 Cooking Amelia
Chef Rich will host a dinner and book signing at Sage on the Coast, Sunday, August 12, to celebrate the publication of Amelia Saltsman’s new Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook. Farmers Alex Weiser, Phil McGrath, and Peter Schaner will be on hand while Rich prepares dishes from the cookbook (for sale at the dinner, $22.95 plus tax) and Jeff and Julie of Thompkin Cellars pour the wine. The cost is $60 per person. You can also buy the book now at Sage on the Coast, test a few recipes, and tell Amelia exactly what you thought of her Tromboncino Trifolati when she signs it. Also attending will be Market Manager Laura Avery, who contributes a short history of the market to the book.
“Over the years, many people…have talked about writing a Santa Monica Farmers’ Market cookbook. But Amelia Saltsman made it happen,” says Avery. Saltsman, a cooking teacher, writer, and host of “Fresh from the Farmers’ Market” on Santa Monica CityTV Cable Channel 16, earns back cover blurbs from Alice Waters, Nancy Silverton, Suzanne Goin, and Lynne Rossetto Kasper. And for good reason. If you weren’t lucky enough to marry a home chef, and were thinking daily meals from fresh ingredients might have to wait until your next lifetime, Saltsman’s cookbook makes sense of the leafy, scabrous, ruddy and round. She shows you that simple, intelligent, flavorful meals aren’t impossible or time consuming, and that you don’t need lessons abroad (although that would be fun) or culinary institutes to eat the way you always wanted to.
 First, she’s organized. Saltsman is great with lists: shopping hints (leave room for surprises, bring small bills); kitchen techniques (how to butterfly a game hen, peel peaches, segment citrus); pantry items (sea salt, anchovies, pancetta); kitchen tools (oyster knife, food mill, immersion blender). She lists crops and recipes by season, and all the growers “from beekeepers to flower farmers.” She catalogues obscure varieties of potatoes, avocados, apples, tangerines, grapefruits, peaches and nectarines (bonus dirty excerpt: “Select fruit with a little give when gently palmed and look for warm depth of all-over skin color, not just the rosy blush.”).
Most useful are the primers on melons, beets, sweet potatoes, fresh beans, winter squash, persimmons, and eggs (the freshest eggs lie flat in a bowl of water; the aged, with a larger air pocket at one end, stand up). Saltsman tells you how to distinguish rapini (broccoli rabe) from Chinese broccoli or from sprouting broccoli (ruffled leaves) and which farmers forage wild summer purslane (and what the chef de cuisine at Lucques would do with it). She’s curious, observant, and experimental. A frittata with stinging nettles is not beyond you, nor a marinade from fresh blackberries, lemon verbena and balsamic vinegar. Come to the dinner and taste what life has in store for you.
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Sage Market Excursion '07
Maui Onion Soup
Beached
