Vegetable

From late spring to early summer, when our winery garden is producing tender peas, Brian makes a delicate pasta sauce with them. It’s not worth making the pesto with starchy peas, so wait for that perfect cusp-of-summer moment. Serve this pasta as a first course, followed by Slow-Roasted King Salmon with Garden Herbs (page 110) or spring lamb chops. On another occasion, spread the pea pesto on crostini for an hors d’oeuvre.

This modern interpretation of a comfort-food classic comes from chef Tom Wolfe, who participated in the 2004 Workshop. Chef Wolfe uses the pungent washed-rind Red Hawk, a cheese from California’s Cowgirl Creamery (see page 177), but you can substitute another washed-rind cheese such as French Époisses or a milder Havarti. The pickled red cabbage provides a crunchy counterpoint to the oozy melted cheese. You will have more pickled cabbage than you need for the sandwiches, but it keeps well. Use it on a hamburger or meatloaf sandwich, or as a slaw.

Brian spreads a roasted-garlic paste on the dough under the mushrooms and potatoes, which gives this pizza an irresistible fragrance. If you have access to wild mushrooms, by all means use them. Bellwether Farms Crescenza cheese is a soft, supple, young cow’s milk cheese that melts well; mozzarella is stretchier, but a good substitute.

It takes a little more attention to grill a pizza than to bake one, but the smoky touch of the grill is appealing—the next best thing to baking in a wood-fired oven. When Brian teaches pizza classes at the winery in summer, he demonstrates the grilling technique because so few people have a wood oven at home. The trick is to start the pizza crust in a hot zone to set it, and then flip it and move it to a cooler zone to add the topping and finish cooking. This topping is vegetarian, but you could add some crumbled sausage or pancetta, if you like.

Save this pressed sandwich for the height of summer, when you can get locally grown zucchini, eggplant, and tomatoes. After grilling the zucchini and eggplant, layer them on a roll slathered with romesco, the Spanish tomato and almond sauce. (Refrigerate any unused romesco and use it within a day or two on another sandwich or with grilled fish or shrimp.) The sandwich can be made hours ahead, so it’s a good choice for a backpack lunch or a picnic. Omit the ham to make it vegetarian. Piquillo peppers are small, slightly spicy roasted red peppers sold in jars at shops that specialize in Spanish or Mediterranean foods (see Ingredient Resources, page 193).

On the first morning of the Workshop, participants rise early to pick grapes before the temperature soars. These chefs may labor in hot kitchens every day, but on grape-harvest day, they learn what real work is like. By midday, they are famished. We keep lunch casual, knowing that a big dinner will follow. Typically, we serve Mexican food, like these soft tacos, with from-scratch tortillas prepared outdoors on a comal (Mexican griddle) by winery staffers Brenda Godinez and Virginia Barrera. Rubaiyat, a blend of red varieties, is perfect for the occasion. Note that the beans need to soak overnight.

In late spring, when California asparagus are still available and the Cakebread garden is yielding the year’s first onions, Brian makes this delicate pizza bianca (a “white pizza,” or pizza without tomato sauce). The fresh-dug onions haven’t been cured yet, so they don’t have papery skins, and their flavor is mild. Many supermarkets sell “spring onions” that look like thick scallions with a bulbous root end. They would work in this recipe, as would leeks or even cured yellow onions, but uncured onions have the most delicate taste. Choose a fresh ricotta without pectin or other stabilizers. The Bellwether Farms ricotta from neighboring Sonoma County is our favorite.

For this salad, Brian likes to mix the moist, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes—such as Garnet or Jewel—with drier, yellow-fleshed varieties. Ask your produce merchant to point you to the right types if you aren’t sure. After roasting and cubing the sweet potatoes, Brian tosses them with a mix of bitter chicories, a nutty sherry vinaigrette, and fine shavings of sheep’s milk cheese—an inspired marriage of contrasting textures and flavors. Serve with pork chops or a pork roast for a winter dinner.

Brian does most of the cooking at home for his wife, Kristina, and their two small children, but this salad is one of Kristina’s specialties. She adapts it to the season, but quinoa is always the starting point. Nutty and quick cooking, quinoa is high in protein and will hold up for about an hour after it’s dressed. Serve this refreshing winter salad with pork, chicken, or fish, or with feta for a meatless meal.

As Cakebread Cellars expanded sales overseas, we began inviting chefs from abroad to participate in the Workshop. Predictably, some new and intriguing scents soon emerged from our kitchen. This warmly spiced lentil soup is Brian’s invention, but he devised it after working with Indian chef Sujan Mukherjee at the 2008 Workshop and observing his spicing. Now Brian makes this wholesome soup with the Napa elementary school students that he teaches regularly, and he demonstrates the recipe at our employees’ wellness classes.

Because of their tart dressings, salads are not always wine-friendly dishes, but adding cured meat like prosciutto can bridge the divide. Toasted nuts help, too, contributing a buttery note that mellows vinegar’s sharpness. This autumn salad from the winery pairs slender French haricots verts (green beans) with a blend of cool-weather greens and a hazelnut-oil dressing. Follow it with roast chicken or duck.

By adding a puff pastry top, Chef Albert Bouchard transforms an easy autumn vegetable soup into a first course suitable for company. The puff pastry seals in all the aromas until diners breach the flaky caps with their spoons. Note that you will need individual ovenproof soup crocks, similar to the type used for French onion soup. The diameter on top should be no more than 5 inches to have the proper ratio of soup to pastry. Chef Bouchard attended the 2006 Workshop.

Many Workshop chefs are unfamiliar with the clamshell mushrooms, maitake, and other exotic fungi that Gourmet Mushrooms cultivates (see page 84), so this company’s table is always a magnet at our opening-day farmers’ market. Chef George Brown, a 2006 participant, took advantage of the bounty to create a warm grilled mushroom and bacon salad. Although many people would be inclined to pair a red wine with a mushroom dish, we chose a mature Cakebread Cellars Chardonnay Reserve, which echoed all the earthy and smoky notes. In this adaptation of George’s recipe, Brian has moved the preparation indoors for ease—first oven-roasting the mushrooms, then tossing them with browned cipolline onions, thick bacon, and tender greens. Serve at the first sign of autumn weather, followed with a pork roast or seared duck breasts.

Chef Scott Neuman is a Latin cooking enthusiast who transformed the zucchini and corn in Dolores’s garden into a lively chile-spiked soup during the 2009 Workshop. This recipe is an adaptation that goes well with Cakebread Cellars Chardonnay. The soup is light and bright, a distillation of early summer flavors and a delightful first course in warm weather.

If you have ever made hummus, you probably still have a partial jar of tahini in your refrigerator. Here’s one way to use more of it: in a creamy dressing for a grilled chicken salad. Brian seasons the chicken with za’atar, a Middle Eastern seasoning, and balances the tahini’s faint bitterness with the sweetness of pine nuts to make the dish more wine friendly. You could substitute a meaty fish, such as mahimahi or tuna, for the chicken. That jar of tahini will be empty in no time. Note that the chicken needs to marinate for at least two hours.

When Southerners like Birmingham chef Frank Stitt talk about field peas, they mean small shelling beans, such as black-eyed peas. (Crowder peas and lady peas also qualify, but they’re less common.) When field peas are fresh, in summer, Chef Stitt, a 1999 Workshop attendee, shows them off in this salad, tossing them with grilled corn cut from the cob, tomato, grilled red onion, and herbs. Serve the salad when you’re also grilling salmon, sausages, or pork chops, or with Brian’s Grilled Mahimahi with Preserved Lemon Butter (page 113). If you can’t find fresh black-eyed peas, use dried ones, soaked overnight, then simmered gently until tender.

The Workshop coincides with sweet pepper season, and many chefs are seduced by the varieties they find in our garden. Chef Donald Barickman, a 2000 Workshop participant, succumbed to the small, sweet ‘Lipstick’ peppers—so named for their crimson color—which he roasted and stuffed with creamy goat cheese and served with arugula and roasted-garlic vinaigrette. Bottled Spanish piquillo peppers make a good substitute. Brian adds heirloom tomatoes to make a more substantial composed salad for the end of summer. Serve it before or alongside grilled lamb, sausage, or burgers.

Hubert Keller, chef-owner of San Francisco’s Fleur de Lys, patterned this recipe after the traditional Provençal soupe doux (sweet garlic soup), a specialty of the peasant kitchen. But as you might expect from a chef for one of the city’s most elegant restaurants, Chef Keller has refined the procedure, blanching the garlic to temper some of its bite and adding saffron for a richer color. A poached egg set on a crouton in the center of the soup really dresses up the dish. Chef Keller participated in the 1991 Workshop.

At the 2001 Workshop, Chef Ken Vedrinski astonished guests with a “consommé” made from the strained juice of tomatoes and watermelon. Preparing the dish involved hanging the pureed fruits in a muslin bag overnight to collect the clear, sweet juices—a procedure that might deter many home cooks. Riffing on Chef Vedrinski’s idea, Brian created an easier gazpacho that blends tomato, watermelon, and other summer vegetables so seamlessly that you can’t decipher the contents. The result is a refreshing and original adaptation of the familiar Spanish soup.

Chef Alan Greeley, who attended the 1997 Workshop, introduced us to this luscious salad dressing. Inspired by the creamy “ranch dressing” that originated on a dude ranch in Santa Barbara, Alan’s version incorporates avocado for an even silkier texture. He pairs the dressing with steamed artichokes and asparagus; we love it on tender leaves of butter lettuce with a shower of fresh spring herbs from our garden.