Weeknight Cooking: California Salad

With more limited time to cook these days and an upcoming trip to San Francisco on the horizon, the mind has a tendency to wander sometimes quickly over the pictures of recipes to prepare and turns them Californian.  To midwesterner, California cuisine is nearly as otherworldly to the imagination as considering French.  Like Mediterranean, Californian has evolved from regional roots; as the French style gathers in its rustic towns agriculture from the likes of the Pyrenees, and cheese from its lowland pastures, San Francisco seeks out its local sustenance from the native agriculture up the bay at Point Reyes, and counts on those cows to produce world class dairy.  The parallels continue on, seafood from a cool shore, sunshine from a generous sun, and as many invested chefs as there are restaurants.  We would like to visit Tyler Florences Wayfare Tavern and see how his powerful style

translates from cookbook genius to the real thing.  We could see a salad like the Smoky Sea Scallops with Avocado-corn Salsa showing up on the menu – a recipe I just tried last night for preparation – a great admixture of things that could become Californian with a few adjustments.  The picture in the cookbook shows blackened scallop, avocado, corn and tomato.  The combination looks good, so why not take inspiration from the components and put the salad together in a way that might be successful?  Although my preparation was simplified, if I were to Californianize I would take fresh shrimp, rub them with a Mediterranean concoction of spices, sprinkle with lime juice, and stick them

over a running flame on a beach fire as the seagulls squawked in jealousy above.  I take several handpicked cobs of corn from  the Point Reyes Pierce Farm, open the shucks, lace them Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam, same spices, maybe a touch of paprika, and let them blacken over the same fire

then cut down their sides leaving the kernel dice hot over the plate.  Now the sand plovers are squawking in unison as they comb the beach and the tide is slowly rising up over the lip of the berm of the sand.  Avocado, hand picked from Morro Bay Avocados, diced and also slightly dripped with lime juice, spread out over the plate for texture and substance.  Many other ingredients could be added over the top at this point, to further Californiafy, (garlic, some heat with peppers, cilantro) but I would choose a homemade batch of buttermilk dressing from the Point Reyes Creamery, made of crumbled

blue cheese, sea salt, pepper, chives, sour cream, buttermilk from the local herd, a pinch of vinegar.  By the now the Pelicans have smelled the aroma and are circling with very wide beaks above awaiting our departure so that they may find their own leftover California ingredients.  It would be time at this point to douse the fire, pack the beach picnic and gently lay the utensils down into the floor of the rowboat and oar off around the still calm spit into the mouth of the Estero and glide on into Nick's Cove where time has stopped at 1930.