LL teaches on Tuesday nights in the Spring semester, so dinner duty falls to me. It’s a good opportunity to try new dishes, some of which are all right — the green lentil curry was O.K. if you like hippie commune food circa 1968 — and several of which are keepers.

A definite keeper is the Pan-Roasted Chicken with Citrus Sauce, from the January issue of Food & Wine magazine. The recipe is a simplified version of the dish created by chef John Sedlar at Rivera in Los Angeles. According to the article, Sedlar uses “a range of citrus, including Cara Cara oranges, blood oranges and pomelos,” though “the dish is just as delicious with a simple mix of navel oranges and limes.” Blood oranges would have been good, but we don’t see them in markets here until late April. And, I’m here to tell you that segmenting a lime is about as easy as picking the white off rice. Even navel oranges don’t segment that easily; they tend to shred. Satsumas, on the other hand — Citrus unshia, formally speaking — peeled and separated easily and beautifully. They’re in the foreground on the accompanying image; the frowsy-looking navel segments are in back, hiding behind the chicken. As you can see, I served the dish with a little farfalle pasta, to soak up the
sauce.

Anyway, this is a terrific, intensely flavored dish, and LL heartily approved.

To drink with the Citrus Chicken, I opened a bottle of the Hugel & Fils Pinot Blanc Cuvée Les Amours 2006, from Alsace. Nothing mysterious or obscure here; Hugel’s Cuvée Les Amours Pinot Blanc is widely known and, in this house, admired. The 2006, with three years on it, delivers a muscat-like floral-oily musky-funkiness that immediately draws you, delicately yet inevitably, into its sensuous and slightly outré precincts. The wine is loaded with notes of roasted lemon and lemon curd, smoked orange rind and lime peel, cloves and ginger, all stretched upon taut strings of bright acidity that keep it fresh and vibrant. Just lovely, for drinking through 2011 or ‘12, well-stored. Excellent and Great Value at about $17.

Imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York.
A review sample.
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Last night’s Pasta alla Norma came from Jamie’s Italy (Hyperion, $34.95), a very engaging book by Jamie Oliver. This was a real winner on any scale of judgment or comparison. The preparation is pretty simple. You fry small skin-on slices of eggplant sprinkled with dried oregano in olive oil until golden brown — and I’m here to tell you that golden brown segues to black ‘n’ burned really quickly — then add some dried red chili, sliced garlic, finely chopped basil stems, a dollop of white vinegar — I used agrodolce — let that cook for a bit and then pour in a can of diced tomatoes and the juice. Give it 10 or 15 minutes to simmer and throw in some basil. Add the pasta and a little of the pasta water. Garnish with more basil, some grated pecorino and crumbles of salted ricotta. This was seriously great and intense, and I have a feeling that I’ll be cooking it fairly often.

Here I opened a bottle of the Easton Wines Zinfandel 2008, Amador County. What a classic of zinfandel purity and faceted completeness! The wine is rich and succulent, deeply spicy and flavorful yet restrained and balanced by a structure that’s stalwart and rugged without being rustic, dense and chewy without being ponderous. Black cherry and blackberry flavors, sporting an edge of molten mulberry, black pepper and crushed gravel, get earthier and fleshier, more briery and brambly with a few moments in the glass; you also feel the wood more, a slightly spicy, dark graininess, from 10 months in French oak. There’s plenty of substance here, a flirtation with black leather allure, but the wine is also clean and forthright, an eloquent and rather wild expression of the grape. Excellent and a Great Bargain at about $16.

A review sample.
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… for many reasons but what I’m thinking of particularly is because LL is such a great cook. I tell her this all the time, and she dismisses my praise by saying something like, “Well, I’ve been cooking for a long time, you just learn things.” I think it’s more than that. LL possesses the instinct and intuition that tell her what flavors, spices and herbs compliment each other; she has the ability to add a squeeze of lemon juice here, a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar there, a sliver of butter in this other place and voila, a dish had been intensified. I mean, I take some pride in my Bolognese sauce, but when LL creates a similar sauce, it’s just better, deeper, more resonant.

Even a dish as simple as shrimp risotto, which she made one night last week, ends up being sublime. She served this with asparagus, first blanched and then sauteed with bits of roasted red pepper. What a great meal!

I opened a bottle of Silverado Chardonnay 2008, Napa County. (Yes, “county,” not “valley.”) The winemaking here is carefully done. Grapes for this wine derive from three estate vineyards: Miller Ranch (55%), south of Yountville; and Vineburg (23%) and Firetree (22%), in Carneros, with Vineburg closer to San Pablo Bay. Ninety-one percent of the wine undergoes barrel-fermentation and 9 percent is fermented in stainless steel. The wine ages six months in 95 percent French oak barrels and 5 percent American oak; only 40 percent of the barrels are new. Finally, 34 percent of the wine goes through the malolactic process. I mention these details to show how deliberately winemaker John Emmerich treats the balance of wood to fruit, creating a chardonnay that’s subtle and supple without the overbearing influence of oak or malolactic-induced creaminess. (And it’s amazing how many wineries in California tart up their chardonnays with cheap oak and malolactic effects!)

Instead, the Silverado Chardonnay 2008 is balanced, harmonious and integrated. Classic grapefruit and pineapple flavors are rich yet restrained, slightly smoky and tinged with baking spice. A few minutes in the glass bring up notes of autumnal stone fruit and hints of jasmine. Within a lovely, moderately lush texture, acidity is apple-crisp, and in the sustained finish a thread of limestone ties all elements together. Drink now through 2011. Excellent. About $25.

A review sample.

LL and I don’t drink a lot of beer, and when we do, it usually fits a pattern: Negro Modelo in Mexican restaurants, Sierra Nevada at our favorite burger joint, Tsingtao for Chinese and Southeast Asian.

I know. That’s pretty boring.

I like to read about beer, though, and always learn something when wine-writers like Eric Asimov or Benito, who are knowledgeable about the sudsy realm, digress into that topic. The passionate responses to their posts indicate that there are whole tribes of fanatic beer-drinkers out there for whom a term like I.P.A. is equivalent to drawing a line in the sand. And of course there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of blogs devoted to hand-crafted brews.

Recently we cooked a Mark Bittman recipe — Panfried Trout with Bacon and Red Onions — (come on, Mark, where else would you fry a trout except in a pan? Oh, right, an engine manifold) that called for “a strong ale” as part of the sauce; it’s an incredibly easy and delicious dish. Anyway, I went to a retail wine and liquor store, where so-called “big beers” are sold in our city, and bought nine bottles of various ales and such, including five examples from Dogfish Head, about which many writers, including Benito, wax eloquently and rapturously.

Most of a bottle of Hennepin Saison Farmhouse Ale went into the skillet, but we each sipped a small glass and found it very crisp, vibrant and refreshing, with a lovely ruddy copper-amber color and a distinct bouquet of apples and wheat. This is made by Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y. Looking more closely at the label, I see that the brewery is “Part of the Duvel Family of Fine Ales.” Is that like saying, Crane Lake is “Part of the Bronco Family of Fine Wines”? I dunno.

With beer in the dish, I thought that we should have beer in the glass, so I popped the cap on a bottle of Coopers Vintage Ale 2008, from South Australia. This was tasty stuff, full-bodied yet light on its feet, smooth, a little “malty” (is that the right word? “hoppy” sounds trite), with a touch of caramel and orange rind. Very nice with the trout. I was surprised at the amount of sediment in the glass, though the back label mentions the sediment as a natural by-product of top fermentation and bottle conditioning. Who knew?

Well, that’s not much of an excursion into the arcane world of specialty, artisanal ale, but I have a feeling that the Dogfish Head products will be revelations of craftsmanship and individualism, and I’m all in favor of those qualities, in ale and in wine. I’ll post about those examples soon.

This weekend, Whole Foods and Fresh Market had beautiful chanterelle mushrooms, but at Whole Foods they were $30 a pound and at Fresh Market they were $20 a pound. Guess where we bought a few ounces of the precious Cantharellus cibarius? Thank goodness it takes only a few ounces, mixed with a handful of crimini mushrooms, to make a fine risotto. Chanterelles, by the way, are high in vitamin C and carotene.

A fine risotto is what LL prepared last night. She sauteed the mushrooms and onions in a tablespoon of olive oil, as well as — vegans stop reading here — a tablespoon each of butter and bacon fat, proving the adage, in our house, that everything goes better with bacon. The chicken broth was homemade, the arborio rice slowly simmered and stirred as it absorbed the broth to a state of slightly chewy doneness. The result was a delicious, rich, earthy concoction that we agreed was probably the best risotto LL has made, and believe me, she is a Queen of Risotto.

I didn’t want a sprightly vivacious wine to drink with the risotto; instead, I wanted a wine with some dignity, a sense of gravitas, as well as the sheen of fruit. I elected to open the Grgich Hills Estate Chardonnay 2007, Napa Valley, a wine now made from biodynamically-grown grapes. My history of drinking the Grgich Hills Chardonnay goes back many years, and the experience has convinced me that this is consistently one of the best chardonnay wines made in California and indeed in the world.

The winemaking process is very careful. The grapes are fermented and then aged 10 months in French oak, 60 percent in neutral (that is, used) barrels, 30 percent in new barrels and 10 percent in 900 gallon casks; the classic size of oak barrels for aging wine is 59 gallons. The point is that there’s no detectable trace of toasty, vanilla-laced new oak in the Grgich Hills Chardonnay 2007. Rather, the oak influence is gently persuasive, a subtle, supple foundation that encourages balance and integration. The wine does not go through so-called malolactic fermentation — I say “so-called” because the process has nothing to do with fermentation — that transforms, in the barrel, malic acid (“apple-like”) to lactic acid (“milk-like”). ML produces, or helps to produce, the creamy, lush, dessert-inflected chardonnays that earn high scores in the Wine Spectator. Grgich Hills wisely avoids that course.

What we have, then, is a wonderfully authentic and intense rendition of the chardonnay grape, a wine of pristine presence and tone, truly elegant but with washes of earthy-gravelly power and the compelling fuel of bold, zesty acidity. Flavors of roasted lemon, spiced pear and a hint of candied grapefruit feel crystalline in purity; a few minutes in the glass develop notes of honeysuckle, pineapple and limestone, honeysuckle in the nose, that is, with pineapple and limestone in the mouth. The finish is long, spicy, stony, generous. Drink through 2012 to ‘14 (well-stored). This was absolutely perfect with the chanterelle risotto; the wine and the dish resonated beautifully. Exceptional. About $42.
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Such perfection doesn’t have to be quite so spectacular or expensive. Last week LL came home for lunch and I whipped up an egg thing, not as formal as a regulation omelet, not as free-form as scrambled eggs, but with a filling (or topping really) of chopped tomatoes, peppers, fresh basil and onions. For accompaniment, I turned to the Swanson Vineyards Pinot Grigio 2007, Napa Valley. It’s gratifying, and not a little surprising, that pinot grigio/pinot gris is a recent success story in California and Oregon; you won’t find many pinot grigio wines from Northeastern Italy (or increasingly from Tuscany, for some reason) as good as some now being made on the West Coast, though Alsace remains the pinot gris grape’s spiritual home. Anyway, The Swanson Pinot Grigio 2007 is made completely in stainless steel and sees no malolactic fermentation. This is incredibly lively and engaging. The wine offers a beguiling bouquet of roasted lemon, lemon curd, almond and almond blossom with hints of quince and ginger and a winsome wafting of wood smoke. Then come notes of fig and dried thyme, celery seed, caraway and honeydew melon. Much of this array is present in the mouth as well, buoyed by tremendously vibrant acidity and a burgeoning limestone element. Wow, what a seductive and utterly pleasurable wine! Drink through 2010 or ‘11. Excellent. About $21.

And yesterday at lunch, with bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches, I thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and opened the Silverado Merlot 2005, Napa Valley, and was really glad that I did. (I didn’t realize that Napa Valley was a theme of this post, but there it is.) At four years old, this suave, sleek merlot is drinking beautifully. A blend of 93 percent merlot, 6 percent cabernet sauvignon and 1 percent petit verdot, the wine is lovely, smooth and mellow, bursting with scents and flavors of ripe and slightly roasted black currants and black raspberries enlivened by touches of cedar, black olive and dried thyme. Such appealing character, such appropriate substance and shape are only found in wines made with thoughtfulness and confidence; there’s nothing flamboyant here or over-done. A joy to drink, now through 2012 to ‘15. Excellent. About $32.
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The demise of Gourmet after 68 years as America’s high-toned food and cooking magazine — the November issue will be the last — is sad, though some would say, I among them, that while Ruth Reichl brought a new, contemporary sensitivity and sensibility to the venerable publication, under her editorship the line between editorial and advertising blurred shamelessly. And despite Reichl’s important concerns for sustainability and local products, such articles as the one in the October issue in which restaurant critics were asked how they would spend $1,000 going out to eat in their home cities, when many Americans would love to have $100 to eat out, reveals a tone-deafness inspired, perhaps, by the free-spending attitude at Condé Nast.

Still, one is sorry to see it go. LL and I cooked from the recipes in Gourmet fairly frequently, and when we recently purchased the new Gourmet Today cookbook edited by Reichl (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40, but with a deep discount at Costco), we were disconcerted to see a sticker on the cover that said “A subscription to Gourmet magazine is included with the purchase of this book.” Um, Big Oops there.

We cooked, in elegiac mood, from Gourmet Today, which offers more than 900 pages of recipes, two nights in a row.

First comes what the book calls “Garlic Shrimp,” but is much more complicated than that brief description. The dish involved, well, yes, shrimp and lots of garlic, but also dried guajillo chilies, onions and tomatoes. As is typical with dried chilies, you heat them in a skillet, pressing them down, until they darken a bit and turn a little smoky. Then you add the garlic and onions and after a few minutes the tomatoes; it’s important to let the sauce stand for 30 minuts or so, so that the cut up chilies soften, otherwise they’ll be pretty darned chewy. After that, you heat the sauce again, add the shrimp and let them cook briefly. This is incredibly smoky, intense, heady stuff, spicy but not hot-spicy, to be eaten wrapped in warm tortillas or with rice, which is what we did, along with sauteed kale.

For wine, I opened something rather unusual, a vermentino from Corsica. This was the Clos Teddi Patrimonio 2008, a really lovely vermentino that incrementally built character in the glass as moments passed. Sporting a radiant straw-gold color, the wine offers scents of roasted lemon, yellow plum and ginger, with touches of almond and verbena. It’s quite spicy in the mouth, brisk with acidity and a hint of limestone, yet with a beguiling texture of talc-like smoothness, softness and density. To roasted lemon and lemon curd flavors, it adds glimpses of grapefruit and spiced pear and dried thyme. Not wishing to romanticize the wine too much, but it struck me as the essence of a Mediterranean white wine. Very Good+. I paid $26 for this wine, but prices around the country start at about $20.
Imported by Bourgeois Family Selections, Swannanoa, N.C.

The knock-out of this duo of dishes was the Wine-Braised Chuck Roast with Onions. For a four-pound boneless chuck roast, you use two pounds of sliced onions, and as the meat slowly braises in the oven for three hours or so in wine and water, the onions almost melt into the sauce, creating a texture and flavor of incomparable richness. We altered the recipe, which curiously calls for no vegetables, by adding chopped carrots, potatoes and turnips. Boy, oh boy, after emerging from the oven after that long cooking, the meat was supernaturally tender and succulent! By the way, everything on the plate, except for the carrots, came from the Memphis Farmers Market, including the chuck roast and the green and yellow beans.

Clearly something big, rich and succulent was called for to march hand-in-hand with this dish, so I opened a bottle of the Benovia Zinfandel 2007, Russian River Valley, Sonoma County. Now some commentators assert that no table wine displaying an alcohol level over say 14.5 or 15 percent can be balanced, that the presence of that much alcohol overwhelms all other aspects and automatically precludes an integrated and palatable wine. Certainly I have railed against the upward creep of alcohol levels in California and have criticized wines that flaunt their gonzo alcohol for sake of sheer size and power. So, I hope you will believe me when I say that despite sporting an alcohol content of 15.8 percent, the Benovia Zinfandel 2007, while, granted, a powerful and intense expression of the grape, is completely balanced and integrated, a sort of marvel of risky engineering. Black as the night that covers us from pole to pole (with a violet-purple rim), the wine bursts with notes of blackberry, blueberry and cranberry (with cranberry’s pert edge) infused with baking spice, licorice and a scent of damp shale. Terrific presence and substance without being weighty or obvious; lush and ripe, yes, but tempered by the rigor of brushy, briery tannins and slightly smoky oak, all this wrapped around an intense core of lavender, licorice and gravel-like minerals. Tremendous with the braised chuck roast. 197 cases made, so mark this wine Worth a Search. Excellent. About $38.

We don’t buy catfish often. In fact, the last time we cooked catfish was probably 10 years ago for a dinner party, and that was a Charlie Trotter recipe for Wok-Smoked Catfish with Sweet-and-Sour Fennel and Kumquat Sauce, a terrific dish from The Kitchen Sessions (Ten Speed Press, 1999), one of the “easy” Charlie Trotter cookbooks, as opposed to the “really hard” original series of Trotter’s cookbooks. Anyway, the truth about catfish is that you can raise them in man-made ponds and nurture them on the most nutritious food, but the bewhiskered little fuckers still taste like bottom-feeders. Which, of course, is part of their unique charm. Which people north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi River probably don’t get.

Anyway, the fishmonger at the Memphis Farmers Market had catfish last week, and we thought, “Oh, what the hell.” So, LL dipped the catfish fillets in milk and then panko bread crumbs and seared them in a hot cast-iron skillet, and when they were nice and crusty and brown, she took them out and fried some slices of onion. I sliced a couple of ciabatta rolls, smeared them with remoulade sauce and put a slice of tomato on each. The catfish fillets went on top and then the fried onions. Definitely catfish and definitely delicious, though, yep, a little funky and earthy as only catfish can be. As LL said, as we were eagerly chowing down, “You wouldn’t mistake this for anything but catfish.”

I opened a bottle of the Clayhouse Sauvignon Blanc 2008, Paso Robles. Made almost all in stainless steel — a whisper of 2 percent is barrel-fermented — this wine is fresh, clean and lemony, through which qualities are woven hints of almond and almond blossom, quince and jasmine. Yeah, it’s pretty darned pretty. Totally dry, crisp as the click of a finger-snap, the Clayhouse Sauvignon Blanc 08 offers pear and melon flavors with a touch of leafy fig and lemon curd, whatever richness it shows off-set by the presence of some astringent floral aspect and the slight bracing bitterness of a finish infused with grapefruit and limestone, all of this wrapped is an appealing, close to talc-like texture, balanced, again, by that vibrant acidity, and could this sentence possibly be any longer? Real class and breeding for the price. Excellent. About $14, a Great Bargain.

The remoulade sauce on these catfish sandwiches was fairly spicy, and this wine handled that spiciness and the earthiness of the catfish handily.

The next morning, while LL was at work, I made a white bean and turnip greens soup, using a recipe from a book we have leaned upon for years, Chez Panisse Vegetables by Alice Waters (HarperCollins, 1996). The cannellini beans had already soaked overnight. It’s a fairly standard procedure, with garlic, onions and carrots, a piece of prosciutto, tomatoes, chicken stock and so on. You add the chopped greens about 20 minutes before serving and then garnish the soup with fried sage and shaved Parmesan cheese. It made a delicious lunch — we ate outside though it was a bit chilly — and finished the bottle of Clayhouse Sauvignon Blanc 08 from the previous night, which provided a satisfying accompaniment to the hearty, flavorful soup, particularly as a foil to the earthy, slightly bitter greens.

We got two great meals from one hefty Berkshire pork shoulder, with plenty of leftovers.

Pictured here is a Guajillo-Spiked Pork and Potato Taco, concocted from a recipe in Mexico One Plate at a Time, by Rick Bayless (Scribner, 2000), creator and chef of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago.

This dish requires that you toast the dried guajillo chilies, which we had on hand — yes, we are the kind of household that just happens to have dried guajillo chilies on hand, as well as cheesecloth and parchment paper and a Chinese hat, what am I supposed to do, apologize? — rehydrate them and them puree with garlic and chopped tomatoes. Brown the cubed pork in oil or lard (well, what are you going to do when you have this lovely, white pork fat, huh?), and then you simmer the meat in the tomato-chili puree until there’s almost nothing left of the sauce, and then you add water and cook it down again, this time with the potatoes. That’s about it. What remains is exceedingly tender and flavorful and intense. LL went to a local taqueria and bought fresh tortillas, which were still warm when she got home. These are not tacos loaded down with extraneous ingredients; cilantro is all that’s called for, though I made a simple salad — chopped romaine, tomatoes and red onion — to go on the side. We didn’t even use any salsa; the slow-cooked meat and potatoes in the rich sauce needed no embellishment.

The first night we had the tacos, I opened a bottle of the Mettler Family Vineyards “Epicenter” Old Vine Zinfandel 2007, from Lodi County, which I thought was more balanced than the version from 2006 that I reviewed on September 20. With 8 percent petite sirah grapes in the blend and seeing 19 months aging in oak (85 percent French, 15 percent American), the wine is undeniably large-framed, dense and muscular. Aromas of ripe, fleshy, dusty blackberries and black currants are highlighted by whiffs of black pepper and packed with lavender and violets that smell as if they had been crushed in a mortar with bitter chocolate, potpourri and pulverized gravel. Yikes, as if that weren’t enough, in the mouth, the wine is rich and succulent, but it doesn’t flaunt that over-ripe boysenberry jamminess that makes many “old vine” zinfandels cloying, nor does its alcohol level — 15.6 percent — come off as hot and sweet. Instead, this wine maintained poise dictated by vibrant acidity and buttressed by a rather stark edge of foresty briers and brambles. Drink through 2011 or ‘12. Excellent. About $25.

The Mettler Epicenter 2007 was a terrific match with the intensity and banked spicy heat of the tacos. It was as if a glass of this wine and one of the tacos went out into the alley behind the cantina for a wrestling match and each round was fought to a draw, until they just said, “Aw, fuck it, amigo, let’s go back inside and eat and drink together.” Ole!

A few nights later, we ate the rest of the tacos, and this time I ventured the Clayhouse Adode Red 2007, Central Coast. This is an interesting sort of New World/Old World blend of 44 percent zinfandel, 32 percent petite sirah, 16 percent syrah, 5 percent malbec, 4 percent grenache and 2 percent mourvedre. It’s tasty and moderately complex, but it’s not the same kind of wine as the Mettler Epicenter ‘07, so while we enjoyed the Clayhouse Adobe ‘07, it didn’t make the same kind of impression paired with the tacos. It offers scents and flavors of ripe red and black currants and plums, an array of dried spices, an intriguing earthy hint of leather and loam and fairly supple, chewy tannins. Try it with burgers, meatloaf and pork chops. Very Good. About $15, Good Value.

With the rest of the pork shoulder, we made the Sun-Dried Tomato and Fennel Sausage Patties with Creamy Polenta from the May 2009 issue of Bon Appetit. My, oh my, what a spectacular dish this was! The sausage contains the chopped pork shoulder, pork fat, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, basil, fennel seeds and so on, The Italinate sauce that accompanies the sausage patties consists of canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots and more basil. Serve this with polenta topped with chopped basil and grated Parmesan cheese, with a salad on the side, and it all makes for fine, hearty, flavorful eating. (My pictures of this dish didn’t work out, sorry.)

Here was a chance to open a bottle of the charming Gilli Vigna del Forno Freisa d’Asti 2006, from Piedmont. Charming, yes, but with plenty of stuffing. (The grape is the freisa.) Black raspberry and black cherry scents and flavors are permeated by baking spice, bitter orange and a hint of tar. The grape’s typical acidity makes the wine unabashedly lively and appealing, while a texture that’s slightly taut and sinewy reminds us that charm can have a serious side. Hints of wild berry and a seductive floral element emerge after a few minutes in the glass. Loads of personality and terrific with the dish. Very Good+. About $20.
Imported by Domenico Selections, New York.

The Memphis Farmers Market closes at the end of October. It’s fascinating to observe, over six months, how the produce changes as Spring turns into Summer and Summer into Fall. Yesterday, one of the biggest purveyors of tomatoes had none, and peas and beans are almost gone, but all of a sudden turnips and kale and bushels of colorful peppers, hot or sweet, are all over the place.

The very cute apple is one of a wide bowlful of apples and pears we bought yesterday. I’ll probably make a clafouti with the pears, and depending on how tart the apples are, well, I don’t know, maybe just eat them. One of the gratifying points about buying fruit at the MFM is that it isn’t all perfect, gussied-up and polished the way fruit is at the supermarket, as if apples and pears and peaches had gone through some mutating perfection process, so they gleam under the lights as if they were starlets on the red carpet. No, these apples and pears bear the marks of variation and individuality; no Stepford Fruit here.

We couldn’t resist buying bags of peppers. At one stand, they were two for a dollar, at another stand, three for a dollar, so we loaded up. Some of the smaller peppers and those baby eggplant (trimmed and broiled with olive oil, salt and pepper) you see in the image went on the pizza I made last night, along with an onion, and tomatoes and a passel of basil and some feta cheese, all from the MFM. The peppers also look really pretty in this bowl, sitting on the counter. I’ll use more in salads this week, and surely some will find their way into a pasta dish of LL’s invention.

I’ll admit that some Saturday mornings, I think, “Oh rats, do we have to drive downtown again this week?” Once we get there, however, it’s always fun browsing the stands, seeing friends, as we inevitably do, and buying produce, meat and seafood — driven up from the Gulf of Mexico the previous night — with the prospect of great meals to come. The fact that at the end of this month the MFM will close until next April is a sign that the growing season, with its waves of successive fruit and vegetables, is also at a close, and that the bounty of the last harvests will be followed by Winter’s dearth.

A perfect dish for seasonal transition, that is from Summer into Fall, is this recipe from the September Gourmet magazine. It touches five essential food groups — chicken, figs, garlic, bacon and thyme — for a combination that’s savory, hearty and flavorful, with a touch of woodsy sweetness. The recipe calls for Cornish game hens, but the examples we see in stores here look like small mutant chickens, not the petite birds of yore, so we used chicken thighs, which we had on hand. The dish did not suffer in the slightest. In keeping with our new philosophy — two small meals a day –LL and I each ate one thigh (and one piece of bacon), along with mashed potatoes and green beans, leaving some for lunch this weekend.

For wine, I opened the Campo Santa Lena Valpolicella Classico 2007, from Villa Monteleone, located in the town of Gargagnago, in the central-western reaches of the Valpolicella Classico region. Valpolicella Classico, in the Veneto, like Chianti Classico in Tuscany, is a delimited vineyard zone, not a style of wine. Theoretically, wines from Valpolicella Classico, closer to Lake Garda and at a higher elevation, will be better than “regular” Valpolicella because of the more salubrious geography and micro-climate. Indeed, as the vineyards of Valpolicella spread easterly toward the city of Verona and flatter land, the more lackluster or at least merely drinkable the wines tend to be.

Campo Santa Lena Valpolicella Classico 2007 is a blend of the typical grapes of the region: Corvina and rondinella with some croatina and molinara. Made all in stainless steel, the wine is a medium ruby color with inviolable violet at the center. The bouquet offers black currants, dusty plums, a whiff of black pepper and dried herbs. In the mouth, Campo Santa Lena ‘07 is robust and earthy, but not heavy; in fact, it carries itself with point and polish, invigorated by lithe acidity. Flavors of black cherries and plums are permeated by chewy, slightly brushy tannins and back-notes of tar and bitter chocolate. A rewarding drink with our roasted chicken, figs and thyme with bacon and garlic chips, it would be equally suitable with a variety of hearty autumnal fare, especially game-birds. Very Good+. About $20.

Imported by Domenico Selections, New York, whose wines are now available not only in the Northeast but in North Carolina and Texas.

LL came home for lunch yesterday — remember, our new regime is two moderate meals a day — and fried one small soft-shell crab. Now the curious point is that neither LL nor I are particularly fond of soft-shell crab, but Saturday morning we were at the Memphis Farmers Market standing at the table of a guy who drives down to New Orleans to pick up fish and seafood from his family’s boats and LL said, “Well, let’s try a soft-shell crab.” I was making objecting hums and haws in the background, but she went ahead; we also bought a pound of shrimp and two beautiful fillets of tuna. (The tuna became the ceviche for the tacos we ate Monday.)

Anyway, LL came home for lunch, cleaned the crab, breaded it with flour and panko crumbs and fried it in a skillet. She also sliced some green tomatoes, coated them and fried them. I sliced one ciabatta roll and spread remoulade sauce on the interior. LL slid two slices of fried green tomato onto the bottom half of the roll, set the fried crab on top of the tomatoes, and I sprinkled some shredded romaine lettuce on top of the crabs, then capped it with the other half of the roll. Voila! A fried green tomato and soft-shell crab sandwich, which I cut in half, so we each had a little sandwich, about six bites each. We served these with a salad of baby arugula, chopped romaine, tomatoes and sliced red and yellow peppers. A great lunch!

We were eating on the screened porch in back — the rain stopped after two weeks, and we’re having gorgeous mild weather — and LL said, “We need about this much wine,” holding thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. So I looked in the wine fridge and thought, “Oh, what the hell!” and plucked forth a bottle of the Rossi-Wallace Chardonnay 2007, Napa Valley. The wine is made by husband-and-wife team Ric Forman and Cheryl Emmolo, each of whom has a long history with wine and vineyards in the Napa Valley. Rossi-Wallace, named for their mothers, is a new project; this chardonnay and a Pinot Noir 2007 are the initial releases.

The Rossi-Wallace Chardonnay 2007 sees no oak and no malolactic “fermentation.” Made all in stainless steel, the wine rests seven months on the lees of spent yeast cells. The grapes derive from the same vineyard that supplies Forman’s chardonnay under his eponymous label but for this wine the grapes are harvested a bit earlier. The result of this fairly hands-off approach is a beautiful chardonnay of shimmering purity and intensity. Classic pineapple and grapefruit scents are permeated by quince and ginger and hints of limestone and wet gravel. After a few moments, a wafting of jasmine lifts from the glass. In the mouth, the wine is lithe and supple, almost crystalline in its vibrant acidity; the pineapple-grapefruit flavors take on a touch of roasted lemon and pear, with hints of smoke and mushroom-like earthiness. Such emphasis on the lively and delicious character of the grape is rare in California. If I were managing a restaurant wine list, I would want a couple of cases of this chardonnay in the cellar. Unfortunately — there’s always a rub! — only 150 cases were produced, so mark this one Worth a Search. About $25.

LL and I drank about one-third of this bottle at lunch — it managed the spiciness and assertiveness of the soft-shell crab quite handily — and finished it last night with shrimp risotto.