The best nectarine tart in the entire world ...

...can be found at Camino in Oakland.

The crust was crunchy and delicate and crackly and crumbly. The nectarines were perfectly ripe and glossy. They did not add pastry cream or frangipane or any other adulterous substances to distract from the perfection of the fruit. They did not mess around.

Just the way I like it.

Homemade pizza

After falling in love with Pizzetta 211 and Gialina (practically in the same week ...I guess I have a wandering eye?), I decided that it would be nice to produce small, folksy, crackery-crust pizzas topped with local ingredients in my own kitchen. I had always assumed that the requirements for success included an oven capable of being cranked up to 800 degrees, but the guy at Pizzetta 211 insisted that his was set at only 500. After an hour of grunting, whining, and weird banging noises, our oven can usually manage to drag itself up into that neighborhood of heat, so I had new-found hope.

This revelation also occurred around the time when my friend showed me his Chez Panisse Pizza and Pasta cookbook, and I fell in love with its simplicity and honesty. Plus, I admire one of the pizza-making girls at 211. She always looks so cute in her little hipster t-shirts, with her muscular arms swinging and tossing the dough around with expert precision, elegantly cracking a single egg into a bowl and then sliding it atop the pizza before slipping the whole creation into the oven with her paddle. I wanted to be that cute, muscular girl with the mad skills! And the hip shirts! And the toned arms!

I shouldn't overlook my boyfriend's importance in this equation, either. Like many gentlemen I have known, he adores pizza and would happily eat it at least twice a week, along with cheeseburgers and almost any pork-based product in existence. I have a much lower pizza tolerance, but despite this handicap, we have been cranking out many a pie lately. Even though he doesn't cook that often (I wonder why??), he has become dough-maker and sauce-fabricator extraordinaire. My role really is just to hang out and snack on the toppings when his back is turned.

Randy likes to keep his pizzas simple; maybe three classic ingredients, and no more. He knows when to quit. I, on the other hand, go wild with reckless abandon, slamming every obscure condiment in our fridge atop the poor circle of dough that soon begins to groan under the weight of black olives, capers, anchovies, Parmesan cheese, mozzarella, and ohh, maybe some sausage and onion confit would work here too? I actually loaded one with so much junk that it gave up the ghost as soon as it got a whiff of the oven's heat, laying there limply at the end of my paddle, refusing to budge, sadly oozing tomato sauce into the fiery depths of the super-heated oven. Panicked, I had to roll it into thirds and make a giant, gooey calzone to nudge it off the paddle and onto the baking stone -- but in the end, it wasn't half bad.

When I exercise restraint, things turn out much better. This was one of my favorites:

Organic arugula, Tome de Chalosse, and Parmesan pizza topped with a little sel de Guerande.

I guess I'm turning into one of those darn yuppie artisan-and-local-ingredients-eating-fleur-de-sel-sprinkling-Tartine-visiting San Franciscans. Don't worry, we topped the next one with Jimmy Dean. We are from the Midwest, after all.

Love stinks

Once a week we usually get takeout from our favorite Korean restaurant, My Tofu House. Over the months, I really have come to consider it MY tofu house, despite the fact that we've never actually dined in the restaurant. It's always insanely crowded, so the alternative -- takeout and Seinfeld re-runs at home -- seems much more appealing.

Typically I order kimchi soondubu, a fiery red broth filled with mounds of soft, custardy tofu and bits of beef or pork. Randy gets the sweet, mild beef bulgogi, some of which I then steal from the container and add to my giant bowl of soup when his back is turned.

Our order always include four banchan (side dishes). My Tofu House likes to keep it simple with a selection of pickled cucumbers, kimchi, mung bean sprouts, and radishes. They also throw in one stick of melon gum per person; I have no idea why.

A few weeks ago, however, we noticed that the customers dining in the restaurant were being treated to an ENTIRE FISH as part of their tableside banchan selection. The fish had never appeared in our takeout order.

I wanted that fish.

The thing is, My Tofu House is perennially noisy and crowded. Add to this the fact that most of the staff speaks very little English. I'm not a shy person, but I just couldn't bring myself to grab the arm of our check-out girl and demand that she wrap up a fish for us in between carting around approximately 400 banchan dishes, snipping meat, cracking eggs into soups, seating customers, and running credit cards.

But I wanted that fish.

As the weeks passed, the mysterious banchan fish became an almost mystical dish, out of my grasp and thus all the more desirable. In my head, accessing that fish began to symbolize something much greater. It stood for all those delectable foods that forever remain untranslated and enigmatic on the menus of my favorite Asian restaurants, available only to those customers that can read Thai, or Mandarin, or Japanese.*

Last week Randy went to pick up our order. "Get me a fish!" I called out jokingly as he headed into the rainy night.

When he returned, I asked, "Fish?" Really, I was just teasing. The responsibility for fish procurement should have rested on my shoulders. He doesn't even like fish.

"Check the counter."

And there it was! My fish, gleaming in a fresh layer of Saran wrap, speedily filling our kitchen with the aroma of ...well, a big, smelly fish.

In our house, that's what love smells like.

*Listen to a funny NPR piece about this phenomenon.