Amy's been wanting me to try this for some time and I finally got around to it the other night, basically it's a stuffed potato hors d'oeuvres that was jolly tasty.  What you stuff it with is really up to you, but the basic starter point is the potato.  Top and tail them to give them a nice flat surface to work with then using a melon baller core the potato to leave a hollow shell.  Dump them into boiling water for 10 or so minutes, checking with a sharp knife to check their doneness.  When finished with that coat them in olive oil and throw them into a 400f oven for ten minutes to give them a crisp and then (assuming your filling is cold) let cool. 

In this case my filling was a bit of salmon tartare.  Minced shallots, chopped smoked salmon, chopped capers, in one bowl.  Creme fraiche and a tea spoon of lemon into another bowl - whisk the creme fraiche until you get some stiff peaks then mix the salmon mixture in with the creme fraiche.  Top with a touch of cavier, a little chive and serve with a nice chilled savignon blanc.

Where to start with La Fenêtre?  Let's see, a year or so after my wife and I had our first girl Zoe my parents came over to stay and volunteered to babysit while my wife and I went out on one of our first real date nights post baby ; after painstaking research we selected Sona on La Cienega Blvd.  David Myers was a chef that Amy had been following for a while and the menu just looked fantastic.  Off we trotted and had one of the best meals ever (David's tasting menu was spectacular, the service was entirely out of this World - and still is today) ; a tasting menu with wine pairings - mostly for me, but Amy had a taste of each.  The sommelier that night was a chap by the name of Josh Klapper, he came over and introduced himself and chatted about the fabulous wines that the restaurant was serving.  Josh was an amazingly friendly and likable chap and during the course of the meal we got talking more and he let us into his deep, dark secret - he was now making his own wines and asked if we'd like to try his first Pinot.  With no further ado on such a magical night Josh brought his Pinot out and frankly it was remarkable.  I gave him my contact details there and then and asked for him to email me when I could buy a case.  We've remained friends ever since, his wines have gone on to get better and better and today he's making great wines at excellent prices across a range of blends.  You can find out more here.

Fast forwarded some four years and Josh sent us a note to say that he'd partnered up with GraceRestaurant and its fabulous chef Neal Fraser for a wine tasting evening.  Well we didn't need much persuasion to find a babysitter for that event, and fortunately my mother-in-law was in town from Alabama too so off we set for a nice set dinner and some fabulous wine.  What Chef Fraser had prepared for us was a light (note this Fabio Viviani) five course tasting menu, each course set to highlight Josh's wine that the fantastic Waitstaff kept topped up most of the night on our table. 

It started off with a little Amuse Bouche ; a toast point with a sphere of fois pate to accompany Josh's latest A COTE Chardonnay (literally straight from the barrel).  Beautifully presented, seasoned, taste was perfect. 

To follow, King Crab, toasted cous cous with summer truffles, this time with Josh's more complete 2007 and 2004 Bien Nacido Vineyard Chardonnarys.  The crab was lovely, paired with the cous cous and the Chardonnay (and I'm not a huge Chardonnay fan) it all came together beautifully.

The next dish was definitely the most ambitious of the night, not just in terms of preparation but for my wife.  The concept of eating rabbit was a stretch for her, but not only did she do so 'gamely' (sorry, had to) but it turned out to be the biggest success of the night by far for both of us.  Bacon wrapped saddle of rabbit, anson mills polenta, pea tendrils, thyme infused game stock - the rabbit was stuffed beautiful with sausage meat (we think!) that held the flavors together like perfection.  I'm not sure Amy will let me cook rabbit, but she won't mind eating Neal Fraser's again! Josh's 2007 Calmant Creek Vineyard Pinot Noir and 2007 Le Bon Climate Vineyard Pinot Noir added to the enjoyment.

The final course of the evening was a Grilled New York Steak with white carrot puree, summer corn and violet mustard.  Again the presentation of the dish was delightful, it was three bites of perfectly cooked steak with the white carrot puree standing out beautifully.  As a bit of a parsnip puree maker in the past we had to do a bit of pondering at first - perhaps it was the coloration that led to it but we were convinced it was parsnip at first.  Ah, the things the eyes will tell you and the mind will wander to.  Josh's 2007 La Fenêtre "Alisos Vineyard" Syrah and 2006 La Fenêtre "Elevage Reserve" Syrah set off the steak and the mustard combination especially well.

This fabulous meal was brought to a close with a little Hazelnut Camembert Twinkie, bayleaf creme fraiche ice cream (yes, seriously, and it was amazing) with some port soaked plums.  Again the creativity and whimsy of the chef came through, it was a wonderfully light and elegant finish to the meal, married to a 2007 A Cote Red Blend.

Overall the meal was a delight, in fact our only complaint (in inverse proportions to Cafe Firenze) was that perhaps there wasn't quite enough on each plate to fill us up.  Personally I think the fact that I left wanting more was a good thing, I think we will certainly return to Grace again and see what Neal Fraser's tasting menu is like in its full glory.

Did this chilled as a lunchtime snack for my wonderful Mother-in-Law when she came to visit recently, slight adaptation from a Gordon Ramsey recipe in the Times.  Works perfectly well piping hot on a cold night too ; in fact there's two preparations (noted below).

Soup
2lbs-3lbs ripe tomatos, halved
2 onions, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, halved
small handful thyme sprigs, leaves removed
3 tbls olive oil
salt
pepper
4 cups chicken stock
1 tsp bakers sugar

Garnish
Handful of Basil
Small Mozarella Balls

Goat Cheese Crostini
French Bread
Goat Cheese
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper

Grab an iron skillet, throw the olive oil in and into a pre-heated 425f oven.  When it's nice and toasty, throw in the tomatoes, onions, garlic and thyme  - and toss to coat in oil . . . .carefully. Sprinkle the sugar over the top to hasten caramelizing it, leave it in there for 25-35 minutes, stirring once or twice as you go.

Meanwhile in a pan on the stove, bring the chicken stock to a boil, remove the tomato mixture from the oven into a saucepan on the stove, and then pour the chicken stock from its pan over the tomato mix.  Simmer for five to ten minutes.  Strain the stock back into its original pan, move the tomato mix to a food processor and blitz it.  Gradually then add back to the stock through the funnel until the mixture is nice and creamy (you might not need all the stock).

Here you have two choices.  If you want a thick, hearty wintery soup - serve as is.  For a more refined, thinner soup - especially if serving chilled - strain the soup back through a sieve again to just get the soup to a beautiful smooth texture. 

Take your basil, roll the leaves up and thinly slice for a nice chiffonade.  Pour the soup into bowls, place mozarella balls, and top with basil.

For the accompanying crostini ; slice the bread on a bias, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with a little salt and pepper, throw it on a baking tray in the oven at 375f for five to ten minutes.  When it's nice and crisp pull it out and spread the goat cheese on.  It highlights the tomato soup beautifully.

Had to put this up quickly before I forgot, something I dreamed up upon walking into Whole Foods last night with my kids that went on to be one of my wife's favorite dishes ever!  That can't be bad.  Walking up to the fish counter I had a brief chat with the chap behind the counter - "what's freshest and best?" ; "the halibut and the salmon, both beautiful" he replied.  Even though I just did Halibut last week I couldn't resist - Salmon's a lovely fish but it is all too fishy at times.  Earlier in the day I'd bought some ginger on a whim, so I picked up a cippolini onion (they were out of shallots - no, seriously) and some creme fraiche and here's what I did. . .

Sauce
1 thumb of ginger (finely diced)
1 shallot / cippolini (finely diced)
1 clove garlic (finely diced)
250ml chicken stock
250ml white wine
2 knobs Butter
1 tbls Creme Fraiche

Put the butter in a pan, when bubbling throw in the onion and start to soften.  After a couple of minutes throw in the garlic and the ginger and let the aroma start to come out.  Add the chicken stock and wine and reduce, reduce, reduce.  When you've less than a quarter cup left in the pan, strain out the solids, return to a clean pan and whisk in the Creme Fraiche while on the heat to reduce further.  You're looking for a coat the back of a spoon consistency, to aid in achieving this get a second knob of butter, roll it with a little flour and whisk that in to finish.

Whipped Yams
2 or 3 yams - (depending on size, depending on needs) cut into half inch cubes
300ml chicken stock (or enough to cover the yams in the pan)
1 knob butter
1 tbls Creme Fraiche
salt
pepper

Chuck yams in pan ; cover with chicken stock, heat on medium high until the yams drain all the chicken stock in the pan and are nicely softened.  Mash with the back of a fork or a potato masher, whisk in the butter and creme fraiche.  Season.

Radishes
Four radishes
Butter
Olive Oil

Easy as pie, just heat the oil and butter in a skillet in a 400f oven, when nice and hot throw the washed radishes into the pan for twenty minutes or so, occasionally jiggling them to give a nice crisp coating all round.

Halibut
0.25lb halibut filet per person
salt
pepper
butter
olive oil

Heat an oven to 400f.  Heat the olive oil and butter in a non-stick oven proof pan, when hot season the halibut with salt and pepper and place it in the pan skin side up.  After a couple of minutes flip the filets to reveal lovely and brown top - throw the pan in the oven for ten minutes or until the fish is translucent. 

Plate the whipped yams using a goose neck, halbut on top.  The lobster "truffles" are just lobster mushrooms sliced thinly and sauteed in a pan with some butter.  They're in season, couldn't resist!  Put them on top, ladle the sauce over ; slice the radishes and lay around the plate.  I could've and probably should've kept it at that, but I saw some lovely brocolini at the store and added that as a little bit of green.  Mum says it's good for yer!

So having returned from a week in China (more on that later) I walked into the kitchen only to be assaulted by a plethora of beautifully ripe tomatoes from our little garden ; the girls had done a magnificent job of cultivating them while I'd been gone!   Large ripe tomatoes always get me thinking about one thing - caprese salad.  I think it was getting hooked on Caprese paninis from Bristol Farms a few years back that did it - and me, someone who for most of my life wouldn't touch a tomato for one second.  But put together with a bit of basil and fresh mozarella - drizzle olive oil and balsamic over it and heaven.

The chicken breast was just cooked as usual, the 'consomme' was just a whole heap of goodness ; four tomatoes cut into small chunks, two sprigs of thyme, two cloves of garlic, three shallots cut up into quarters - all just thrown into a saucepan with water and a bit of wine and reduced, reduced, reduced.  Then strained through a small sieve.  Finally i just threw it in a skillet that I cooked some brown beech mushrooms and small yellow tomatoes for presentation, reduced it some more and lobbed in a knob of butter.  It was delicious, good enough for a soup on its own one day ; perhaps chilled even . . .

A little interesting dish for a Sunday night ;  after a long tiring few days I figured I make something that would see us through the evening, and what better than a caffeine laced dish!  Have to say I was already half way through preparing the dish when my wife through in a bit of a curve ball, the old garden outside has just flourished a load of Kohlrabi, I turned round half way through preparation to see one sitting on my chopping board.  Hmm, not sure what to make of that I thought!

As usual the dish started with the sauce.  Kick ass sauces don't HAVE to take days to prepare, but I do find it helps.  I actually started the base of the sauce on Saturday - it was clean out the vegetable drawers of the fridge time so I rummaged through and started making a stock.  I love using brown mushrooms as presentation pieces, as it happens they come in packs with long stalks and the original fungal base - makes GREAT stock material.  Had some baby bellas that were looking worse for wear too - so those go in, celery, carrots, onions, leeks, parsley - pretty much anything that's going to add flavor to the water.  Add some peppercorns and bay leaves, fill up the pot with water, add a good shaking of red wine vinegar (I like a bit of acid to my stock base) and a touch of red wine and boil away.  After an hour or so you're left with a wonderfully deep base for any sauce. 

Sauce
1 cup instant espresso (after adding water, obviously - plus add 1/3 tsp chili powder for the kick and a tsp sugar)
2 cups stock
Half bottle of red wine

Stick that lot in a pan and bring to a boil - then reduce, reduce, reduce.  When you're down to about a cup or less you should have a nice final product to finish with.

Kohlrabi Puree
Half a head of Kohlrabi
2 slices bacon
2 shitaki mushrooms
1/2 a shallot
1/2 clove garlic
1/2 cup chicken stock

For the Kohlrabi I simply chopped half of it up into a medium dice and then through it in a pan with half a cup of chicken stock (or until just covered).  Simmer until the chicken stock disappears and then through it into the mini-prep (told you I loved it).  While it's doing its thing get a sauté pan and add a couple of rashers of bacon (sliced into 1/4 inch squares), half a shallot, some garlic and a couple of shitaki mushrooms.  Get the bacon fairly crisp before adding the rest of the ingredients.  When cooked through add that to the mini-prep, blitz, add a touch of cream and you're golden.

The fingerling potatoes simple as they come, simply half, steam for four minutes to par cook them then roast for twenty minutes in peanut oil, turning once.  Sunday being Sunday, SoCal being nearly 100 degrees I actually did this on the barbecue in an iron skillet.  Throw a few shitakis on top of the potatoes for a nice finishing piece to the dish.

Lastly the steak.  Beautiful piece of dry aged New York strip which I coated in an espresso rub from Surfas (http://www.surfasonline.com/) - so that's kind of cheating I know - but basically it's sugar, salt, pepper, espresso powder, onion, paprika and cayenne.  Can't be that hard to recreate can it?  Coat the meat for at least half an hour to an hour at room temperature to allow it to start working on the meat.  Stick it on the bbq or pan fry in a skillet for a few minutes either side to get that nice crisp coat then stick in a 400f oven for five-ten mins (depending on your done less liking) or move off the flame on the bbq.

While you let the steak rest on the cutting board it's time for final prep.  I had some figs left over which always make a beautiful presentation piece as well as adding a ton of flavor - chop a few in half along with some halved cherry tomatoes.  Heat up a non-stick pan on the stove and put them in cut side down.  Give them a good sizzle then turn them over for another minute or so then pull off to a reserve plate.  If you leave a tomato or two in the pan more's the better, it adds to the sauce flavor even more.  With the pan still hot pour a cup or so of your now reduced sauce into the pan and simmer down to a nice consistency - chuck a knob of butter in at the end to add some gloss.  While that's working, steam up some spinach (seriously this is the easiest thing on the planet these days - buy baby spinach bag from grocery store, snip off corner, throw in microwave for a minute and a half!  Healthy and tasty.  Slice your now rested steak and begin plating.

Fingerling potatoes down - check, spinach on top, check, sliced steak ; scallop out some of the kohlrabi puree for the side, lay down the figs and tomatoes, add a roasted shitaki on top and lay some of that sauce over the top.  Sorted.


And yes, that's some pea puree on the other side of the plate.  Had it left over, can't waste that!

Had some friends of our over for a nice little afternoon of fun on Sunday, started with a crostini topped with herb goat cheese and beets and followed with this new version of a recipe I've been doing for a while.  Summer being summer, and Southern California being hot, I wanted to keep the meal fairly light.  The miso sea bass is extremely rich as well so I wanted to ensure what accompanied it was nice and light.  No pictures I'm afraid, I was being a bit too much of a good host to interrupt proceedings, which is a shame as I even 'painted on' the reduction with a brush.

The sea bass is super simple, just a marinade of yellow miso, sake, mirin and a touch of sugar.

Marinade
1 cup mirin
3/4 cup yellow miso
1/2 cup of sake
1/4 cup (or less) fine granulated sugar

Whisk it all together in a bowl and place the sea bass in for five to six hours.  Yes, you have to actually remember you're cooking this tonight in the morning - and fish being fish also remember that you'll need to head to the fishmonger or grocery store when you wake up - or it's just not going to work! 

Once you've done that, whack it in the fridge and look - you have the whole day to do something fun!  Head to the Mall ; lunch at a diner, fishing on the lake, swimming . . . . really the World is your oyster.  Awesome.  Oh, anyway.

Pea puree - done a thousand times, useful in so many instances I'm now finding.  It made a nice pairing under the sea bass this time around :

Pea Puree
2 cup frozen peas - cooked (I microwave them for two minutes or so)
10 large mint leaves
salt
pepper (both to taste)
olive oil

Throw the first four things into a mini-prep Cuisinart (I love my mini-prep), opening occasionally to scrape down the sides.  When nicely pureed start drizzling the olive oil through the top of the mini-prep until you find a nice consistency - it shouldn't be a sauce, it should remain solid - but honestly it's all a matter of taste so I'm not dictating.

The asparagus / bean salad is a lovely little accompaniment on the side, taken from a recent Gourmet magazine I believe. 

Asparagus/Bean Salad
1 sweet onion (play with the amount depending on how much bean/asparagus you're going to use)
1 tbls red wine vinegar
1 tbls Dijon mustard (grainy recommended)
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
2 tbls olive oil
1/3 cup flat leaf parsley
1lb-2lbs green beans / asparagus

Finely chop the sweet onion and put it into a bowl, add the red wine vinegar and mustard, whisk together and let sit for at least ten minutes.  Meanwhile have a saucepan on a nice boil and add the beans to blanch for four minutes or so ; remove to an ice bath (or just cold water if you're not THAT bothered) ; blanch the asparagus for about two minutes and repeat the bath.  Ice baths shock the vegetable to stop the cooking process as instantly as possible - i actually don't have ice around that much and find the cold water works almost as well - both should help retain the color of the vegetables nice and bright.  Drain the vegetables on paper towels - meanwhile whisk the olive oil and parsley into the now marinaded onion mix, then toss the asparagus and beans in the mixture.

The balsamic reduction isn't a necessity to the dish at all, I just liked it from a presentation standpoint. 

Balsamic Reduction
1/2 bottle red wine
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup chicken stock

Boil it down to nothing - and I mean nothing.  It'll end up like paint - which is why you can drizzle a tad on top and around the fish, but mostly just paint it onto the plate for a pretentious piece of "flair".

Speaking of the fish - you might want to cook that round about now.  Course the nice thing about this dish is that the assembly is all very easy and because the sides are cold you don't have to panic about getting everything on the plate at once while hot.  Heat the oven to 400f, remove the fillets from the marinade (and sadly discard all that goodness) and place them on a lightly oiled piece of foil on a baking sheet.  Throw them in the oven for approximately ten minutes or until the fish is looking translucent - remove the fish, switch the oven to broil and when the broilers blazing stick them back under for a couple of minutes.  The sugar in the marinade will have left a lovely caramelizing goodness that the broiling will add.

While cooking you can spoon a decent heap of pea puree onto one side of the plate and flatten out slightly, and on the other side a nice heaping of salad.  Paint reduction wherever your creative nature takes you!  When the fish is done, remove and place down onto the pea puree.  Now as a courtesy to our guests I like to remove the skin of the seabass (after marinating and cooking it peels off easy as pie) but the choice to do that is yours!

Moorpark, home of, well, now you come to mention it, not a great deal.  Culinary wise it's claim to fame up until recently was it being home to the Secret Garden, a restaurant that got mauled by Gordon Ramsey on Kitchen Nightmares.  But a year or two ago a new restaurant opened its doors in Moorpark and started getting some quite good reviews - Cafe Firenze.  I ate there for lunch not long after it had opened and had to say the food was good, the service was goddam awful.  The food took ages to arrive, the appetizer didn't appear at all (well it did after prompting and AFTER our main courses arrived) but the atmosphere of the place was good and you could tell that the kitchen was capable of producing quality food.

Some time later the Executive Chef of said restaurant sprang to fame as the most charismatic member of the Top Chef New York series - Fabio Viviani did not win the competition but he certainly won a legion of fans (most of them probably female) for both his down to Earth Tuscan cooking and his wit and charm.  This was my first visit back to Firenze since the Top Chef phenomenon, but I had heard many stories of how absolutely packed the place has become since Top Chef started and on an early Thursday evening that certainly proved to be the case (interestingly I had tried to get in several months earlier for an early dinner on a weekend - it was easier to get into Ramsey at the London!).

Amy and I arrived to sit at the Chef's Table and sample the seven course tasting menu.  I thought this meant sitting at the kitchen counter, apparently not.  However the restaurant was very obliging and moved us to the kitchen counter to sample the menu with a view.  As it happens two members of the Firenze cook  staff we have ties to through friends - pasta chef for the night Richard and John Paolone, the co-Executive Chef and Fabio's right arm.  Have to say both were in fine form and it was very impressive to see the pace and fluidity that John could expedite - especially when there's a party of forty seven sitting on the patio.  Never have I seen food come and go so efficiently and without fuss as when John stood at the pass.

Our first course arrived swiftly, a beautiful piece of imported mozzarella on which sat some oven roasted thinly sliced zucchini finished with a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic.  Very simple, nicely presented it was a great starter for the meal ahead.  From there we moved on to a pasta, butternut squash filled ravioli with a lovely sage and cream butter sauce, crispy sage and a finishing pepper.  The portion was a perfect size, just a few bites and continued the meal nicely. 

The highlight dish of the night followed, a beef carpaccio made from the finest fillet, with a spherical olive, rocket and parmesan.  It was perfectly balanced, the addition of the olive was inspired as was the form in which they'd made basically an olive sauce and repackaged it back into the original olive 'shell'.  Creatively it was the highlight, taste wise it left us wanting to lick the plate clean!  The spherical olive was especially cute, it was something that Fabio did on Top Chef to win a round last year - basically a little touch of molecular gastromeny in Moorpark, via Spain and El Bulli of course.  Basically it's an olive puree then reformed using calcium chloride and sodium alginate, very cute and actually incredibly tasty.

Now the trouble with tasting menus is at some point you usually start getting full, whether it was that factor or the denseness of the course that follows, the experience started to wane.  A large shrimp wrapped in pancetta sat on a bed of polenta with parmesan was overly salty and rather featureless.  There was nothing inspiring about it in the slightest, though the overall taste was good.  Similarly followed a beautiful piece of sea bass on pumpkin mash and a brown butter sauce.  There was a similarity to these dishes starting to form, starch underneath protein on top.  The fish was beautifully cooked, the brown butter sauce rather burnt.  Finally we came to a beautiful piece of fillet mignon, again wonderfully cooked, sitting on a bed of potato truffle mash with gorgonzola sauce.  Nothing was inherently wrong with any of these dishes per se, they just seemed to lack the finesse one would expect of a tasting menu - even in a Tuscan styled restaurant.  Each dish was delicious in its own right, the preparation cannot be faulted but a lighter touch was definitely needed over seven courses and that was lacking in these dishes.  By the end of it I was groaning.

The evening ended with course number seven, definitely a course of redemption.  Just when I thought I couldn't eat another thing along came a beautifully simple plate - olive oil cake with a blueberry compote and a beautiful panna cotta with strawberries and balsamic.  Simple, small and each bite was just wonderful.  I really didn't think I could eat another bite, but I ate the whole thing!

Really the only other note I have that tends toward the negative side was the wine pairing that I chose to have for the food.  I can't say that anything really was wrong with it, they went with the food well, but the choices of wine were fairly mundane and familiar.  I always thought that the joy of a pairing was to find exciting new wines you hadn't tried that tested the palette, there was none of that going on here - cruelly I commented to my wife that I questioned whether the Sommelier spent his afternoons at Vons.  That was harsh!

Overall - well Firenze has come a long way from its somewhat stuttered start, the fame that Fabio has achieved through Top Chef seems to have been well channeled into what looks like an extremely well run restaurant turning out quality food and, from looking at the main courses coming through the pass, in big portions and very efficiently.  I'd absolutely recommend it for an evening out, it certainly has quality that is hard to find in this neck of the San Fernando Valley. 

Pretentious continued!!  So after Friday's simple duck dish I moved on to another "use what we've got" recipe.  My wife and kids have managed to cultivate the most amazing little 'market garden' as my Mum likes to call it.


One of our most successful and plentiful bounties has been beans.  Yellow, green and purple varieties, growing like there's no tomorrow!  So had to do something with beans before Zoe, the eldest, eats them all straight off the bush!  I still had some beets (also from the garden) left over from the night before so I replicated that again and made a little bean salad with asparagus.  Simple as could possibly be, just blanched the vegetables then sliced on a bias, tossed them with minced shallots and olive oil and hey presto, beautiful fresh dish.

To accompany it  I wanted do something hot (i.e. the fire) - so I went back to a classic sauce - dice some tomatoes, add two cloves of garlic, thyme, glug of olive oil, glug of red wine and throw all of it in an iron skillet and into a 400f oven to roast it for about 45 minutes.  Normally if I'm doing Italian I'll just put this sauce straight onto pasta, but for this I wanted something a little more refined.  So I pushed it through a chinois (or sieve) into a small pan and then add a touch of rooster sauce to add the heat and swirl around a touch of butter to add a smooth finish.  What was the sauce for I hear you cry!

First of all I sliced and panfried some chorizo, put that aside and in its fat then sauteed some scallops and shrimp.  Sliced them both in half, plated along with the chorizo and then add the now hot tomato based sauce.  Quite yummy when served with a nice cooling rose.

So turns out, much to my chagrin, that I still have yet to take my wife to an ACTUAL Gordon Ramsey restaurant.  Found out last week that we must have eaten at the London in West Hollywood a couple of days after he sold it!  Technically, therefore, I guess I still owe her a trip to London - the city that is - so we can experience his food for real!