Wishing for a Crabby New Year

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Ring in the New Year with Dungeness crab cooked in beer.

I’ve got the TV set for watching the glittery ball drop in Manhattan’s Times Square and the fireworks exploding in technicolor over San Francisco.

I’ve got a bottle of fine bubbly chilling in the fridge.

And I’ve got my husband geared up to do battle with the long, unruly lines at the seafood counter at the local Asian market — all in effort to snag live Dungeness crab on New Year’s Eve.

It wouldn’t be a New Year’s Eve without any of that. Nope, not in my book.

You can have your lobster. I’ll take Dungeness over that any day.

Especially on New Year’s Eve, when you just can’t go wrong with simple yet spectacular seafood and glasses of Brut sparkling wine.

Sure, you can buy already cooked crab at your local seafood market. Just make sure it’s freshly cooked and there’s a lot of turnover or else you risk ending up with dry, stringy meat. And nobody wants that.

But having grown up in a Chinese-American household, I’m used to cooking my own at home for the freshest taste. My late-parents liked to steam our Dungeness. Then, my Dad would take a cleaver to the steaming hulks and crack them with a resounding wallop before bringing the massive platter to the table, where we would all dig in, our hands getting messier by the minute.

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The Recipe for Bakesale Betty’s Iconic Fried Chicken Sandwich

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If you’ve had the pleasure of chomping down on the two-fisted, crunch-a-palooza known as Bakesale Betty’s fried chicken sandwich, you know it’s hard to forget.

Not with that impeccable golden crust, pillowy torpedo roll and mound of tangy slaw.

If you can’t make it to Bakesale Betty’s two Oakland locations to stand in line for it — and there almost always is one — you can try your hand at making one at home.

Baker-Owner Alison Barakat, who dons an electric blue wig as her alter ego, “Betty,” shares the recipe for this killer sandwich on the new, improved Via magazine Web site. Starting with this inaugural spotlight on Bakesale Betty, yours truly will be working with Via to bring you a new recipe on that site each month for a signature dish created by a landmark restaurant in the West.

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A Comforting Cake Laden with the Bounty of the Philo Apple Farm

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An apple-cranberry cake with a sense of time and place.

Amid all the lengthy, elaborate and supremely elegant recipes in “The French Laundry Cookbook” (Artisan) is a most homey one that concludes the book.

Perhaps it’s only appropriate, too, since “Sally Schmitt’s Cranberry and Apple Kuchen with Hot Cream Sauce” was a favorite dessert at the original incarnation of the French Laundry when it was owned by Sally Schmitt and her husband, Don, before the couple decided to sell it to Thomas Keller.

As “The French Laundry Cookbook” co-author Michael Ruhlman so eloquently writes of the couple in the intro to the recipe, “…they are the ultimate purveyors. They purveyed a restaurant.”

Indeed, had it not been for them, and what they nurtured in that spot, there might not have been the French Laundry as we know it today, nor the now vaunted reputation of the town of Yountville as a tiny culinary capital of the world.

So when I purchased some Philo Gold (Golden Delicious) apples from the Philo Apple Farm that the Schmitts bought after leaving Yountville, and which their daughter and son-in-law now run, I knew just what to do with them. To pay homage to all that the Schmitts have accomplished and created, I knew those apples that Sally had helped sow the seeds for had to be baked into the apple cake she used to serve at her restaurant.

A very thick batter of butter, sugar, egg, flour, a little milk and baking powder gets stirred up with nutmeg and a pinch  of salt. Spread it evenly into a greased cake pan. Then artfully press thin slices of apples down into the batter. Arrange fresh or frozen cranberries over the top. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and bake.

Gild the lily with hot cream sauce.

The simple, tender cake lets the fruit shine through. It’s fine as it is. But Sally also adds a hot cream sauce fortified with sugar and butter that you can pour over slices as liberally as you want. I must say, it does add a rather nice touch, making the cake even more special and memorable as it soaks up all that warm richness.

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A Visit to the Philo Apple Farm

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Apples grown the old-fashioned way.

You might not know Sally and Don Schmitt by name. But you know of them by their legacy.

They were the original owners of the French Laundry in Yountville. They transformed what was once variously a bar, laundry, brothel, then run-down rooming house into a destination restaurant with a prix fixe menu even back then that attracted wide acclaim and visits from the likes of Julia Child and Marion Cunningham. Opened in 1978, Don was the maitre d’ and Sally was the cook, serving up five French-comfort-style courses that topped out at $46 per person.

Entrepreneurs and pioneers, Sally and Don Schmitt.

In 1994, after a number of restaurateurs eyed the property with interest, the couple decided to take the chance to sell it to a then down-on-his-luck, young chef named Thomas Keller.

As Sally deadpans now, “That turned out pretty well, didn’t it?”

The Schmitts ran the original French Laundry restaurant. Here is their menu on opening night in 1978.

Sally, 79, and Don, 81 have a gift for seeing the potential in things most folks would turn their backs on.

After selling the French Laundry, they went on to refurbish yet another run-down property — a 30-acre swath in Philo in Mendocino County near the Navarro River. They turned what was once a decrepit sharecroppers farm into a thriving biodynamic farm specializing in heirloom apples. The Philo Apple Farm is so picturesque now that it’s a favorite setting for retailer Pottery Barn to do its catalog shoots.

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