herbs. Notes of black pepper, cedar, and charcoal join in on the palate. This was the most structured of the three wines, with the darkest flavor profile, due in part to the blend in the wine, and likely from volcanic soils, the grapes were grown in adding to the smoky impressions.

How it Worked: While it didn’t make for a bad pairing, this is a wine that wants a meatier, richer pairing. The tannins and flavors competed a bit with the spice in the dish and just felt a little heavy alongside it. Have this with a peppery steak or a braised meat dish. We also enjoyed the rest of the bottle with a big juicy burger, and that was a hit!

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pasta, vegetarian, tomatoes, eggplant

dinner

Italian

Servings: 4-6

Adapted by: Nicole Ruiz Hudson

Pasta alla Norma (Oven-Roasted Variation)

Prep Time: 20 MinCooking Time: 60 MinTotal Time: 1 H & 19 M

This recipe was adapted from the recipe in What's Good? by Peter Hoffman.

Ingredients

2 Japanese eggplants (each about 9 inches/20 to 25 cm long) sliced into ½-inch/12 mm rings (If rings are large, slice in half or in quarters)
1 to 1.5 lbs (454 to 567 g) of tomatoes, sliced in half or quartered (Early Girls were used here, Canestrinos recommended in the original recipe)
3 dried chile peppers, such as guajillo, Thai, or arbol chiles, chopped up (If you desire a less spicy sauce, remove the seeds before breaking up the chiles.)
4 cloves of garlic, minced
½ cup loosely packed basil, roughly chopped
1-16 oz (455g) package of dried pasta of your choosing
4 ounces, ricotta salata
Olive oil
Salt, as needed
Pepper, as needed

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400°F.
Generously coat the bottom of two large roasting pans (or sheet pans with a rim) with olive oil. Place the eggplant slices and the tomatoes on the pans in a single layer and season with salt and pepper. (In this version roasted the eggplant and tomatoes separately, but it should be fine to combine them, but the eggplant will likely not brown as much.) Place the pans in the oven and roast for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the vegetables have begun to brown, flipping them halfway through. Remove the pans from the oven and set them aside.
Lightly toast the chiles and garlic in more oil in a large pot or Dutch oven. Add the tomatoes, eggplant, and most of the basil (reserving some to use a garnish) and stew for about 15 to 20 minutes or until the vegetables have softened further, the flavors have melded, and excess liquid has cooked off, and a sauce consistency is achieved.
Meanwhile, set up a pot of salted boiling water for the pasta. Cook the pasta to al dente, drain, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid.
Add the pasta into the pan with the sauce and toss well to combine. Add some of the reserved cooking liquid as needed, a little at a time, to achieve your desired sauce consistency. Taste and adjust seasoning if needed. Garnish with the remaining basil leaves and grate or crumble to ricotta salata on top.

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Almost exactly a year ago I shared a post called Napa History with Gamble Family Wines & a Lamb Feast with Friends about a wonderful dinner party we’d had in the Before Times. I invite you to take a look at that post to get to know the winery, but there was one piece of Gamble’s story that I didn’t get to share in that post that I’ve been wanting to come back to since then, and it seems perfect to share during Women’s History Month.

Mary Ann McGuire, owner Tom Gamble’s mother, played an integral role in the history of Napa Valley as a driving force in establishing the 1968 Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve. I had the chance to speak with Mary Ann a couple of years ago, and then recently had the chance to participate in a virtual tasting with Tom and Mary Ann to delve even deeper into the story. I found her incredibly inspiring.

Mary Ann was born in Oakland – where I currently live – and grew up in the East Bay. In 1960, she married George Gamble, a Napa County cattle rancher, and moved to the valley. The Gambles felt a strong responsibility to be good stewards of the land.

Circumstances would soon galvanize that feeling of connection and duty to the land into action. One has to recall that in the 1960s Napa was not the bucolic yet posh destination it is today – it was still very rural, full stop. However, modernization was coming, but perhaps not in ways that kept an eye on conservation. The US Army Corps of Engineers and the California Department of Transportation were laying down plans that in combination would strip Napa Valley’s waterways and construct a six-lane freeway through Mt. St. Helena that would destroy hundreds of acres of farmland and wildlife. They began to see the negative effects of these plans on the land when in 1965, the Army Corps of Engineers stripped all living vegetation from the banks of Conn Creek which runs through the Gamble Ranch in Oakville.

Mary Ann went to work helping to organize a sizeable coalition to protest the freeway plans and the further river paving. The efforts from Mary Ann and the other participating families (among them, several other famous names tied to historic wineries) were extremely grassroots relying on phone trees and using up shoe leather:

"When we arrived in the Napa Valley, we saw it as a bountiful garden. For 10,000 years, this sacred land was historically cared for by the indigenous inhabitants of Napa, including the Onasatis (Wappo) Peoples. We felt we had the moral imperative to preserve that legacy. We drove house to house, we’d load the kids up and knock-on doors trying to convince people to create a good future for this land,” says Mary Ann.

Saving the land also required grit, determination, and audacious courage. Mary Ann adds:

“One day I looked out my car window, and I saw these huge earth movers had returned and were tearing up the land by the river. I reacted instinctively,” says Mary Ann. “I parked right in front of the bulldozers and I said, ‘I'm not moving my car and if you don’t leave, I will call every newspaper and every mother in this valley and they are going to bring their babies down here and we're going to sit in front of your bulldozers.’ They left pretty quickly.”

Photo credit to Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve's website, via Jarvis Communications.

Their efforts were successful but additional threats to the valley were soon to follow. On the plus side, the families in the valley now had a framework for how to proceed, and the group she had helped form would become the core behind the establishing Napa Valley’s Ag Preserve. After their experiences with the river paving and highway initiatives, the group began to pay careful attention to how development was transforming areas of Los Angeles and the Santa Clara Valley, and several key figures in the group, including Jack and Jamie Davies of Schramsberg, began championing the idea of an agricultural preserve in 1967.

The group got to work writing a zoning proposal, petitioning the community, and speaking at meetings of the Napa Valley Board of Supervisors. The work came to fruition when the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve was enacted with the passage of Ordinance # 274 in 1968.

Photo credit to Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve's website, via Jarvis Communications.

The landmark set of zoning laws that formed the Ag Preserve, as well as the Ag Watershed lands, established agriculture as the highest and best use of the land in Napa County, with the goal to protect agriculture in the region for future generations. It was the first zoning ordinance of its kind in the US.

Here are a few other points shared by Napa Valley Growers pertaining to the importance of the Ag Preserve:

Planted vineyard land makes up 9 percent of Napa County land totaling around 45,000 acres 37,100 acres of land (7.3% of the County) are protected in perpetuity through Conservation Agreements between landowners and the Land Trust of Napa County

Nationally, we lose nearly 40 acres of farmland every hour due to urban sprawl; however, not one acre of Ag Preserve zoned land has been lost to urban use since its adoption

According to the American Farmland Trust, an acre of agricultural land on average produces 58 times fewer GHG emissions than an acre of urban use.

The Ag Preserve celebrated its 50th Anniversary in 2018 and Napa would definitely not be the same without it. It has not been without controversy throughout its history for the restrictions it places on landowners, business, and development. It is also gets chipped away at fairly regularly, so it does regularly need defending. However, while visitors to Napa might find it frustrating that there aren’t more hotels available and other similar inconveniences in which the Ag Preserve does have a part to play, we can also thank it for making sure those beautiful views of vineyards and other farmlands weren’t long ago paved over for other uses.

Mary Ann, who is now 81 years old, continued to remain involved in the Napa Valley community in the decades after the Ag Preserve was established, getting involved not only in preservation efforts, but also in the arts, as well as religious and cultural efforts. She was on the founding board of the Napa Valley Performing Arts Center and was a driving force in restoring and reopening the historic Opera House in downtown Napa, among many other projects.

As you can probably imagine, Mary Ann’s work couldn’t help but influence her son, Tom. He, and by extension Gamble Family Wines, has continued to be involved in sustainability efforts in Napa as well. He helped draft both Napa Green and the Fish Friendly Farming Initiative. He is also incredibly active in the Napa Valley Vintners and the Napa Valley River Restoration Project, taking up the mantle of stewarding the land he grew up on.

Tom Gamble. Photo courtesy of Jarvis Communications.

In a time when it’s really easy to be cynical about the difference one person or even a small group can have on their community and the world around them, hearing Mary Ann’s story left me feeling inspired and hopeful. I’ll leave you with one more quote from Mary Ann:

“You have to see the planet as one, as interrelated,” says Mary Ann. “What happens in the South Pole is happening to us, what happens in the rain forest happens to us. What happens in the country affects the cities, what happens in the cities affects the country. It cannot be us and them, we are interrelated, interdependent, we are one.”

Flowers outside of May Ann Gamble's house.

The Pairing

I’ve had the chance to taste and enjoy many of Gamble’s beautiful wines, but the perfect wine to showcase in this post is the one dedicated to her, the Gamble Family Vineyards Mary Ann Mt. Veeder 2016. Tom Gamble describes his inspiration for the Mary Ann bottling on their website:

“It is with great pride that I name this wine after my mother, Mary Ann. She lives her life with loving elegance, which belies a firmness of resolve. In the face of life’s challenges, both attributes have been tested. Neither has wavered. Wine inspires and evokes memories. Marrying Merlot’s femininity and opulence with Cabernet Franc’s firm tannins and structure creates a wine that will only grow more elegant with time. As has my mother, Mary Ann.”

The Cabernet Franc and Merlot grapes (there’s also a splash of Cab Sauv) for this wine were grown on Mt. Veeder, which enjoys a very different micro-climate than the valley floor. The vineyards are about the fog line and as a result grapes get lots of sunshine while maintaining acidity thanks to the elevation, as well as lots of minerality from the rocky slopes. Wines from this area tend to be powerfully structured, and I often get a hint of a pine note from wines from this area.

All of this held true for this wine, which I don’t think I’d have pinned as Cab Franc and Merlot in a blind tasting given that structure. I asked Greg what he thought the wine was before revealing the blend, and he guessed Syrah because it reminded him a little bit of the Northen Rhône. I could absolutely see what he meant as the wine’s structure, stony minerality, herbal profile, and black pepper notes all were a bit reminiscent of the French region, but with that ripe California fruit character.

On the nose, the wine showed notes of black cherry, currants, red plums, espresso, and black pepper. These were joined on the palate by that pine note I often get from Mt. Veeder, olives, bay leaf, chocolate, spices, and lots of hard stones like granite. The wine was medium+ to full bodied, with medium + tannin, and plenty of acidity to buttress the structure. I think this wine could age for a quite a while yet. While it was lovely now, it almost seemed a little too young, even after allowing it to open up and breath for a while.

In my mind, I had plans of making a beautiful handmade pasta topped with a meaty sauce to go with this wine, but life, time, and laziness got in the way. Moreover, once I opened and tasted it I was struck by that Old World earthiness as well as the herbal notes, and thought I'd steer the dish in that direction instead. I decided to create a one-pot lentil dish using lots of veggies, herbs, mushrooms, and shredded pork, since we had quite a bit on hand after our recent Pork Showdown. You can easily swap in any other protein you have available or leave it out altogether for a hearty vegetarian dish (be sure to swap in mushroom or veggie stock in this case as well).

This is definitely a filling dish on its own that doesn’t need anything else, but I decided to serve it with some potatoes roasted with rosemary and Parmesan, and roasted carrots, which I like to get really roasty-toasty so that they’re all caramelized on the outside and super sweet on the inside.

The food and wine matched really nicely, and the homey, nurturing dish seemed appropriate to go with a wine inspired by one really impressive mother and activist.

The beautiful iridescent Aura Wine Glasses in these photos were provided by Dragon Glassware as samples. I've partnered with Dragon Glassware as an ambassador. Click here to get the glasses for yourself and use the code "NICOLE10" for 10% off. (I might receive commission through the links at no cost to you.)

Geeky Details

Taken from the wine’s tech sheet.

Average Price: $75.

Composition: 54% Cabernet Franc, 35% Merlot, 11% Cabernet, Sauvignon
Appellation: Mt. Veeder, Napa Valley
Vineyard and Winemaking: The south-west facing Cabernet Franc slope was harvested on October 4. The northeast facing Merlot slope was left hanging a few days longer. Fermentations peaked at a moderate 80 F helping to preserve the delicate mountain flavors, balanced with gentle tannin extraction. The Merlot and Cabernet Franc were blended together just prior to bottling. The Merlot’s opulent dark fruit is a perfect foil for the Cabernet Franc’s firm tannic structure and red fruit character. A splash of Cabernet Sauvignon added even greater complexity.
Cooperage: 45% new French oak
Cellaring: 20 months in barrel
Alcohol: 14.2%
TA: 0.60 g/100ml
pH: 3.69

Servings: 6 to 8

By: Nicole Ruiz Hudson