Carb overload! Mini penne with sausage, garlic, onion, roasted pepper, mushroom, alfredo sauce. Parm, parsley. Panzanella and toasted garlic baguette. Vino.
Dessert is my fist ripe fig, cambozola and syrupy balsamic.
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Black cod meunière (so, with brown butter), leftover pilaf, haricots. I think the thin brown crust isn’t traditional meunière, but it made a light crunch with the flaky and delicate fish.
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Spaghetti with Bean Sauce and Coffee from a recipe in essen & trinken - great recipe which really shows why we like essen & trinken so much. The ingredients might not sound like they would work together but in the end everything flows together - Saltiness from the pancetta, earthy from lima beans, coffee for some bitterness, some spiciness from black pepper, pears for some sweetness and pecorino to bring it all together with its umami.
You saute some pancetta, onion, garlic and lima beans, cook it a few minutes with vegetable broth and puree it. In parallel, you caramelized a little bit of sugar, dissolve it in pear juice and cook diced pears and some butter until you can mash it into pear sauce. You grind coffee beans and black pepper corns to a medium grind. Once you have cooked the spaghetti you use some pasta water, pecorino and the coffee-pepper grind to build an emulsion, add the spaghetti, bean puree and some pear sauce. Serve topped with a little bit more pear sauce and additional pecorino
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Back from Stinson Beach 2025 and I’m pooped/in recovery but happy as a clam. Fabulous time with all my best besties - SO many belly laughs, SO much booze/bubbles, SO much food, all worth every second of it. I had an extra night there this year with a dear friend/former boss who drove up from L.A., so i cooked and prepped a lot on Thurs. (there were 16 of us the first night).
On the menu this year: Alison Roman’s overnight Focaccia with red onions (which I seriously fucked up every way I possibly could and thought I had ruined, but it turned out to be pretty danged tasty - everyone loved the flavor, even if the texture wasn’t right (although as it sat it improved throughout the afternoon!); an orzo/smoked trout/white bean/cherry tomato salad with fresh parsley/basil/dill dressed with evoo/lemon zest/sherry vinegar; Alison Roman’s vinegared golden beet salad with buttermilk and sumac onions (SWOONY GOOD); Smitten Kitchen’s crushed cherries/burrata/mint salad (DITTO); heirloom & Early Girl tomato/burrata/basil/caper salad; the always crazy popular cambozola/heavy cream dip with drizzle of evoo/fresh thyme; another dip of simply chipotle juice/peppers/sour cream/s&p (which I could not stop eating); an assortment of yummy cheeses/charcuterie/bread/chips; fancy French butter; grilled steak strips with red chimichurri (oh, the red chimichurri - AMAZING!); grilled chicken thighs marinated in “regular” chimichurri and more at the table; smashed potatoes with a smokey paprika rub; wild trout (for the pescatarians) sauteed and topped with chopped pistachios/green olives/fennel pollen/lemon juice; a friend brought gorgeous just-caught tuna and made delicious Hawaiian poke with it; another friend who drove down from Oregon brought a luscious cheesecake he made with fresh Oregon blueberries - 64-count-them-64 blueberries, for each of my 64 years.
Saturday was the annual trip to The Marshall Store in Tomales Bay, on a day that started out cool and grey and quickly turned spectacularly sunny & hot, with an abundance of raw and grilled oysters, grilled buttery sourdough, Dungeness crab and veggie sandwiches, chips, lots of bubbly and orange wine.
After a nap, 5 pm happy hour started out with a vermouth tasting and then Negronis made by our host, for which I made guacamole; followed by white and red wine, followed by who-knows-what-all but plenty of it, followed by all the leftovers, for dinner number 2: some of the leftover steak got chopped up with the leftover taters and turned into hash, ditto the leftover trout; made an improvised salad of canned smoked trout, zucchini and grilled red peppers, and newly grilled sausages from Fatted Calf and Gus’s Community Market I’d brought.
just a small sampling of my FIRST plate:
(I’m realizing now, believe it or not, i didn’t get pics of everything, and that my lens was apparently quite smudged (sorry!) - I blame the Negronis.)
And my return home Sunday morning…
At home by 11:30, reunited with the BF 
, did our Sunday crossword puzzle (but no brunch!), dozed the afternoon away, and woke up to a piece of oven-roasted chimichurri chicken (we only grilled half of what I marinated at Stinson) with broken rice and avo. A perfect and very necessary, delicious small plates dinner, ala the BF.
and tonight: Crispy tofu with soy/ginger dressing, and a salad of basil/tomatoes/shallots/pickled ginger.
C’est tout! Happy to be home, can’t wait for next year. 
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Wow. Is this an annual tradition?
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Another stunner, Happy 64th. Red chimichurri, who knew? I can’t wait to try it on something. Cambozola dip too, is there a recipe?
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Thank you for sharing! The best of the bestie gathering, for sure!
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Epic, as always! I thought that list of food at the beginning was for the entire weekend, and it was just Friday night! Happy happy!
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(post deleted by author)
Thanks for your feedback especially about your favourite cuts of beef. I don’t buy red meat very often except for ground meat so I really need help in this area. Steak is in fact expensive but I haven’t been eating out much lately so I don’t mind investing in a steak instead of getting take out on Saturday night. @Phoenikia recommended a meat thermometer as well on the weekly menu planning thread so I think it’s time for me to invest in one.
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Thanks for the recommendation! I am going to look into getting one.
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Expensive, but worth it.
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If you salt the steak the night before, doesn’t it draw the juices out of the steak?..
And thanks for recommending what types of steak are good cuts. Now I know what to look for the next time I buy a steak.
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I’m not the nerdy type (nor can I remember more than my name & address these days), so I’ll just link to his 'splanation 
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Happy birthday, @mariacarmen! Such a joyous getaway. I’ve really gotten to look forward to these annual trip reports.
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Also the Thermapen that @linguafood mentioned does go on sale from time to time. I watched prices for awhile and then bought one on sale several years back.
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Yes! We got ours on sale, too.
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Ohhh, I’ve been WAITING for the Stinson Beach 2025 roundup! This is all SO fabulous - what an amazing time and food and booze and sunshine and fun! So glad you had such a great weekend!
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(Edited to add - I see it’s already been recommended. So tagging along:)
I’ll recommend the standard Classic Thermapen by Thermoworks. Are they on a expensive side? A wee bit. But they work in 1-3 seconds.
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Yep! sometimes in Sept. but always a bday celebration for two of us.
