Cooking in Napa:

The day after Gary and I cooked in his restaurant kitchen in San Francisco, we traveled together to Napa. It was a late fall day, and a spectacular one: The view of the bay was clear, and when we turned inland, the vineyards, with the harvest just completed, were sparkling with dew. Gardens were filled with November produce and we found persimmons, figs, squash of all kinds, just-cured olives, just-pressed olive oil, walnuts, and more.

Our ultimate destination was Maria Manetti’s Tuscan-style estate in Napa Valley, which she calls Villa Mille Rose—the villa of a thousand roses—and, there too, the November harvest was impressive. The four dishes we cooked there—his quail, my chicken, and the persimmon recipes—relied almost entirely on local products, including the birds (from nearby Sonoma), lemons, parsley, olive oil, even vinegar. The walnuts, figs, pomegranates, and persimmons were all from Maria’s trees (the olive oil and vinegar were also hers, but produced earlier). We cooked the birds on a grill in Maria’s huge kitchen fireplace, a real treat.