Bay Area Bites

Bay Area Bites Redesign

2008-04-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

KQED's food blog, Bay Area Bites had been redesigned and relocated. Please go to http://www.kqed.org/bayareabites to reset your RSS feed.

Celebrate The Sweet Life

2008-04-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

A chilly Spring has me longing for a tropical vacation. One way to get a little taste of the islands in our own backyard is to dine at Roy's. Chef Roy Yamaguchi is one of the most influential and well-respected Hawaiian chefs. His style of fusion cuisine combines Asian, French and Hawaiian ingredients and techniques. He is Hawaii's first James Beard award-winner and this year his restaurants are celebrating their 20th year with special dinners.

Tomorrow's 20th anniversary dinner takes place at the San Francisco Roy's, with Roy at the helm. Local and Hawaiian ingredients will be featured with a particular emphasis on sustainable seafood and a portion of proceeds will go to Grow for Good, a national initiative dedicated to supporting local farms and encouraging sustainable agriculture.

amuse buche 
Shiro-Shoyu Marinated Kona Kampachi "Nigiri" sustainable princess conch, tri-color tobiko & Kumamoto oysters Perrier Jouet Grand Brut

first course
 Kona Lobster Ceviche California avocado and halibut turtle shell,  organic watermelon radish, Cara Cara oranges
 Jacob's Creek Riesling

second course
 Organic Sausalito Springs Watercress & Red Kaiware Sprout Salad goat cheese, Sparrow Lane Napa walnut vinaigrette  Brancott Sauvignon Blanc

third course
 Japanese Wagyu Topped Niman Ranch Top Sirloin Delta asparagus, red Irish potatoes, Sebastopol mushrooms
 Jacob's Creek Reserve Shiraz

fourth course
 Hawaiian Vanilla & Rum Infused "Baba" Berkeley Farms sweet cream Sandeman
Tawny 20 Year Port

What: Roy's 20th Anniversary Dinner
Cost: Tickets are $100 (excludes tax & gratuity)
When: Thursday April 10th, Seating from 5:00 to 9:30 pm
Where:Roy's is located at 575 Mission Street in San Francisco
More: The evening will also include performance by Hawaiian dancers and Patrick Landeza
How: To make your reservation for this special event, please call 415.777.0277

Another sweet event, literally, is a pairing of wine and chocolate at local chocolate shop, Cocoa Bella.

Head over to Cocoa Bella Chocolates on Union Street for the first Wine and Chocolate Soire. They'll be offering a six-piece tasting of favorite American and European chocolates paired with a 3-glass selection of sparkling and dessert wines. The staff will be on hand to discuss how to match up your favorite bonbons with port, Madeira, and other after-dinner drinks. Each attendee will go home with a 2-piece box of complimentary chocolates chosen from the evening's special selection.

Space is limited, so make your reservations now. Reserved tickets can be paid for at the door. Some additional tickets may be available on the night of the event, but advance reservations are encouraged to ensure your space at this entertaining and informative event.

What: Wine & Chocolate Soiree
Cost: $40 per person
When: Thursday, April 10, 2008, 7 PM - 9 PM
Where: Cocoa Bella Chocolates, 2102 Union St at Webster, San Francisco
More: Includes 6-piece chocolate tasting, 3 glasses of selected wines, and complimentary 2-piece chocolate box
How: For reservations, call (415) 931-6213 or email cocoabellachocolates@yahoo.com
Additional tickets may be available at the door

Bar Jules: Delight in Hayes Valley

2008-04-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

"The chestnut soup was good, but not Bar Jules good," a friend told me the other day. She was referring to a delicious chestnut and farro soup that we'd eaten at Bar Jules a couple of months back.

In the time since Bar Jules opened in December, it has quickly become a place that I recommend to friends -- especially for its lovely weekend brunches. Chef Jessica Bonecutter is known around San Francisco, having chefed at Hog Island Oyster Bar and Zuni Cafe.

Bar Jules has a stated commitment to sustainable practices and is buying most of their ingredients from local farmers and sustainable sources.

Entering Bar Jules, you will find several large chalkboards with the day's menu instead of paper menus. The small menu changes on a daily basis and is dependent on seasonal availability. As Sam of Becks and Posh stated, "because of the limited options, this is not the place to take a fussy eater."

If you're not fussy, however, delights will abound. I seriously mourned the day that Desiree, my favorite breakfast location in the Presidio, closed a couple of years ago -- mostly because of their perfectly cooked eggs. The brunch that I had at Bar Jules came close to Desiree's taste -- scrambled eggs with sorrel and parmesan were on the menu the morning I went. While those were delicious, the hit of the table was poached eggs with lamb.

Last week, I returned to Bar Jules for lunch. I loved the "mussels on the grill with paprika, garlic & lemon" ($12). The mussels had a deep roasted flavor. I requested bread to dip into my mussel juices, and was given a perfectly grilled toast which went perfectly with the dish.

Even the drinks at Bar Jules are special. Beer and wine are available, along with a lovely rosebud tea, Blue Bottle Coffee and seasonal juices -- last week I had a delicious pomegranate spritzer.

The Bar Jules menu changes daily, but the staff meticulously updates their web page with the most current menu and prices. Bar Jules does not take reservations.

Common Ground on Bar Jules' sustainability practices

Bar Jules
609 Hayes Street (at Laguna)
San Francisco
415-621-5482

Dinner, Tuesday - Saturday
Lunch, Wednesday - Saturday
Brunch, Sundays
Closed Mondays

Culinary Laboratory: Cooking by Chemistry

2008-04-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

Blueberries and oysters? Chocolate and cauliflower? Blue cheese and rhubarb and pineapple?

If taste buds could cringe, then mine were recoiled into a wincing mess when I first learned about these flavor pairings. For those of you who have been eating at El Bulli or The Fat Duck or Alinea, this is all old news. For me, though, it was definitely an invitation to walk on the wild side.

To help wake up my outdated taste buds, my friend, Frankie, linked me up with Food for Design, where chemists and chefs and some overachieving web designers are putting together a provocative, highly entertaining website. With just a few minutes of clicking, creative and courageous cooks can find some very unusual food pairings.

Bernard Lahousse and Lieven De Couvreur in Belgium are the masterminds behind Food for Design. Based on the simple premise that "food combines with each other when they have major flavour components in common," their postings attempt to pair foods according to their physicochemical properties. If two ingredients share common sequences or similar molecules, the thinking goes, then their overlapping flavor compounds will echo each other.

Even the simplest flavors that we perceive depend on hundreds if not thousands of molecules interacting. Heat, time, acid, oil, sun, salt--any number of things can change the bonds and the resulting shapes of these flavor compounds. Structural shifts lead to flavor changes. (Too much information, you say? Just ask any culinary student to summarize the Maillard Reaction to hear more than you ever wanted to know about the science of bread crust.)

Back to the fun stuff: My favorite pages are those with elegant tree diagrams tracing molecular groupings of common ingredients and the links between them that lead to not-so-common pairings. They're perfect illustrations of form and flavor, the culinary equivalent of graphic designers' never-ending debates about form and function. Keep exploring their pages to find such gems as: "Most people and even many engineers would guess that the shape of a raindrop is the familiar teardrop shape. However, the teardrop shape appears only in cartoons and the real shape is closer to the flattened hamburger bun." Hence, the macaroon.

Later this week, I'm going to try making a cauliflower souffle with dark chocolate shavings, serve it to my guests, and see how long it takes them to figure out that they're not eating white chocolate. If all goes well, I may have a recipe for you next week. Or not.

In the meantime, you can try a much simpler dish created by organometallic research chemist-slash-gourmand Martin Lersch: Caramelized Cauliflower and Chocolate Jelly.

Please do share your tasting notes!

Hidden Villa

2008-04-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

I usually try to buy local and organic foods, but am not always successful. Choosing to buy locally is often inconvenient, while buying organic can be expensive. Most grocery stores do not stock local foods, so I need to go to the farmer's market to purchase it, which eats up a Saturday morning. Organic food is now widely available in grocery stores, but is almost always more costly than non-organic purchases (sometimes more than twice as much). But when I see an article about how pesticides are killing off bird populations, or when there's another recall on beef, I feel that I need to make every effort to buy locally produced and organic foods for my family. As a parent who thinks a lot about the food my family eats and where it comes from, I have often wished to share this type of information with my children in an age-appropriate way. So I was excited when I recently learned about an organization in the Bay Area whose main focus is on teaching children about organic farming and environmental education.

Hidden Villa, which is a working organic and sustainable farm in Los Altos Hills, is dedicated to helping parents and teachers do just this. So when my daughters' classes scheduled a trip to Hidden Villa, I knew I absolutely had to chaperone so I could see their educational program up close.

Hidden Villa was founded in 1924 by Frank and Josephine Duveneck. With a vision of social justice, they turned their farm into a gathering place where people from all over the world could take part in "discussion, reflection, and incubation of social reform." In 1937, they created a hostel to house their guests (the first hostel on the West Coast), and in 1945 created a multiracial summer camp amid protests. A trust for Hidden Villa was created in 1960, when it became a nonprofit organization.

In addition to being an organic farm, Hidden Villa spends much of the school year providing educational programs to elementary school children. The entire second grade for my daughters' school visited Hidden Villa this week, participating in their Farm and Wilderness Exploration program, which provided an open and honest look at real organic farming and food cycles. When we arrived, I was immediately taken with the serenity and beauty of the place, and, after a day's visit, impressed with the depth and diversity of the curriculum as well.

On our tour, we met pigs, cows, goats, sheep, and chickens and learned not only what they eat and how they live, but also what people use them for. When we visited the pig sty, the kids were all able to pet the pigs and see them eat (with a lot of oohing and aahing about how cute they were), but this wasn't just a petting-zoo experience. After we interacted with the pigs, we were directed to a learning center outside the sty where Susan, our guide, led a discussion on the many things people make from pigs. In addition to the obvious chat about ham and pork chops, Susan showed the children a dog chew made out of pig skin, marshmallows made from gelatin (which I hate to admit has pig collagen in it), a fancy hair brush with bristles made of pig hair, and a leather water pouch made of pig skin. She also told the kids that Hidden Villa slaughters some of their pigs and that using the animals is part of what happens on a working farm. The information was straightforward, yet age-appropriate, and the kids accepted it very maturely, and made some thoughtful comments of their own.

Our tour also included an expedition to Hidden Villa's extensive vegetable gardens and green house. In the composting area, the children were given shovels to help a little with the farm work, while we talked about growing seasons and fertilization. We then wandered through the vegetable beds, where Susan pulled sorrel leaves, rhubarb spears, and herbs to make "burritos" of all the vegetables wrapped in lettuce for the kids. Not one child moaned about hating vegetables. Everyone was eager to taste the burritos and exclaimed how much they loved them. One of my daughters has been begging me to grow sorrel since we've returned home.

After our farm visit, we wandered into the wilderness area, which is the largest part of Hidden Villa, for a hike that included discussions on plant communities, food webs, predator and prey relationships, and good stewardship of the land in a friendly and accessible way. Susan taught the kids how to make face paint by rubbing river rocks together and sent each child on a short (and safe) hike alone to reflect on the individual aspects of the forest and the surrounding area. When I asked my daughters and a friend of theirs what they liked the most about the trip to Hidden Villa, they shouted "the hike!" – with all three mentioning the solo walk as the best part of their day.

The Farm and Wilderness educational program at Hidden Villa is meant for 2nd – 6th graders, with tours every Tuesday through Friday. They also have farm tours, which are shorter and don't include the wilderness hike, for Pre-K through 1st graders. Weekend tours are available for families. During the summer months, Hidden Villa emphasizes the Duveneck family's commitment for nurturing relationships between people of different cultural, religious, economic and racial backgrounds through their summer camp program. Both day and overnight camps are offered, always with an emphasis on caring for each other and the environment.

If you live on the Peninsula, you're close enough to participate in Hidden Villa's Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, which allows you to purchase a share of the harvest at the beginning of the season, and then receive a basket of vegetables once a week from May until Thanksgiving. Hidden Villa participates in this program so people can get to know the farmers who grow their food and visit the land that produces it.

If you are a teacher or parent interested in teaching your kids about food cycles and organic farming, I highly recommend a visit to Hidden Villa. To learn more about this great resource, visit their web site or call (650) 949-8650.

Where the Blackberry is Never in Season

2008-04-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Miss Manners,

"When dining, does one place one's Blackberry to the right of the plate, or to the left, near the salad fork?"

The answer to this unsent question is, of course, never. I don't care if you're the Pope. Of course, popes don't use Blackberries. They use people who use Blackberries.

Hey there, Mr. Business Guy. Ho there, Little Miss Connectivity. You want to see a hand held device appropriate for restaurant use? Look down and to your right, it's called a table knife.

It looks a lot like the one with which I'll impale your (expletive) PDA if you use it one more time during your meal.

At some point a decade or so ago, P.D.A. went from meaning an improper "public display of affection" to "personal digital assistant." The employment of either P.D.A. is rude at the table, displaying a certain lack of respect for your dining companions. Would you like to watch your mother give good old dad a hand job during the salad course? No? Then what makes you think they want to see you texting friends or fielding phone calls over dessert?

It's not just Blackberries. Last night, I watched as two men ate dinner together. Not such a strange occurrence, except for the fact that one of the men did not take his iPod headphones out of his ears for the entire duration of the meal.

I saw a woman who was so busy texting someone as she walked through our very busy dining room that she hit the chair of a man who was rising from his seat. There was no, "Excuse me, I'm sorry," from her. She didn't even bother to look up. I was tempted to trip her to see what it might take to make her drop her machine.

It's certainly annoying when I have to repeat a litany of specials to guests who are too busy on their phones to pay attention to me, but I take that as part of my job. After describing something a second time (unless there is a genuine communication problem), I consider myself done.

But I'd be happy to text you about today's whole fish, if you like, you self-involved (expletive).

Like I said, it's an annoying aspect of my job, and I deal with that type of rudeness in my own way. What I find so terrible about all this abuse of take-it-with-you technology is the toll I see it taking on the other diners, and on basic human interaction in general.

For example, on Tuesday evening, I waited upon a young woman, her boyfriend, and her mother. The young woman kept her Blackberry on the table to her right. She'd eye it occasionally as her mother or her French boyfriend spoke. When dessert time rolled around and I came over to the table, the boyfriend said they had made their selections. The girl didn't take her cue to order because she was busy texting someone. He gave her a soft, sing-songy "Heeeey!" and waved his hand in front of her face as one does when one is uncertain of another's consciousness. She pulled away like a sulky toddler. I could see the mother squirm. I felt terrible for the boyfriend, but I wanted to smack the girl. Hard.

What's getting me so angry is that no one is doing a god damned thing about it. As a server, it's not my responsibility to teach people lessons in manners. At the restaurant, I will just give you a wan smile if you misbehave, though some days the urge is more difficult to resist than others.

I am not seeing the recipients of this technological rudeness-- the boyfriends, the business clients, the parents-- call these idiots to task about this bad behavior. Maybe it's because they themselves are too polite to say anything. Whatever the case, their silence is sending a very bad sub-text message.

How long has this complacency been going on? Not forever, fortunately...

True Hollywood story--

In the days when cell phones were called mobile phones and still somewhat of a novelty, John Lovitz, Julianne Moore, Phil Hartman, and two people I did not recognize sat down at a booth in my section of the slick Beverly Hills eatery I worked in while at university. Mr. Hartman entered talking on his phone. When I approached the table, I asked quietly if I should come back when he had finished. Miss Moore nodded. Perhaps, I thought, it was a very important phone call.

After a while, it became quite clear to me that he was just yammering away on his new gadget, rudely ignoring his dining companions, but I stayed away from the table, nevertheless.

After a few more minutes, Miss Moore motioned me over to the table. She quietly asked for a piece of paper and a pen. When she had finished scribbling, she handed the paper back to me with a "thank you" and a sidelong glance at Mr. Hartman. I nodded and excused myself to read the note. On the paper were Mr. Hartman's name, his phone number, and instructions for me to call him.

I marched over to the hostess stand at the front of the restaurant, dialed the number, and held my breath. He answered up my call with an abrupt, "Yeah?"

"Mr. Hartman? This is your waiter, I was just wondering if you'd decided on your order yet..."

Silence greeted me on the other end. Then a loud burst of laughter from both the receiver and the back of the restaurant. When I returned to the booth, Moore beamed, Hartman glowered. Fortunately, Moore picked up the check.

My love for her has never wavered since.

I think what the world needs now is more people like Julianne Moore. I'd suggest putting her at every dinner table in America if I didn't think it would be both exhausting and physically impossible. I'm sure she's busy enough as it is.

My point, of course, is that she got it. And she found a way to correct the bad behavior that was both funny and very effective.

I think that's what we all need to do.

I realize I've done a lot of name-calling this morning. I don't necessarily think the perpetrators are bad people, but their behavior is soul-killing. You want to invest in some great personal connectivity devices? How about turning off your iPhone for two hours and start using some eye contact instead? Face-to-face communication is far more effective than interface-to-interface.

As TennisPeter from Andover, Mass commented at Ask Annie, "Checking your Blackberry 24/7 doesn't make you important. It means you are insecure and lack the confidence to say, 'I'm not working right now.' " I am inclined to agree.

Oh, and while I'm on a rant, take that ridiculous Bluetooth thing out of your ear. It makes you look like some crazy homeless person who happened upon a dumpster filled with business casual clothing in his size. Sometimes, I like to pretend that these devices are hearing aids. I mouth my words with care-- slowly and with volume. And then I tilt my head and smile at the wearer in a way that says, "See? I'm sensitive to your special needs."

Can you hear me now?

I feel much better getting that off my chest. There is, however, one little favor I'd like you to do for me...

The next time you dine with the technology-addicted, kindly remind them that, for at least the duration of the meal, the phone gets locked back in its cell, the "i" retreats to its Pod, and the only blackberries allowed on the table have been baked into a cobbler. Smile when you say it.

If that doesn't work, gently place a ball peen hammer next to you on the table. Every time your tablemate touches his or her device, gently finger your hammer. If they pick up their phone, you pick up your hammer, and so on.

I think that might be one message they're sure not to miss.

Two Artisan Distillers

2008-04-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

If you know me, you know I have a taste for whisky. My palate is slowly (ever so slowly and with much repetitive training) being refined and, more and more, I'm learning what I like and what I don't like. I have an affinity for Scotch, particularly two distilleries from the lowlands (Glenkinchie and Auchentoshan) and a few Highland and Speyside gems. I haven't, however, quite found my love for American whiskey...yet. But times, they are a-changing (I think there could be flirtatious tendencies buried deep down).

Before I get into that though, I think it's important to make sure we are all on the same page. Whisky or whiskey, however you choose to spell it, includes Scotch, bourbon, rye, and Irish whiskey. It can be made with all kinds of grains, from barley to corn to rye, and aged under a whole variety of different circumstances, but always in wood.

Anything labeled Scotch has to be distilled in Scotland and aged a minimum of 3 years in oak casks. Most single malts are aged 8 to 10 years, which means that you have to guess what the market is going to be doing, and what people are going to be into, 10 years before it actually happens.

Bourbon, rye, and corn whiskey are all American whiskeys. They each have different regulations. Bourbon must be made with a minimum of 51% corn and aged in new American charred oak barrels; rye must be at least 51% rye; and corn whiskey must be made with at least 80% corn mash. As far as I can tell there are no aging regulations, which means that American producers can do some really interesting things, and have a lot more freedom to react to the market. Add that to the fact that there is a less rigid expectation of what American whiskey is anyway, and people here are more open to trying different things (in my Scottish husband's opinion anyway).

Last weekend I had the opportunity to sample the wares of two new artisan distillers: Tuthilltown, based in upstate New York and High West, which is based in up-and-coming Park City, Utah.

Tuthilltown
Tuthilltown's variety of spirits and beautifully packaged bottles (which look like apothecary bottles that are sealed with a big dollop of wax) beg you to pull one off the shelf. Founded in 2003 by Ralph Erenzo and Brian Lee, the artisan distillery is the first in New York since prohibition.

Their Old Gristmill Corn Whiskey is basically what I would consider moonshine, an unaged bourbon made with 100% corn. The difference is that this has been distilled for flavor rather than strength. This ain't no firewater, it's smooth as a baby's butt, crystal clear and clean with a distinctive corny flavor.

This same corn whiskey is the foundation for Hudson Baby Bourbon which is matured for 4 months in small, charred new American oak barrels (perhaps quarter casks?). The smaller the barrel the more the whiskey comes in contact with the wood, giving it the character of the barrel. This tasted woody, smoky, had more of an edge. Surprisingly, it was not nearly as smooth as the raw whiskey, and had a very deep color, like burnt amber.

My favorite had to be the Hudson Four Grain Bourbon. This one, made with corn, rye, wheat and malted barley, had more depth and character than the Baby Bourbon. It was sweet and smooth.

High West
Ok, yum. I think rye whiskey, and perhaps even more specifically, High West's rye whiskey could be my turning point to actually liking something other than Scotch.

High West is brand-spankin-new. They have one whiskey, the rye, and one vodka. The distillery was started by a Californian named David Perkins, who is actually a chemist by training. The distillery, along with a tasting saloon, is based in historic buildings right on the main street of Park City. So if you're in the chair lift line and the line gets backed up into town, you end up standing right in front of the windows and watching the distillery operate.

Their Rendezvous Rye Whiskey is non-chill filtered, and it's really smooth with a bit of spice and honey. I highly recommend it.

Currently, it's really hard to get either of these brands unless you are in their state of origin. But the folks at Tuthilltown promised that we'd be able to find their gorgeous little bottles at The Jug Shop in San Francisco by mid-summer. And apparently K&L Wine Merchants just picked up High West and will be carrying their wares soon. I'm keeping my eyes out for both of them.

More Chocolate Cookbooks & Double Chocolate-Hazelnut Biscotti Recipe

2008-04-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

We can't ever have too many chocolate recipes, can we? Since the quality of chocolate available in the supermarket has dramatically improved over the past twenty years or so, it's great to have a few more cookbooks that focus on using the most widely available products including chocolate bars, cocoa powder and chocolate chips. Here are three recent titles.

First up is a book that falls into the "I can't believe I didn't think of that!" category. The Essential Chocolate Chip Cookbook. Veteran baking expert and pastry chef Elinor Klivans who has written books on cupcakes, cookies and cakes has created a book devoted to chocolate chips and surprisingly there are only 6 cookie recipes in it. The book contains 45 recipes and is divided into chapters starting with Chocolate Chip Cookies and Candies, Chocolate Chip Brownies, Bars, Muffins and a Tea Loaf, Chocolate Chip Pies, tarts and Puddings, Chocolate Chip Cakes without Frosting, Chocolate Chip Cakes with Frosting and/or Filling and finally Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Desserts. There are recommendations for brands of chocolate chips to use, and happily most of the recipes come together very quickly.

One of Klivan's top picks for chocolate chips is Ghirardelli, especially in the bittersweet category. Ghirardelli has their own cookbook, The Ghirardelli Chocolate Book. A hardback book, it has 16 recipes for cookies, though not all of them are chocolate chip cookies. The book contains 80 recipes in all. The chapters are fairly similar to the chapters in the chocolate chip book, but also include Chocolate Breads and Breakfast and Anything-but-Boring Chocolate Drinks. Despite the ice cream parlor at Ghirardelli Square, there are only two ice cream desserts. The book has many classics like chocolate souffles, flourless chocolate torte, and chocolate fudge sauce plus some new ideas such as butter breakfast scones with chocolate chunks and chocolate dipped lemon cookies.

The slimmest volume of the three books is Viva Chocolate! but it is the most diverse and includes 50 savory as well as sweet recipes. Smokin' Hot Chili and Turkey Mole both caught my eye as did a recipe for champurrado, a Mexican chocolate drink with masa I've been wanting to try for ages. During citrus season, the Chocolate Tangerine Pound Cake with or without the Tangerine Whipped Cream is a great pick as well.

While each of these books are smaller format "gift" types, they are also solid choices for the chocoholic looking for easy recipes to whip up at home.

Double Chocolate-Hazelnut Biscotti

Makes 48 cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated white sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup Ghirardelli Sweet Ground Chocolate and Cocoa
4 ounces Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate baking bar, finely chopped
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup hazelnuts, coarsely chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease two cookie sheets.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, baking soda, ground chocolate and semisweet chocolate.

In a separate bowl, combine the eggs and vanilla, and stir until well-blended. Pour the egg mixture into the dry ingredients. Beat with an electric mixer on medium speed until a dough forms (it should adhere to the beaters), 2 to 3 minutes. Fold in the nuts.

Divide the dough into 4 equal parts. On the prepared cookie sheets, using lightly floured hands, shape each portion into 1 1/4-inch-by-10-inch logs. Place the logs at least 4 inches apart.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the logs are firm to the touch. Let cool on the cookie sheets for 15 minutes or until cool enough to handle. Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees.

Transfer 1 log to a cutting board and with a serrated knife, cut into twelve 1-inch-wide cookies. Repeat with the remaining 3 logs. Remove 1 oven rack and place the 48 cookies directly on it. Return the rack to the uppermost position in the oven and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until crisp. To test for doneness, remove one cookie, let it cool, then check for crispness.

Transfer the cookies from the oven rack to a wire cooling rack and let cool completely. Store at room temperature in a tightly covered container.

Reprinted with permission from The Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook Copyright © 2007 by the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company published in 2007 by Ten Speed Press.

Spring at the Farmers Market: Fava Beans

2008-04-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

The return of fava beans, the dinosaur-looking, rather ugly shelling bean, to the market is a sure sign of spring. Fava bean season is ridiculously short, and during fava bean season you will find me in front of the television doing the tedious work to clean the beans as often as I can. Unlike some who find the work to prepare them to not be worth it, I personally find the nutty, sweet, unique flavor of a fresh fava bean to be worth every moment of work.

Favas come in a rather large pod from which they must be released. Once pulled from the outer pod, each bean has an inner pod that is usually peeled off as well (some recipes call for some of the shells to stay on for the bitterness that they impart). Most people remove the inner pod with a quick blanch -- 30 to 60 seconds in boiling water and then dropped into ice water -- however I find it nearly as easy to peel the pods raw with my hand or a small knife. I started this method after reading the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, in which Judy Rodgers tells us that the quick blanch changes the texture of the fava bean.

While I am not sure of the exact yield of the fava bean, casual observation finds the yield to be about 1/2 cup of edible beans per pound.

Fava beans do really well when little is done to adulterate the flavor. "The less you do tho them, the more beautiful they are," says chef Jody Adams. "I feel they are one of those foods that should be treated with almost ritualistic simplicity." Favas can be eaten raw in a salad, sauteed, added to a risotto, pureed, or put into soup among other things. The photo you see above is of a side dish I made this weekend -- I quickly sauteed the peeled favas in olive oil (only 2-3 minutes), added salt, tossed with mint, and then added pecorino romano once the dish had cooled a bit. It was addictively good, and a great addition to an already full table of spring treats.

Favas will soon be widely available at the markets -- I bought my first this weekend from the Star Route Farms booth at the Marin Civic Center market.

If you've never had fava beans, please heed this warning (taken from Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini): "Fava beans should be avoided by anyone taking antidepressents of the MAO-inhibitor type. In addition, the beans can cause sever anemia in a small number of people of Mediterranean origin (and some Africans, Arabs and Asians) who suffer from glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, an inherited imbalance. One hopes they know who they are before they sit down to your table."

Need more ideas for fava beans?
The Food Section has grilled fava beans.
Lucullian delights has raw fava beans with pecorino.
Exploring the Silver Spoon tells us about fresh fava bean puree.

Corn Art: The Great Tortilla Conspiracy

2008-03-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

After successful runs last year at the DeYoung Museum and Galleria de la Raza, The Great Tortilla Conspiracy returns for another fantastic show at SomArts Cultural Center. Self-described as "the world's most dangerous tortilla art collective," the father and son team of Rene and Rio Yañez explores a wide swath of themes in their unique medium. Along the way, they recruit other artists as well as creatively minded gallery visitors to join the fun. Immigration and genetic modification, apparitions of religious icons and pop-culture celebrities, free trade and lucha libre -- it's all game in tortilla art.

Artist: Jos Sances

Artist: Rene Yañez

Artist: Anonymous pork lover

The exhibit opens with a reception on ~~Wednesday~~Saturday, April 5th, 6:00 to 9:30 pm. Throughout the month, SomArts will host a series of interactive tortilla events, including a tortilla fashion show and a panel discussion on the globalization of tortillas and corn. Those who don't want to think about the rising price of Mexico's staple can skip straight to the hands-on art workshop, where you'll create a masterpiece of your very own to contribute to the growing body of tortilla art.

Artist: Nicole Schach. Oh Blessed Virgin Mary, grant me patience for the 14 Mission, the 30 Stockton, the 38 Geary....

Artist: Rene Yañez

THE GREAT TORTILLA CONSPIRACY
April 3rd to 23rd, 2008
SomArts Cultural Center
934 Brannan Strreet
San Francisco, CA, 94103
(415) 863-1414
Google Map

Event Schedule
April 5, 6 – 9:30 pm - Opening Reception
April 11, 5 pm – Tortilla Drawing Rally
April 12, 6 pm – Artist Panel Validating Tortilla Art
April 18, 7 pm – Tortilla Fashion Show
April 19, 5 pm – Special Panel on the globalization of Tortillas
and Transgenic Corn

The divine Morrissey graces a tortilla.

Cold Comfort Charm: Fondue

2008-03-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

The weather is still dropping cold in San Francisco, so I see no reason not to dip into a new fondue book. Written by fellow Cowgirl, Lenny Rice, and her friend Brigid Callinan, Fondue is witty, cute, and perfectly delicious. Dropping allusions to Laverne and Shirley and Hawaii 5-0, this cookbook takes you through fifty fondue recipes -- sweet and savory -- as well as fondue accompaniments, like mango marshmallows, Irish soda bread, and spiced doughnut holes.

While I didn't make it yet, my favorite recipe by far has to be the one that came out of Lenny's football-watching childhood in Oklahoma. It's called "Whiskey Tango Game Day" and the recipe includes ground beef or pork and Velveeta. (Yes, Velveeta -- stop your pearl clutching.) Lenny writes, "And the name? If you're familiar with military radio alphabet, you'll probably know how we came up with it!" While drink recommendations for other recipes guide you to specific wines and beers, this recipe suggest you pair your WT Game Day fondue with Dr. Pepper, Bud Light, and RC Cola. Awesome.

The other night Big Cheese and I melted up a big pot of California Country Roads, which throws together the tangy-stinky combination of Cowgirl's own Red Hawk and Bellwether Farms Carmody. The recipe notes suggest using walnut bread, Fig Newtons, Graham crackers, and apples as dippers and pairing with a blanc de noirs. The Fig Newtons were definitely an interesting idea and the Fig Newton lovers in the group became addicted to the combo after the first bite.

With all these recipes at the ready, and a whole lotta cheese out there just begging to be turned into bubbly, velvet masses of goo, I hope these cold nights continue for quite awhile.

California Country Roads

Makes 2 cups

1 (12-ounce) round Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk, rind discarded and cubed
8 ounces Bellwether Farms Carmody, grated
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup Napa or Sonoma sauvignon blanc
2 tablespoons muscat or other sweet dessert wine

Toss the cheeses with the flour in a bowl and set aside. In a fondue pot, bring the sauvignon blanc to a boil over medium-high heat. Decrease the heat to low and add the cheese mixture, 1/2 cup at a time, stirring until melted after each addition. Add the muscat and stir until smooth. Serve immediately.

Serve with: toasted walnut or other rustic bread cubes, pear chunks, apple chunks, fresh figs, quartered, fig bars, Graham crackers.

Beverage Suggestions: pinot noir, blanc de noirs (sparkling wine), fino sherry

Depression (Era) Food

2008-03-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know. The word of the hour is recession but, frankly, I don't know the difference. Nor do I much care, since I've never had much money to lose anyway.

I do, however, smell a trend.

On Tuesday, my cousin Stephanie sent me an odd little collection of cookbooks from the 1930's-- all three of them product-related (Heinz 57, Royal Baking Powder, and Crisco). They made me giddy. And then, out of nowhere, my friend Lyle hands me a book called Cheerio! -- a cocktail book from 1930. Published in New York in total contempt for the Volstead Act. If ever there was a time one needed a drink, it was the 1930's. Unless it was the 1940's, of course.

On Wednesday, Amy Sherman commented that online traffic to low-cost ingredient recipes has nearly doubled in the past three months.

And yesterday? While soaking in a bathtub full of gin before work, I noticed, as I flipped through the pages of Saveur magazine, that this month's issue is featuring items like Mock Apple Pie, Rabbit Stew, and pasta, pasta, pasta.

In case, you didn't know, that's poor people food.

Is the American mindset taking a turn towards the cheap? I think this will be rather fascinating to watch. History repeating itself often is. If one doesn't mind reruns, of course.

In the meanwhile, I think I'll just pour myself a Cholera Cocktail, put a little Al Bowlly on the Gramophone, and wait for all this anxiety explode into a delicious panic.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Ahwahnee Dining Room

2008-03-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Ahwahnee is a special place for me. My husband proposed to me while cross-country skiing in the Yosemite Valley meadow and we ate at the Ahwahnee that night. A year or so later we then got married at the Ahwahnee and had our reception in the Solarium behind the Great Lounge. I love the architecture, Native American art and tapestries, and, of course, those amazing views of Yosemite Valley from every window. I also love eating in their dining room.

The Ahwahnee was built in 1927, and since that time has offered visitors a fine dining (and hotel) experience in this treasure of a National park. The hotel and dining room itself are architecturally magnificent, with high wood-beamed ceilings, stone pillars, enormous windows looking out onto the valley and the enormous granite cliffs above it, and candles hung from immense candelabras. A large Steinway piano sits along one side and the restaurant offers music during dinner and special events. On our last visit, the piano player was kind enough to include renditions of Puff the Magic Dragon and the theme to Harry Potter, which delighted my daughters, along with some nice Cole Porter and Duke Ellington pieces.

In addition to the views, architecture and ambiance, one of the things I appreciate about the Ahwahnee dining room is that they make an effort to offer organic and locally-grown ingredients. When I was there last week, the dinner menu had a paragraph at the bottom that said "We are proud to present our seasonal dinner menu featuring both organic and sustainably harvested products. We source our meats and produce as local as possible and serve seafood listed on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch List as 'Best Choices' or 'Good Alternatives.' Delaware North Companies Parks and Resorts is strongly committed to working in harmony with our environment to better service our guests." Last week, the menu included local chicken, trout from nearby streams, rabbit from the neighboring community of Turlock, and grass-fed beef. They also include some sample menus online.

I have eaten at the Ahwahnee probably just under 10 times. I've had breakfast, lunch and dinner there and have always enjoyed my meal. My family and I were in Yosemite last week and spent an evening dining at the Ahwahnee followed by board games in the Great Lounge before we shuffled back to our accommodations at the Yosemite Lodge. We got to the dining room right when it opened for dinner. They sat us at a beautiful table near the back and next to a large window. Technically, long pants and jackets are required for men, but we saw plenty of people being ushered in wearing jeans and t-shirts. In some online reviews I read, a few people were irritated that the dining staff sat people who weren't dressed according to the rules, but this has never bothered me. The hotel is in a National park and I like that they don't get too caught up in the ceremony of how one is supposed to dress for dinner. Also, I've seen men seated at many other nice restaurants without jackets, so I can't get irritated about this happening in Yosemite.

During our dining experience last week, my husband and I decided that after a day of skiing at Badger Pass, we were too tired to split a bottle of wine, so we each ordered a glass from the wine menu. I then chose to start my dinner with a baby iceberg lettuce wedge that had Chiogga beets, shaved onion, and Point Reyes blue cheese dressing. The salad was crisp, the dressing creamy and sharp without being overt, and the beets were sweet and perfectly cooked. My husband ordered the Caesar salad, which looked equally delicious, although I was so focused on my own salad that I forgot to take a bite. Our daughters, who ordered from the children's menu, each received a very pretty fruit cup.

For dinner, I ordered the Braised Snake River Farms Kobe beef cheeks. I was surprised and excited when I found that they served the cheeks two ways on the plate. One piece was cooked to the point of falling apart, in some sort of reddish sauce and served on top of an heirloom squash puree. I asked our waiter what was in the sauce, but he wasn't sure. The other beef cheek was also braised, although it held its shape and was firmer than the other one. It was served with a garlic and tomato jam, which was sweet and a perfect accompaniment to the beef, and sat atop a mound of creamed spinach. Unlike most creamed spinach, which is often gloppy, this version seemed just barely cooked within the sauce, with each leaf retaining its shape and texture. It was delicious. In between the two beef cheeks were some shaved and fried parsnips, adding a crunchy and slightly salty accent to the other flavors on the plate. Overall, this was a great entrée and I really loved it.

My husband ordered the braised Niman pork osso bucco served with a soft polenta and cauliflower, which was also delicious (although I must say I think the beef cheeks were better). For our daughters, we went with the kids breaded chicken tenders. I normally hate kids' menu chicken tenders, because they are often processed bits of chicken with a tasteless coating. The Ahwahnee's chicken tenders, however, were in a kids-menu class all their own. They were real chicken breast tenders coated in a flavorful crust similar to the kind you'd find on a nice piece of fried chicken.

For dessert, I had a chocolate flourless cake embedded in a chilled chocolate ganache and served with ice cream. Although it was delicious (and very pretty on the plate) it was incredibly rich and I could only eat a few bites.

My husband ordered the boysenberry pie, which had a nicely crisp crust and great berry flavor. All the entrées were between $25 - $46. Our total bill, which included our salads, meals and desserts, along with two glasses of wine and three glasses of juice for the kids, was $140.

On each of our visits, I've found the service to be friendly and professional. The waiters sometimes are not fully informed about the food and, on a busy night, the attention you get can be a little spotty, but this doesn't bother me as the service has never been bad and I'm there for the experience of eating in a beautiful historic hotel under half dome. The staff has also always been very friendly to my children, which I appreciate.

The Ahwahnee Dining Room offers daily breakfast, lunch and dinner, along with an elaborate Sunday Brunch. They also have a few yearly dining extravaganzas, such as the Bracebridge Dinner each December, which is a four-hour Renaissance pageant in the dining room that includes an elaborate seven-course banquet. I've always thought this would be sort of fun to attend, but the cost is a bit much. A package deal that includes a two-night stay at the Ahwahnee along with the Bracebridge Dinner is $1,634 for two people. If you stay at the Yosemite Lodge, it's $1,126. With four people in my family, we won't be going any time soon.

So if you find yourself in Yosemite, and have a little spare cash for your next meal, try the Ahwahnee dining room. It is truly an experience worth having.

For more information about the Ahwahnee, or to make reservations, just go to their web site, or call (209) 372-1489.

Burgers or Steak?

2008-03-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

We may not be in a recession yet, but you wouldn't know that from the way we're eating. According to Allrecipes, an online cooking community with over 35 million unique visitors annually, the economic downturn might just be causing Americans to cut back on food spending. Traffic to recipe pages using low-cost ingredients, such as ground beef and pasta, nearly doubled over the past three months. Searches for low cost vs. their high cost counterparts have increased significantly, 74% overall. For example, they noted ground beef had a relative increase of 24% when compared to steak.

Two recent cookbooks can help you make the most of your burger or your steak, regardless of your budget. Recipe of the Week Burgers 52 Easy Recipes for Year-Round Cooking is a fun little book with very creative recipes, for example week 6 is Curried Chicken Burgers with Chutney Mayonnaise and week 16 is Espresso Rubbed Burgers. There are Portobello Burgers, Lamb Burgers, Salmon Burgers and Turkey Burgers. While you may not actually wish to cook a burger a week, there are lots of great ideas for spicing up repertoire. You may never eat a plain old burger again.

The New Steak looks at often overlooked cuts such as skirt, flat iron, hangar and flank steak and discuses all kinds of meaty issues such as Kobe, Wagyu, organic beef and certified Black Angus. Author and blogger Cree LeFavour also pays lavish attention to the side dishes. This would no doubt please my sometimes vegetarian sister-in-law who thinks the sides are the best part of any steakhouse. Corn Griddle Cakes, Avocado Salad and Rum-Glazed Plantains are just a few of her unorthodox choices.

Recipes are divided into four chapters, American Steak, Bistro Steak, Latin Steak and Far East Steak. If you're going to invest in good steak, make the most of it with recipes like Hangar Steak with French Feta, Salsa Verde, and Mint-Zucchini Pancakes or Caribbean Spice Paste-Rubbed Top Sirloin with Lime-Cilantro Crema and Red Beans and Rice. Recipes are incredibly detailed, giving instructions for both pan frying and grilling.

Cauliflower Mash

1 head cauliflower, about 2 pounds
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon kosher salt

Chop off the stem of the cauliflower and break up the remaining florets. Put the cauliflower in a steam basket over water in a pot with a lid. Make sure you have water up to the basket. Bring it to a boil, and cook for 10 to 12 minutes , or until the cauliflower is tender. Drain and coarsely mash the florets with a potato masher before transferring the cooked cauliflower to a food processor. Add the butter and salt and blend until smooth, 1 to 2 minutes. Scrap the mash into a bowl and it's ready to serve.

Reprinted from The New Steak Copyright © 20088 by Cree LeFavour, published by Tenspeed Press.

Curried Crab Cake Burgers
makes 4 burgers

12 ounces crabmeat, very coarsely shredded
1/2 cup panko
1/4 cup mayonnaise or whole milk yogurt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 lime, quartered

Place the crabmeat, panko, mayonnaise, cilantro, chive and curry powder in a medium sized bowl and using your hand, mix very gently to combine. Form into 4 patties, cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour and up to 4 hours.

Place the flour and salt on a large plate. Dredge each patty in the flour mixture. Place a large skillet over medium-high heat and when it is hot, add the oil. Add the patties and cook until lightly browned, about 4 minutes on each side. Serve immediately with the lime wedges.

Reprinted from Recipe of the Week Burgers, Copyright © 2008 by Sally Sampson, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Starbucks acquires The Clover: Good news or bad news for the independents?

2008-03-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

In coffee circles, a lot of noise has been made recently about the Clover Brewing System -- a coffee machine which reportedly comes close to brewing the perfect cup of coffee. The machine costs $11,000 and achieves cup-by-cup perfection via computer chips, Internet connection, and programming capabilities for every part of the brew process including temperature, water amount, and brewing time.

In an article for Slate, Paul Adams tests out the Clover, and considers its effect on the coffee industry:

"The immediate consequence of the Clover and its precision isn't necessarily better coffee, but more attention to coffee. By creating this rigorous laboratorylike brewing environment, it encourages cafes to explore the nuances of different beans, where and how they're grown and dried and sorted and roasted."

The Clover Coffee Maker

Over the past two years, Clover has been much more of an anomaly than the norm. Approximately 200 of the individually-produced machines are scattered around the country, and they are found in small, independent coffee bars.

Until now.

Last week, Starbucks held its annual shareholder meeting. As a reaction to poor earnings and share price drops, CEO Howard Schultz announced a five-point plan to help revive the company. Part of the plan involves the acquisition of the Coffee Equipment Company, the company that makes the Clover Brewing System. Starbucks will have exclusive rights to the Clover and is planning to introduce the machine to 30 percent of its stores in 2008.

"I think it's very interesting," said James Freeman, owner of Blue Bottle Coffee. Freeman thinks that Starbucks is generally a good company that treats its workers well, and has a place in the coffee world. They've been "good for the specialty coffee industry" and are a good training ground for customers. Customers often start learning about coffee at Starbucks and then move on to smaller coffee houses to further explore the nuances of a great cup of coffee.

Freeman doesn't use a Clover at any of his coffee locations -- he's more a fan of a drip bar: a simple filter system in which the perfect temperature water is poured over coffee grounds into a waiting cup. "Clover is about dialing in the parameters. A drip bar is more about craft."

That said, Freeman believes that the Starbucks acquisition of Clover may be a good thing. Using the Clover, Starbucks is going to "educate millions of people and those people may end up going elsewhere."

And what about the fact that this acquisition will be excluding non-Starbucks shops from owning a Clover? Something new will come along, believes Freeman. And a lot of little cafes may start looking at the drip bar as an alternative.

So is the Starbucks acquisition of the Clover Brewing System a good thing for small independent coffee bars? Time will tell, but for the moment I'm going to assume that a rising tide of quality will float all boats.

Locally, you can try coffee brewed from a Clover at Ritual Coffee Roasters and at Coffee Bar.

To read more in the press:

NYT: At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee
Seattle PI: Starbucks will 'fight to the death,' Schultz says
Slate: Could a coffee maker be worth $11,000?
Chow: You can't afford this coffee maker

BO-DE-GA: Food Choices at the Corner Store

2008-03-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Bodega: The Bronx

Laughs are few and far between for anyone who works in that tough corner of the food world where food security, public health, and urban development issues intersect. Fortunately, the dynamic duo of Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam have been making short, sharp, and extremely funny documentaries about shopping and eating in urban neighborhoods, including this short on bodegas, those infamous corner stores.

Dallas Penn blogs about music, sports, politics and whatever else strikes his fancy (tags include "Black Bullshit" and "Wig Owners" and "Social Upheaval"). His partner in comedy, Rafi Kam, reviews albums and writes features about topics like Baduizm, a contagious disease that strikes the nerve endings of rap artists.

Together, they tackle the finer points of the Bodega Food Pyramid. This short film is a refreshing break from the boring, depressing, and thoroughly condescending material that comes out of many public health agencies. It somehow manages to be affectionately searing.

For anyone out there who has wondered why "certain communities" don't buy organic fruit or eat more salads, this will be an educational feature. For those who grew up in the Bronx or East St. Louis or South Central L.A., this documentary will hit close--perhaps too close--to home and heart.

Here in Bayview Hunters Point, nonprofit organizations and city agencies have been trying to spread good food with the Good Neighbor project. UK-based Tesco is eyeing a space for one of their newly polished Fresh&Easy markets, grocery stores with smaller footprints that are positioned to enter under-served neighborhoods. There's been some back and forth, though, as the company has been hesitating to agree to community standards that might cut into their profits. Neighbors are asking them to not sell hard liquor, but Tesco is loathe to give up the very high margins of the alcohol aisle.

At a policy symposium last year, I listened as their frontman pointed out how grateful we should all be that they're even considering opening a full-service grocery store and creating jobs in a poverty-ridden food dessert. Ask some of the locals, though, how happy they are to have their requests ignored.

And watch Penn and Kam's "Bodega" to understand, with a smile, what is at stake.

Bodega: The Tenderloin

On a complete tangent, the title of the film reminds me of a Vietnamese restaurant on Larkin Street in San Francisco (another neighborhood that also happens to be facing the community upheavals accompanying many urban redevelopment projects). Yes, service is spotty. And yes, the food is not good across the board. But it's one of those neighborhood places that has lingered through change and remained popular through several face-lifts and menu tweaks.

Bodega Bistro used to actually serve all three: bo (beef), de (goat) and ga (chicken). Hand-penned signs taped to the wall once advertised their special goat stew, but those are long gone. The name of the restaurant stuck, though, and its menu offers the usual suspects. One dish worth highlighting, though, is bun cha, a specialty of Hanoi.

For first-timers, it might be a bit confusing when the order arrives. A plate of greens and herbs piled high. Some plain rice noodles. Some meat submerged in clear broth. And an empty bowl. None of it looks particular appetizing on its own, but it's culinary magic when the layers of flavors and textures meld together.

Like many Vietnamese meals, it's all up to the diner. Combine small amounts of each ingredient in your own bowl, then drizzle a spoonful of sauce over all. If you've ordered any type of bun, the refreshing cold noodle salads that's a popular lunch item in Vietnam, then you'll have an idea of what bun cha can be. It's more formal, however, and when done well, truly memorable. The cut and quality of the meat and the freshness of the herbs are what determine the best versions. I wish the food were more consistent here, but two out of three times, it hits the spot.

Now, if only Bodega would bring back its second-syllable goat dishes.

Bodega Bistro
607 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94199
(415) 921-1218
Google Map

Easter Bread

2008-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend is Easter, so in addition to coloring eggs and having our annual Easter egg hunt, I wanted to make a nice loaf of Easter bread. I had a problem, however. I couldn't figure out which type of holiday bread to make. Many cultures have breads that are traditionally served during Lent and the Easter holidays. One of the most famous is the Greek Easter Bread (called tsouréki), which is sometimes made with spices -- such as allspice, cinnamon or cloves -- or vanilla and/or citrus zest. Most recipes use mastícha, which is a Greek spice that can be found in specialty or gourmet stores. Hot cross buns are another type of traditional Easter bread and often have currents, raisins or nuts, as well as spices such as cinnamon. They are topped with a cross of icing and are a traditional English holiday bun.

My mother made a Greek-style Easter bread when I was a kid, and I always thought it was the perfect accompaniment to hard boiled eggs, jelly beans, and chocolate bunnies. I made this type of bread once or twice, but since having children, have relied on serving the lovely hot cross buns made at La Farine each Easter morning. Now that my daughters are a little older, however, I wanted to revive my mother's tradition of making home-made Easter bread.

After a childhood eating traditional Greek Easter bread during Lent, followed by an adulthood eating hot cross buns, I had a case of culinary confusion once I decided to bake something myself. Luckily, my mom is visiting right now, so we put our heads together and came up with our own creation yesterday. It is reminiscent of the traditional Greek Easter bread in that it uses eggs and is airy and light. For sweetness, I added a sugar glaze similar to that found on hot cross buns. Because I was creating my own recipe, I decided to make just a simple yeasted egg dough, but am open to adding lemon zest and spices in the future. We cut the dough into three pieces and then braided it in a circle and decorated it with red Easter eggs, which is a tradition in Greece. The result was a slightly sweet light bread with a lemony glaze that goes perfect with coffee and eggs. I can't wait to dig in Sunday morning.

Easter Bread
Serves 6 - 10

Ingredients
1 cup tepid water
2 Tbsp granulated sugar
2 packages fast-acting yeast
1 cup warm whole milk
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
3 raw eggs
7 cups unbleached white flour
1 tsp salt
8 hard-boiled eggs dyed
2 cups powdered sugar
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp whole milk

Preparation
1. In a large mixing bowl, combine the water, sugar and yeast. Let stand for at least five minutes or until it foams (see picture). Note: If you are using your stand-alone mixer to make the bread, use the mixer bowl.

2. Heat the milk in a pot on low until it's warm.
3. Mix the milk, eggs, oil and salt in a medium bowl.
4. Add the egg mixture to the yeast mixture and stir.
5. Stir in four cups of flour. If using a mixer, such as a KitchenAid, use the dough hook.
6. Slowly mix in about two more cups of the remaining flour, or until the dough no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl. Note: the dough should still look glossy.
7. Lay the dough out on a wooden cutting board or counter top dusted with flour.
8. Knead the dough, adding in the last cup of flour if the dough gets too sticky, until it is pliable.
9. Put dough in an oiled bowl and cover with a piece of oiled plastic wrap. Let it rise for an hour or two, or until it doubles in size.
10. Punch dough down and divide it into three equal pieces, stretching and lengthening each piece so they are about two-feet long.
11. Braid the pieces together in a circle, joining the ends.
12. Nestle five of the dyed eggs into the dough (yes -- you bake the bread with the dyed hard-boiled eggs in it.)

13. Cover with the oiled plastic wrap for 30 – 60 minutes, or until it rises further.
14. Bake the bread at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes or until it is golden brown and cooked throughout. Note: the bread only took 20 minutes in my convection oven.

15. Remove bread from the oven and place it on a serving dish.
16. In a medium bowl, mix one cup of the powdered sugar with 1 Tbsp of the lemon juice and 1 Tbsp of milk. It should be the texture of soupy toothpaste.
17. Spread the glaze onto the bread with a pastry brush.
18. Let the bread cool for a few minutes with the glaze and then make another batch of the glaze and recoat the bread.

The Pavlova

2008-03-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

Oh, it's Spring. What joy.

In honor of this turning of the seasons, I bring you a light little piece of fluff-- the Pavlova.

When I was cooking at a little restaurant in the Mission called the Moa Room, my favorite Kiwi and boss, Chef Jan Gardner often let me run off and do my own thing with our desserts, which was rather brave of her. But not so when she felt the call to make her Pavlova-- the most famous dessert to ever come out of New Zealand. I would stand back to watch her work, asking her to say things like "milk" and "bottle" so that I might be better able to imitate her accent as well as her dessert-making technique. She was a very patient woman who only occasionally would ask a co-worker if he or she wouldn't mind punching me in the neck.

This pleasant breath of fresh air is rarely seen on San Francisco dessert menus, which I think is a pity. It is as light and airy as the dancing of its namesake, the most famous of all ballerinas, Anna Pavlova.

There is some argument as to the origin of this dessert. Australians claim it was birthed by Herbert Sachse of the Hotel Esplanade, Perth, Australia, citing in 1935 that the dish was "as light as Pavlova." She stayed at the hotel while on tour in 1929. It just took him six years to come up with something clever to say about it.

New Zealand has an earlier, similar claim coming out of Wellington in 1926, when a hotel chef created a dish inspired by the shape of the touring dancer's white tutu with green cabbage roses and frothy netting. I'm no social archaeologist, but I'll just bet the farm he was gay.

Well, I love Australians, but I am siding with my friends from New Zealand on this one.

Pavlova

Jan Gardner shied away from kiwifruit, most likely because they are not echt New Zealand. To her, a kiwi is the smaller, non-extinct cousin of the moa. The Chinese Gooseberry arrived in the land of the dead moa from, unsurprisingly, China in 1904. The name "kiwifruit" was originally a marketing ploy. One that has worked all too well. Though this meringue happily supports a wide variety of fruit, I have used the kiwi because the original dish, as far as I can tell, contained them. Remember those green cabbage roses.

This is not Jan's recipe. I never got it. I could just punch myself in the neck for not asking for
it. The recipe listed below is a culling of several.

For a great run down on how to approach a meringue, read Shuna's take on the Pavlova.

Ingredients:

For the Pavlova:

4 large egg whites, room temperature
1 cup of superfine sugar (you can make this out of table sugar by whizzing it in your Cuisinart.)
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon corn starch
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract. Tradition does not call for this, I just like it in my meringue.

For the Topping:

3/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup buttermilk. Again, this is not traditional. I just prefer a bit of tang to compliment the
über-sweetness of the meringue.
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Fresh fruit. Tart is good. Things like kiwifruit, strawberries, raspberries, beri beri. I don't care.
Passion fruit is really amazing with it, too.

Procedure:

1. Pre-heat oven to 300 F.

2. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Create and cut out a separate circle of parchment paper about 7 inches in diameter. Cut out a matching circle of cardboard. Attach the parchment circle to cardboard with a smear of corn syrup or whatever you've got handy to adhere. I'll bet even Elmer's glue would work, though I would not recommend it. (Note: this cut out circle business isn't absolutely necessary, but I find it helps me get a cleaner edge on the meringue.)

3. In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk egg whites at slow speed (Thanks for the tip, Shuna), gradually increasing the speed as the volume of the whites increase. When the whites begin to hold a soft peak, add the sugar a little at a time to dissolve. Increase the speed and whip until the mixture is silken and holds stiff peaks.

4. Having made a slurry of your vinegar and cornstarch, stir to discourage any lumps. Sprinkle the slurry over the meringue and fold in.

5. Gently heap meringue onto your parchment disk, making certain to leave a shallow bowl in the center for eventual cream-and fruit-filling. Smooth the edges of the meringue for a clean look or make any sort of design you wish. Please email me if you've come up with anything interesting or vaguely obscene.

6. Place your meringue-topped cardboard parchment onto the lined baking sheet and place in oven. Bake for 15 minutes, turn off the heat and walk away. Baking should take about one hour, but it is best to peek in every once in a while to see how your creation is doing. The Pavlova should not brown, but take on a slight cream color. Leaving it in the oven to dry out a bit is a good thing.

The now-baked Pavlova will keep for up to a week when stored in non-humid conditions in an air-tight container.

7. For the topping, whip cream and buttermilk until soft peaks form. Gradually add sugar and vanilla, then whip a little more. You make chose to remove half the cream at this stage for spreading, whipping up the remainder for piping those tutu-like frills around the edge that I somehow failed to achieve.

8. Spread the whipped cream over the meringue. Top with the fruit of your choice, and serve immediately in the fifth position, thereby impressing your friends and family with your limberness of both lower body and culinary expertise.

Eat immediately.

Serves 6

A New Kind of Barfly

2008-03-19T22:48:00.001-07:00

Photo by Jen Maiser

Casual drinkers beware, cocktail nerds have a new way of ordering drinks in San Francisco. No longer satisfied with set menus or even with drink specials du soir, the true cocktailian now knows how to order custom-made drinks, and it's definitely the In thing to do.

Don't believe me? Next time you go to a bar, take a listen. There will probably be at least one or two patrons who, after sampling a few drinks on the bar menu, will leave their next drink up to the bartender. They'll probably give clues like, "I'd like something with Bluecoat gin and ginger" or "I'm looking for something with a bitter edge, but not Campari-bitter," and then sit back to wait for their custom drink.

It's akin to a diner swanning into a restaurant, disdaining the proffered menu, and instead waving a hand at the waiter, announcing, "Tell the chef to surprise me!" In that context, it sounds imperious, arrogant, and more than a bit conceited to assume the chef has nothing better to do than to whip up some special, off-menu delicacy. However, just like a sommelier ferreting out the best wines to pair with dishes, I've noticed that some bartenders in the Bay Area seize upon this request from their drinkers as a challenge.

Not only that, but when the drinker can talk at length about their specific preferences -- often displaying an informed knowledge of liquors, liqueurs, and mixology in general -- the bartender realizes, "Hey, this isn't just another cosmojitini swiller, who doesn't care what I make as long as it was pimped on Lipstick Mafia and goes down easy." The bartender seems to like the fact that the drinker is not just drinking, but thinking. That, in recognition of the bartender's prowess, the drinker is putting as much care into their ordering as the bartender puts into his or her shaking and straining.

Now, I'm not saying that you should charge into a bar, heedless of the crowds that might be there, and demand your made-to-order drink. I'm saying, take some time to learn the menu, get a rapport going with the bartender, and if he or she is not overwhelmed with orders and customers, make your move. But you can't just say, "Surprise me!" and expect magic to swirl into your glass. No, you have to do your part as well. Explain the things you like and don't like. Show some respect for the menu and the bar.

Toasts, Tastes & Tapas

2008-03-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

There are so many great food events going on in the next few weeks, it's hard to choose. Here are three that particularly caught my eye and whet my appetite.

Next Thursday March 27th, 2008 is the Wine Enthusiast Toast of the Town. Attending will be 70 domestic and international wine producers including Trinchero, Mumm Napa, Champagne Piper-Heidsiek, Rodney Strong Vineyards and J. Lohr Vineyards. A complete list of invited wine vendors is available here. The event will be held at the War Memorial Opera House.

I spoke to one of the organizers and got a sneak peek at just a few of the dishes that participating restaurants will be serving.

Bar Tartine
Blood Orange-cured Sardines with Asparagus & Soft-boiled Egg Vinaigrette

Bistro Jeanty
Crème de Tomate en Croûte - Tomato Soup in Puff Pastry

Café Gibraltar
• Moroccan Lamb & Beef Tagine – Savory Mélange of Beef and Lamb Shoulder, with Seasonal Vegetables, Chickpeas and Fingerling Potatoes in a Savory Date-mild Chile-Harissa Glaze

• Algerian Vegetable Couscous – Seasonal Vegetables, Chickpeas and Currants in a Roasted Sweet Pepper-Saffron broth, Served Atop House-Rolled Couscous

Campton Place
Spot Prawn Sashimi on Watermelon Carpaccio Chutnied Mango Chili Fizz with Apple & Wild Rocket Gazpacho Air

Étoile at Domaine Chandon
Braised Veal Cheek, Morel Mushrooms, English Pea Purée and Preserved Meyer Lemon

Go Fish Restaurant
Scallop and Shrimp Ceviche

PlumpJack Cafe
Ramp Panna Cotta with Langoustine and Pickled Cloud

Poleng Lounge
Walu Kinilaw – Hawaiian Butterfish, Toybox Tomatoes, Shallots, Cilantro, Coconut Milk, hand-harvested Philippine Sea Salt

Postrio
Tuna en Ponzu Gelée with Wasabi Tobiko, Lemon and Shiso

Pres a Vi
Hamachi Two Ways –
• Teradito with Anju Pepper Aioli, Siracha, Blood Orange Oil and Micro Cilantro
• Poke with Inamona, Soy, Lemon Zest and Wasabi Tobiko

Rivoli Restaurant
Rivoli Smoked Beef on a Cheddar Biscuit with Horseradish Cream and Pickled Onion Relish

The Grand Tasting is from 7-10 pm and tickets are $95. A silent auction at the event will benefit America's Second Harvest The Nation's Food Bank.

Share our Strength's Taste of the Nation is also a benefit for America's Second Harvest with a focus on ending childhood hunger. It will be held April 6th, 2008 at Acme Chophouse.

From 6:30-7:30pm you'll enjoy appetizers from top local restaurants before a sit-down dinner prepared by the Next Iron Chef contenders and wine pairings from top sommeliers and live and silent auctions. The chefs for the dinner will be:

Michael Symon of Cleveland's Lola and Lolita

Traci Des Jardins of Acme Chophouse, Jardiniere and Mijita

Chris Cosentino of Incanto

Gavin Kaysen of NYC's Café Boulud

Elizabeth Falkner of Citizen Cake and Orson (dessert)

Tickets are $250 and 100% of your ticket purchase goes directly to Share Our Strength.

If you are still waiting for your economic stimulus check, here's a bargain opportunity to enjoy a taste of Spain.

Tonight, March 19th, 2008, at 6 pm Gerald Hirigoyen of Bocadillos and Piperade will create Basque-inspired small plates at Macy's Union Square as part of A Mosaic of Spain, Macy's Annual Flower Show. Jon Bonne, wine editor at the SF Chronicle and Andy Booth, owner of the Spanish Table will be on hand to discuss wine pairings.

In addition to food and wine samples, you'll receive a 60-day subscrition to Zagat.com and VIP card from City Dish.

Tickets are $10 and benefit the Espanola de California.

Engaging Food: Do you remember?

2008-03-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

When Catherine of Food Musings announced her engagement to Mr. Food Musings last week, she told us all what she ate for lunch right after the engagement. "... I said yes. Then we went and ate lunch. He had a chicken taco and a veggie taco Nick's way and I had a taco salad with grilled fish. One day I might want to know that, so I'm writing it down."

Which got me to thinking: What about my other food blog friends? Having a predilection toward eating great food, did their engagements involve any special foods or meals?

The answers were wide ranging. Some didn't remember what they ate. One anonymous blogger who we all know and love said "This is embarrassing but we can't remember what we ate after getting engaged. My strong guess is pizza but it is foggy."

In addition to being a great food and wine blogger, a wine instructor, and a writer, Derrick Schneider at An Obsession with Food is also a puzzle designer. So it's no surprise that The French Laundry and puzzles figure into his engagement story.

I proposed to Melissa at The French Laundry, using a puzzle box from Japan to hold the ring. Of course, the way I tell it is that I made the reservations and thought, "Huh. That would be a good place to propose." And, of course, I had two months to plan.

She didn't know I was proposing, though she always assumed she would. Just as we were heading out the door on March 2, I said, "Oh, I almost forgot. I have a late Valentine's Day gift." I ran back and grabbed the box, which, being a wrapped puzzle box was not obviously ring-sized. She asked if she could open it; I suggested we wait until we were at dinner. We arrived in Yountville, and she asked if she could open it; I suggested that we wait until we were seated.

Melissa unwrapped the box and I said, "Well, it's probably not what you think." The puzzle box was a heart in two pieces, and Melissa turned it over and over and admired its beauty. At which point, I said, "Maybe you should try to open it." The solution was to put the two halves of the heart together (aw). So she did that, started to slide the top panel, and I said, "So the next question is going to be..." at which point she got it open and shouted out, "Oh my God! Yes!" The waiter brought us champagne, and we both had the full tasting menu, though Melissa says she doesn't remember it all that well.

This story from Bonnie Powell at The Ethicurean made me laugh out loud.

I do remember quite well. I proposed to Bart in a roundabout way on our fifth anniversary, which we celebrated by having dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, staying nearby. When he made sure I was asking him to marry me, I took a deep breath and confirmed that I was. I was so relieved when he said yes that I ordered a dozen raw oysters to celebrate and ate them all -- he doesn't even like them. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I then ordered and ate another dozen. And no I was not sick. I think we also had a bottle of champagne.

I heard some answers from our own Bay Area Bites authors. The first is from Kim Laidlaw.

He took me out on a boat then to dinner at Piperade then a stroll on the pier next to the Ferry Building, where he popped the question. We stayed across the street at the Hotel Griffon, and just after we got engaged we returned to the hotel and drank my absolute favorite whisky: Glenkinchie Distiller's Edition. I think he'd also brought some Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam and probably some Bi-Rite ginger cookies too. But it's the whisky that stands out in my mind.

Fellow BAB author Stephanie Lucianovic were engaged in Boston.

I don't remember what we ate the night we got engaged. I remember walking through Beacon Hill in Boston, and I remember the actual proposal, but the food itself eludes me. I know we went for a ridiculously expensive glass of champagne at the Four Seasons, because we had it in our naive heads that if we told them we just got engaged, they would, like, comp us or something. I think we looked at the menu and decided that all the bar bites were too pricey, so we headed over to the Ritz Carlton where my roommate was a club level concierge and ate whatever free bites she had sent up from the kitchens. It's possible she snagged plates of cheese, chocolate-dipped strawberries, truffles, and maybe some caviar.

Way more memorable for us was the celebratory engagement dinner my soon-to-be-in-laws sent us to at L'Auberge Chez Francois in the rolling green hills of Great Falls, Virginia. It was our first experience with the storied and elusive (we're talking almost nine years ago) amuse-bouche.

Virginia from The Perfect Spot, and her husband Dan, chose Foreign Cinema as their perfect spot.

If only I could recall what I ate... that is the state of engagement, I guess. We went to Foreign Cinema (it was our second year of living in SF) and though I do not remember our entrees, I do recall an excellent sweetbreads appetizer they used to have. And we had what was at the time my favorite Dark Chocolate Pot de Creme dessert. I also remember how they gave us free champagne and lots of congrats and attention.

Sean Timberlake from Hedonia wraps up our stories.

Fifteen years ago (!), DPaul and I went up to Tuolumne Meadows Yosemite for a weekend. We had discussed taking the relationship to the next level, but this was the weekend we made the decision.

That we were able to go to Tuolumne at all was thanks to a friend of ours who was the chef at the lodge up there that year. He was able to bump us up to the top of the wait list, and we luckily were able to land a cabin. The lodge has only 8-tops, so you sit with complete strangers. The night of our "engagement," we were seated with some blue-bloods from Kensington, who happily gabbed our ears off. David, our chef friend, kept sending us tasters of every dish on the menu above and beyond what we ordered. I don't remember exactly what we ate, but I do remember the society lady to my right reaching across me and plucking tastes of things off our extra plates.

What about you? Do you remember what you ate when you were engaged?

Fortune Cookies and Starving Cyborgs: Sweetness on Film

2008-03-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

With SFIAAF 2008 in full swing, I've managed to munch popcorn with yeast for dinner more times than I care to admit during the past few days. And with another week of films ahead, it looks like I'm going to need to restock my supply of dental floss.

Fortunately, it's been worth it. Over the weekend, two titles that food and film lovers should add to their list were screened to sold-out crowds.

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE COOKIE

Who among us can resist opening a fortune cookie? No matter how jaded or snobby, no matter how much you may hate that dry, tasteless joke of a dessert that sits on your bill after a meal at the Golden Imperial Jade Wok Garden, I dare you to leave behind, unopened and unread, that little strip of paper and its peek into your future.

Like many things we touch in daily life, the beginnings of the humble fortune cookie are murky, but in his documentary, The Killing of a Chinese Cookie, director Derek Shimoda doggedly follows the complex maze of historic claims and counterclaims. Best of all, he collects the amazing stories of thoroughly lovable individuals. Third-generation confectioners and visual artists, judges and lawyers, historians and entrepreneurs, master chefs and hack writers--everyone has an opinion about the fortune cookie. Among the highlights are recollections of the mock trial held in 1983 at the San Francisco Court of Historical Review. Instead of settling the dispute, though, the arguments seemed to have only stirred up the controversy even more.

More recently, The New York Times covered the long-standing debate in a feature about the origins of the ubiquitous cookie. Among the many representing Northern California's interests are the descendants of Suyeichi Okamura, who in 1906 opened the Benkyodo Company, a confectionary in San Francisco Japantown where you can still buy handmade moochi, sembei and other traditional sweets.

One of the Suyeichi Okamura's grandsons shows how hot cookies were once slipped into this wooden rack to cool slightly before a fortune was hidden within its crisp folds.

I can't remember the last time I laughed so much during a documentary while learning about the secrets of the past. With great affection, Shimoda tracks the cookie's influence from Japan's sembei treats to Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden, though World War II and the rise of Chinatown restaurants, to erotic art and lucky lottery numbers. I won't reveal any more about the film or the cookie's history, since I highly recommend this film. The fun of it will be in watching the story unfold for yourself.

A manager at a Los Angeles factory showing an old tin of fortune cookies that he's resisted opening for posterity's sake.

The Killing of a Chinese Cookie
Directed by Derek Shimoda
Sunday, March 23
12:00 Noon
Camera Cinemas 12 Downtown
201 South Second Street
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 998-3300

You can still buy tickets for this weekend's screening of the film at San Jose's Camera Cinemas 12. Until then, you can read the memorable fortunes submitted by NTY readers.

I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OKAY

Many of us have been waiting to see Park Chan-Wook's latest film on the big screen. If you've survived his infamous films, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, then you'll already know that Park's work is not for everyone. But those who love his intense, over-the-top vision or who can't get enough of Korea's boundary-breaking films, his latest should not be missed.

I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay reveals a new tack in his filmmaking: romantic comedy. In Park's world, though, this means telling the story of how two psychotics in an insane asylum find love across the distance of alternative realities, group therapy and padded rooms.

Im Su-jeong plays Young-goon, a pale and skittish young woman who refuses to swallow even a single grain of rice, since cyborgs like her cannot digest food. She licks batteries to help recharge her energy, talks to vending machines and flickering lights, and mourns the loss of her daikon-nibbling grandmother. Superstar singer Rain plays a scruffy kleptomaniac, Il-sun, who invents and (in one of my favorite scenes in the film) installs a tiny machine called the Rice Megatron--with lifetime service guaranteed--inside Young-goon to help her survive the rigors of reality.

Any further attempt to explain the plot or introduce the cast of characters will fail miserably.

Viewers who nearly died from cuteness overdose during Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain or Michel Gondry's La Science des Rêves might think twice about seeing this film. You'll find a bit of relief from romantic sweetness during a few crazed killer-bot scenes, but don't expect the endless blood or deep anger of Park's earlier films.

I'm a Cyborg is the ultimate film, however, for fans of surrealism on the screen, well-intentioned massacres, hope flickering in a chaotic world, and uncertain non-endings.

Brenda's French Soul Food

2008-03-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Mark, who knows about everything before I do, has been wanting to go to Brenda's French Soul Food for months. He planned to take some people to brunch there a few Sundays ago. It was, however, closed. They don't do Sunday brunch. Who can blame them? Unless drag queens are somehow involved, the thought of Sunday brunch makes me cringe. The two of us hoped to have dinner at Brenda's last week. The only glitch in that little plan was this: Brenda's doesn't serve dinner. Rather than being miffed, I found that news heartwarming.

When I was a young and foolish California Culinary Academy student, one of my courses called for creating a restaurant business plan. My teammates and I decided that a breakfast and lunch-only venue would suit our tastes just fine, since you can really mark up egg dishes. We'd be doing what we loved-- serving up great food, but we'd have our evenings free-- enabling us to have a relatively normal social life. We could have our pancake, as it were, and eat it, too.

Brenda's, then, is a place after my own heart. It's exactly what I'd want to do if I were crazy enough to run a restaurant.

Located at 652 Polk Street between Eddy and Turk, Brenda's shares a stretch of road with two other food venues. On its right is Kentucky Fried Chicken-- a place of no culinary pretensions whatsoever. To its left and across the street is the California Culinary Academy-- a sad, musty diploma mill that churns out nothing but culinary pretension every few weeks. Hovering somewhere pleasantly in the middle, Brenda's has not disturbed that delicate balance of the block in the least. What it has done, thankfully, is bring great food to the neighborhood.

When I arrived at Brenda's on Wednesday morning, I was told I might sit wherever I liked by a tall, thin gentleman with a scruffy beard who was, it would seem, the sole server on the floor. I took a small table near the door, where I could have a clear view of the customers around me.

The restaurant is small. Two white-clothed tables for four in the center of the room, one small table in the window, and five small tables along the left wall.Counter stools populate the right wall, just below a bank of mirrors which runs the entire length of the place.

I ordered a coffee and dug into my portable Sherlock Holmes, which I placed on top of my little notebook. To my left was a man about my age with a scruffy beard, also reading, but near the end of his meal. Looking at my notebook and camera, he asked me if I was going to do a write up on the place. I cringed at my obviousness. That and the fact that every man in the place, including myself, was wearing a scruffy beard. I lied to him and took another sip of coffee.

There were two men sitting in the window. One was a handsome fifty-something Frenchman . His non-French breakfast companion was rattling on loudly about Napa wineries, San Francisco restaurants and who he knew just about everywhere else. Fortunately, he made his great show of saying goodbye to Brenda before I started eating.

I asked my server which beignets he thought were best. He suggested I try the beignet flight ($8.00) and decide for myself. I did.

From fore-to-background in the photo above: plain, Granny Smith apple with cinnamon honey butter, molten Ghiradelli chocolate, and crawfish with cayenne, scallions, and cheddar. It is the order in which I ate them. My server stated that people normally consumed the crawfish first. I am delighted that I didn't, because it was by far my favorite-- the chewy sweetness of the crawfish popping every so often through the ooze of the cheese, the heat of the cayenne, and the sharpness of the scallion. I am already planning my return to have a full meal of them.

They were all quite good, really. The apple beignets weren't overly sweet. They had a subtle saltiness to them I found appealing. I'm not an expert on these pastries, per se, and I've heard some people (Yelpers) whine that beignets in New Orleans are normally much bigger and cheaper. I would hardly call the portions here small. Or over priced. In fact, nothing at Brenda's is more than $10.00.

Wondering what to order next, I asked my server's opinion on the matter. Mentioning that I was intrigued by the Pineapple Upside Down Pancakes with Vanilla Bean Cream and Ginger Butter, he said that, while they were great, I might not want them after so much beignet. He was right, of course. When I asked about the Hangtown Fry special I noticed written in white grease pen on the mirror across the way, he smiled. That's all I needed. It doesn't take much arm-twisting to get me to order a Hangtown Fry. "Grits or potatoes?" he asked. "I'm kind of a potato guy," I said. I saw his smile fade a little. "But, I suppose I'd better have the grits, right?" His face brightened. I was grateful for my ability to read social cues. I told him I'd keep the menu, in case I wanted to order anything more.

It is obvious from the above photo where I placed the most of my gustatory enthusiasm. The grits. Buttery, lightly peppery, and just salty enough. The pat of butter I was given may have been intended for the biscuit, but mine ended up on the grits. I did not ask for instructions.

I never knew I liked grits. In fact, my two or three previous experiences with the dish had left me rather bored. In my thoughts, grits were an unseen province of salty, beehived situation comedy diner waitresses and they were meant to be kissed in some kind of submissive fashion. Well, I kissed Brenda's grits, and I'll kiss them again, happily.

While I was tucking into the fry, a man and woman dressed in chef whites wandered into Brenda's from the Culinary Academy. I thought how sad it was that they couldn't find anything worth eating over there. The man, I noticed, had one bright blue eye and one of milky hazel. I got caught looking, so I initiated a brief conversation with them about the school. I admitted my status as an alumnus and warned them to keep a wary eye out for people who do not understand the etiquette involved in walking around a busy kitchen with 10" chef knives. Their reaction to the pitying look on my face when I was told that tuition at the school had nearly tripled since my graduation eleven years ago indicated to me that our little interview should end as quickly as possible. I went back to reading The Adventure of the Copper Beeches and stuffing my face.

As I sat eating and reading, another man of my approximate age and scruffiness sat at the table beside mine. I really must shave. Unlike his predecessor, he seemed uneasy in his status as a single diner. He tapped is fingers and wagged his foot as though it had fallen asleep within the first ninety seconds of his being in a seated position. When his eyes weren't darting about the place, they were fixed upon his iPhone. I didn't know whether to laugh (on the inside) or cry. Few people seem really at ease with dining alone. It made me mildly depressed, but it did give me an idea for another blog post, which made me mildly cheerful.

The Hangtown fry itself was good, loaded as it was with salty, smoked bacon and fresh, fried oysters. But my delicate, hummingbird frame was challenged by the enormous portions of both dishes tried. Delicate, too, was the biscuit-- the flavor of fresh butter melted in my mouth as is the way with the good ones and it had a flakiness that, had the biscuit taken a human form, might be diagnosed as Brittle Bone Disease by medical students. I mean that in a good way.

I was unable to finish my meal, being as well-stuffed as one of those beignets from earlier in the meal. I took my remaining victuals home and had them for lunch. The grits were good even then, served cold.

My server returned, looked at the menu still placed on the table, and said, smiling, "Are you still planning on ordering more?" My brain said yes, but my stomach disagreed. I looked out the window at the Eastern Park Apartments, a retirement home that is neither in the East nor anywhere near a park. I thought to myself that, if I kept eating like this, I might not live to an age which might necessitate my inhabiting such a place. I sided with my stomach and asked, instead, for the check.

Now, I do not know Brenda Buenviaje, namesake of the restaurant. I chose not to introduce myself nor ask questions during my first visit. My photo-taking and journal entries made me look idiotic enough. When I took a closer look at Brenda's website, I read her profile and had a better clue as to why the food made me happy-- she is a former head chef of Sumi (the only good restaurant in the Castro, as far as I'm concerned) and of Cafe Claude (my I'm- hungry-and-tired-of-watching-other-people-shop/ I-need-a-drink place of choice). She looks like someone I might like to sit down with over a glass of wine. I only hope, should that occur, that I can stifle my desire to blurt out grits-kissing remarks.

I'll be back to Brenda's, and soon. There's a lot there that I still need to try, like the Grillades and Grits, the Egg and Bacon Tartine, and those Pineapple Upside Down Pancakes. But really, it's that crawdaddy beignet. Second only to relieving my bladder, it was the first thing I thought about this morning. Really, I swear.

Brenda's French Soul Food is located at:

652 Polk Street (at Eddy)
San Francisco, CA 94102

Telephone: (415) 345-8100

Hours of Operation:

Breakfast is served Monday through Friday from 8 am to 3 pm.
Lunch is served Monday through Friday from 11(ish) to 3 pm.
Brunch is served on Saturdays from 8 am to 3 pm.
Closed, for now, on Sundays.

Smoothie A Go Go

2008-03-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ah… smoothies. What's not to love about those frosty fruity drinks? Ever since I was a kid, I've been a lover of all smoothies. It all started with my childhood addiction to Orange Juliuses, which were all the rage (at least in my childhood Southern California bedroom community) when I was a kid. I think they started to become really popular after they were the official drink of the World's Fair in 1964. By this time, the health food craze was catching on in the United States and smoothies were the drink of choice for that burgeoning market. Plus, on a warm day, an icy beverage really hit the spot.

For those of you who haven't experienced a smoothie, it's a general term for an icy fruit drink that is blended. They almost always include some sort of fruit and then after that, the sky's the limit. You can add yogurt, juice, ice, protein powder, dairy creamer, frozen yogurt, soy milk, regular milk, or whatever you like (within reason).

In college, I sort of forgot about smoothies, preferring frozen margaritas and daiquiris instead for my frosty fruit fix. It wasn't until a few years ago, when my daughters started asking to go to Jamba Juice, that I rediscovered the smoothie. Whenever we're in the vicinity of one of these shops, my daughters beg to go. This was okay for a while, but after spending almost $20 every time we walked into one of these franchises -- and wondering how three smoothies could cost so much -- I decided to break out my blender and start making them at home.

After many rounds with the blender, I've found that there are a few keys to making a great home smoothie:

1. Use frozen fruit: Although it's tempting to use fresh fruit, especially when it's in season, frozen fruit will give your smoothie a natural frosty texture. This is usually better than the consistency you will achieve if you use ice, which has a tendency to break into inconsistent pieces, sometimes leaving larger chunks behind. Also, frozen fruit creates a creamier texture than blended ice.

2. Use Small Pieces of Ice: Some recipes simply need ice. When this is the case, try to use small pieces, or, even better, crushed ice if possible.

3. Sweeten with honey: Sometimes berries can be a little tart. If your smoothie has too much zing, just plop it back into the blender and add a tablespoon of honey to sweeten it up.

4. Add more liquid to fix a clogged blender: Sometimes when making a smoothie, the blades on the blender will fruitlessly (excuse the pun) whirl around, without actually mixing the smoothie. This happens when the smoothie doesn't have enough liquid. Just add small amounts of juice until the smoothie mixes properly.

Here are a few smoothie recipes that I've come up with. The first is for one that my daughters and I love. Plain yogurt provides the creaminess, along with an extra dose of calcium into our daily diets. In this recipe, I almost always use frozen berries. With each sip providing a burst of berry flavor as well as a load of antioxidants, the berries are the real star here.

I have also recently come to enjoy dairy-free smoothies. One of my favorites is the ultimate in simplicity. Made only with frozen mango chunks, a half a banana to add body, and orange juice to help it blend, the taste is all about the mango. What's remarkable about this smoothie is how creamy it is, even without any dairy.

My new favorite smoothie, however, is a lactose-free chocolate and almond smoothie. Yes, I do realize that this one doesn't include a lot of fruit, but the combination of the banana with the soy vanilla ice cream, along with almond butter, chocolate syrup, and either Almond Dream or soy milk is truly lip smacking.

Finally, I've recreated a version of the Orange Julius drink from my childhood. I really have no idea what they put in those drinks when I was a kid, although some web sites claim it had orange juice, powdered sugar and dairy creamer. In my version, I used two seedless tangerines, nonfat milk, orange juice, honey and ice. I made the drink and it definitely reminded me of the Orange Juliuses I drank as a kid, although I have to say that it has lost most of its appeal.

Smoothies are fast to make. Even better, they're portable: just pour them into a plastic cup or bottle and have breakfast or lunch on the go.

Berry and Yogurt Smoothie
Serves 2 medium smoothies

1/2 cup yogurt
1 cup frozen berries (cherries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries)
1 cup orange juice
1 whole medium banana
1 Tbsp honey

1. Place all ingredients in a blender.
2. Mix on high for one to two minutes, or until everything is smooth and you don't have any large ice chunks.
3. Serve.

Mango Infusion
Serves 2 medium smoothies

1 heaping cup of frozen mango chunks
½ medium banana (frozen or room temperature)
1 cup orange juice

1. Place all ingredients in a blender.
2. Mix on high for one or two minutes, or until everything is smooth.
3. Serve.

Vegan Almond, Banana, and Chocolate Smoothie
Serves 2 medium smoothies

2 large scoops Soy Vanilla Ice Cream
1 medium Banana (preferably frozen)
1 cup Almond Dream, Soy Milk, or Rice Milk
2 Tbsp unsalted almond butter (crunchy or smooth)
2 Tbsp chocolate syrup

1. Place all ingredients in a blender.
2. Mix on high for one to two minutes, or until everything is smooth and you don't have any large ice chunks.
3. Serve.

Orange Smoothie of my Childhood
Serves 2 medium smoothies

2 seedless tangeines
½ cup nonfat milk
½ cup orange juice
1 Tbsp honey

1. Place all ingredients in a blender.
2. Mix on high for one to two minutes, or until everything is smooth and you don't have any large ice chunks.
3. Serve.

Delicious Art at STUDIO Gallery

2008-03-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

I couldn't have been more pleased when STUDIO Gallery opened up on Polk street a few years ago. The gallery is unlike any other I know. First of all, it's not airy and industrial, it's a tiny and cozy storefront, and it showcases the work of only Bay Area artists. Art shows are accessible, sometimes provocative and more often than not, fun. Most of the artwork is very affordable and there is just about something for everyone and every budget. In addition to folk art you will also find fine art, but I've yet to see anything stuffy or terribly intimidating.

One of the more enjoyable shows they have held every year is Delicious, art inspired by food and drink. The show opens today and runs through April 13th, and there will be a reception this Saturday from 4 until 8 pm. This year there are over 70 artists participating and on display are oil paintings, pastels, prints, photographs, drawings, mixed media and even a paper sculpture from one of my favorite local artisans, Toshiko Kamiyama who makes the most amazing realistic pieces like this one, all made out of paper.

You can see photos from Delicious here. STUDIO Gallery has also recently launched another web site called Really SF that has plenty of local art, from photographs to painting to maps to prints and it is all San Francisco or Bay Area themed. Online is fine, but do check out the Delicious show in person if you are in the area. And don't worry, there are plenty of places to eat in the neighborhood if the show stimulates your appetite.

STUDIO Gallery
1718A Polk Street (between Clay & Washington)
San Francisco, CA 94109
415.931.3130

Gallery Hours
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 11am - 8 pm
Saturday + Sunday 11 am - 6 pm
Monday + Tuesday by appointment

Green Garlic: A Sign of Spring

2008-03-11T11:43:00.001-07:00

A sure sign of spring at local farmers markets is the appearance of green garlic. It arrives in late winter, but it is a sign of what's to come: spring meals resplendent with fresh green peas, spring lamb, mushrooms, radishes and asparagus.

Hard garlic bulbs come into season in June and July. At that point, the bulbs are dry and look like what we typically use the rest of the year (they are stored in dry, ventilated rooms by the farmers). But to get to that point, garlic begins much earlier in the year as a green stalk that is similar in appearance to a leek or a spring onion. As the year goes on, the end portion becomes more bulbous until it starts to harden and dry out.

While green garlic can be used in any recipe calling for garlic, it has a subtle flavor that is unique from dry garlic. When I particularly want to highlight the flavor of green garlic, I make egg dishes, risottos, or simple meat dishes with gads of the herb.

Fellow bloggers also enjoy green garlic and have published recipes:

• Pim suggests shrimp stir-fry with green garlic
• Brett likes his green garlic in a Spanish tortilla with white beans
• Catherine has a cabbage and green garlic soup recipe for us
• And Laura Rebecca brings us a green garlic pesto

You can find green garlic at most local farmers markets. I have never seen green garlic in a traditional supermarket. Farms I know that carry green garlic include:

Eatwell Farm (Ferry Plaza Farmers Market)
Knoll Farm (Ferry Plaza Farmers Market)
Marin Roots Farm (Ferry Plaza, Marin Farmers Markets)
Phan Farm (Heart of the City Farmers Market)

World Snack Series: Books for Young Palates

2008-03-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

From Tricycle Press, that little imprint of our very own Berkeley-based Ten Speed Press, comes the World Snack Series, a cheerful set of children's board books about sweet and savory treats enjoyed around the world.

Author and illustrator Amy Wilson Sanger provides both the books' sing-song text and the artful, colorful sculptures that grace their pages. Adults and children alike will love the parade of scrumptious snacks: cha siu bao, bhel puri, tamales, hamentaschen, little polpetini, and even temaki with uni roe. One of my favorite lines, from Yum Yum Dim Sum, sent me straight to the closest teahouse: “Why, oh why, my little sui mai, why do I love you so?”

Sanger's sculptures are exquisitely detailed yet retain magic and imagination. Flour on the handle of the pasta roller? Check. Translucent beads of flying fish roe? Check. Little snips of tree mushrooms in the dumpling filling? Check. Hand-stitched tofu? Of course. Occasional beans and sesame seeds cross the pages to add real-life dimension, but for the most part, Sanger depends on the transformation of paper and cloth to create amazingly mouth-watering renditions of favorite foods.

I have four of the six titles published so far, and though I keep promising myself that I'll hand them off soon to worthy tots, I must confess they're still in my possession. They were supposed to go into the emergency gift box--yes, my friends' kids' birthdays have been accruing at a startling rate--but I have a feeling that these books are heading soon to one of my own shelves. I'm especially looking forward to the seventh in the series, Chaat and Sweets, that will be released later this spring (May 2008).

What appeals to me, as the "California aunt" in my family, is the matter-of-fact approach to such a widely diverse table. There's an emphasis on foods that one might find in take-out and at restaurants, particularly noticeable in First Book of Sushi and Hola Jalapeno. Still, this series as a whole stands head and shoulders above other multi-culti children's books about the world of food. There's no preachy agenda between the lines, and dishes aren't presented as the newly discovered, unfamiliar foods of other families. (Read Everyone Cooks Rice for a well-intentioned, first-generation example of both of these shortcomings.)

The back covers of most of the books in the World Snack Series provide helpful pronunciation glossaries for parents who may not have grown up tying tamales or rolling maki themselves. While some may roll their eyes at the thought of cultivating pint-sized gourmands--with miso in their sippy cups and salsa on their bibs--I for one consider this another wonderful step forward in the long, pot-holed road to incorporating international flavors with neither condescension nor wide-eyed wonder.

Ma Petite Chou: For the Love of Cabbage

2008-03-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

Cabbage. This word often brings up images of drippy boiled leaves and pungent smells. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket and his family were so poor they had to live off a diet of cabbage soup each day, the idea being that cabbage soup was just one of the miseries Charlie and his family had to endure before they retired to a life of nirvana at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Although I wouldn't want to eat cabbage every day, it's unfair to this lovely cruciferous vegetable, full of antioxidants and cancer fighting agents, to have such a bad reputation.

People in other parts of the world love cabbage. It is a staple across northern and central Europe, where it is the basis for German kraut and Polish bigos (not to mention Russian borscht). The French also use cabbage in a variety of dishes, often braised. Kimchi, a fermented cabbage dish, is a staple in Korean cuisine, and different types of cabbages are standard fare in China and other parts of Asia.

Although many of the international cabbage dishes I list above require cooking the cabbage for lengthy periods of time, these dishes are cooked according to time-tested methods to produce amazing regional cuisines. This is not how the poor cabbage has been treated in America. The simple and sad truth is that many Americans have had a tendency to overcook their vegetables. Most vegetables, even the sturdiest and crispest, lose their appeal (and a load of nutrients) when overcooked. Cabbage, however, just gets plain stinky if you cook it too long, especially if you are boiling or steaming it on its own. Although it can be fine cooked in a nice New England Boiled dinner (i.e., corned beef with cabbage), this hearty winter vegetable really shines when the life isn’t cooked out of it. So, for a home chef, the secret to delicious cabbage may be simply to barely cook it or not cook it at all.

Following are a couple of cabbage recipes my family loves. In both I use Savoy cabbage, but you could just as easily use Napa cabbage or a "standard" cabbage. The first is for a Fresh Kraut with Bratwurst where the cabbage is cooked just long enough to soften, but not any longer. The key to this recipe is to cut the cabbage into thin slices so you end up with small slivers that cook quickly. I first made this dish because my daughters both have an acute sense of smell and I didn't want them to be turned off by a cabbagy aroma. The result was a hit. Sautéed with olive oil, fresh onions, and fennel and then steamed with cider vinegar, it's a wonderful accompaniment to savory sausage.

The second dish is for a crisp cabbage and beet salad. With an Asian-inspired peanut dressing, it has a tangy flavor and a crunchy texture. Tangerine slices add a fresh burst of sweetness and roasted peanuts give it a slightly salty twist. Slicing up the cabbage is a breeze, and if you use the shredding attachment on your food processor, shredding the beets takes only a minute or two. Overall, this dish take less than ten minutes to assemble and is a great alternative to a regular lettuce salad, or a traditional cole slaw. It's a perfect light meal by itself, but would be great with roasted or fried chicken or pork.

There is a wonderful French phrase, "ma petite chou," which is a term of endearment for someone who is much loved. The literal translation is "my little cabbage." It seems perfect that a vegetable so sweet and healthful, yet hardy and reliable, should be the description for one's beloved in France. Maybe one day, once people stop cooking cabbage to death, Americans will come to love it just as much.

Fresh Kraut with Bratwurst

Makes 4-6 servings

Ingredients for Kraut
½ large white onion
1 fennel bulb
½ large Savoy cabbage
2 Tbsp olive oil
¼ cup cider vinegar
½ tsp celery seed
½ tsp salt
Dash of black pepper

Ingredients for Bratwurst
5-6 bratwursts
1 Tbsp olive oil
3 large potatoes sliced into ¼-inch chunks
Salt

1. Place bratwurst and potatoes in a baking dish (I like to use my large cast iron pan)
2. Mix in olive oil and salt so the potatoes and sausages are thorough coated on all sides.
3. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes.
4. Turn bratwurst and stir potatoes, bake for another five minutes.

5. When bratwursts are almost ready, cut onion, fennel, and cabbage into thin slices.
6. Heat a large sauté pan on medium high and add olive oil to the pan once it’s hot.
7. Sauté onion for about five minutes, or until soft.
8. Add fennel and cook for another 3 minutes.
9. Add cabbage, being sure to spread the leaves out so they look shredded.
10. Add celery seed, salt, and pepper and then stir.
11. Add cider vinegar and immediately cover.
12. Lower heat to medium-low and cook cabbage for five minutes or until soft. Stir if heat seems too high as you don’t want to burn or char the vegetables.
13. Taste and add more salt or pepper if desired.
14. Serve alongside bratwurst.

Fresh Cabbage and Beet Slaw with an Asian Peanut Dressing

Makes 2-4 servings

Ingredients for Salad Dressing
Salad dressing
¼ cup rice wine vinegar
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 tsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp peanut butter (crunchy or creamy)
2 tsp honey
½ tsp minced ginger or ¼ tsp powdered ginger
1 tsp chopped mint
1 garlic clove smashed and chopped
Green part of one green onion chopped

Ingredients for Salad
½ cabbage sliced
2 large or 4 small raw beets shredded
2 seedless tangerines divided
½ cup snow peas slivered
¼ cup roasted peanuts

1. Add all the salad dressing ingredients in a bowl and mix well, making sure to incorporate the peanut butter.
2. Slice the cabbage thinly.

3. Peel the beets and then shred them. You can do this in a food processor using the shredding insert, or you can grate them by hand (warning: the latter will make your hands very red).
4. Sliver the snow peas.
5. Peel and divide the tangerines
6. Lay the cabbage on each plate, being sure to separate the leaves so they look shredded.
7. Top the cabbage with the shredded beets and slivered snow peas. (Note: Be sure not to mix the beets with the other vegetables as the beets will stain everything pink.)
8. Lay the tangerine slices on top.
9. Top with the peanuts.
10. Garnish with a sprig of mint.
11. Drizzle enough salad dressing on top to coat the vegetables, without drowning them.
12. Serve.

Health Care Ordinance Infects Restaurant Industry

2008-03-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

San Francisco restaurants are suffering from what Michael Bauer at The San Francisco Chronicle called "another 1-2-3 punch to their already slim wallets." The first hit: a minimum wage increase to $9.36 per hour. The second: a sick leave law which states that employees receive one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked.

And then came the rabbit punch: The Health Care Security Ordinance, which mandates that businesses employing 20 or more employees to spend a minimum of $1.17 per employee per hour on health care. For businesses employing more than 100, that minimum increases to $1.76.

If one also factors in sharp increases in fuel costs, the doubling of wheat prices, and a public hyperventilating over dismal economic forecasts, the San Francisco restaurant industry isn't looking forward to a rosy-hued 2008.

The cost of business, my friends, is rising like so much expensive dough. How, then, are our local eateries attempting to punch it down?

A few are taking it on the chin, while others are increasing their menu prices to help absorb the costs.

And some are implementing an additional service charge, in the guise of either a percentage of the total bill, or a per person cover charge. With letters of explanation attached.

There are those among us who appreciate the transparency of these explanatory letters, even applaud them. Others find this new trend offensive. I sense that composing such letters and adding these charges was a tough call for those who have added them-- one made under the strain of coming to terms with a well-meaning, but essentially flawed ordinance. The result has become unavoidably political.

Personally, I don't want my dinner to be any more political than it needs to be. I make enough of those choices in my daily life as it is. Even the choice of which restaurant I go to is often a political decision. Once I enter that restaurant, however, I'm done. I want someone to greet me warmly, I want to be fed and watered well, and I want to forget-- for an hour or two-- the problems I purposefully left outside the front door. I want to feel taken care of.

If I want a full explanation of what goes into a Tripe alla Fiorentina, I'll ask my server, thank you. The same goes for any price increases. I don't need an essentially whining, buck-passing letter of explanation slapped in my face. It is the diner's role to whine, not the restaurant's.

If these letter writers were indeed so "proud to do business in a city that has chosen to test a landmark solution to this ongoing and serious national problem," these letters would not have been written in the first place. It is clear that the authors are distressed about the increased financial burden this new ordinance places on their shoulders. Of course, they are. But these letters just smack of insincerity. What's next? "Dear Guests, we are excited to announce that our rent has just been raised! We are proud to live in a city of astronomical real estate values..."

I think not.

For the time being, the health care ordinance is, for better or for worse, part of the cost of doing business in this city. There are many other restaurants here that have chosen to deal with this hit gracefully. And, yes, I think that a discreet increase in menu prices is graceful. It allows customers to make their own choices. Actually, it allows customers to feel more akin to what they should be feeling like-- guests. It offers a choice. It allows them to feel a little more in control of the dining process. If a guest wishes to pay x amount of dollars for a steak, he will. If not, he will opt to pay y amount for something else. Regardless, he is paying for his seat one way or another. Adding an extra math equation in the form of a service charges is anything but guest-friendly.

Great restaurants don't just fill the stomach, no matter how spectacular the food. They must satisfy an emotional need, as well.

Think of all the people who go out to dinner and then think for a moment about how these people have spent their day. Most likely, they have been working at their own jobs, seeing to the needs of others. How many people come into restaurants after hours of taking on the stress of their children, their bosses, or their customers? As a waiter and twenty-year veteran of the restaurant industry, I have to remind myself daily that it is my job to see that the people who walk into my place of work forget their troubles and get happy, even if it's just for the two hours they are under my watch. They've got problems of their own. They don't want to hear about mine. Or yours.

By writing these letters and adding this charges with little notes attached, restaurant owners are chipping away at the fragile-yet-necessary façade that a diner's needs are what matter most. By reading these letters, people of good conscience trade in a part of their much-needed role of the care-given, to that of care giver. It's a subtle shift, but it's important.

As diners, we know that we all have to pay in the end-- the check, I mean. But tacking on an extra percentage or per-person fee to the end of the bill will ultimately cost the restaurant industry far more than the money it hopes to recoup from the sting of this health care ordinance. Like goodwill.

The letters? To me, it's like reading the list of ingredients on the side of a pint of ice cream. I already know the basics of what goes into the mix, but do I want to know everything? Not always. Sometimes, I just want to treat myself to something that is going to make me feel good for a little while. If the machinery involved in the perfect churning of the cream is expensive to maintain, if the vanilla pods are of the best quality, I am quite willing to pay the reflected price for my indulgence. I don't want to read a god damned sob story about it on the side of the package.

What is most irritating to me is that these charges are being implemented by some of the busiest -- and most influential-- restaurants in the city. These chefs and owners have ridden mighty high in the good times. Now that the going has gotten tougher, they're still busy as hell but, rather than deal with their problems gracefully, these darling prime ballerine of the food press are bitching to the audience that their toe shoes are too tight.

If they want to play the Dying Swan, I suppose we should let them. However, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever paid Anna Pavlova to honk and squawk when she first performed it-- it is a role that is most effective when it is played in silence.

Yes, this is a troubling time for the city's restaurants, but if these restaurateurs could stop their complaining and blame-gaming long enough to realize that their integrity is potentially at stake, they might hopefully get back to the business of doing business. If these already-successful places keep providing us with the food and service they're known and respected for, we'll keep supporting them. Should they need to raise prices to offset the costs of a harsh city ordinance, no one in their right mind is going to think they're greedy. I just want them quit their pandering, stick out their grease-encrusted chins, and remember that the show must go on.

Because it will.

Whiskies of the World 2008: An Interview with Riannon Walsh

2008-03-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

The 9th Annual Whiskies of the World Expo takes place in San Francisco on March 28th and 29th. Recently, I spoke with Riannon Walsh, the engaging and energetic founder and organizer of this popular Bay Area event.

So this year marks the 9th annual Whiskies of the World expo. It must be very exciting to still be going strong after 9 years.
Yeah, it's amazing to me to realize it's been nine years because when I first started to do it I said I'm going to do this for like 5 to 7 years, that's it. I do it all myself and it's a big show and you know here we are going into the 9th year.

You put it on all by yourself?
I do, yeah. I'm a consultant primarily so I don't really have any need to have any staff. Like a lot of the shows are put on by magazines, who've got these armies behind them. I think that's part of the glow of this show, people feel, even though it's such a big show, for most of the attendees now it's personal. Sometimes during the show people will come up to me, and it blows my mind, because they just paid $100+ dollars for tickets and they'll say to me, "Thanks for inviting me to your party!"

Well, it does have the feeling of a party because you have food and bands...
We try to make it feel really different than other spirits shows, which can, you know, tend to dissolve into drunk-fests because there's not much else going on but drinking. And I personally think that's a damaging platform for the brands. This year we are really trying to raise the bar, and I'm really into cooking with whisky, pairing with whisky, I do menus for restaurants...

So this year we're bringing in about 12 artisanal food purveyors to the show all who know that their stuff is there to be paired with the various whiskies.

Are these local Bay Area artisans?
All but one are local, Northern Calfornian [artisans]. One of them comes in from Texas, called Caledonian Kitchens which is geared toward mail-order supply of whisky cakes and haggis, and stuff like that. The woman at the Cheese Shop of Healdsburg is coming down and I mean her stuff is drop dead amazing. And then Scharffen Berger Chocolate, they've come every year and they'll be back with their chocolates this year.

We're also having a chef come in, named Alan Stern, he's a San Franciscan, and he has a catering business, and he has a specific interest in cooking with spirits, so he's doing four different dishes each hour and each has cocktails that he's created to pair with each dish.

All the food booths give out samples so people can bring their whiskies over and pair them, mix and match and really learn how conducive a beverage whisky can be with food.

Oh that sounds delicious...
And this year we have more music too. We're doing the big night tasting on the boat again, and on the top deck at 8pm, the Bushmill's International Pipe and Drum Corp will be with us doing a full 40-minute concert out over the bay, where you can really let the sound out.

Nice. So basically on Friday you're doing the seminars and the Whisky University, which is also new, and then on Saturday there's tasting and the big event on the boat.
Yes, exactly. You know, we've got a lot of people who come to the show who are interested in the seminars, and a good supply of people who are really super into this and they want more of a learning experience so that's why I decided to do the Whisky University this year.

The other thing is that we are the only whisky show that doesn’t charge our speakers so we can pick and choose from the smallest to the biggest companies, hands-on artisanal spirits producers... you know at the other shows it's [very expensive] and we don't charge them because I don't want to be bound to only having speakers because they're rich.

So over the years this has allowed us to have speakers at our show that have never been able to speak anywhere else. It's really great. And it kicks me in the pocketbook, but it's really worth it.

This year we've got a couple of independent bottlers, one of them is doing our Whisky University, and that's John Glaser from Compass Box, and people just line up for him.

Oh yeah, I know his whisky. It's really good.
Yeah, I've been a part of his development of the company since like the day he started it, and been really involved. He's a very close friend and we do a lot of business together. I’m so proud of Compass Box, I think it's amazing stuff.

And we're launching a couple of artisanals this year at the show, which will be really exciting. Tuthilltown, a distillery in upstate New York, which is doing beautiful stuff.

Also, High West, which is something again that I've been very involved with and am very excited about. It's in Park City, Utah. Right smack in the middle of Mormon country they started a distillery (laughs) and they're proud of that. They have extraordinary rye whisky called Rendezvous.

Actually the distillery was started by a Californian called Dave Perkins who was with [a big silicon valley corporation]. Young guy...he's a chemist by training. He'd always wanted to do a distillery, and he came to me—he's just a guy who used to come to the expo and he decided he loved this whole thing to death one year and said "You know I really want to make whisky, I really want to open a distillery, and I've got the money, I can do it, what do you think, will you help me?" And I said to him, here's all the reasons why you shouldn't do it, and which I'm dead serious about because it's a killer business to start up. And I said if you still want to do this after you've considered this, come back to me in 6 months and damn if he didn't come back to me ready, totally prepared to go. He bought these great historic buildings right on the main street of Park City, and he launched everything this year at Sundance. And he's up and running. And it's really cool, cause if you're in the chair lift line and the line gets backed up into town, you're standing right in front of the windows and watching the distillery operate. And he's doing a little saloon too.

There's also Copper Fox Distillery and Eades Malts who are launching.

So, I'm curious why you chose San Francisco for this event and what inspired you to first organize it?
I was spending a lot of time in the silicon valley back in '95-'96 raising money for a distillery project I was doing in the west of Ireland. And I was doing a lot of little tastings to investor groups, anywhere from 8 to 50 people as I was trying to talk them into writing big checks. And people were saying, "We have so many wine things and there's nothing for whisky out here." And I was turning them onto how fascinating and complex whisky is, and they'd never talked to anyone who could teach them how to nose it and appreciate it, the way winemakers do. There was a whisky show that had just started in NY that year, and there were a couple in Europe that I'd been to, and I just thought it would be a great thing to do and I love San Francisco, and wanted to spend more time out there. And I was literally sitting on my porch, looking out over the pond, and I remember just saying, "You know, I'm just going to do a whisky show in San Francisco next spring. And that was it."

And that was it. That's where it started...

Whiskies of the World Expo
Friday March 28
Le Meridien Hotel
3-8:30pm

Saturday March 29
San Francisico Belle, Pier 3
5:30-10pm

Bake Until Bubby & Macaroni and Cheese Recipe

2008-03-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

When I worked as a counselor in a homeless shelter I gained an appreciation for casseroles. The shifts were long and dinner was often the main focus of the evening for counselors as well as guests. Churches and synagogues provided meals at the shelter, and casseroles were served night after night. Because we didn't always know what was in them, when asked what was for dinner, one of my colleagues used to say "hot dish." The best casseroles ironically came from the poorest part of the county. Those Baptist's sure knew how to stretch a food dollar and make something out of close to nothing, they put the Episcopalians from the expensive neighborhood to shame!

In Bake Until Bubby, author Clifford A. Wright explains that casseroles gained a bad reputation after World War II when home cooks relied on processed, packaged and canned food rather than farm fresh ingredients. Thankfully, with the exception of canned tomatoes, Bake Until Bubbly eschews the cans, boxes of crackers and bags of chips and uses great high quality ingredients to create both traditional and modern casseroles.

Wright is a food historian and begins the book with casseroles throughout the ages. The recipes are divided into Breakfast Casseroles, Classic American Favorites, Casseroles from other Countries, Vegetable Casseroles, Vegetable Casseroles without Meat, and Dessert Casseroles. It's great to see casseroles being elevated into something worth savoring because they are generally easy to make, economical and yield something comforting. I've always been a fan.

Macaroni and Cheese
Makes 4-6 servings

3 Tablespoons unsalted butter
3 Tablespoons finely chopped onion
1/2 garlic clove, finely chopped
3 Tablespoons all purpose flour
3 1/2 cups whole milk
1 pound milk or sharp aged white cheddar cheese, shredded
2 Tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt plus more to taste
1 pound elbow macaroni or any short tubular pasta
2 Tablespoons dry bread crumbs

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 10 inch round baking casserole that is at least 3 inches deep.

2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat, then add the onion and garlic and cook, stirring until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the flour to form a roux, stirring for about 1 minute. Remove the saucepan from the heat and whisk in the milk. Return to low heat and simmer, stirring until smooth but liquidy, about 15 minutes. Add the cheese, 1 cup or a handful at a time, stirring frequently until it melts. Add the mustard, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and stir to blend well.

3. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of abundantly salted water to a vigorous boil. Add the macaroni and boil until half-cooked (follow the package instructions). Drain the macaroni and transfer it to a large bowl. Pour the cheese sauce over the macaroni and stir and toss a bit. Transfer the macaroni mixture to the casserole. Sprinkle with bread crumbs on top and bake until the top begins to turn golden and the sauce is bubbly, about 25 minutes. Let rest for 10 minutes, then serve.

Reprinted by permission from Bake Until Bubbly, by Clifford A. White. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2008 by Clifford A. White. All rights reserved.

Dongpo Rou: Melt-in-Your-Mouth Pork

2008-03-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

For those who love both poetry and pork, the recitation and the recipe, Dongpo Rou's silken layers hold a potent blend of both. This famous dish of Hangzhou, a city tucked near where the Qiantang River spills into the Yangtze Delta of eastern China, is named for its creator, the celebrated Chinese poet, Su Shi. Also known as Su Dongpo, he gave his name to the much-loved dish.

Stories are still told of how he forgot his simmering pork while playing chess or of the misunderstanding among his servants when he called for pork with wine. He was thinking a nice cup of spirits; they were thinking boozy stew. I like to think that while the pork belly simmered gently in wine and soy sauce and spices, the poet composed and ink-brushed and recited an afternoon's worth of verse.

Nicole Mones has written a lovely essay about the lingering ties between the poetry and the pork. Since this is Bay Area Bites and not Bay Area Chapbook, I will let other sites cover Chinese poetry. The recipe, however, is most definitely within our domain.

While teaching a writing class several years ago, I had the pleasure of having two students who were in the middle of their own dongpo rou studies. Class discussions about literary metaphors and run-on sentences quickly gave way to debates about judging slabs of pork belly and the precise ratio of wine to soy sauce and which spices should absolutely not be omitted. A friend's father generously walked me through his own recipe a year later. And then this year, after listening to Martin Yan, Olivia Wu, Albert Cheng, Nicole Mones, and Alex Ong rhapsodize about the dish during a panel discussion at the Chinese Culture Center, I realized it was time to embark on my own journey.

Many a Chinese food lover will name dongpo rou among the finest, most difficult, most sublime and most purely enjoyable of classic dishes. I know cooks who have dedicated years to perfecting it in their own kitchens and still bemoan the challenge of coaxing that alchemical melting of the pork's layers of fat and lean, meat and skin. My own explorations have just begun, but like any still-fresh convert, I can't stop talking about my newfound joy. It's like eating pork custard that melts on your tongue. It's like swallowing savory silk. It's what pork will taste like in heaven. (And now you know why I'm not a poet.)

I can't claim native expertise, nor can I say I have settled on my own final, best recipe. But, damn, this stuff is good!

DONGPO ROU

Ingredients
• 2 to 3 pounds of finest quality pork belly
• Half a stick of Chinese golden sugar, or 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 4 scallions, white part only
• 3 thick slices ginger
• 6 whole star anise
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
• 2 to 3 cups chinese wine (I use Shaoxing rice wine aged 8 years)
• 1/2 to 1 cup stock or water
• 3 to 4 tablespoons light soy sauce, plus more if needed

Preparation
1. Check the skin of the pork belly to be sure all hairs are removed. Tweezers are good for this. Cut cubes that are 2-1/2 by 2-1/2 inches and tie with fresh straw or kitchen string. Blanch in boiling water for 2 minutes; drain.

2. In a heavy pot big enough to hold the pork in a single layer, skin-side up, combine the pork packets, sugar, fresh aromatics and dried spices. Pour in enough rice wine to come up two-thirds on the sides of the pork, then add enough stock or water to just cover the skin. Drizzle in soy sauce.

3. Bring to a gentle simmer, reduce heat until the liquid ripples with a bare shiver, cover tightly and then leave the kitchen for a few hours. Stay close, though, to check that the liquid never boils. Taste one or twice to adjust sweet and salty flavors, but otherwise, it's a matter of trusting the magical effects of time and moisture on the pork and its flavorings. I like to float a round of parchment paper on the surface of the liquid to help cover the meat and fat evenly. If you're in a hurry, you can stop the cooking at 1 1/2 hours, but it won't be as good as when you have waited for 4 hours.

4. Remove the pan from the heat and let the pork cool in its liquid. For the best results, I like to refrigerate overnight to remove excess fat that floats to the top. If done well, though, you'll be surprised by how little fat comes off into the sauce.

5. Set up a steamer over your wok, or place a shallow dish in a large pot. Arrange the pork in a bowl or deep platter with its liquid, which after refrigerating has become a deeply colored, sparkling pork aspic. Steam for one hour. If desired, reduce the sauce by boiling it separately.

6. Serve the pork cubes in small, individual bowls with the sauce spooned over and accompanied with lots of white rice.

Fish on Fridays

2008-02-29T09:51:00.000-08:00

Why is this fish sweating? He isn't. Fish can't sweat. They don't have sweat glands. But he does look rather distressed. Why does he look distressed? Because he was painted that way. He's not real.

If he did have the slightest understanding of human food ways, Fridays would be met with a great deal of anxiety indeed. There are more than one billion Catholics around the world.

And it's Lent.

My family was not the greatest model of a Catholic household. Neither son was an alter boy, holy days of obligation were not obligatory, and an experiment with Catholic school was an unmitigated disaster for my sister, ending with her prompt placement in a public school after her habit-wearing instructress was not-so-quietly removed in a piece of protective (for others) outerwear. So the story goes. But somehow, we always managed to eat fish on Fridays.

To my own horror, this invariably meant a tuna fish sandwich in my lunchbox, the smell of which permeated the plastic and even the skin of the accompanying brownish banana. I loathed this part of Lent. But, of course, Lent is about privation and penance. Lent is also about alms-giving, but try as I might, no one-- not even the poorest of my classmates-- wanted my tuna sandwich.

The one, bright, fish-related candle upon my Lenten cake was the occasional Friday foray to Anthony's Fish and Chips, a dark, wood panelled establishment housed in a mini-mall that smelled, unsurprisingly, of grease-- both from the fryer and from the heads of the old men that always seemed to be loitering around the place. My mother or sister would send themselves down the road to pick up a bright pink box filled with monoliths of battered cod and hot, steamy fried potatoes. Fish and Chips. It was the only seafood we ever saw as kids, barring the occasional shrimp cocktail. I loved it.

I had nearly forgotten how much I enjoyed fish and chips until it was suggested the other week that, while visiting friends in Redwood City, we all go have some for lunch.

We went to Al's Fish n' Chips on Roosevelt Boulevard, located in an unassuming mini-mall not unlike those of my suburban youth. It led me to question whether or not there was some sort of zoning law specifically targeting such establishments.

We ordered several items, but the fish and chips ($7.95 for a two-piece order) really stood out in my mind. It was (and I don't use this word often) perfect. A crisp, flavorful batter coating that complimented rather than competed with the tender, steamy cod inside. The chips were nearly the same. A tad thinner than the usual chunky chips associated with the dish, but still thick enough to produce both exterior crunch and inner steam. Everything we consumed there was fresh and really very good (the black beans? Yes, do try). I nearly wet myself with joy. And I cursed myself for not having my camera with me.

The following weekend, I rode up to Sausalito for a morning run to Heath Ceramics with my friend Mark. He suggested lunch at Fish nearby. There was no need to twist my arm. No guessing what we ordered.

I was a bit shocked at the sticker price-- $21.00 for beer-battered fish (3 pieces) and chips. It was, however, extremely good. I just had to tell myself that I was sitting in a restaurant in Sausalito and not in a suburban mini-mall. Perhaps the proximity of a bait and tackle shop adds incalculably more to property value than, say, a Tan n' Nails.

The final stop on my cod binge was a place in my neighborhood I've wandered by for years-- Piccadilly Fish n' Chips. A fire knocked it out of commission a little while back but it has returned. I ordered the 2-piece fish and chips, of course, for $6.95. Since this is classic English takeaway, I did just that. What made me happiest was the fact that my order was wrapped in newspaper-- the SF Weekly. I stifled any impulse I had to engage in Cockney rhyming slang, since I was the only person in the place apart from the sweet woman making my fish who is, I believe, Korean. And I'm not a Cockney. I took away my take-away.

When I arrived home, I found that the fish and chips had continued to steam as they snuggled in the Pink Section-- exactly what is supposed to happen. To my joy, the fish was still crispy, but not beer-battered; more tempura in style-- delicate, brittle and pock-marked. It was good. I ignored the small packets of tartar sauce and made my own impromptu condiment of mayonnaise, chopped sweet pickles and cider vinegar (since I didn't have the traditional malt vinegar handy). It worked in the pinch. Disappointing, however, were the chips. Rather soggy and bland. Of course, I am partly to blame. I was the first person in Piccadilly's door at 11:00 am and these were the first batch of chips of the day. I should have known better. The fish (and the price point) will bring me back.

All this battered cod and fries over the past few days. I'm actually not sick of it. Could you, my reading public (yes, all three of you) tell me of other, great places to go for a Friday Night Fish Fry? I'm all ears. And all stomach.

And now for the history lesson.

A Brief History of Fish and Chips
The potato has been known to the English since the late 16th century-- about the time that old canard about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing it to a grateful nation started making its rounds. According to The Straight Dope, the Irish refused to plant them, since potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible. They have since eaten their words. It was the French, naturally, who invented pommes frites, in the 1840's.

Fish has, not surprisingly, been known to the English for a much longer time. They live on an island, after all. Frying the fish is believed to have become popular in England in the early mid-19th century, even being mentioned in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

There is a bit of controversy as to where the inspired idea of combining fried fish with fried potatoes first occurred. A Mr. Lees opened a fish and chip shop in Mossley, Lancashire in 1863 while a Mr. Joseph Malin opened his London shoppe in 1860. Or 1865. No one is certain. The National Federation of Fish Friers recognizes that both should share the Oscar. They ought to know, since an average of 300 million servings of fish and chips are served each year in Britain. That's six servings for every human.

Fish has a rather entertaining website, its map is drawn on a napkin.

350 Harbor Drive
Sausalito, CA 9465 (latitude and longitude also given)
415) 331-FISH

Open seven days a week
11:30 am- 4:30 pm for lunch
5:30 pm- 8:30 pm for dinner

Piccadilly Fish and Chips
1345 Polk Street (at Pine)
San Francisco, CA 94109

Open seven days a week

Monday- Thursday 11 am - 11 pm
Friday 11 am - midnight
Saturday 11 am - 11 pm
Sunday 1 pm - 11 pm

Al's Fish n' Chips
2139 Roosevelt Avenue
Redwood City, CA 94061
650) 366-FISH

Open seven days a week

Monday - Thursday 11 am - 8 pm
Friday - 11 am - 8:30 pm
Saturday - 11 am - 8 pm
Sunday - 11 am - 7:30 pm

* Oh. A food person's fun(ish) fact about Lent. Marie-Antoine Carême's last name means "Lent", derived from the Latin quadragesima. Go now, and impress your friends.

Tips for Getting Your Kids to Love Vegetables

2008-02-28T07:45:00.000-08:00

Ever since Jessica Seinfeld’s book “Deceptively Delicious” was a hit last year, I’ve been contemplating why people feel the need to hide vegetables in their children's meals. I need to say up front that the idea of hiding vegetables in food has always made me cringe. Although I would like to think my dislike for being "deceptive" is due to my belief that parents should always be honest with their children, I must admit my sensibility as a true vegetable lover is offended as well.

I am also confused as to why this book was such a big hit. I realize that the author is Jerry Seinfeld's wife, and that the exposure she received from her publisher is pretty impressive, but is there more to the story (other than another cookbook author suing both Seinfelds for plagiarism)? My question is: why has the vegetable become persona non grata at the family dinner table?

I can think of many reasons why parents should avoid hiding vegetables in their kids' food. For one thing, if the veggies are hidden, kids have no idea they’re actually eating them. Although this may seem to be the point of masquerading them in the first place, it sets up a scenario where children grow up thinking they can live vegetable-free lives. Okay, maybe not vegetable free entirely, but if vegetables aren't a part of a child's regular daily food consumption, she (or he) won't acquire a taste for them and so won't necessarily want to eat them as an adult. Stealth recipes, as Ms. Seinfeld calls them, can eventually backfire. The trick of pureeing and chopping up vegetables so children don't notice them will only work for so long. At some point, those little smarties will figure it out and when they do, they'll get the message that vegetables are "gross" and inedible, worthy only of being smashed to bits and hidden in meat, pasta or cheese. I realize that many parents themselves aren't vegetables lovers, but instead of throwing in the towel and passing on an aversion to an essential food group, I suggest exploring new and different ways of eating and preparing vegetables with the kids.

With this in mind, here are some suggestions for serving vegetables in an open and honest way with your family. They may not all work for you, but the chances that one or two of these suggestions could make even a small impact is worth a try.

1. Take your children with you to the store or farmer’s market to pick out the vegetables themselves. Show them the variety of vegetables available, as well as the vibrant colors and different textures. When you get home, your kids will be more excited about the vegetables they've chosen for the family dinner table and more likely to eat them.

2. Take your child to the farmer’s market and speak with the farmer or sales person about the vegetables that are currently in season. This will help your children to build a curiosity about where their food comes from.

3. Grow your own vegetables if you have a yard. And, even if you don't, try growing some small container plants like cherry tomatoes or peppers. After growing a vegetable for weeks to months, your child will be excited to get to pick it her or himself and, more importantly, eat it.

Note: Gardening doesn't have to be labor intensive. If you want to spend a lot of time in your yard, you can have a beautiful garden, but this isn't necessary. Just pick a few plants to grow and be sure to water them every couple of days.

4. Ask your child to help you cook. They can help you wash the vegetables, peel them, chop with supervision, and actually do some of the cooking. If your child feels a sense of pride about the meal your family is eating, he or she is more likely to want to eat it.

Idea: One way to do this, now that it's almost Spring, is to buy fresh English peas in the pod and spend time with your kids shelling them. This is a fun hands-on experience that my daughters love. Oh, and be sure to let them taste them raw.

5. Make vegetables fun by purchasing them in a new way.

Idea: Try buying purple potatoes or different colored carrots to spark your child's interest. In the Fall, you can also buy Brussels sprouts on the stalk. When my daughters were about four, they weren't thrilled with sprouts until we bought them this way; but, after an afternoon of plucking them off the stem and then pretending the stem was a scepter, they loved them. I now try to buy the sprouts on the stalk as often as I can. Buying Brussels sprouts has become an event instead of a hated side dish (I don't have a picture of Brussels sprouts on the stem here as they’re not in season, but check out those purple carrots!).

6. Respect that your child will not love every vegetable and allow them to name one or two that they prefer not to eat. Then ask them which vegetables they love and make a point to eat one of them that evening.

7. Try serving some vegetables raw with dip as part of your meal or as a snack. Great vegetables to use are carrots, peppers, cucumbers, snap peas, green beans, broccoli, and fennel.

8. Try cooking vegetables in a different way. Sometimes a child's aversion may be to the texture or preparation of a dish, rather than the vegetable itself.

Idea: Instead of steaming cauliflower, try chopping it up into small florets and roasting it with olive oil and butter topped with some fresh bread crumbs.

9. Serve vegetables every day so they become a natural part of the meal.

10. Be sure to eat your own plate of vegetables in front of your child so they see you enjoying them yourself. In this case, actions really do speak far louder than words.

Massimo's Italian Kitchen & Pork Spareribs and Cabbage Recipe

2008-02-27T09:18:00.000-08:00

Lee's favorite food is Japanese. When we celebrate his birthday or really any occasion it's Japanese food that he wants. Much as I love Japanese food, and I really do, I have to say Italian is still my all-time favorite. Italian food just spells comfort to me. I love rustic food and great ingredients treated well but not fussed over. Ok, I like them fussed over some of the time. But on a day to day basis nothing makes me happier than a plate of pasta, risotto, or even polenta.

It should come as no surprise that I was utterly charmed by Massimo's Italian Kitchen. The subtitle is not totally accurate, "authentic one-dish meals from a seasoned chef" because there are plenty of desserts and side dishes too. That said, there isn't a recipe in this book I wouldn't make, except perhaps the tripe soup, I'm still a bit squeamish about tripe. The photos really do a good job of showing the food, which when it comes to rustic food is not always so easy. A fancy plated dessert is much easier to shoot than say rice and pea soup or handmade noodles with ragu.

The recipes are written in a very conversational style, but are generally not that complicated or long. One of the things I particularly like about the book is the large number of both vegetable dishes and one pot meals that include less common vegetables like radicchio and cabbage. Living in Italy I discovered how much vegetables were loved. In fact, they were usually served as their own course to be totally savored without distraction.

This book covers the different regions that the chef has knowledge of and is a nice compilation for the intermediate home cook looking for something beyond Italian-American classics. Recipes include Winter Salad with Potatoes and Apples, Garganelli with Fava Beans and Crispy Prosciutto, Risotto with White Asparagus, Black Pepper and Wild Strawberries and Baked Cardoons with Pecorino.

Pork Spareribs and Cabbage
Costine di Mailale e Verze

Makes 4 servings

4 whole racks baby back ribs
salt and pepper
1 Tablespoon sugar
3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic
1 cup julienned onion
1/2 cup white wine
2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon tomato paste
1 cup chopped fresh tomatoes (note: I think canned would be fine here)
1 cup chicken stock
1 head cabbage

Wash the rib and pat dry. Cut between each bone to separate them, and season with salt, pepper, and sugar.

Heat the olive oil in a heavy-bottomoed pot over medium-high heat. Add the ribs and sear until golden brown. Add the garlic and onion and cook for a few minutes.

Pour in the wine and vinegar and cook until they evaporate. Stir in the tomato paste and then the tomatoes. Pour in the chicken stock, reduce the heat, and simmer for about 20 minutes, covered.

In the meantime remove each leaf from the cabbage and cut our the center spine, splitting the leaf in two. Cut the cabbage into wide juliennes. Add the cabbage to the meat, season with salt and pepper, stir, and cover. SImmer until the cabbage is tender about 10 minutes.

Reprinted from Massimo's Italian Kitchen, Seller's Publishing 2008

Restaurant Websites: The Great and the Terrible.

2008-02-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

I admit to being a bit of a design snob. I initially judge blogs on the way that they look or their terrible photos rather than the quality of their writing. And I often want to avoid restaurants whose websites have irritated me in one way or another. Of course, once I look further into some of those blogs I find writing I love, and once I actually go to some of those restaurants I find I enjoy them. But first impressions mean a lot.

A couple of days ago, a friend was asking me for a restaurant recommendation. Easy task, I thought. I had some restaurants in mind and just needed to check and see if they were open and send her the websites. What should have been a 5-minute email turned into a half-hour nightmare as I slogged through websites that are more intent on impressing me with movies, music, and other annoyances than on giving me direct information.

Hear this, restaurants: We are not looking to your sites for entertainment. We want to get our information, get out, and get back to watching Eli Stone. Noise of clinking glasses or a dull roar or fancy music does not make us want to go to your restaurant more, it just tips off our employers that we are making dinner plans instead of filing our TPS reports. We don't want to sit through 30 second flash movies of how happy we'll be if we go to your restaurant. We just want the facts: When are you open, what's for dinner, and how much does it cost. And I want to do that in as few clicks as possible.

Oh, and also? We are in the Bay Area -- arguably the technology capital of the world. How difficult is it to learn to code up a simple HTML page? Why are you still making us click through to PDF's of your menus or (horrors) Word documents? It's all about time for me, and opening up the pdf takes up my precious seconds.

MY FAVORITES

Some of my favorite restaurant websites are super basic, nice to look at, and tell me all I need to know.

Spork. Looking at this website makes me want to spend my hard-earned money to hire this designer to redo all other restaurant websites. It's gorgeous.

Bar Jules. The lovely Bar Jules site changes daily and tells us what's for lunch and dinner.

Slanted Door. Chock full of information, and has a handy plug-in to make an Open Table reservation.

Arizmendi Bakery. Arizmendi's pizza changes daily, and Arizmendi has a calendar for the whole month of delicious flavors.

SITES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO SCRATCH MY EYES OUT
(warning, many of these have music)

Bix. I want to send a friend directly to Bix's list of cocktails, as I had an excellent one there the other night. Oh wait ... the whole site is in FLASH so I can't send a direct link!

Market Bar. Don't. Resize. My. Browser. Ever. (And while you're at it, you might want to get spellcheck. Mediterranean is spelled with one "t".)

Spruce. Let's review how many steps I have to go through to find the Spruce dinner menu:

1) wait for flash site to load
2) click "menus"
3) click "food"
4) click "dinner"
5) change my browser to allow pop-ups for this site
6) PDF!

House. Give us prices. Seriously. Not having prices reeks of pretentiousness and is absolutely useless.

And then we have a "bandwidth exceeded" message over at 1300 Fillmore.

Fortunately for us consumers, there are ways around these horrid websites. Menu Pages, while not the prettiest site out there, lists over 4000 menus in San Francisco. And Yelp is the easiest place I've found to figure out restaurant hours.

Let's call out all the bad restaurant websites -- which would you nominate? What are your pet peeves?

Cooking with Banana Leaves

2008-02-25T09:20:00.000-08:00

Once a month or so, my mother sends me a box from home filled with food. The last one, timed perfectly for lunar new year, included a batch of rice cakes. Before I even saw them, though, I knew there was treasure buried somewhere deep beneath her homemade peanut brittle, gingery mustard pickles from the last greens in her garden and bags of candied coconut used as packing material. The distinctive green-tea aroma of banana leaves had emerged as soon as the packing tape was cut.

Throughout the tropical sun belt, banana leaves appear as easy, inexpensive, natural, sanitary--and most importantly--delicious packaging. From Mexican tamales to Indian wedding feasts, Malaysian lunches to Vietnamese fast food, the leaves provide pliable wrapping, compostable tableware and a lovely flavoring for steamed or simmered specialties. Throughout Southeast Asia, you'll see banana-wrapped foods for sale as street food. Food sealed within their layers and then cooked slowly will keep for days without being refrigerated. Traditional foods for the lunar new year period are often cooked in banana leaves, especially for serving during the first three days when families are supposed to be enjoying each other's company rather than cooking.

For my mom and all my generous, food-loving aunts, banana leaves are perfect for the three-day priority mail period between the Midwest and California.

BUYING BANANA LEAVES

Virtually all Asian and Latino markets with a freezer section will stock banana leaves that have been folded and frozen into large squares. Though more delicate than fresh leaves, they're easy and convenient to use. If you're lucky enough to have a pesticide-free tree somewhere in your neighborhood, you might offer a trade in sweet or savory treats for an armful of fresh leaves. Berkeley Bowl often stocks fresh leaves, and there are also numerous mail-order sources for fresh leaves, such as Florida-based Greenearth.

USING BANANA LEAVES IN YOUR KITCHEN

Here are just a few simple suggestions for experimenting with banana leaves:

Golden Rice
Cook long-grain rice, substituting 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the water or stock with coconut milk. Add a few slices of ginger, a cinnamon stick and a pinch of turmeric. After the rice is cooked, stir gently and then prepare small packets of the rice. Steam for 20 minutes and then serve with curries or grilled fish.

Tamales
Rick Bayless offers a recipe for banana-leaf wrapped Red Chile Pork Tamales at his Frontera website. We're lucky enough to live in an area where tamale dough is available pre-made in Latino markets. Leftover or take-out chicken mole is a most excellent substitute for slow-cooking your own filling. For variety, sprinkle green olives, bell peppers or corn kernels over the filling before enclosing and cooking.

Fish with Red Curry
Small packets are a fun alternative at summer grill parties, while a hot oven is a perfectly decent rainy-weather option for a dramatic yet simple dinner-party dish. Rub sea bass or salmon with a generous amount of prepared Thai red curry paste thinned with a small amount of oil. I prefer using a whole fish and filling its cavity with scallions and lime wedges, but you can easily use steaks or fillets. Wrap a whole fish completely in three layers of banana leaves, alternating the grain of the banana leaf to crisscross from layer to layer for added stability. Individual portions can be wrapped in one large rectangle on a bed of scallions and lime slices. Tie tightly with wet string and then grill over medium high coals or roast at 400 degrees, allowing 10 minutes base time plus 10 minutes for every inch thickness of the banana leaf packets.

Mushrooms with Tomatoes and Ginger
Thinly slice full-flavored mushrooms and toss them with diced tomatoes (drain well if using canned), chopped scallions, grated ginger, cilantro, salt and black pepper. Wrap in individual packets and bake or grill until completely charred on the outside. Serve as a side dish with steamed rice and grilled chicken or pork.

Sweet Rice with Coconut and Peanuts
Cover about 2 cups of sticky rice with 3 inches of water and let soak for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Drain well. In a small bowl, mix together 1 cup each of grated coconut and chopped, roasted peanuts. Stir in a few spoonfuls of brown sugar to taste (omit if using pre-sweetened coconut) and then a healthy sprinkling of salt. At the center of a large square of banana leaf, mound 1/4 cup of sticky rice, layer 1/4 cup of the filling, then finish with 1/4 cup more of sticky rice. Fold the leaf in thirds like a letter, then fold in the two side-flaps to overlap at the center; tie securely with string. Steam for one hour, then let cool completely before serving as mid-morning or afternoon snacks with strong tea.

WORKING WITH BANANA LEAVES

If you're used to Saran wrap or foil, there's a bit of an adjustment to using natural material that's irregularly shaped and varied in texture from package to package, leaf to leaf. But banana leaves are immensely fun to work with, and their flavor is far, far superior to plastic or metal. Like crepes, practice with one or two or three first to get into the groove. Each thin package of banana leaves doesn't look like much, but there's a lot folded up in there. The leaves are inexpensive enough that you can get an extra one for back-up if it's your first time working with them.

• A couple of hours in the fridge or a few minutes submerged in very hot water will thaw out frozen leaves. I usually place the leaves in my empty sink, and then pour boiling water over them to clean and soften them. I keep them in the hot water until just before I need them, wiping a few at a time with a cloth to absorb excess moisture. Always wipe in the direction of the grain to prevent splitting the leaves.

• Soak some toothpicks or kitchen string at the same time. I prefer string for larger parcels of food, since the toothpicks can cause more damage then their convenience is worth. If you forget to soak the string or toothpicks, expect to see them char completely if grilled or roasted. If you're making very small packets, you can use thin strips of the banana leaf itself as ties.

• With a pair of scissors, trim away the hard, center vein of the leaf. Sometimes, I use the hard edges as extra support for larger packages, such as whole fish, but it can cause the leaf to split, so it's best to remove them until you're comfortable working with larger leaves. For appearance sake, you might also want to trim away any yellow streaks.

• To repair and reinforce a split leaf, just place it on top of another leaf with its grain running perpendicular.

• When grilling large items, such as a whole fish, use a cookie sheet and two wide spatulas to transfer the package to the rack, to turn it halfway through the cooking period and to remove it when done cooking.

• For easier and more attractive serving, especially on a buffet table, use shears to snip open the packets.

• Banana leaf packets are perfect for preparing ahead of time and cooking later. They hold up to moist fillings and they're easy to carry to potlucks and parties. Cover with a damp cloth to keep them moist in the fridge. Don't wait more than three days to cook them, though. They're organic material, after all, and will start fermenting if left raw too long. Once cooked, though, they and the food they hold last a surprisingly long time even at room temperature. While we have become spoiled by the apparent safety of refrigerators, much of the world still enjoys prepared snacks wrapped securely and deliciously in banana leaves.

Best Supporting Meal

2008-02-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

Hors d'oeuvres. Tapas. Appetizers. Small plates. There are many names and countries of origin for those little bites of deliciousness. From canapés and dips to dumplings and kabobs, the small plate is varied and versatile. Although appetizers were once used primarily to sate guests until the main course arrived, they have more recently achieved a higher status in the entertaining world. I have attended everything from cozy gatherings to large weddings where only small plates were served. This is always fine with me, as I love variety and a dinner made up of appetizers offers just that.

In honor of Oscar night Sunday, I wanted to share a couple of my own favorite quick and easy small plate recipes. Although I think I’ve only seen one movie up for the Best Picture award (this is the sad state of movie-going affairs in our house after our two favorite babysitters left for college), I see Sunday as an excuse to curl up on the couch with a couple of my favorite hors d'oeuvres and a glass of wine while my daughters comment on the red carpet fashions.

The first recipe is for a white cannellini bean dip. This is my standard appetizer when we have unexpected guests--I can make it in less than five minutes and always have all the ingredients on hand. It’s similar to hummus in texture, but has more Italian than Middle Eastern seasonings. You can make it with or without hot pepper sauce, so you can customize the spices to your own taste. I like to serve this dish with bruschetta, but crackers, pita chips, or bread sticks would work just as well.

The second recipe was created by mistake. I wanted to try out a new appetizer recipe but forgot to look at it and write down the ingredients before I went to the store. I knew the general idea was stuffed dates, but that was it. After wandering around the store and picking out ingredients for the varied dishes I was making that evening for guests, I went home and saw that other than the dates, my groceries didn't include any of the required ingredients. After a good laugh with my husband about my inability to take a list with me to the grocery story, I immediately got to work to see if I could concoct something with what I had bought. I had some goat cheese on hand for a salad, but decided to use it instead as a stuffing for the dates because I thought the velvety rich texture would counteract the sweet denseness of the fruit. I had also gone to the deli section to buy prosciutto for sandwiches the next day. I had plenty, so decided to use a few slices in the hopes that the salty flavor of the cured ham would accent the other sweet and creamy flavors. After tasting one of my new creations, I realized each flavor was too distinct. In the hopes of melding the tastes of dates, cheese, and cured pork together, I set everything in a 350-degree oven for about five minutes. The result was what my friend Jeff called “pork candy”: goat cheese oozing into the sweet date meat with a crisp salty finish. Just the thing when watching those starlets ham it up on the red carpet.

Cannellini Bean Dip

Ingredients
1 can cannellini beans drained and rinsed
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 - 3/4 teaspoon salt
Dash of pepper
2 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
2 Tbsp lemon juice
A few dashes of hot sauce
1/4 cup cooked or raw red onion

Preparation
1. Place all the ingredients in a food processor and puree.
2. Taste and add more salt, pepper, lemon juice or hot sauce as desired.
3. Place in a bowl and drizzle the top with olive oil and a sprig of parsley.
4. Serve with bruschetta, crackers, pita chips, or bread sticks.

Note: I am not a big fan of raw onion so I like to sauté the red onion in a drizzle of olive oil for a minute or two before I add it to the rest of the ingredients. If I get an exceptionally sweet onion, I’ll skip the sautéing process.

Serves 4-6 people

Pork Candy (a.k.a. Stuffed Dates with Goat Cheese and Prosciutto)

Ingredients
12 fresh dates
2 ounces goat cheese
6 slices of prosciutto cut in half
Olive oil

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Pit dates and remove stems.
3. Spoon enough goat cheese into each date to fill the centers.
4. Wrap dates with between a quarter to a half slice of prosciutto each (depending on the size of the dates).
5. Lay stuffed and wrapped dates on a baking tray.
6. Drizzle with olive oil.
7. Bake for 5 minutes, or until prosciutto crisps up.
8. Serve warm.

Serves 4-6 people

From Lemons, Lemonade

2008-02-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

At some point in his motivational speaking career, Dale Carnegie uttered the famous, if misguided words:

"When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade."

The fault is not so much in the sentiment-- making lemonade out of lemons is, naturally, a rather positive, productive activity. What bothers me is the underlying belief that there is something inherently unpleasant about this citrus fruit. Carnegie was not alone in his thinking. Used car salesmen have given the lemon a bad name over the years, associating them as they do with automobiles that are slick and shiny on the outside, but of dubious dependability under the hood, which is all rather pot vs. kettle when one stops long enough to think about it.

All I know is this-- Carnegie's family certainly didn't hail from a sunny, Mediterranean clime, or he would never have said it. He might instead have related his comment to the Germans or the idea of an eight-hour work day. When fate hands you a German... you can fill in the rest.

Of course, Carnegie was telling his audience that, when fate hands you something unpleasant, make the best of it. When fate hands me that kind of lemon, I would more than likely stare at it for a moment and say something like, "I don't think that lemon is mine," and walk away.

When fate or, more often than not, the supermarket checker hands me an actual lemon, I am more likely to own it. When fate hands me Meyer lemons, I get happy.

I am not about to delve into the history and genetics of the Meyer lemon today. Others have done it well enough that I do not have to. I suggest you let our own Amy Sherman tell you about them. Read her blog post on Meyer lemons.

If you want a few ideas as to what you can do with Meyer lemons, read another Amy's (Scattergood) fun list "100 things to do with a Meyer lemon" from the Los Angeles Times online to get some great ideas. Some are oddly practical, like playing fetch with them in order to freshen canine breath. If you can come up with other uses, please let me know. No one has mentioned the Meyer lemon as an elbow-softener. Perhaps there are few people who still care for supple joints as I do.

And if you really, really want to know everything you could possibly want to know about the lemon, its history, and its uses, by all means go out and buy yourself a copy of Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. It's quite a fascinating read.

Look, I just like lemons. Perhaps it's my Sicilian heritage and the fact that my ancestors actually earned their bread and marmellata exporting the little yellow fruits. Which leads me to wonder that, had Dale Carnegie been born, say, Dale Carneghi, he might have said, "When fate hands you a lemon, make limoncello." But he wasn't and he didn't, so I am stuck with making lemonade for the purposes of today's post.

It strikes me as a cruel twist of fate that a fruit which makes such a great summer thirst-quencher should reach its peak in the dead of winter, but that isn't going to stop me from making it. One still needs to stave off scurvy, even in the chilly months. What better way to pretend that winter isn't happening than to wear gingham, put some zinc oxide on your nose and pour yourself a tall glass of lemonade? It is denial perfected. After all, I believe it was Mr. Carnegie who also said, "Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude." I am not going to argue with him about that. With that as my new credo, I shall chose to pretend it isn't raining outside, my complexion isn't pasty, and I haven't gained 10 pounds. Instead, you'll find me inhabiting my inner world, where it's perpetually sunny, and I am always tan and thin. Thanks for the motivation, Dale.

Meyer Lemonade

Meyer lemons are ideal for making lemonade. Lacking confidence in their own identity (half lemon, half mandarin), they share space well with others. Three flavors that blend well (in lemonade) with the fruit are mint, cucumber, and coriander. Yes, coriander. Don't ask me how I know. I have chosen mint today because it is pretty.

Ingredients:

1 cup freshly squeezed Meyer lemon juice-- about 5 to 6 lemons, depending upon size and juiciness. You can actually squeeze them the night before-- the juice won't separate like orange juice does.

1 cup simple syrup. Mint is added to mine here. I'm not telling you how to make simple syrup.

3 to 4 cups cold, clean water.

Mint sprigs and (very) thinly sliced Meyer lemons for garnish.

Ice cubes, if you're into them. I find they keep the garnish from floating to the top.

Preparation:

1. Take all the ingredients and dump them into a big enough pitcher. Stir and serve.

Or, if you want to be very French about it and serve it comme un vrai citron pressé...

1. Place lemon juice and syrup in the antique apothecary beakers you found for next to nothing at the marché aux puces in Dijon last autumn. Place on a tray with chilled, bottled Volvic, one pastis glass and spoon per person, and a pack of Gauloises Blondes. Let your guests prepare their own concoctions, according to personal taste.

Note: If you opt for cucumber lemonade, slice up a cucumber thinly, add to the water and refrigerate for 24 hours. For coriander? I haven't quite figured that one out. I'll let you know when I do.

Serves 4 to 6.

Country Ham 'n All the Fixins

2008-02-21T06:41:00.000-08:00

My dad grew up in West Virginia, and is a true lover of good 'ol Southern food. Biscuits and gravy, slow-smoked ribs, fried chicken, creamy potato salad, braised greens, key lime pie, and country ham with red-eye gravy. Now, I've been hearing about country ham for a good long while, but having grown up in Texas, which isn't really the South (but definitely shares many qualities), I had actually never tasted it.

Country hams have a long history in the South. These traditional American hams are salt-cured, usually in a salt brine, which dries them out and preserves them (this is how succulent pig legs were preserved prior to refrigeration). They are then typically smoked, although there are very delicious examples of unsmoked country ham. From what I can tell, the best seem to come from Virginia or North Carollna. In fact, you might have heard of Virginia ham or Smithfield ham, which are both examples of country hams from Virginia. Smithfield hams seem to be the most highly revered, and are aged longer than other country hams. Apparently they are also more deeply flavored and saltier. Each region seems to have their own particular style.

So, this past weekend, for my dad's 70th birthday, we decided to not only fly up to Portland and surprise him, but also give him a true-blue (well, it wasn't really blue) country ham. In fact, we even went one step further, and threw him a birthday party where he, and the ham, were the guests of honor.

But getting the ham did take some planning. First, you need to find a reputable place that sells real, exceptional country hams. I had read an article about Calhoun's Country Hams in Saveur, and so I thought, not really knowing where else to turn, to give them a call. I was greeted on the phone with true down-home Southern hospitality. They answered all my questions, and I figured out what I wanted: a 15-lb (the smallest available) uncooked bone-in country ham, which takes about 7-10 business days to ship. Because the hams are salt-cured, you do not have to refrigerate them, as long as you keep them in a cool place (like my brother's basement, next to his Kegerator) and make sure they stay nice and dry.

We served my dad's ham as part of a huge Southern birthday feast, complete with buttermilk biscuits, hush puppies, scalloped leeks and potatoes, roasted asparagus, and sauteed collard greens with apple cider vinegar. To top it all off, we ended with a tall citrus cake. My dad was in heaven. And frankly, after tasting the ham, so was I.

How to Make Yourself a Real Good Country Ham

Cooking a country ham is easy, but takes some time. The first thing you need to do is to scrub the ham clean with a vegetable scrub brush and some warm water, it's best to do this in the sink. I recommend trying this prior to drinking. Although that did make for some interesting fun. There will likely be bits of mold here and there, but that's normal and nothing to worry about.

Next, find a big container. I find that a cooler works best. You want something large enough to submerge the entire ham. Lie the ham in the container and fully submerge it in cold water. The reason for doing this is to suck some of that salt out. Like I said above, these hams are salt-cured and very salty. And if you aren't used to it, like me, then it's best to soak your ham. Soak the ham for about 24 to 48 hours. Yep, you heard me right. And change the water as often as you can, maybe every 4 to 8 hours or so. There's no sense soaking it in salt water if you are trying to remove some of the salt.

Once your ham is clean and soaked, remove it from the water, and put it in the largest stockpot or deep roasting pan you can find. Again, you want to submerge it. The largest pot we had was actually a canning pot and still the top of the bone stuck out, but that's fine, as long as the bulk of the ham is under water.

Fill the pot with enough water to cover the ham, cover the pot loosely with foil, and set it on the stovetop. Bring the water to a slow rolling boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to maintain the slow boil. Boil the ham for about 3 hours or so. You want it to come to about 140°F at the thickest part of the ham.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Remove the ham from the pot and set in a large roasting pan or a rimmed baking sheet (you can double this up to make sure it's nice and sturdy). Use a sharp knife to trim as much fat from the ham as possible. There will likely be quite a bit.

In a bowl, stir together about 1/3 cup brown sugar with about 1 tablespoon grainy mustard until it's like a paste. Slather it all over the ham. With your hands. Don't be afraid. Bake the ham for about 15 minutes until the paste glazes the ham and it looks all bubbly and delicious.

Carve the ham using a very sharp knife, cutting the ham into the thinnest slices you can.

Calhoun's Country Hams
219 South East Street
Culpeper, VA 22701
Toll-free 1-877-825-8319

Whole Grains for Everyone

2008-02-20T07:43:00.000-08:00

Whole grains. Those are the grains you are supposed to be getting three servings of a day. They are also possibly hiding out in mysterious jars in your pantry. Well, it's time to clean out the cupboard and begin again. Stop passing by the Bob's Red Mill display and grab some packages, because more help than ever is available to get you to use them. Three recent cookbooks combine accessibility with a very low earth mama quotient.

You know the whole grain trend has gone mainstream when Betty Crocker puts out a cookbook on the subject. Betty Crocker Whole Grains: Easy Everyday Recipes is a pretty good one too. There are recipes that use whole grain breakfast cereal and whole grain bread in addition to just the grains themselves. As the name suggests, these recipes have a tendency to lean toward the short and easy, this is not a cookbook for the aspiring gourmet chef. But it's actually a great choice for those times when you aren't feeling overly adventurous. Recipes like S'more Swirl Bread and Take-Along Oatmeal Bars appeal to the junk food junkie in all of us. The Best Ever Oatmeal Brown Bread could well become a staple in your baking repertoire and even if you're not a baker, recipes for quick breads like muffins and scones will con your significant other in thinking you are. All told, there are 140 recipes divided into chapters such as Better Breakfasts, Best Breads, Dinners in 30 Minutes, Slow Cooker Sides and Meals, and Delicious Desserts. A chart with cooking times, suggestions for flavor boosters and a full color photo of 20 different grains are all smart additions.

The Complete Whole Grains Cookbook: 150 Recipes for Healthy Living is a weighty tome. With 150 recipes and in-depth background material that includes nutritional and culinary profiles, general cooking times, and storage information, this book could have been subtitled, "everything you ever wanted to know about whole grains but were afraid to ask." For instance, did you know that whole grains make particularly tasty ingredients for salad? The whole grain salads in this book include such appealing offerings as Kasha and Beet Salad with Celery and Feta, Cranberry Pecan Couscous Salad, and Millet Salad with Lemony Chickpeas and Tomatoes.

The slimmest of the volumes, The New Whole Grains Cookbook: Terrific Recipes Using Farro, Quinoa, Brown Rice, Barley, and Many Others begins with descriptions and nutritional information for 17 different whole grains. Primarily a vegetarian book, there are plenty of company worthy dishes like Whole Wheat Potato Gnocchi with Truffle Oil and Mushrooms, Pecan and Wild Rice Stuffed Squash and Thai Coconut Fried Rice with Basil and Shrimp or Tofu. Over 75 recipes and 28 color photos will tempt you into trying something new and delicious. Don't be fooled by the emphasis on vegetarian entrees. The focus is on flavor too, as much or even more than health. Proving once and for all, whole grains aren't just for hippies.

Global Warming & Our Farmers

2008-02-18T23:02:00.001-08:00

Next week, the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) will be hosting a discussion called "Agriculture in a Warmer World." The discussion will include presentations from two different researchers and will focus on how climate change will impact food supply, food distribution, and food security.

Dr. W. Michael Hanemann is Director of the California Climate Change Center at UC Berkeley, and Dr. David Lobell is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment.

We're already seeing changes in our food supply due to global warming. Just this past weekend, an international conference was held in Barcelona to talk about the effects of climate change on the wine industry. And in August, a top UN official warned that climate change could have devastating effects on food production in India.

CUESA's last informational panel was on food safety, and covered topics ranging from genetic engineering, food recalls, and the leafy green industry in California.

"Agriculture in a Warmer World" is part one of a two-part series. The second, to be held in about a month, is called "Climate Friendly Eating" and will focus on how our personal food choices affect the climate.

When: Thursday, February 28
Where: Port Commission Hearing Room, Ferry Building
Time: Reception at 6:30, Program at 7:00 pm

Pho Ga: Vietnamese Penicillin

2008-02-18T04:06:00.000-08:00

Lucky me, the flu came visiting last week. Even after three days of sleeping in bed and swallowing nothing more than bananas and Advil, I could tell my uninvited guest had no intention of leaving. Time to get serious.

Cooking was out of the question -- I could barely stand up straight with the long, invisible spikes piercing both sides of my brain -- so I smiled as sweetly as possible at my husband and said three words: Pho ga. Please.

He'd never made the soup before nor did he have a mother who cooked it once a week, so I scribbled down some notes on a scrap of paper. I fell back asleep before he left for the grocery store, and by the time I woke up again, blessed me, I could smell the lovely scent of star anise and cinnamon and ginger all the way into the bedroom.

Now, lest you think that I'm married to a kitchen wizard, let me just say that during the five years he lived alone, the only meat he ever bought was bacon and he never, ever, not once, turned on his oven. Fortunately, the best foods for the soul are always the simplest.

Pho ga is an excellent way to prepare meals ahead of time. My mom used to simmer the chicken on Sunday, boil a big batch of noodles, wash all the herbs, and then refrigerate the components separately. It only takes about 10 minutes to reheat the stock and noodles for a comforting bowl of soup anytime during the week.

Eating my way through my husband's very first pot of pho ga brought me back to the land of the living. Here, verbatim, is the recipe:

Half-Conscious Notes on Making Pho Ga

Preparation
1. Cut chicken in half & pull off fatty chunks @ tail

2. Cover with cold water. Add onion (halved), some carrot logs, lots of star anise (8-10) a few cloves, teaspoon of peppercorns, and cinnamon stick. And Bay Leaf for the French. Add giblets, etc. & fennel seeds.

3. Bring just [double underlined] to a boil, then lower heat, cover partially & simmer gently 1 1/2 hour.

4. Remove chicken. remove big chunks of meat & return carcass. continue simmer 2-3 hrs.

Shopping List and Additional Notes

Ingredients
One 4-5 pound chicken
1 package wide rice noodles
A small hand of ginger
1 large onion
1 small carrot
Spices: star anise, cinnamon stick (preferably Vietnamese cassia), peppercorns, cloves, fennel seed
Fish sauce
Fried shallots

Fresh herbs: scallions, cilantro, Thai basil, saw-leaf herb, Bay leaf (optional)
Mung bean sprouts
Lime wedges
Fresh Thai chiles

This is the dream list for a homemade bowl of pho ga. Decent shortcuts include using good-quality, prepared stock and the meat of a rotisserie chicken. If you keep a box of premixed spice packets in your pantry (they look like big teabags), you can infuse plain chicken stock with Vietnamese flavors in 20 minutes. I've been known to enjoy a bowl of pho with only scallions for garnish, but each additional herb really does make a huge difference.

When buying rice noodles for this soup, look for the words banh pho ga on the label. If you're lucky enough to find fresh ones, you'll just need to immerse them for 10 or 15 seconds in very hot water. Dried noodles require 2 to 3 minutes of boiling.

I have a wide, extremely sharp cleaver that eases right through chicken bones. Halving chickens is also super simple if you have good kitchen shears. If you don't have a pair...get some. One of the must useful tools ever. Look for the heavy-duty ones with a round indentation at the base of the blades; that's what allows you to snip through the ribs and along the backbone. For those who think this all too much, just go ahead and buy chicken parts (bone-in!), but be sure to simmer the meat for only 30 or 40 minutes before stripping it off the bones. Having exposed bone marrow extracts more flavor. Besides, anyone who's tried to remove a whole chicken from a pot of simmering water can vouch for the wisdom of chicken halves or parts.

If you can, throw in a few extra chicken wings or, best of all, a couple of feet.

My family never bothered to strain the soup. All the aromatics and bones sink to the bottom of the pot, and we'd just ladle the soup from the top. If you prefer, though, you can strain the stock and reheat.

Vinegared onions are a favorite topping that's rarely available in restaurants. To make your own:
1. Slice an onion very thinly.
2. Drizzle generously with white vinegar.
3. Stir in lots of coarsely ground black pepper.
4. Let stand for 10 minutes and then serve alongside the herb platter.

Arrange sprigs of the fresh herbs, lime wedges, bean sprouts and chiles on large platters for finishing the soup at the table. Set a big bottle of fish sauce right on the table, too, because this is a Vietnamese meal, after all.

I like to pour boiling water (from cooking the noodles) over the bean sprouts to blanch them so they aren't hard and cold in the soup. (Shhhh, don't tell my Saigon-born mom. That's a Northern trick that I adopted after leaving home.)

For each diner, place a small nest of noodles in a large, preheated bowl. Cover with very hot stock and add a handful of shredded chicken. Sprinkle with chopped scallions, chopped cilantro and fried shallots. Let guests fine-tune their bowls with herbs and other flavorings as desired.

Dives I Love: Cordon Bleu

2008-02-15T09:20:00.000-08:00

Typically, when I heard the phrase "Cordon Bleu", I used to think in purely French terms. Mustachioed men in perfect white chef coats tasting expensive-looking dishes with silver spoons pulled from little pockets in their sleeves. Or I'd think of the literal translation, which is, of course, "blue ribbon", which I might mentally attach to one of the chef's coats. Since I moved near Polk Gulch four years ago, the little Frenchmen in my head have been replaced by thoughts of five spice chicken. And I couldn't be happier about that.

The restaurant isn't much to look at. In fact, there are those who are downright turned off by its distinct lack of physical charm, décor and, well, apparent hygiene. As far as I'm concerned, the unadventurous can keep their distance. It's not as though Cordon Bleu needs their business-- there's a line out the door every evening.

Why the line? Well, Cordon Bleu is tiny-- nine stools bolted around a formica counter, three small tables in the back, and next to no room in between. The real reason for the crowds, however, is the chicken, which they tout as... just read the sign:

I've never been to Vietnam, so I wouldn't know. Considering the fact that the jungle fowl-- the ancient proto-chicken from which all others derive-- originated in Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese have been able to take their time perfecting chicken recipes. The one at Cordon Bleu is pretty damned good, but the best? I'll take their boast with a grain of salt. And a pinch of five spice.

Chinese Five Spice, if you didn't know, is a combination of ground cinnamon (cassia), star anise, cloves, Sichuan pepper, and fennel. When rubbed on chicken, it gives Cordon Bleu the means to pay its rent.

When I visit the place, it's usually before or after seeing a film at the Lumière Theatre, depending upon the subject matter. I'd much rather fill myself here than with movie theatre fare. And possibly for less money than a coke, some popcorn and a candy bar.

The food is-- I hesitate to use the word cheap-- inexpensive. I can stuff myself silly for $8.25 with the "Number Five", which I think is the most expensive thing on the menu.

The Number 5 consists of one piece of "five spiced roast chicken" which, apart from roasting, spent a good deal of time on the grill, one pork and glass noodle fried Imperial roll, one "shish kebab" (which is neither shish nor kebab. It's very thin slices of marinated steak. The only common ground it shares with kebab is that it is meat that spents a good amount of time over a hot grill), country salad (shredded cabbage), and "meat sauce on rice".

Meat sauce on rice. Ground pork, peppers, onions, tomato. It's piled high on nearly every plate. I'm fond of its no nonsense name. And its flavor. It's no surprise to me why SF Weekly dubbed Cordon Bleu the Best Dive Restaurant of 2006. It's good food. And damned cheap.

The next time you're in the neighborhood, whether it be to see an art film, catch a drag show, or pick up a hustler, stop by Cordon Bleu. That is, if you can get in.

Cordon Bleu Vietnamses Restaurant

1574 California Street (at Polk Street)
San Francisco, CA 94109-4708

Phone: (415) 673-5637

Hours: Tuesday- Saturday 11:30 am- 2:30 pm, 5-10 pm.
Sunday 4-10 pm

Cash Only. No alcohol is served, so bring your own beer. Hell, bring some for the women behind the counter. The last time I was there they said they could sure use one.

Chocolate Fondue Love

2008-02-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

I love Valentine’s Day. In addition to it being the day my normally unsentimental husband proposed to me, I see Valentine’s Day as a “free” day for eating chocolate. From morning to late in the evening, all chocolate is fair game.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day this year, I thought it would be fun to make three different kinds of chocolate fondue. Although I’ve trained my kids to love semi-sweet chocolate, we plan on eating the fondue after dinner tonight, which is about an hour and a half before bedtime for my kids. I’m concerned the semi-sweet chocolate will have enough caffeine to wire them just enough to keep them up, so am opting to make a nice white chocolate fondue as well as a creamy milk chocolate one. I also think it will be delicious to have a varied palette of chocolate to choose from.

I must admit that until yesterday, I had never made chocolate fondue. After making a batch last night, however, I am a convert. In addition to it being a remarkably luscious dessert, it is also probably easier than almost any other dessert I’ve ever made.

Before I get into how to make the actual fondue, however, we need to talk about chocolate. When I decided to make fondue, I had a lot of questions. What sort of chocolate should I choose? How much should I use? Should I make it with heavy whipping cream or sweetened and condensed milk? The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to buy the chocolate at Bittersweet, the lovely little chocolate café in the Rockridge district of Oakland, not far from my house. So, with a list of questions in tow, I headed over to Bittersweet.

Bittersweet is a fantastic little café and chocolate shop. In addition to carrying a wide array of fair trade chocolates, they also have a bar where you can order a variety of chocolate drinks: from a classic creamy cocoa or a hot and spicy chocolate, to a white chocolate drink infused with cardamom and spices (which I had and loved).

Becky Vandragt was nice enough to show me around. She listened to my chocolate needs (making fondue for adults and kids) and helped me pick out the best chocolates for my requirements. She started by showing me the white chocolates, of which there were only two. She thought the El Rey Icoa from Venezuela was the best choice. It turns out that most chocolatiers deodorize their cocoa butter so they can sell it to other manufacturers (who make things like lip balm and lotion). The deodorizing process takes out all of those wonderful and natural cocoa smells. El Rey, however, doesn’t sell their cocoa butter. They use it all in-house. This means that their white chocolate retains the natural perfume of the cocoa beans, which gives the white chocolate a more nuanced flavor.

Becky then showed me the milk chocolates. She felt that the E. Guittard and the Michel Cluizel Mangaro Lait were both great choices. I ended up buying the Michel Cluizel simply because it came in a 7 oz. package, while the E. Guittard was 3 oz. package. We then moved over to the other end of the wall of chocolate to find a nice semi-sweet. I told Becky that I planned on flavoring this one fondue with either amaretto or Grand Marnier. I was surprised when she said that I should figure out which one I wanted to use before I settled on a chocolate. I didn’t think it would matter much, but Becky explained that many chocolates have undercurrents of citrus or vanilla and that I should take that into consideration when buying my chocolate. I settled on using Grand Marnier. She then chose a Grenada Organic Dark Chocolate 71%.

After settling on my chocolates, Marienne Warehine, the store manager, gave me a quick rundown on how to make fondue. She felt that heavy cream was the best liquid, as sweetened and condensed milk could make the fondue too sweet and could detract from the complexity of the chocolate. She also felt that you should use a one-to-one ratio when using dark or milk chocolate, but that you should use a two-to-one ratio when using white chocolate. According to Marienne, white chocolate needs more cream to become smooth. Her other bit of very helpful advice was to add any liqueur (to white, milk, or dark chocolate) after everything has melted and fused together because adding it too soon could make the chocolate seize up. I wasn’t quite sure what seized chocolate would look or taste like, but it seemed like something I should definitely avoid.

Last night, I put some of this great advice to the test and made the semi-sweet fondue. We didn’t have any sterno gel for our fondue pot, so I ended up putting the fondue in a glass bowl set in another glass bowl that contained warm water. The fondue stayed silky for about 10 minutes and adhered nicely to the fruit and pound cake I had made earlier that day. I used a one-to-one ratio of heavy cream and the Grenada Organic Dark Chocolate. I then added the Grand Marnier.

White we were admiring how nicely the chocolate tasted with fruit and pound cake, I noted that this was really one of the easiest desserts I had ever made. It literally took me less than five minutes to throw everything together, which included cutting up the bananas and peeling the tangerines. I can’t wait to do it all again tonight.

Recipe for Semi-Sweet Chocolate Fondue with Grand Marnier

Ingredients
7 ounces heavy whipping cream
7 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
2 teaspoons Grand Marnier or other liqueur

Preparation
1. Chop chocolate into small pieces.
2. Heat whipping cream on medium heat until it starts to simmer.
3. Turn off heat and add chocolate.
4. Stir until chocolate is melted.
5. Add to fondue pot or heated bowl and stir in liqueur.
6. Serve with slices of fruit, pound cake, angel food cake, or macaroons.

Note from 2/15/2008 -- I made some white chocolate fondue last night, using a 2-to-1 cream-to-chocolate ratio. The result was a bit drippy and runny. Next time I will use a one-to-one ration (as I did with the semi-sweet and milk chocolate fondues) and then add more heated cream by the teaspoon as necessary to create the right consistency.

Kylie Kwong Cookbooks

2008-02-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

I get the feeling that parts of Australia are a bit like the Bay Area--an abundance of top quality produce and cuisine influenced by Europe and Asian settlers. There is also a lack of orthodoxy, a flexibility and willingness to experiment when it comes to food. All of this can be found in the cookbooks written by Kylie Kwong. Kylie Kwong is a television personality, celebrity chef and restaurateur in Australia of Chinese descent. While I've never seen any of her television shows, or dined in her restaurants, I am a big fan of her recipes and her style.

The first book of hers I became acquainted with was Simple Chinese Cooking. Like all of her books the photography is excellent, the recipes straightforward and the writing clear. But what really impressed me was her choice of recipes. There were some very traditional ones like Hot and Sour Soup and Dry Fried Sichuan Beef, but there were also salads! Not just Chinese Chicken Salad, but Eggplant Salad, Soy-Dipped Radish Salad, and Tofu and Celery Salad. This is simple stuff that could be done on a weeknight but is exciting and filled with vibrant flavors. And she isn't afraid to tweak the classics either, like adding a salad layer of iceberg lettuce to a "mapo" style dish of ground pork and tofu.

My favorite Kylie Kwong book of all might be Heart and Soul. Knowing the title probably tells you everything you need to know. These are the recipes the author loves the most. When you are passionate about something, anything, it shows. The book features gorgeous photos and great recipes but this time they are not just Chinese recipes, although they sometimes have a Chinese sensibility like the Roast Cinnamon Chicken with Lemon and Cider Vinegar Dressing. A more French style of roasting a bird is employed with pepperberry butter smeared under the skin but the tangy lemon and vinegar adds piquancy to the dish that feels somehow Chinese. There is also Braised Moroccan Style Baby Lamb Shanks, Italian Mushroom Ragout and some recipes using decidedly Australian ingredients like Fresh Mud Crab Salad and Crispy Skin Duck with Blood Plum Sauce.

The third Kylie Kwong book in my collection is called Kylie Kwong: Recipes and Stories. While it's actually the first book in publishing order, it's the third book I read and it's the most personal of the lot. It's all about Kylie Kwong's extended family and their recipes, so many of the recipes come with a story or two. It reads a bit like a memoir and having already been intrigued by her other books and recipes, I wanted to savor every page. It's particularly fun to see how each of her siblings approach a similar recipe like chicken wings. I also enjoyed seeing her mothers recipes, because we are all influenced by our parents cooking in one way or another, right? The recipes for Chris's Spicy Dry Fried Green Beans, Mum's Bread and Butter Pudding and Goong Goong's Homemade Pickles are favorites of mine from this book. With her easy style, enthusiasm for great ingredients and focus on basic techniques you are bound to find your own favorite recipes in each of her books.

Ferry Plaza Farmers Market Report

2008-02-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

Wanna know how cold it was. Too frigid for apples. One farmer stood in the cold; when a hearty customer arrived, she would bang on the truck door. Her partner, with the better end of the deal, would pass along a bag from the stash. Cold.
- "Vital Information", regarding an Ann Arbor, MI farmers market in January.

I am constantly humbled by how fortunate we are to live in the Bay Area foodshed. Here it is the middle of winter, and we have many farmers markets to choose from and can still come home from the market with our bags laden with fruits and vegetables.

"Please find me just one avocado," I have been begging Will Brokaw every time I see him. "Sorry, not for a few weeks," he tells me sadly. I have been craving avocados and the winter hiatus in the avocado season seems longer than ever this year. But two weeks ago, after eating a sub-par, underripe ("watery fat" a friend of mine called them at this stage) avocado, I thanked Will for holding out and not putting out avocados before they're ready. It will be a while longer for Will's avocados, but he is offering us a new crop of delicious kumquats in the meantime.

Steve from Rancho Gordo had a new offering for us this week: dried Chiles de Arbol. I'm looking forward to making something fun with these super spicy delights. While a few are being reserved for a pickled lime recipe that I'm in the process of making, I think I'll try out this recipe from Orangette for the bulk of them.

Have I mentioned Tory Farms? I first learned of Tory during a June Taylor conserve class, when she mentioned the farm's stone fruit several times. Tory joined the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market within the past couple of years, and I have been a fan since day one. Their stone fruit is very good in the summer, but right now they are bringing spectacular citrus fruit to the market. Namely, Paige Mandarins and Oro Blanco grapefruits. They are located in the back, right under the Ghandi statue.

Achadinha Cheese Company is a weekly stop for me. Farmer and cheesemaker Donna Pacheco brings goat cheeses to the market from Petaluma. I've been buying the feta cheese lately -- it's cured in a sea salt brine and a great addition to my weekly salads and pastas. A hint: if you can think of it, bring a jar for the feta cheese. Donna is happy to give it to you in a ziploc, but I find that my cheese arrives home more safely when it's in a jar.

Overall, it's a great time to get to the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market. The CUESA newsletter says that we can look forward to spring vegetables this month including asparagus, spring garlic and cippolini onions.

GOOD: The Food Issue

2008-02-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

With a decidedly new take on the happy meal, the folks over at GOOD have filled their upcoming March/April issue with stories and photos about food along with their usual provocative round-up of art, politics and culture from around the world. Excellent visual design and a refreshingly straight-forward take on sustainability distinguish their pages. My friend Stewf introduced me to GOOD last year, on a camping trip no less, and since then I've been a loyal reader.

Be forewarned: this is not meant for the patchouli posse nor the bake-your-own-bread-after-grinding-your-own-wheat camp. Expect to see glints of flashy ads here and there. That said, my favorite sections include Statement, where the editors give an artist free rein with several pages at the beginning to set the theme and tone of the magazine. As a bit of an information wonk, I love Transparency for its always creative graphical exploration of intriguing, important data.

This food issue has a somewhat predictable feature on organic, free-range meat that will not be news to most who read this blog. Other pieces, though, offer interesting takes on what people are eating now in the U.S. Adam Leith Gollner's predictions for "the next sushi" includes bibimbap and dosa. Photographer Vanessa Stump's in-your-face layouts of everyday meals highlight the healthiest school lunch the magazine could find (Pasadena High School), military rations with squeezable apple jelly and a $250 pizza (wine not included).

With a bent toward revealing the power structure behind our consumer world, GOOD often highlights writers, photographers and graphic designers who can find new patterns in old realties. In this issue, Phil Howard shows which multinationals actually own your favorite organic snack. The magazine is based in New York, but the editors do manage to look west for stories on public housing in Chicago and an urban deer hunter in Los Angeles. There's definitely an emphasis on stories from big cities, though.

One section's title says it all: Provocations. Should we harvest the organs of death-row inmates? Should anthropologists be more involved in current military psyops? Do kids really need to learn handwriting with graphite and ink anymore? Read opinion pieces that are not afraid to take highly unpopular stands.

Finally, Good Project, the page that closes the magazine, invites readers to contribute their own ideas and creativity. The food issue ends with a call to send in photos and recipes for the best possible lunch that you could carry to work or school. It has to fit into a brown paper bag. And extra credit if you make all the food yourself.

Dinner for a Crowd -- Roasted Chicken and Italian Sausage

2008-02-09T08:40:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, my mom would make these fabulous and enormous dinners when family and friends came to our house. She’d work for two days making heaping piles of meatballs, stuffed artichokes, baked ziti, eggplant Parmesan, and a host of other delicious Italian dishes. I loved all these dishes (and still do) but came to really appreciate the easy simplicity of her baked chicken and Italian sausage dish once I started hosting my own parties.

Roasted chicken and sausage is really the perfect meal for a crowd (although it’s also pretty darn good for a family dinner). First of all, it’s incredibly easy to make and you can finish most of the dish before your guests come over. Then, as the dish cooks, you get the extra benefit of having your home infused with the lovely aroma of roasted meat that will prime your guests for their upcoming meal. Another bonus is that it’s an economical meal to serve to a large group.

Easy and affordable are great, but in the end, it’s really about taste. The biggest reason I make this dish is because I love chicken and sausage, and in this dish, the comforting appeal of roasted chicken is intermingled with the savory deliciousness of baked sausage to form a beautiful marriage of flavor. I often use Molinari sweet Italian sausage from Piedmont Grocery. I really like the flavor of this sausage, as well as the fact that Molinari and Sons is a San Francisco company that has been selling sausages locally since 1896.

For the chicken, I use a nice organic Petaluma Poultry Rosie, also from Piedmont Grocery. It warms my heart to think of all those little chickens running around outdoors, gobbling up organic corn and soybeans before they meet that great chicken in the sky. As a mother, I appreciate the fact that there aren't hormones in it, and, as someone who tries to buy locally, I love that it's sustainably farmed nearby.

I ask my butcher to cut my Rosies (I usually make two for a dinner party) into eight pieces each (legs, thighs, and quartered breasts). When I get home, I split these into two baking dishes. I then halve my sausages so they are smaller. Most people will eat one half sausage with a piece of chicken, so it’s easier to cut them up before you cook them. Cutting the sausages also helps those lovely pork juices spill into and fuse with the chicken drippings. I then divide the sausages into the two baking dishes and cover everything with a healthy portion of extra virgin olive oil. I toss on some sea salt and freshly cracked pepper to season the meat, and then throw on some fresh rosemary. I round the seasonings out by grating off the zest of a lemon with my zester/grater. Now comes the fun part -– I mix it all up with my hands, making sure that the olive oil and seasoning are massaged under the chicken skin and onto the actual meat. My kids often want to do this, but I’m too paranoid to let them touch raw meat. Sorry, girls. Maybe when you're sixteen.

After the meats, olive oils, and seasonings commingle for at least an hour in the refrigerator (and up to a day), I'm ready to cook. While preheating the oven, I thickly slice some russet potatoes and slip them under the chicken and sausages. I’ve found that by tucking these under the meat, they capture the pan juices, which seasons the potatoes. Also, as the potatoes sit at the bottom of the pan, the bottoms crisp during baking. I then add wedges of yellow onions, which help to flavor the meat and also caramelize in the oven. Finally, after the dish is about half finished, I add a few red and yellow peppers, their sweet fresh flavor nicely accenting the roasted meat.

I’ve served this dish probably over 50 times. It’s perfect for family meals, as most kids love chicken and sausage, but you can also lay everything out nicely on a pretty platter for grown up dinners. Served with a nice bottle of wine, some crunchy Italian bread, and a pretty salad, it's the perfect dish for company. Now I know why my mom made it all the time.

Baked Chicken and Italian Sausage

Ingredients
2 Rosie chickens cut up
8 Mild Italian Molinari sausages
3 Medium yellow onions
6 Large russet potatoes
2 Tbsp rosemary leaves
2/3 Cup extra virgin olive oil (This measurement can vary. You want to use enough oil to thoroughly coat the meat without making it super oily. Use your best judgment.)
The zest from one large lemon
3 Large red or yellow peppers
1 Tsp Salt and Pepper each

Preparation

1. Divide chickens and sausages into two baking pans and top with the rosemary, salt, pepper and lemon zest, along with enough olive oil to thoroughly coat the meat (Divide everything between the two pans).
2. Mix seasonings into the meat with your hands, being sure to get the seasoned oil under the chicken skin and onto the meat.
3. Let marinate for at least an hour and up to a day in the refrigerator (if you don’t have time, you can bake it immediately, but the chicken will have more of a lemony-rosemary taste if it marinates first).
4. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
5. Peal potatoes and cut them into ¼-inch thick slices
6. Slide potato slices under the chicken and sausage pieces.
7. Chop onions into wedges and add them to the mix.
8. Drizzle more olive oil on top.
9. Cover pans with aluminum foil and bake for a half hour.
10. After a half hour has passed, uncover the pans and cook for another 15 minutes.
11. Remove the pans from the oven to add the red and yellow peppers. Turn the sausages over so the undersides get a chance to brown.
12. Bake for another 5-15 minutes or until the chicken and sausage are browned and reach 170 degrees.
13. Place bread in the oven for about five minutes to heat it.
14. Serve on a platter with the bread.

Joys of Jell-O

2008-02-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

The title says it all. There is a world of joy in Jell-O-making.

I picked up this treasure written in 1963 at a garage sale years ago. I had always meant to prepare the recipes from it but, invariably, I'd just dust it off every once in a while to giggle over the saturated color photos.

Flights of 1960's culinary fancy fill the pages. Dishes such as Hawaiian Eyeful, Fruited Perfection, and Under-the-Sea Salad Keep me reading. Fantasies, Medleys and no fewer than five Surprises populate the book. The most surprising being the fact that someone discovered what pleasure combining stewed tomatoes, vinegar and strawberry Jell-o can produce.

I was fascinated by Jell-O's versatility-- a Twentieth Century aspic--especially, according to the company, how well it goes with seafood. The Sea Dream, in which a cucumber and vinegar-spiked lime Jell-O serves as the perfect pedestal for bay shrimp, was intriguing, as was the playfully named Ring-Around-the-Tuna (a "beautiful jewel-like entree salad for your luncheon or buffet table"). Luncheon. I wish more people said that word.

At some point during my latest perusal of this book, I realized that no one I know seems to make Jell-O anymore. Except my friend Karen. Granted, it still seems to be a mainstay of the Mid-western Junior League and the state of Utah, but the product isn't a part of my life as it was when I was a kid. And before you ask, I have never ever wrestled in a pool of it, no matter what anyone tells you.

In my household, there was never any ceremony to its preparation. No sophisticated layering, the special molds collected dust behind my giant playchest of Hot Wheels. One just added the boiling water, poured it into custard cups and shoved them into the refrigerator. At my grandmother's house, it may have been prepared solely and grudgingly for the purpose of entertaining grandchildren. A woman who made pastas, soups, sauces, and desserts entirely from scratch must have held this product in contempt, judging by the cracks and semi-petrified state which developed from lack of interest and/or consumption at the back of her ice box. I never asked her about it, I'd simply take one and eat it anyway--letting the super-hardened bits melt on my tongue. Texture is important to children.

I've gone a very long time without eating Jell-O. What makes this product so immensely popular outside my circle? Is it the watching of its wiggle? The witnessing of its jiggle? Perhaps there are more people with throat infections out there than I had previously thought.

This week, I decided to find out how much joy this gelatinous product could give me.

I thought I would tackle one of the more savory, aspic-like dishes such as Vegetable Salad (pictured below, right) with cauliflower and pimiento.

It was much more difficult than I thought. Rather than the looking somewhat like one of Hedda Hopper's spring hats, which is what attracted me to the dish in the first place, mine took on a rather sinister appearance. Growing impatient for the thing to gel, I had great difficulty in getting the vegetables to suspend themselves attractively. Lots of air bubbles ensued and the result looked more like cauliflower drowning in an algal bloom. It even tasted of futile panic.

And it turned my fingernails green.

I sat down on my couch, empty Lime Jell-O box in hand, and took a look at the ingredients. Sugar topped the list, followed by gelatin, adipic acid (for tartness), less than 2% natural and artificial flavor, disodium phosphate and sodium citrate (control acidity), fumaric acid (for tartness), Yellow 5, Blue 1, BHA (Preservative).

Adipic acid? I looked it up. Granted, this is food grade adipic acid, but the realization that it's primary, non-food use is in the production of nylon and Polyurethane made me a little uneasy. At least fumaric acid is found naturally in lichen and Iceland moss. BHA? Butylated hydroxyanisole, which the National Institute of Health considers reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. I threw my little disaster away.

And yet, I still wanted Jell-O. I opted for something Jell-O-esque instead. Like real gelatin. I grabbed a box of unflavored gelatin from the store shelf and read the ingredient list: gelatin. That's it. I decided to make my own, with a little suggestive help from a recipe on the side of the box. Why not add real fruit juice for tartness? Why not indeed.

Making your own flavors gives you a lot more freedom to explore an exciting gelatinous world outside your door and inside your refrigerator. It doesn't really take any more time than the other stuff. And it wont give you cancer.

In all, I was more disturbed by Jell-O than over-joyed by it. Don't misunderstand me. I love to be disturbed by food items. I enjoy the idea of Jell-o, and there will always be room for it's cookbooks on my shelves, just not in my refrigerator.

Tart Cherry Gelatin

You can use whatever juice you want in this, provided you avoid pineapple, kiwi, ginger, papaya, fig, or guava juice-- the enzymes in these will not allow the gelatin to set. I just chose a tart cherry juice because that's what my mood dictated.

You may or may not wish to add sugar to the recipe. The sugar level of your juice-of-choice will tell you what you need. Just taste it first.

Ingredients:

1 packet (7 grams) of unflavored gelatin
2 cups tart cherry juice
1/4 cup sugar (or not)

Preparation:

1. In a medium bowl, sprinkle gelatin over 1/2 cup cherry juice, letting stand for one minute.
2. Add 1 1/2 cups of boiling cherry juice, stirring until dissolved. Keep stirring for about five minutes.
3. Pour into vessels of your choice-- a two cup mold, dessert dishes, or wine glasses.
4. Chill for several hours or overnight until firm.
5. Garnish with whatever you feel like. I'm tired of telling you what to do. I chose a slightly sweetened whipped cream and toasted almonds. Judging by the photo, a lot of whipped cream.

Serves two.

Leftover Mash = Potato Bread

2008-02-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

After our wild night of haggis, neeps, and tatties, we had a least half a stockpot full of my husbands' famous, delicious, light and fluffy mashed potatoes. The only reason they hadn't been demolished during our Burns Night feast is because we stowed them away on top of the fridge and promptly forgot about them in our whisky-induced haze. Fortunately they were discovered before the night was over, and secured for later use.

But what do you do with all those leftover clouds of deliciousness? I have a knack for making way too much food, so this is often a question I ask myself or pose to those around me. Mostly my husband. Who agrees wholeheartedly that I like to cook for an army. Or at least a family of 10.

Anyway, faced with a giant pot of mash, I starting flipping through cookbooks and searching online, trying to think about what I could make. I mean, who isn't often left with extra mashed potatoes?

Ok, so here are some ideas I came up with:
• tattie scones (which I made from my Scots Cooking Cookbook, and were delicious)
• potato-leek soup (just add chicken broth and sauteed leeks to the mash, and warm through)
• any kind of pie with mashed potato topping: shepherd's or cottage pie, chicken pot pie, roasted root vegetable pie
• potato bread

I adapted this recipe from an old one I found by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. It turned out delicious. And it filled our house with that amazing home-baked smell of fresh bread.

Potato Bread

Ingredients
1 1/4 cup whole milk
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup mashed potatoes, warmed
2 packages active dry yeast
5 cups bread flour

Preparation
1. In a saucepan, combine the milk, butter, salt and sugar. Warm over medium heat just until steaming. Stir in the mashed potatoes, then set aside to cool to room temperature.

2. In a mixing bowl, combine the yeast with 1/3 cup warm water (about 105°F), stir, and set aside until foamy, about 5 minutes. When the potato mixture has cooled, add it to the yeast mixture.

3. Add 4 cups of the bread flour. Using an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook, mix until the dough starts to come together (you can also use a wooden spoon and elbow grease!). Add up to 1 cup more flour, kneading with the dough hook (or your hands), until the dough is smooth, about 5 minutes.

4. Dump the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and knead for a minute or two with your hands. Get your hands in that dough! Form the dough into a ball. Grease up the mixing bowl with butter. Place the dough into the buttered bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and set aside in warm place (like inside your oven, but don't turn it on!) to rise about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

5. Butter two standard loaf pans. Dump the dough out of the bowl onto a lightly floured work surface. Divide it into two equal pieces. Flatten one piece into a thick even square that is as wide as your loaf pan is long. Starting at one end, tightly roll the piece of dough into a tube. Pinch the seam together and place the dough, seam side down, into the loaf pan. Repeat with the other piece of dough. Cover each loaf with plastic wrap, and let them proof (rise) until doubled, about 45 minutes to 1 hour. Don't let them over-proof though, or they will collapse in the oven.

6. When the loaves are about 1/2 hour from proofing, preheat oven to 375°F. Bake the loaves for about 25 minutes, or until the bread is golden brown, and sounds hollow when you tap the top of the loaf.

This bread is the ultimate versatile white bread. Great for toast and sandwiches, and it even makes mean French toast. Oh and for those of you trying to figure out what to do with all that leftover haggis (we had not a whisper left), here are some ideas.

New Healthy Cookbooks

2008-02-06T08:12:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago it was believed that low-fat diets were the way to go. It seemed if you could just cut out the fat, you could lose weight and be healthy. But nutrition is science and science changes with the times. Fat is no longer vilified. Though for a while, carbohydrates were the enemy.

Today nutritionists tell us there are "good fats" and "bad fats." Bad fats are saturated and trans fats and good fats are omega-3 fatty acids, polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fats. And carbohydrates? It turns out there are good carbs too, such as the complex carbohydrates found in whole grains, as well as in many vegetables, nuts, and seeds.

The very concept of dieting has changed too. There is less emphasis on going on diets and more emphasis on changing our diets, changing what and how we eat. So now might be as good a time as any to throw away those old diet cookbooks and consider something new.

The Betty Crocker Cookbook, Heart Health Edition has over 1400 recipes, cooking tips and hints, and an introductory section on heart health. Like other Betty Crocker cookbooks, the recipes do not use Betty Crocker products. Nothing is off limits and there are recipes for dishes like Scrambled Eggs, Lemon Chicken with Grilled Fennel and Onions and Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce. Not all recipes are heart healthy, but moderation is the name of the game and nothing is off limits. Each recipe has a detailed nutritional breakdown and many have suggestions for how to make substitutions to make the dishes healthier.

I was particularly impressed with the number of recipes using whole grains like quinoa, barley and wheat berries. It's a good all-around basic cookbook with a balanced approach towards nutrition. The book is spiral bound, making it easy to use in the kitchen.

The Weight Watchers All Time Favorites cookbook is also spiral bound and the recipes also have nutritional information. Following the Weight Watchers system, each recipe has "points" assigned to it. There are 200 recipes and they range from Shrimp and Sausage Paella to Warm Chile Spiced Edamame to Pomegranate and Star Anise Poached Grapefruit.

Honestly, I was quite surprised to see how sophisticated many of the recipes are. Missing are any detailed sections on health or cooking tips, and some of the recipes are not exactly gourmet such as Barbecue-sauced Sloppy Joes, also I would have liked more recipes using whole grains, but all in all, the cookbook lives up to it's name. There are plenty of appealing recipes and they are all healthy to boot.

The Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine - The French Culinary Institute

2008-02-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

I could have saved $40,000 and 6 months, endless cuts and burns, bad hair days, bruised egos, fashion disasters, gas that could peel the paint off the side of a barn, and having cats follow me home because I smelled like a mackerel! If I'd only waited 5 years...

Y'all have heard me prattle on about cooking school and know that I attended the full time 6-month culinary program at the FCI a few years ago (and yes I experienced all of the above... in abundance!) so when I saw this book come out, I had to buy it. Like James Peterson's Sauces, this book too could ballast a boat - all 500 pages! - but it is also a veritable treasure chest, a culinary Fort Knox if you will, of all things cooking. If Techniques is the only cookbook you ever purchase, you'd be set.

Techniques is almost verbatim our first quarter (6 week) curriculum. Really! Word for word, gram for gram, ingredient for ingredient. I even pulled out my notebook and compared the Sauces section. Exactly the same. Our first quarter was spent learning these 250 techniques. I had to learn all 250 since before I went to cooking school I burned water! I still do, just less often... But I digress... We then spent the next 3 quarters refining and practicing and expanding on all these techniques. So if you don't want to sacrifice 6 months and $40,000 and the above mentioned humiliations to attend cooking school, then buy this book and cook every recipe over and over and you will become an excellent cook. If you master all the skills and techniques in the book, you can walk into any kitchen (even in France!) and hold your own as this is the foundation of classic cooking and the language of the kitchen.

Hints and tips from the Deans and Chef Instructors pepper the book in every technique with tidbits such as "...cook beans at a constant low temperature and cool them in their cooking liquid. ~Dean Alain Sailhac" or "Do not cover a chicken after roasting or it will steam and make the meat taste reheated." ~Dean Jacques Pepin". It's like getting a personal cooking lesson from some of the world's the greatest chefs. A few that I'm not sure made it into the book that will I will never for include, "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean ~Chef Henri Viain" and "What you put in the pot, you get out of the pot. ~Chef Pascal Beric" and God love them both for their dedication to their students.

Techniques teaches the 250 classic foundation techniques including stocks, sauces, soups, salads, eggs, potatoes, poultry, game, beef, veal, lamb, pork, fish, shellfish, marinades, stuffings, organ meats (my least favorite day in cooking school!), pastry dough, creams & custards, crepes, brioche, frozen desserts, meringues, mousses, and soufflés (my favorite day in cooking school! :) As I flipped the pages, 6 months of my life flashed before my eyes, intermittently cringing while remembering slicing off the tip of my thumb on the mandoline or burning my wrist on the convection oven and laughing out loud picturing the over-whipped genoise, splattered pommes anna, and over-salted Poulet Rôti Grand-mère.

Many if not all of the recipes in my humble little blog, such as a Christmas Menu and Magret de Canard aux Figues de Vendée, are based on the foundation and techniques I learned in cooking school. Techniques also explains in great detail terms in a kitchen, names of equipment and pots and pans (and the difference between stainless steel and aluminum, cast iron, non-stick and the benefits and pit falls of each), food safety, knifes and knife skills, and professional kitchen management.

If you want to become an great home chef or are considering or about to attend cooking school, I implore you to devour (pun intended) this book. If you learn all the techniques, or at least become familiar with them, then you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the game. Bon courage et bon appetit!

Michael, Beverly, Michele, and me proudly displaying our Poulet Rôti Grand-mère

Poulet Rôti Grand-mère -- Grandmother's Roast Chicken
Serves 4
Estimated time: 1-1/2 hours

Ingredients
For the chicken:
• 3-1/2 lb (1.5 kg) roasting chicken (including neck, gizzards, heart)
• coarse salt, fresh ground pepper
• 2 tablespoons (30 gr) unsalted butter
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) vegetable oil
• 3-1/2 ounces (100 gr) carrots, mirepoix (rough chopped)
• 3-1/2 ounces (100 gr) onions, mirepoix (rough chopped)

For the garnish:
• 14 ounces (400 gr) russet potatoes, peeled
• 3-1/2 ounces (100 gr) slab bacon
• 4-1/2 ounces (125 gr) button mushrooms, cleaned
• coarse salt, fresh ground pepper
• 2-1/2 ounces (70 gr) pearl onions
• 3 tablespoons (40 gr) unsalted butter
• 1 teaspoon (7 gr) sugar
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons (10 gr) flat leaf parsley, finely chopped

For the gravy:
• 3-1/2 tablespoons (50 ml) dry white wine
• 2 cups + 2 tablespoons (500 ml) brown veal stock
• coarse salt, fresh ground pepper to taste (optional)

Equipment:
• Chef's Knife
• Trussing twine
• Trussing needle (optional)
• Heavy-bottomed roasting pan or poêle
• Instant read thermometer (if necessary)
• Paring knife
• Large shallow saucepan
• Strainer
• Small, sharp knife
• Sauté pan
• Slotted spoon
• Paper towels
• Stainless steel bowl
• Sautoir or russe
• Parchment paper
• Ovenproof poêle
• Heatproof bowl
• Wire rack
• Baking pan
• Wooden spoon
• Boning knife
• Large metal spoon
• 4 warm dinner plates (I will never ever ever forget Chef Henri admonishing us with "Hot food, hot plate. Cold food, cold plate!")

Preparation
1. Prepare your mise en place.

2. Preheat the oven to 450°F (232°C)

3. Remove and reserve the gizzard, neck and heart from the chicken; set the liver aside for another use. Using a chef's knife, carefully trim the chicken of excess fat. Season and truss the chicken.

4. Heat the butter and oil in a heavy-bottomed roasting pan or poêle over medium heat. Add the chicken and sear, turning frequently without pricking the skin, for about 10 minutes or until the thighs and legs are well-browned and the breast is just lightly browned.

5. When all sides have browned, turn the chicken on its back and add the gizzard, neck and heart to the pan. Place the pan in the oven and roast for 10 minutes.

6. Add the mirepoix vegetables and toss to coat with a bit of fat.

7. Continue to roast, basting frequently, for about 40 minutes or until the skin is golden brown and the juices run clear from a hole poked in the thigh or when the internal temperature measured between the breast and thigh registers 60°C to 66°C (140°F to 150°F).

8. While the chicken is roasting, prepare the garnish.

9. Using a paring knife, turn the potatoes into 5-centimeter (2-inch) cocottes (small football shapes with 7 sides). Place the potatoes in a single layer in a large shallow sauce pan with cold water to just barely cover over high heat. Bring to a simmer. Immediately remove from heat, drain well without refreshing, and set aside to air dry.

10. Cut the bacon into 1/2-inch (1.3-centimeter) thick slices and then into strips about 1/2-inch (1.3-centimeter) wide to form lardons.

11. Place the bacon in a sauté pan over medium-high heat and sauté for about 5 minutes or until the bacon has rendered its; fat but has not browned. sing a slotted spoon, transfer the lardons to paper towels to drain, leaving the rendered fat in the sauté pan.

12. If the mushrooms are small, leave them whole; if large, cut them into quarters. Add the mushrooms to the rendered bacon fat. Place the pan over medium heat, season the mushrooms with salt and pepper to taste, and sauté for about 5 minutes or until just lightly browned on the edges. Set aside.

13. Place the onions in a stainless steel bowl with hot water to cover. Soak for about 3 minutes or until the skins have loosened. Drain well and, using your fingertips, push off the skins.

14. Place onions in a single layer in a sautoir or russe just large enough to accommodate them over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon (15 gr) of the butter, the sugar, and just enough water to barely cover the bottom of the pan. Salt to taste. Cover with a piece of parchment cut to the exact size of the pan opening to make a loose lid and glacer à brun (cook until a golden brown). (Take care not to use too much water, as the onions will steam and overcook rather than brown. They should begin to brown in the remaining butter after the water has evaporated.) Taste, and if necessary, add seasoning. Set aside and keep warm until ready to serve.

15. About 10 minutes before the chicken is ready to come out of the oven, heat an ovenproof poêle over medium heat. When hot but not smoking, add the oil. Add the potatoes, keeping them in a single layer. Sauté for about 5 minutes or until all of the potatoes are evenly browned. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons (25 gr) of butter and season with salt and pepper to taste. Please the potatoes in the oven and roast for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown and tender when pierced with the point of a small, sharp knife.

16. When all the garnish items have been cooked, combine them in a heatproof bowl. Toss to blend, then sprinkle with parsley. Set aside and keep warm for service.

17. When the chicken is done, remove it from the oven, drain off and reserve the fat, and transfer the bird to a wire rack placed over a baking pan to rest. While the chicken is resting, make the gravy (jus de rôti)

18. If the pan drippings have not caramelized during roasting, place the pan on the stovetop over high heat and bring to a boil. Boil just until the drippings caramelize; take care that they do not burn. Carefully drain off the fat. Lower the heat and add the white wine to the pan, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon to lift up the sucs and deglaze the pan. Add the stock and stir to combine. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cook at a bare simmer, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes or until the mixture is slightly reduced and fall-flavored. Taste, and if necessary, season with salt and pepper. Strain. Keep warm until ready for service.

19. Using a boning knife, remove the breasts and the thighs from the chicken. Manchonner the ends of the drumsticks (cut off the big joint at the end of the drumstick) and the wings. Cut each breast half into two pieces on the bias. Cut the legs in half at the joint. Remove the thigh bones and any cartilage. You should now have 8 pieces

20. Assemble one leg piece with one breast piece on each of the four warm dinner plates, taking care that only one of the pieces on each plate has a bone.

21. Garnish each plate with an equal portion of the warm vegetables. Spoon the gravy around the chicken pieces. Serve remaining gravy on the side.

WHEW! All that for a roast chicken!
Bon appetit!

PS: Don't miss Michael Procopio's interview with FCI President, Dorothy Cann Hamilton where they discuss her PBS show "Chef's Story," her tenure as Chairman of the James Beard House and her day job running the FCI.

Luxor Cab Ruined My Dinner

2008-02-04T08:17:00.000-08:00

You know the old saying: "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive"? Well, that's literally true when you're dining out in San Francisco and relying on taxi service. Forget about the cab being on time, most of the time you just hope it shows up at all.

My husband and I MUNI'd for a few years, but door-to-door, the travel time was sometimes over an hour when the restaurant was only ten minutes away by car. We have our own car, but parking is a nightmare in some neighborhoods and we enjoy wine with dinner. There are enough drunk drivers careering around the streets of San Francisco, we don't need to add to them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you call a cab company and they tell you they're sending a cab your way, you've entered into an agreement. They've agreed to send you something, and you've agreed to wait. And wait. And wait. AND WAIT!

It's gotten so bad that after we call a cab, we now look at the clock and estimate how long we'll wait before we try to hail one off the street or call another company.

For us, the worst cab offenders have been Luxor and Yellow Cab. They're both equally horrible, and by the time we finally weaned ourselves off of both companies, we had lost count how many times we had called for cabs that never showed up. We lost count of how many times we paced around the sidewalk outside our building, straining through the dark to find the muted light on top of a car roof. We lost count of how many times we called the cab company back to ask where the HELL our promised cab was only to be met with a busy signal over and over and over and OVER again!

We've also lost count of how many times we've had to call sympathetic hosts and hostesses and push our reservation by 15, 40, 60 minutes. Another time, we weren't so lucky and we lost our reservation and our dinner. We had Luxor to thank for completely ruining a night out we had been anticipating for weeks.

Of course now, some restaurants have even started instituting a grace period. If you don't show up, say, within 15 minutes of your original reservation time, you risk losing the reservation entirely. I don't blame the restaurants for this policy, because just like ordering a cab, a reservation is an agreement. A contract. A promise to show up when you said you would show up.

Why don't the cab companies understand this?

Resist the Box: Homemade Macaroni and Cheese

2008-02-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

Before I start talking about Homemade Macaroni and Cheese, I wanted to say hello and introduce myself, as I'm a new blogger on BAB. I am a writer, editor, and mother of two 7-year old twin girls. I am also obsessed with food and so spend a lot of time thinking about what to feed those two girls (as well as my husband and myself). Meals at our house are often a struggle between what I want to make and what they want to eat, with compromises on both sides. Luckily we all have pretty open palates so everyone is usually happy.

Last Friday night was a perfect example for how this little game of tug-of-war works. I wanted to make a brisket (a lovely Prather Ranch grass fed cut that I got at the farmer’s market). My daughters, however, had other plans. When I mentioned in the morning that I would make them a barbecued brisket during our traditional Friday Movie Night dinner, they both looked at me and frowned. Maddie said she wanted macaroni and cheese and Sophie agreed. As we were late for school, I ignored the comment so we could finish our morning routine, find shoes and rain jackets, and leave the house five minutes late for the bell. Although I like my children to want to eat whatever I make, my general rule is that I'm the mom and the cook, so I get to decide and I was determined to make brisket. Later that day, however, as I walked toward the grocery story in the cold rain, shivering and trying not to step in puddles, I realized that my daughters might be on to something. It really was the perfect day for homemade macaroni and cheese, all oozy and gooey and warm. My cold body started to crave it.

One thing I love about macaroni and cheese (other than its wonderful comfort food appeal), is that you can tweak it to suit your family’s needs. You can pretty much use whatever cheeses you like: I’ve had Italian versions with mozzarella and provolone, traditional versions with cheddar and American cheeses, and more epicurean types made with a roux, beautiful European cheeses, and heavy cream. You can add meat (such as ham, which I think tastes delicious), vegetables and herbs (parsley, peas, spinach and wild mushrooms are great), eggs (to fluff it up in the oven), or even toasted nuts (which I once saw and, I must admit, found appalling).

At our house, however, macaroni and cheese is usually simply what the name suggests –macaroni, cheese, and some milk and butter along with seasonings for a little extra flavor. I'm a food purist (well, at least most of the time) and so don't like to add too many ingredients to the dish as I want to taste the delicious cheese and pasta flavors. I also like to use at least three different types of cheeses as it gives the dish a richer and more nuanced taste. It's great to throw in something creamy (I like medium Tillamook cheddar or Colby), something sharp like aged provolone, Parmesan, or Gruyère, and something with a slightly distinct taste like Fontina or Cotswold.

A general rule for homemade macaroni and cheese is to make sure that every piece of pasta is covered in some creamy goodness. You don’t want a rude awakening from comfort-food nirvana by biting into a piece of plain pasta instead of bubbling savory cheese-coated noodles. Likewise, it's unappealing when the cheese clumps together in separated blobs.

To coat each piece of pasta, I make a roux and then add in some warm milk and whatever creamy cheese I'm using, which makes a thick cheesy sauce. I then pour this over some previously cooked al dente pasta. I try to cook the pasta ahead of time, so it's room temperature or cool when I use it, which in turn brings the cheese sauce down in temperature when you mix them together. The pasta, now blanketed in the cheese sauce, is ready to mix with the other cheeses. Because the pasta isn't hot, the other cheeses don't immediately melt when you add them in, allowing them to instead melt into and permeate the pasta while it's baking. This also allows the three cheeses to maintain more distinct flavors in the final dish as they melt on their own instead of together. Once I add the pasta to the buttered baking dish, I top it all with fresh breadcrumbs (usually heels of sliced bread chopped in the Cuisinart), which end up melting into the cheese on top to create a crunchy and slightly salty topping for the dish.

When I pulled the final dish from the oven last Friday, the cheeses were bubbling up and the top was crispy and crunchy. I served everyone a healthy portion alongside a plate of green salad (the cool crispness of the lettuce nicely accented the hot cheesy pasta). So there we were, kids and adults devouring homemade macaroni and cheese while watching Home on the Range. As I sat there watching Maggie and Mrs. Calloway outwit Alameda Slim, I realized this was really the perfect dish for our evening. If you’re unfamiliar with the movie, Maggie and Mrs. Calloway are cows, and so it would have been unseemly to have the beef brisket for dinner.

Homemade Macaroni and Cheese

Ingredients

1 lb smallish pasta (such as celentani, small penne, or elbow)
1 ½ cups grated and packed Tillamook medium cheddar or Colby cheese
1 cup grated and packed Fontina or Cotswold cheese
1 cup grated and packed Gruyère, Parmesan, or aged provolone cheese
2 cups whole milk plus ½ cup to pour in later
1 Tbsp butter
1 tsp flour
½ - 1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
A dash of nutmeg
½ cup fresh bread crumbs

Preparation

1. Cook pasta until al dente. Run cold water over it in a colander until it cools. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Butter a large casserole dish.
3. Grate cheeses and set them aside.
4. Heat the milk in a sauce pan, being sure not to let it boil. Turn off heat and cover until ready to use.
5. In a medium sauce pan, melt butter on medium heat. Whisk in the flour when it starts to bubble, making a roux .
6. Add in the 2 cups of warm milk, whisking to incorporate it into the roux. Warm on medium until small bubbles start to form in the milk.
7. Turn off the heat and add the Tillamook or Colby cheese, stirring until it evenly melts and becomes smooth.
8. Add a ½ tsp salt, the nutmeg and the pepper to season.
9. In a large pot or bowl, mix the cooled pasta with the cheese sauce. Stir until the sauce is completely incorporated. Taste a piece of pasta and add the other ½ tsp of salt and more pepper if desired.
10. Add in the other two cheeses and gently stir so most of the cheese retains its grated appearance.
11. Place pasta and cheese in the buttered casserole dish and drizzle the remaining half cup of milk on top.
12. Spread the fresh bread crumbs evenly on top.
13. Oil a piece of aluminum foil large enough to cover the casserole dish and tighten it around the sides, oil side down.
14. Bake for 20 – 25 minutes or until the cheese starts to bubble up from inside the pasta.
15. Uncover the dish and bake for another 5-7 minutes or until the top starts to nicely brown and crisp up. Serve immediately.

Eating Space: Food in the Open

2008-02-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

I've always wondered why street food was not as popular in the US. And then I started trying to understand health codes, land use policy, business permits, tax laws, risk management briefs, and sidewalk obstruction ordinances. I soon lost my appetite. The confusion was enough to make me give up on ever enjoying hot rice cakes while sitting on a plastic stool leaned up against a park wall or discovering the best roasted yams ever at the entrance to a post office.

Farmers' markets also face similar difficulties in getting started. While some neighbors relish the thought of fresh mesclun within walking distance, others fear backed-up traffic, loss of what little parking they already have, trash littering their yards, and rodents gathering for weekly food fests. Public parks, natural places for impromptu booths, end up having conflicts in mission and charter with profitable enterprise. Market management, like any other business or nonprofit, has its own risks and rewards and crazy ways of doing things. And finally, farmers have enough to keep them busy in their fields without having to face a long drive into the city. Not many can make a living for their families by standing around selling a few carrots here or some organic apples there, while their thin profit margins preclude hiring retail staff.

In many other countries, people figure out how to make use of every bit of space, material and time. While I understand the need for protecting the public, I'd love to see us loosen up just a little bit and support more micro-businesses, more diversity in the food market, and more openness and curiosity in place of fear and nimbyness.

A couple of months ago, my next-door neighbor decided that he didn't like the shape of my waist-high rosemary bush, the one I tended in that tiny patch of soil cut into the sidewalk in front of my building. So, without asking me, he cut it down to a stub of three inches and then poured so-called river stones over the space. A few weeks later, "someone" planted a begonia where my rosemary bush used to be. Not even a scented begonia, thank you very much. When pressed, my neighbor mentioned words like "property value" and "attractive landscaping." He's a new home-owner; I'm one of the last renters still toughing it out on my block. A sprawling, eight-year-old rosemary bush apparently does not have a place in my changing neighborhood.

Fortunately, another old neighbor realized how sad I was and planted a small, three-sprigged sprout of a baby rosemary plant next to the useless begonia. I look forward to watching it grow, and I hope that we both--my rugged herb and I--will still have a place to flourish on this shined-up street.

And about that video above: be sure to watch to the very end to see the magic happen.

Welsh Rabbit, Welsh Rarebit

2008-02-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Always searching for a happy, late-night snack, I recently turned my attention to Welsh Rarebit, primarily because I'd never had it before. I'm not Welsh.

I'd heard tell of rarebit, garnering sufficient information to know that rabbit meat was not involved, yet not enough to understand that this was not some vegetarian variation on S. O. S. , also known as chipped beef on toast. I was certain of two things: 1) bread and cheese were involved and 2) the Welsh were not being flattered in the naming of this dish. I did a little research.

Yes, it was cheese toast and, no, praise for Welsh culture was not intended. Though ostensibly an English dish (other British and European cultures have their own versions), the original name of the dish was Welsh Rabbit. In England, rabbit was considered poor man's meat so, in a rather clever, back-handed way, naming the dish "Welsh Rabbit" suggested that, not only were the Welsh poor, as they were, but too stupid and/or lazy to go out and capture their own prey, thus having to satisfy their hunger with bread and cheese. It's 18th Century insult food. But it's good, both as an insult and as a dish.

Sometime in the late 19th Century, some forward thinking, politically correct person or personess took pity upon the poor Welsh and softened the name by changing it to Welsh Rarebit, taking with it much of the bite. In a sense, making it blander than it need be.

Personally, I think the Welsh are doing just fine. How can one not love a culture that has given the world Tom Jones, Dame Shirley Bassey, and countless vowel-shy place names that no one but an insider can pronounce? And I would argue that this dish is for the lazy. Lazy is a grilled cheese sandwich. Think of this as a grilled cheese sandwich that requires a bit more effort.

Welsh Rarebit with Apples

The rarebit recipe is taken directly from New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman, a.k.a The Minimalist. You can go directly to a video of him preparing the dish here, which is what made me want to make it in the first place. In fact, I spent so much time sitting at my desk, watching his videos I got very little done that day. I've always enjoyed reading him, but I am now an even bigger fan of his as a result of seeing him on camera.

There are a great number of variations on the rarebit-like, cheese on toast theme. I have chosen to prepare Bittman's because, apart from being extremely simple to prepare, it has a little spicy kick. I added sliced apples because I like apples, which is reason enough.

Ingredients:

For the Rarebit:

2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon dried mustard
a healthy pinch of cayenne pepper
1/2 bottle of good, dark English beer, like Guinness Stout
a few generous shakes of Worstershire sauce
1 pound excellent English cheddar, grated

For the Rest:

1 loaf of good, hearty wheat or white bread. I do not recommend sliced sandwich bread. The results will depress you.

1 tart, sweet apple, sliced thinly. I used Pink Lady, because I like their flavor, they're available and I loved the pop duo as a child. Granny Smith will do, too.

1 bunch scallion, chopped

Preparation:

1. In a saucepan large enough to contain all of the ingredients, melt butter over medium low heat and add flour. Cook the mixture, stirring with a wooden spoon, until it is dirty blonde in color and smells faintly nutty.

2. Add mustard and cayenne pepper, then pour in the beer, stirring all the while.

3. Add Worstershire sauce (if you add the sauce before the beer, the sauce will burn, sending up blackish flecks as you stir, so I do not recommend it).

4. Now add the cheese and keep stirring until your efforts result in a smooth cheese sauce.

5. Pour into a bowl, large ramekin, or containing vessel of your choice. The rarebit sauce will cool into a solid mass, looking just like a cheese spread, which is precisely what it is. The sauce will keep covered in your refrigerator for several days, which is precisely the idea-- it's ready for you at a moment's notice.

6. When the moment has notified you sufficiently, slice your crusty bread to its desired thickness, place on a sheet pan and put it under a broiler. If you place the bread slices under your broiler and you notice that no change has occurred to them in several minutes, make sure your broiler's heating element is turned on-- listen to the voice of experience. Toast the slices well on one side, remove the pan from the oven and turn the bread over, replacing them under the broiler and toasting them less thoroughly than you have the previous side-- this will be the upside to your rarebit.

7. Spread a little of the now-solidified cheese onto your toast. This will adhere your apple slices to the bread. Arrange apple slices over the cheese.

8. At this point, I like to warm up a bit of the sauce in my microwave on low, to make it softer, therefore easier, to spread over the apple slices. Cover the apples generously with the cheese. Place the hopefully well-constructed toasts under the broiler. Do not remove them until the cheese bubbles and browns. If you have a conventional, broiler-on-the-bottom oven and your kitchen floor is clean enough, I might suggest lying down on the floor with one hand propping up your head and the other clad in an oven mitt, leaving the door of the broiler open a bit in order to get a good view of the action. If you are prosperous enough to have two oven mitts, I would suggest wearing the second one on the hand that supports your head for added comfort.

9. Remove the toasts from the oven when they have reached the desired doneness, transfer to a serving plate and sprinkle with the scallions. If you eat them immediately, the cheese will very likely burn the roof of your mouth. The time it takes to walk to you refrigerator, grab a beer and pop it open is sufficient cooling time.

Techniques of Healthy Cooking

2008-01-30T07:38:00.000-08:00

The Culinary Institute of America recently published the third edition of Techniques of Healthy Cooking. It's a massive tome, almost 600 pages long and provides a broad overview of nutritional basics such as current dietary guidelines, recipes planning, and recommendations for minimizing fat, salt, sugar and even alcohol in recipes. There are nearly 150 photographs and over 400 recipes, which yield between ten and twenty servings.

Not only is this a book for professional chefs but the recipes sound more like what you might find in a restaurant than a hospital dining room. Some examples include Grilled Veal with Blackberries and Vanilla, Rabbit and Oyster Etouffee, Duck Breast Crepinette, and Strawberry and Rhubarb Strudel. You can see excerpts from the book here.

I was curious how a culinary school might address nutrition, so I got in touch with Certified Executive Chef Eve Felder, Associate Dean for Culinary Arts at The Culinary Institute of America.

Felder has been a chef at Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkeley and has held just about every other role in the kitchen from Pastry Line Cook at the Quilted Giraffe in New York to Executive Chef at V. Mertz Restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska. She has traveled throughout Europe, the Far East, and North Africa studying the historical connection between the culinary traditions and agricultural practices of different cultures. She also won the first ever educator of the year award from Women Chefs and Restauranteurs, just last year.

Are healthy cooking techniques generally part of a CIA education?
Yes, The Culinary Institute of America approaches healthy food from various perspectives. The first is from the standpoint of ingredients. Are the ingredients sound? Are they seasonal? Have they been treated with care in terms of growing, receiving and preparing them for a meal.

The second is from the perspective of deliciousness. What do we do to ensure that a meal is delicious and healthy? What techniques can we use in cooking to enhance flavor? What ingredients from the global pantry are healthy and at the same time delicious?

Third, what is the responsibility, as a professional in the food service industry, to provide food that is healthy and good for you? This is much more of a philosophical discussion that we address not only in the college's kitchen and bakeshop classes but in our academic classes as well. Students at the CIA will ultimately be the leaders of the food service industry need to think about their social responsibilities.

What prompted the CIA to revise this book now?
The college's commitment to leading and providing the industry with a text that will elevate the way in which we think about food.

How is this book different from all the other healthy eating books out in the market?
All of The Culinary Institute of America's texts are written to address the needs of the chef, maitre d' and leaders in the foodservice business. The CIA's audience is not only the professional, but also food afficionados who have a curiosity that goes beyond simple recipes.

Chefs don't often have the healthiest diet, in part because of their career. Any tips specifically for chefs trying to live a more healthy lifestyle?
Come to the CIA! We not only address healthy cuisine in our curriculum but have a 52,000-square-foot recreation center.

Seriously, there are health liabilities to being a chef and it is vitally important that we embrace a balanced life that includes a commitment to exercising, reasonable work hours, and being aware of the long term consequences of eating poorly. Eating healthy is part of the discipline of cooking.

Usually, people have come to cooking because they have a passion for sharing the table and food. Once we've become a chef we have to reach back to what it means to sit down, enjoy a meal and enjoy the company of people.

Grace Cathedral, The Forum Podcasts

2008-01-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

Grace Cathedral is the eponymous "cathedral on a hill" in San Francisco. It's located on Nob Hill, and many of us have been there to see the beautiful Keith Haring altar at the AIDS Chapel, or to walk the labyrinth inside the church.

What I didn't know until recently is that Grace Cathedral hosts a Forum program each week before the Sunday service, and that the program is often focused on current news makers or people of interest.

The Forum, which is available in a podcast archive, often focuses on food issues and I have enjoyed the past season of speakers for that reason. It's a worthwhile podcast to subscribe to even if you pick and choose which speakers pertain to your interests.

In October, I went to Grace Cathedral to hear Dr. Jane Goodall speak. While Goodall is known foremost as a champion of animals and a teacher of the ways of primates, she is also an advocate for conscious eating and published a book called Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. At the Forum, Dr. Goodall spoke to the importance of food choices in the overall health of the planet, and I found her message challenging and inspiring at the same time. Dr. Goodall implored the audience to become vegetarian or at least eat free-range meat, saying "It's not widely known the extent to which the intensive farming of animals is damaging the environment. People don't want to know about the suffering and the cruelty that goes on within the intensive farms. "

A month or two later, Mollie Katzen visited the Forum. Katzen is the author of the Moosewood Cookbook and one of the founders of the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. She writes about vegetarian cooking and is credited with helping make vegetarianism a mainstream eating practice. Her interview was compelling due to her ties to the Bay Area, and the fact that she's a great speaker. Surprisingly, Katzen is not a strict vegetarian. She eats some meat, but her cooking is inspired by a fierce love for all things vegetable.

Last week, Michael Pollan visited The Forum. He is currently on book tour for his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. This was an informative hour, and it serves as an excellent overview of his book and his outlook on eating.

As an aside, my friend and colleague Bonnie Powell of Ethicurean will be interviewing Michael Pollan in a Slow Food event in Vacaville on February 7. You can find more information on the Ethicurean site.

The Grace Cathedral Forum schedule can be found on the cathedral website. You can attend the forum sessions in person for free on Sundays or can download them from the Internet. You can also listen over the Internet in real-time and email your questions to the moderator.

The Forum with Jane Goodall
The Forum with Mollie Katzen
the Forum with Michael Pollan