Winter Greens

Cold nights and dry, warmish days in the 60’s make for flavorful winter greens, says Romeo Coleman of Coleman Farms in Carpinteria. Romeo grows the feathery-leaved peacock kale on the Sage menu, as well as cavolo nero kale, so tender and intensely flavored one happy couple routinely jettisons all their sides for double helpings of it. January also brings broccolini and spigarello, a variety of wild broccoli with masses of leaves and tiny florets. “Weeds,” Romeo’s father Bill calls them. Wild arugula, rapini, chard—once horticultural curiosities Bill sold to hippies on the steps of Mission Santa Barbara—now go directly to high-end restaurants in Los Angeles and farmers’ markets from Goleta to Santa Monica. Bill began farming an abandoned lemon orchard in 1965, embracing techniques an older generation of Japanese and Filipino farmers learned in their youth: amending the soil only with compost and controlling pests with natural predators, crop rotation, and, creepily, “hand removal.” His flowers are chic to the point of depravity. During a December cold snap, the bar at Sage Eastbluff was bunched with the prodigious tender petals of snowy ranunculus and nodding white lisianthus, like piña coladas on a ski lift. But aren’t those spring flowers? “They’re a little bit forced,” admits Romeo. “It’s a trade secret.” After the rains come, his sugar snap peas and pea tendrils—little shoots that taste exactly like peas but with leaves—will be on the menu once again.

The Key Lime and the Beautiful

At their annual Newport luncheon Reverend Bursting found in the tartness of his key lime pie a correlative for his bracing hour with Mrs. Withertip. A matron of daunting principles, devoted to their breathless exposition, Zettalene Withertip always left him in a state of rattled but salubrious humility after the weeks of fulsome holiday congratulations. He imagined she would produce in her Maker the same flummoxed dismay, were they to meet again.

“Giddy, what is that pink concoction?” Mrs. Withertip asked her niece, a young woman whose petulant charm the Reverend was beginning to enjoy.

“My dessert. A Perfiditini. No, that can’t be right. Shall we ask for the list again?”

“One will do, I think,” said Mrs. Withertip.

“I meant to find the name. It was awfully clever.”

“Go on, Reverend. You were speaking of sponges.”

“Spongers, my dear. Men who lived on boats, diving for live sponges in the Keys. It is believed they came up with the recipe in the late 1800’s. Living under the sun, only heat and humidity, with little to refresh them. No refrigeration. No fresh milk. No ice.”

“Torment.”

“The Reverend’s stories often feature fishermen, “ observed Giddy.

“The bent of my vocation, Miss Breeze. We do find them figuring in the great ones.”

“And is Key Lime Pie as vast as that?”

“The Key lime is ancient, my dear. Carried by Arab traders from the Malay Peninsula to Palestine, by Crusaders to Europe, by Columbus to the West Indies. They naturalized in the Keys and in Mexico.”

“They aren’t Mexican limes!” gasped Mrs. Withertip.

“The same—Citrus aurantifolia Swingle. Thorny branches, thin rind, yellowy fruit. Many seeds. Lots of juice—juice high in acid, which cooked the egg yolks and thickened the canned condensed milk aboard ship, making a custard filling. Very clever. Native genius.”

“I should think a little baking more prudent.”

“Home cooks in the Keys were spared heating their ovens. The recipe became endemic in South Florida, though the cook at the Curry Mansion, laudable Aunt Sally, was given the credit. Key lime plantations were built by dynamiting holes in the limestone, but they were wiped out in the hurricane of 1926. Greener, thornless, shippably thick-skinned Persian limes replaced them. Key limes became dooryard relics, and, finally, objects of nostalgia, ripe for admen to use in their tourism campaigns in the Fifties.”

“So should it have a whipped cream or meringue topping, Reverend?”

“I take no stand, Mrs. Withertip. These are contentious refinements. Thus do the products of scarcity and invention—justly acclaimed, disseminated, embraced—become objects of dogma, schism, and petty tyrannies. This one is quite good. Do try a bite.”

“Another Key Lime Pie,” commanded Aunt Zettalene. “And three forks.”

Soupçon

Abraham Lopez steals in the back door three hours before opening for lunch. It’s a cold Friday morning, the last of the year, and the last chance he’ll have to make soup before the New Year’s Eve rush. He begins by rinsing the sunchokes. Knobbed and knuckled, like ginger root, their rough scalloped layers revealing lurid purple underneath, the sunchokes, or “Jerusalem artichokes,” look like they want only to be put back in the ground. Abraham pulls out ten fennel bulbs and with a large new Swiss knife, its sides still unscored, he quickly chops them, washing them in a bowl wider than a sundial. He strains them, drizzles them with olive oil in a roasting pan and covers it with foil. They go into the Wolf oven for an hour, during which he heats a 40-quart stock pot, the rim of which reaches his chin. Abraham has been making soups at Sage Eastbluff for five years. Taught by Chef Rich himself, he now does a dozen or more, including the Maui Onion, White Bean and Kale, Carrot Ginger, Butternut Squash, Lentil with Chicken Sausage, Tomato Asparagus, and the perennial Tortilla Soup. In this chilly season, a barrel-sized batch may last only a few days. Celery, leeks and onions are chopped, washed, plucked from the water, drained, then tossed to the bottom of the pot with olive oil and chopped garlic. It takes a while to chop twenty pounds of sunchokes. Abraham adds them to the pot in three batches, stirring with a wooden spoon, and the kitchen fills with a hearty, meaty, mouth-watering aroma. No herbs or stock are in yet: “It’s them,” says Abraham. The sunchokes. They simmer another 30 minutes before he scrapes the fat off 16 quarts of chicken stock (5 hours, 5 chickens, cooked the day before) and strains it through a sieve. More kitchen workers have arrived, whipping up tapenade and rolling bread dough into loaves. A series of deliverymen drop off fish, cheese, yams and avocados. Abraham checks the roasted fennel, browned on the edges and smelling sweetly like pancakes, and stirs it into the soup. He fills his side of the kitchen line with the ingredients for a dozen salads, each with its own fanatical cult following at lunch, and turns up the flame under the soup for another three hours. After lunch he’ll add the herbs, base and cream (only about a quart, or 5 percent of the finished product), then begin the long process of pouring it into an industrial sized blender to finish it. Look for the Jerusalem Artichoke and Roast Fennel Soup early in January.

Ecco i Panini!

If you are languishing between trips to your beloved pensione in Vernazza or semi-refurbished villa near San Gimignano, you may console yourself in tedious hours with a visit to Sage on the Coast and a bit of Italian warmth and caprice. Be sufficiently hale and affable (tell them you've been to their uncle's restaurant in Chicago) and the ragazzo will kiss your cheeks and order you a panini. A newly-purchased, well-secreted panini machine lets Chef Kris put a new panini sandwich on the bar menu (it might as well be written in water) whenever the mood strikes him. Deliciously warm, crisp and satisfying, these panini are nothing like the one you bought outside San Giovanni in Laterano, when you found the church door locked and a riled flock of gesticulating saints on top, and a sturdy-lunged nine-year-old in a truck sold you (8 euro!) a roll as artisanal as a hot dog bun with a translucent slice on ham inside. Was it even warm? Sage's are made with freshly baked, custom-sized ciabatta bread, slightly underdone so it finishes light and crisp in the machine. They're crusty outside, gooey inside, filled with hearty cheeses, lots of meat (the braised beef was fantastico), maybe even arugula. Available lunch and dinner at the bar only.

Eastbluff Shopping Center
2531 Eastbluff
Newport Beach, CA 92660
949.718.9650