Save Me, San Francisco
May 17, 2011 § Leave a comment
Word is that it snowed at Tahoe this Sunday. Maybe so. But it sure rained in the city. We hit the finish line at Bay to Breakers — I was dressed as a bumblebee and hooked into a centipede with twelve other runners — and the sprinkles started. Sprinkles turned into downpour the next day and now the sidewalks are sheathed in water in the middle of May. A predictable “only in San Francisco” ending to a quintessentially San Francisco weekend.
We started it off with a pizza tasting at Coffee Bar. Four street pizza crews — Pizza Politana, Fist of Flour, Copper Top Ovens and Casey’s Pizza — descended on the light, airy, working café on an unexpected corner of the Mission-Potrero Hill merge to engage each other in a street-side, pizza throw down for charity. Twelve dollars got you four slices of pizza and a glass of wine or beer. We warmed up by the barbeque-housing-pizza-stone ovens at Casey’s Pizza while waiting for our margarita and lusting over their white spring onion pie. Another favorite was the Xtra-Xtra pie from Pizza Politana with chilies and spicy olives.
The eating continued the next day, this time with me on the other side of the table. The food blogging world came together for a spectacular bake sale Saturday morning, complete with gold-sparkled chocolate hazelnut macarons, red velvet cupcakes, vanilla bean salted caramels, tri-colored mochi, various vegan and gluten-free quick breads and pear-almond tarts. I made Italian plum-walnut frangipane tarts and black and white checkerboard cookies (more on these later), packaged with colorful, curled ribbons. And then I sat behind the table for an hour so, coaxing 5-year-olds out of snatching up the chocolate chip cookies without doing a complete tour of the room first.
And then it was off to the New Taste Marketplace, where many up-and-coming food entrepreneurs in the city showcase their creations. I finally met Kai of NoshThis, the genius behind bacon crack. Don’t know what that is? Crunchy, pralined bacon bits covered in dark chocolate. Look him up, consider yourself warned. He was also selling salt and black pepper caramels and Irish coffee on a stick, which I was convinced into adding to my bag. I also bombarded the girls at A Humble Plate, who were making Lao sausage sliders. I’m not normally a sausage fan and I recently went back to being vegetarian so I couldn’t order any but my memories of Lao sausage as not likely to be wiped from my mind anytime soon, so I enthusiastically forced a slider on our obliging weekend guest.
Sunday evening saw us at a wine tasting benefit for the Italian Institute. Hidden on a small alleyway at the foot of North Beach, the Institute holds daytime and nighttime Italian classes of all levels. I ran into my Italian teacher at the door, sampled several white wines and ate plenty of tuna tartare toasts before we snagged a quick dinner at the bar at Bix next door.
And more on a random note but also things that made me very happy this weekend. I succumbed to Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets at a local bookstore this weekend so there will be lots of pastries in the future. And the weekend was that much sweeter with the discovery Saturday evening that local corn on the cob is finally in season.
Cornmeal shortbread for windy sea days
April 7, 2011 § 3 Comments
After a couple of months of floating around, sort of doing one thing, starting another, the rest of my life until the start of school in September is all but laid in stone. Plane tickets are bought, apartment secured, various bureaucratic forms being sent in. It’s a little surreal — at the start, the idea of having a whole year seems so long and then I got swept up and suddenly I have it all planned out down to the last day. It seems I have a thousand documents open at once: draft articles for my new column, writing samples for journalism seminars, and finally, I’m pouring through past journals, filled with fiction stories and trying to edit, but failing that because well, they’re not really fiction and I’m not really ready to see an editor.
My spring is filled with half-thoughts, ideas that will be realized simply because I have deadlines that need to be met. Meanwhile San Francisco seems to be similarly indecisive about what time it is. The blazing hot afternoon softly melts into evening at the top of my hill. Dogs that I often trip over dart around the dusty paths and I pass the same people over and over again as I complete the sixth mile repeat. There’s something eerie at the shorelines blurring by as I run, at any second in time a different shore of the bay appears across the crosshatch of streets. As the sky darkens, a couple of lights begin to appear among the houses, outlining the city in gold. And then the wind comes out in full force, bringing runners to a standstill, burning the skin with frosty gusts.
The end-all-be-all in non-poetic language is that I am leaving for Prague in about two months, right after the Taste of Mendocino Public Tasting (follow @tasteofmendo), which I strongly urge you all to attend here in San Francisco. It’ll be packed full of wine tastings, food vendors and haystacks and promises to be a good time. Kind of like a weekend away in the country, just a bit more condensed and uhhh…it doesn’t require you to actually leave for the country.
These cornmeal shortbread are a bit of a rustic take on shortbread. I would recommend using superfine cornmeal, though the recipe doesn’t specify. We loved the grainy texture of the cornmeal but could have done without the couple hard crunches. Finally, the recipe says to pipe the dough into spirals using a pastry tip. My dough came to a thick, normal shortbread consistency, that absolutely would not have supported being piped through anything. So, I used the roll and cut method, which worked just fine.
Cornmeal Cookies
Adapted from Saveur
2 1/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cornmeal
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest
21 tbsp. (1/2 lb. plus 5 tbsp.) butter, softened
2 egg yolks
Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, and lemon zest in a large bowl. Add butter and egg yolks. Use your fingers to work the butter and egg yolks into the dry mixture until you get an even crumb. Turn the crumbly dough out onto a clean counter and knead into a soft, smooth ball. Place the ball of dough back into the bowl and cover with a clean damp cloth for about an hour.
Preheat oven to 300°. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper. Lightly dust a clean work surface. Roll out to dough to a 1/4-inch thick. Cut out cookies using shapes of your choice and place on parchment paper. Bake cookies for 25-30 minutes or until lightly golden browned. Transfer cookies to racks to cool.
Send a little sugar to Japan
April 1, 2011 § 1 Comment
I wasn’t really planning on posting about Japan. Mainly because whenever something disastrous happens, I sort of clam up and never know what to say. And then I start feeling like there’s nothing I really can say that will actually help, so then I end up saying nothing at all. The suddenness, the shock of it all, the horror of waking up the next morning to tsunami warnings in my own city and then reading in the paper about entire towns and homes being swept away in the water. The idea that one minute you’re on land and the next you’re at sea became terrifyingly real before the world’s eyes. But even people who aren’t the most articulate when it comes to facing natural disasters head on can still lend a hand. For me, it came in the form of baking. And baking comfort food, food that it hasn’t really occurred to me to make since I started writing about food. Batches and batches of brownies came out of my oven, some studded with milk chocolate chips, some swirled with salted caramel and bacon, blondies with coarsely chopped pistachios. Chopped into squares. Packaged up. Tied with a bow. Quiet, peaceful, calming. Put in a cardboard box and delivered to the Bake Sale for Japan at 18 Reasons.
The food community has always struck me as an amazingly cohesive group, despite our vastly varying interests, causes and talents. In it are active, relentless organizers like the lovely Samin Nosrat, and always plenty of people that spring on any request for help or advice. The particular event I am talking about, the Bake Sale for Japan, will take place at locations across the nation tomorrow afternoon, including two in my hometown of San Francisco. There will be simultaneous bake sales in big cities like LA, NYC, Boston, Washington DC, Austin and Chicago among other locations stretching from coast to coast, from Maui to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Donations will go to Peace Winds Japan. They are accepting donations of baked goods from amateur and professional bakers alike. It’s not too late to donate! And it’s certainly not too late to stop by one of our many locations tomorrow and pick up something sweet — and send a sweet gift to relieve those who suddenly find themselves in need of a little help.
I left my cart in San Francisco
August 21, 2010 § 3 Comments
Well, I am officially home in San Francisco, a day earlier than I had originally planned. I spent my last week in DC alone in the Georgetown townhouse. The quiet was slightly eerie and because my key to the front door stopped working, I had to enter the house through the back alley every night, where the rats come out after dark. I never got a fully coherent explanation of why the otherwise very nice neighborhood is overrun with rats; this will be the subject of further research. But needless to say, when I had the opportunity to leave for my week home a day early, I jumped on it. Especially since it would mean being able to go to the Street Food Festival today on Folsom.
But as much I wanted to be home, it seems like someone doesn’t want me here. First, United lost my luggage. Luckily, I had only checked one bag with running clothes and cooking magazines. Then, a plywood sign like the one below fell on my and my brother’s heads at the Festival this morning when we stopped to look at “I left my (cart) in San Francisco” T-shirts. As such, we were not in the mood to walk the last block of food carts, which was packed full of mini red velvet cupcakes and chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches — the dessert block —, and instead chose to walk home through the Mission with ice on our heads. We already had the one dessert we were looking for — crème brulée from the Crème Brulée Cart, which I have only been following on Twitter for a year and had yet to pay a visit. Thick and creamy Mexican chocolate and vanilla bean brulées topped off a lunch of curry-fried chickpeas, papusas, veggie empanadas and spinach and cheese pirozhki. Yum. I am so glad to be home.
And…the fire alarm just goes off in my house as my family sautées salmon for dinner. Got to go.
Also, I just realized that you can like and tweet my blog posts. Cool?
Soufflé Days 