A version of a favorite. The base: boiled potatoes, olive oil, lemon and fresh garlic. Taste will depend on quality of olive oil and of course the potatoes (for the dish in the photograph I used organic potatoes from the farmers market). You always want something to balance the potatoes on texture, ideally a little crunchy. I often use sauted beans, sometimes cucumbers (I’ve used Japanese & persian cucumbers). In this version I used cucumbers, but also capitalized on the abundance of delicious heirloom (and other) tomatoes we got from the farmers market all through Sept and Oct. I then added an experimental twist to the dish, that came out very well: I used thinly sliced red onions fried in olive oil as a hot garnish. I fried the onions over low heat, with patience, letting them slowly caramelize. After the rest of the salad mixture has had some time to cool in the fridge with the garlic, lemon, olive oil, salt and fresh pepper, right before serving, I garnished the salad with the hot fried onions. If you want crisper onions, take them out of the oil and drain on a paper towel before adding to the salad.

I’ve called the final garnish “onion tarka” in the title because the onion garnish, chopped differently, and with the addition of various spices, is the hot garnish used on many Indian dishes, and called “Tarka”.

You know how, in The Golden Girls, Rose was forever telling tales of men called Lars and fish called herring? Well we just came back from a dinner where you could cook anything you liked, as long as it was salmon. And it was deeeevine. I can see why Rose got all misty-eyed. Sure, there was a great deal more salmon on the table than you’d have reason to hope for, but then again, it’s salmon *season* here. Plenty of locally caught wild salmon around, and quite a lot around for sale at less than the $18/lb we paid for it. But, tush, the salmon itself was ace. Some cooked through cedar planks, like this:

Some cooked in mustard. Some in filo, some in lime, some with cajun, some with thyme.

Yes. It’s a rhyming sentence about salmon.

Point being, though, that there were more ways to eat locally, ecologically, and heartily, than you’d think. Alongside the salmon, local tomatoes, plums, endives and apples. And booze. Let’s not forget that Northern California does booze.

Props, then, to Marco Flavio, the gentle culinary disciplinarian over at Cook Here and Now, who put an afternoon of local and seasonal cooking and eating together. You can see pictures over at Flickr (use the CookHereAndNow tag).

Wild Salmon is in season. We bought 5 fillets at the Hapuku Fish Shop in Rockridge for a whopping 50.00. But the fish looked beautiful, and my first try of a dish I’ve been dreaming of for 15 years - Mustard (Hilsa in Calcutta, Salmon here) - came out just right. Pungent, mustardy, and addictive. The rest of the fillets will be cooked at the “Cook Here & Now” local food cookathon. Recipe coming shortly.