MISSION FOOD BLOG

2008-10-28T21:43:00.003+04:30

Alli and I have eaten at a lot of special restaurants, and I’ve blogged about some of them before. One thing we haven’t done is eat at a really, like, crazily high end place together. Poor folk, etc. But, armed with a gift certificate (holiday gift from Dan and Dalia. (Hi Dan and Dalia!) and on the occasion of Alli’s birthday, last night we went to Michael (fucking) Mina!

I just want to tell you what we ate there. But if you’ve never seen the place, it’s in the Westin St. Francis in Union Square. It’s totally beautiful inside. The service was absurd. and I mean also that I am a little uncomfortable with that level of professionalism, both in its sort of the-diner-is-royalty thing and in some of the actual aspects of it: its weird gender problems, its rigidity, etc. But I did really appreciate feeling like I could ask our person absolutely anything about what we were eating, and that he could talk about the food without condescension or the sense that we were annoying him with questions.

As far as the food goes, it is complete artistry. It may not have been the most meaningful restaurant experience I’ve ever had (though it was very much so), but it may have been the best food, all things considered.

Mina is known for serving “presentations”, generally three takes on a given ingredient. We chose to do a three course pris fixe, and luckily got to taste everything on each other’s plate. This isn’t cheap. The pris fixe is $100 at minimum (extras for treats: foie gras, crab, caviar, beef), but by the end of the night I was convinced that it is a bargain. I mean, including the amuse bouche and mignardise at the end, I had thirteen (flawless) courses. And since I bit off all of Alli’s and she mine, we each tried 22 dishes!

Before the pris fixe courses started rolling in, we both were given an amuse bouche. Of lobster and crab. Lobster and crab three ways. The ways: beautiful lobster salad with tail meat, celery spears, and buttons of watermelon radish (reminding me how good shellfish and celery are. shellfish and celery!), rich lobster consommé with tapioca, and finally a fried crab tortellini over a lemon aioli type sauce.

For the first course I had bacon-wrapped scallops in three different chowders: one with corn, jicama, sweet peppers; one with young leeks, Yukon potatoes in a cream sauce; one “Manhattan” chowder with tomato concasse and celery. Alli had the Dungeness crab presentation; poached claw wrapped in endives with three different sauces, two whole legs with one of the best sauces I have ever tasted, made of butter, crab stock, and espelette pepper; finally a cioppino, Mina-style, with backfin meat, squid, and tinkerbell peppers.

For the second course Alli had the “Bouillabaisse”, starting with pan-seared branzino with perfectly crisped skin over a fennel slaw and burnt bread aioli; a poached turbot with a lobster mousse and a saffron lobster hollandaise; finally, an arrangement of shellfish: a scallop, a tomato stuffed clam, and a tempura calamari with sauce pistou (French pesto). I went with the duck. And oh my god: crispy skin rare duck breast with parsnip puree, star anise jus, and roasted apples; seared foie gras with pink lady apples, apple puree, and this gorgeous sweet parsnip bread; and what really took me over the top: leg rillettes formed into a breaded and lightly fried cake, topped with apple butter and mesclun.

Finally, or almost finally: dessert. The theme of my dessert was floral chocolate, so it started with a white chocolate and rose petal panna cotta with hibiscus foam and crumbled macaroon, a S’more with saffron marshmallow and pistachio puree, and deep dark chocolate ice cream with lavender sauce and shortbread. Alli’s dessert presentation focused on quince, and I thought all three were even better than my chocolate desserts (though they were phenomenal). Hers started with a quince paste and something she described as halvah-like but unfortunately I can’t find or remember the dish too well; but I do remember well the orange blossom donuts with apple chip and quince jam and the quince cobbler with ginger ice cream.

The wine was gone, the cognac I had was gone, and with our check they brought us cold bon bons, one with white chocolate and rice, the other with dark chocolate and sesame.

I kept proclaiming near the end of our meal that it was the “perfect” amount of food, but it was actually a little too much, not that I’m complaining. I wouldn’t give back one of those 22 courses.

Again, when I think about the best restaurant experiences that I’ve had, this one really stands out. It’s not where I would go when I want to eat something (pork hearts, pig’s feet) I thought I could never prepare (that would be Incanto). It’s not where I would go when I want Tuscany in San Francisco (that’s Delfina). But it is utterly inspiring cooking. It’s the kind of meal that makes me want to spend the next month straight in markets and in the kitchen; it makes me want to buy fillets of fish, cut them into three pieces and make three different preparations and do this on like a Tuesday. It was beautiful.

p.s. the photo above depicts the bacon-wrapped scallops chowder, but, again, I didn't take it. Thanks anonymous flickr person!

showtime!

2008-06-12T03:21:00.000+04:30

I definitely didn’t grow up watching basketball. I always forget that Kansas City even had a team, and I was shocked to find that the barely-memorable Kansas City Kings (now safe in Sacto) played in my hometown from 1972-1985: why, I could have spent my first seven years watching them suck! Instead I watched the Royals (sorry, the awesome Royals) and in the winter, I dunno, I must have done my homework and slurped up plate after plate of Hamburger Helper™ (thanks mom, thanks dad).

But Alli is a Lakers fan, and I get it. Beyond even just being from the Los Angeles area, if I had been seven watching Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I’d probably be a basketball fan too. And even being a basketball fan isn’t necessary for enjoying a Lakers/Celtics NBA final—just liking sports at all will do it. Anyway, to celebrate the Lakers/Celtics final and try to achieve total triumph in gender role reversals, I cooked dinner while Alli watched the game on the couch.

On the walk to the market yesterday I decided that I wanted to do a yellow & green themed meal for the game. Green, I knew, would be pretty easy, but yellow? In early June? No problem. It really just came down to a decision between yellow crookneck squash and these early-season yellow heirloom tomatoes. When I ventured inside to check out the fish market and saw fresh, beautiful, yellowtail in the case, supper took shape.

So here you have it, Showtime Yellowtail “Fauxencal” with Lamb’s Quarters

Yellowtail is definitely not a fish I know anything about past the sushi bar. And the Interweb was not much help: it couldn’t even really tell me which sort of fish I had! But I could tell by the texture, and the color, even, that the fillet I had (I asked for a center cut) was going to be full of flavor, meaty, close in some respects to ahi tuna, and thus probably (hopefully) amenable to a take on Provencal preparation, with capers and tomatoes, olive oil and salt. The result was terrific. The acidity of the tomato sauce played against the meatiness of the fish, and the braised greens provided a spiciness which, paired with the sweetness of the tomato, was sublime. Oh, and absurdly simple.

for the greens. any greens would work. I actually used a combination of fava leaf and lamb’s quarters. I washed the greens well, let them drain for a few minutes over a bowl, and then chopped them into one inch or so strips. I heated a tablespoon or so of olive oil over medium-high heat until hot, added the greens, and tossed to coat in the oil. Season these with salt, and red pepper flakes (at your discretion, my taste is for lots), lower the heat and cover until they’re cooked—again at your discretion, I let them cook for about ten minutes and they were tender, and delicious).

for the sauce. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Slice a thin “X” in the bottom of the tomato and plunge into the water for 20-30 seconds. Let cool, and slip off the skin. Dice the tomato, making sure to save all seeds and pith and goodness. Then heat a tablespoon or so of olive oil over medium-low heat and add tomatoes, a healthy pinch or two of salt and pepper, and let cook. I cooked mine for about fifteen minutes, until the tomatoes were cooked through and the sauce had thickened into a semi-paste. Only when I turned off the head did I add a pinch of drained capers.

for the fish. I really was going to broil this guy, but decided to cook it in a pan instead, and the results were wonderful. There may be better instructions for cooking thick, belly pieces of yellowtail out there—let me know!—I had to improvise. I cut a 7 oz. fillet in half, and massaged the pieces all over with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and let it sit with oil and salt and pepper in the refrigerator for about an hour. When it was time to cook the fish, I heated up half a tablespoon of olive oil in a nonstick pan over medium-high/high heat until it was very hot. I added the fish skin side down, listened to it sizzle, and watched it cook for five minutes. The skin side was very brown and crispy. I turned it in the pan and let it cook on the flesh side for 90 seconds or so, no more. I also let the fillets rest for a few minutes before plating.

The Lakers won in thrilling fashion, making my supper second fiddle for Tuesday thrills, but it was a successful preparation! And yellowtail beyond the sushi bar, who knew? (Probably everyone. But now I know too.)

2008-06-05T02:19:00.002+04:30

So are any of you planning on participating in the Slow Food Nation events in late August?

I've been browsing the site this afternoon and, I mean, okay, look, it's all great. The day trips to the creameries of Marin sound totally awesome, "mysterious Bolinas," sure, etc. I guess the source of my confusion is about who these events are for. Will there be a big influx of foodie tourists from around the country coming to the Bay Area to eat slow? Is it mostly a chance for locals to see what's been in their own backyards all the time, just for $130-160? I'm completely with the politics of it, and undoubtedly will trek to the Civic Center on my Friday lunch break to see the (free) spectacle, but how will it be much different than, say, any Saturday at the Ferry Building?

I'm not asking any of this rhetorically, but seriously, I wonder?

If the idea is that San Francisco is a good inaugural place for such a festival, which will then move on to less like-minded regions, I get it. After all, it's a fitting time for me to be thinking about the Slow Food thing--I just got back from visiting Kansas City, Missouri. It's not that I eat so terribly when I visit there, there is a city cuisine that is terribly satisfying, artery-ruining, and greed-inducing. But the concepts which guide my everyday consumer choices as a Bay Area person interested in food and eating primarily, and the politics of food and eating secondarily, the trope of the "local," etc., are totally absent from food culture in a major Midwestern metropolis like KC. There are individual chefs and restaurants, from what I hear, interested in changing things. But the metropolitan area as a whole? Forget it. Which is why I think Kansas City would be a terrific place for Slow Food '09.

2008-05-27T23:10:00.002+04:30

There's a lot of long weekend highlights I could report about today. Cocktails at Beretta and Elixir, rye whiskey at Whiskey Thieves, the bistro hangar steak and the arista I made yesterday. But I'll have to stop short and reveal that this show is going on the road later this week, as I return to the land of my birth, Kansas City.

Just for a short, family-focused jaunt. But even given the brevity of my trip, I do hope to be looking at something a lot like the picture to my right while I'm there, as often as possible!

2008-05-21T23:06:00.000+04:30

I work in the Financial District in downtown San Francisco. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday there lies a daytime farmer’s market within lunch break’s radius—pretty hot stuff. Yesterday I walked down to the Ferry Building with the happy opportunity to improvise a night’s dinner. We had two boneless pork loin chops in the fridge and a small bag of Far West Fungi shiitakes, and the rest was up to me.

I thought I’d share this one for its ease, healthfulness, and deliciousness, though I know using boneless pork loin chops gets me no head to tail points for sustainability. Oh well. What I did is make a simple shiitake quinoa and fava leaf timbale, pan-grilled the pork chops and topped those with jus-tossed fiddlehead ferns.

Fava greens are becoming one of my favorite greens—that’s saying something, I love greens. Mustards, collards, kales, chards, sure. But part of the beauty of being a Mariquita Farms CSA subscriber is the terrific greens that come in our box: spigiarello kale, orach, agretti, different spinaches and bok choy. But for a weekly greens fix, the kind women who vend for Heirloom Organics at the Ferry Building are perfect. They had at least three kinds of spinach yesterday, plus arugula rabe, the fava leaves, orach, mustards, and more. But back to favas—they have just the right amount of bitterness and earthiness to complement the fiddleheads and the savory quinoa.

Here’s the recipe, more or less. I stemmed, rinsed, and sliced a cup or so of shiitake mushrooms, and sautéed them over med-high heat in a tablespoon of olive oil, until they softened and released their juices (about five minutes). I added a cup of well-rinsed quinoa, stirring to coat the grains in the oil and mushroom jus, and let cook for a conservative minute. Then I added a cup and a half of chicken stock, brought it to a simmer, covered the pot, and let that cook for fifteen minutes. After twelve or so, I noticed the liquid had receded too much and added a little bit of water, tasting the quinoa to check for doneness. That’s a better method than following a formula.

Meanwhile, I very simply washed the fava greens well. I heated one tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet, and added the leaves, again stirring them to coat each leaf. I reduced the heat to medium-low, and added two pinches of black smoked salt and a turn of pepper. At this point, you just keep your eye on them. When they’re tender, they’re done. It seems like you could keep cooking these nearly forever, if you wanted, and they’d be fine. You could also eat them raw. This is the epitome of easy cooking.

When the quinoa was cooked and the water was gone, I took the pot off the heat and let it rest, covered, for a couple of minutes. Then I seasoned the quinoa, and stirred in a tablespoon of sweetened butter. C’est tout.

This was actually a terrific side dish for the pork chop and the fiddleheads, but could almost be a (gasp) vegetarian meal in itself!

2008-05-20T21:15:00.000+04:30

I’m not trying on purpose to make this blog exclusively about cocktails, but I suppose I’ve been doing more drinking lately than cooking (pass the Advil), and, god, this is the city for it.

We went to an art opening and performance Saturday night in Hayes Valley, and the idea was to walk from our place and stop for a cocktail on the way. The place we stopped was Elixir, on 16^th and Guerrero, a bar I’d never been to, but knew was on the long list, at least, for interesting drink. We both selected drinks off the cocktail menu, and I was pretty ready for The Shirazerac, which purported to complicate the Sazerac (until later that night my favorite drink) with Shiraz. But there was a wrinkle. The bartender explained that the owner “hid” the ingredients, and that he didn’t know a) how to make the drink and b) where the ingredients for the drink were. (Cue sound of deflating balloon). Luckily, he could make Alli’s drink, a vodka/cucumber/kumquat thing that was nice and refreshing. But I decided, out of a strong desire to not make our bartender’s shift any more unpleasant, to try the house-aged tequila straight up. It was great, actually, and I found myself saying to Alli that I wanted to start trying to do this more often: when visiting terrific drink establishments (Alembic, Nopa, etc), I would try to expand my knowledge of spirits by trying them straight (bourbon, rye, tequila) or simply chilled (gin).

I was going to eat those words within the hour.

The walk from Elixir to Hayes Valley took way less time than I predicted, and we found ourselves with half an hour to kill. In Hayes Valley. Ugh. Sorry, Hayes Valleyans and fans. I worked for many years at a café/bar establishment there and while some of that experience (and the people involved) spark nostalgic good-feeling, mostly when I think of Hayes Valley my chest tightens and my mood plummets into my espresso-grimed shoes. Not interested in shopping for four hundred dollar shirts, I proposed having a beer at Suppenkuche, somewhat of an oasis. But it was horrendously packed, even at the early hour. So with 29 minutes left to kill, we decided to check out Absinthe.

We ran into friends there, and luckily it was not as congested, and the night was mild, so we were able to all sit outside. We shared the charcuterie plate (hurrah for the charcuterie plate and the best mortadella I’ve ever had (including in Italy—though the disclaimer for that is I didn’t eat too much of it there. It’s hard for me to pick mortadella over, uh, say, wild boar and fennel salami)) and instead of walking the walk and expanding my spirit-palate, I ordered the Bob-Tailed Nag at our server’s recommendation.

OMG.

Best. Cocktail. Ever.

Or not really, right? Like anything else, it’s wholly subjective. Really what I should say is, drinking at these places serves to teach me what I like, because I actually don’t know. Cooking, of course, teaches you the same thing. But not having access to the really overwhelming array of spirits and tinctures and bitters that are available, it takes time and effort, at least for me, to get a good grasp on which of those spirits and tinctures and bitters, and in what combinations with fruits, and vegetables, and herbs are most pleasing to me.

So it’s more correct to say that the Bob-Tailed Nag at Absinthe is exactly what I like, at least on a mild Saturday evening in May of 2008. I reserve the right to have my mind blown elsewhere. The BTN sort of alludes to two classic whiskey cocktails, the Manhattan and the Derby. It’s made from Michter’s Single Barrel Straight Rye, mint bitters, a lemon twist, and the surprise: Cocchi Barolo Chinato, an herbaceous Italian spirit that just moved to no. 1 on the must-have-around list. (This list, of course, now perfectly conforms to the recipe for the Bob-Tailed Nag.) Like any great cocktail, each of the ingredients lets its presence be known, and yet the sum is far greater than any of its parts. I’m sure Michter’s is fabulous in a glass with nothing else but air, and after I run out to buy mint bitters on my lunch break, I’m sure I can tell you that a chilled whiskey with vermouth is improved by the bitters. But in combination, this is an achievement.

I’ll remember this next time I do find myself in one of these places, these great places to drink. A spontaneous walk, a little luck, and these freaking genius half-scientist, half-artist people with aprons and shakers: they really can make life better than the sum of its parts.

2008-05-16T02:42:00.003+04:30

The CUESA cocktail event last night at the Ferry Building was a really terrific time. The “farmer’s market inspired cocktails” were actually perfect given the very unusual warmth and pleasantness for a mid-May in San Francisco. In a way, the organizers of this event were a little crazy—it was far more likely to be overcast or raining or cloudy or, you know, San Franciscesque—to have this event planned for the outdoors in the evening time. But the sun was out and it was warm, and many of the drinks featured seasonal fruits (strawberries, blackberries, rhubarb) and herbs (thyme, tarragon, the first basil!), which all lent themselves nicely to light, refreshing, fruit-forward cocktails.

I thought all of the cocktails were pretty good, with only one notable, and not-to-be-named, stinker (think college, vodka stink). But if I just had to choose a favorite, I’ll choose two. Josey Packard’s (Alembic, mise en place pictured above) “Morangoes e Cata”, an amazing concoction of cachaca, lemon juice, simple syrup, and drops of absinthe topped with a buckwheat honey whipped cream. The surprise of the experience was that just a little buckwheat was really present in the finished product—marvelous. But it’s not really a surprise that the drink was great. I’ve raved about Alembic on these vaunted pages before, and I’m always happy when Josey makes our drinks.

My other favorite, though it was not, decidedly, Alli’s favorite, was “The Jubilee Train,” created by Steven Liles of Boulevard. Heck, great cocktails at Boulevard? I had no idea (but, then again, why would I have an idea? My bank has a sensor that delivers a small electric shock to the back of my neck every time I entertain the notion of going to Boulevard). The Train consisted of Barsol Pisco, Luxardo Maraschino, lemon juice, fresh pressed cherry juice, dashes of orange bitters, and allspice dram. Ooh, allspice dram. My new favorite thing. Christmas in a bottle. I’m definitely investing in a bottle of this before the holidays. With bourbon or brandy as a base, this is going to be like a fireplace in a glass (these similes are lame. I’m sorry). But it did work in a summer drink, with the sweetness of the cherry, the puckeriness of the lemons, and finally the back-of-the-throat spiciness of the dram. Wow. It was good.

The next best part of the whole event, besides the luscious cocktails and awesome cocktail snacks (fava bean bruschetta, truffle grilled cheese, chilled potato and green garlic soup), was that each station offered a copy of the recipe for the drink. Did I mention that the bank also buzzes me when I compile a list of all the fancy liqueurs I’m contemplating buying? ZZZZZZ. But I’ll include one here—they won’t mind, this one was in the SF Chronicle as well. This drink, the Soiree, was the official drink of SF Cocktail Week, and one of two that the $15 entry fee entitled you to a full glass of.

The Soiree

1 ½ ounce Partida Blanco

¾ ounce Green Chartreuse

½ ounce St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur

½ ounce lemon juice

2 dashes Cinnamon Chile Tincture

Mint Leaf, for garnish

Combine first 5 ingredients in an ice filled mixing glass, and shake for 10 to 15 seconds or until well chilled. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and garnish with the mint leaf.

2008-05-14T21:04:00.000+04:30

“That’s our chef’s philosophy: waste not, want not”, said our server at Incanto Monday night. That’s the story of Incanto; and even though it’s most widely characterized by the inventive use of offal on its menu, one thing I truly love about Chef Chris Cosentino’s work there is that it doesn’t stop there.

We shared an antipasta of local, cured sardines with green peaches, capers, and carefully strewn celery leaves. The line our server used was, in fact, in reference to those green peaches (apparently pre-peach hard fruits that most farmers clear so their summer peaches are warmer and juicier). The thin, chewy slices of peach cut through the oiliness of the sardines perfectly, and also provided a color accompaniment to the capers and celery leaves. A beautiful dish.

Not wanting to have a full-blown (and wallet-blowing) dinner, we decided to share a couple of pastas. We had the pappardelle with lamb sugo, because that’s just irresistible, and the pork heart ravioli with pine nuts. This leads me to the second thing that I really love about Incanto. The ravioli were really good. Perfectly cooked pasta, the raw pine nuts a flavor foil for the meaty goodness of the pork heart. But truth be told the pappardelle was even better. The lamb sugo was made with mint and olives, and it was by far the best lamb/mint combination I’ve ever experienced. What I mean is that when I go to Incanto, of course I look at it as a way to try offal and other less typical cuts of meat cooked in an expert way, but the more traditional dishes are just as sublime. The range of the menu is actually quite wide: a (gulp) vegetarian could have a fantastic meal. I think I counted half of the antipasti as meat-free, and there were more than adequate choices of pasta and entrée.

Alli and I get kind of a kick out of the…is there a euphemism for this?..uh, relative unhipness of the space there. Incanto, décor-wise, is the diametric opposite of, say, Slanted Door. The big bright windows, the carpet, the kids, the elderly. As Alli pointed out, for the total youth and hipness of the cooking, the philosophy, and the diy salumi company, the atmosphere is decidedly different. But thinking of it now, it’s done in a way that’s a lot more in accord with the restaurants we loved in Italy. Delfina restaurant in San Francisco is about 150 years “ahead” of Ristorante Delfina in Artimino, in terms of restaurant architecture, but there is something very homey and pleasing about carpets and evening light and elderly patrons!

I think I’ve come to admire Cosentino’s work not only as your run-of-the-mill foodie and home cook, but also as a citizen. It seems to me to be wildly successful (the dining room was packed on a Monday night), and people were clearly pleased. The older couple next to us were getting an education in ingredients (“what are ramps?” “what’s agretti?”) as much as we were (“this is what pork heart tastes like”, “green peaches!”). And to gather these people into a real life economy of respect for produce and animals is a beautiful, and politically gratifying, gesture.

post script: I know that if you have a food blog, you’re supposed to take pictures when you go to restaurants, and not just steal some image of salumi from Google images. I know! But I just can’t do it. I can’t do it! To make it up to you, though, I will take some pictures of the cocktail week party at the Ferry Building tonight, that is, if I’m sober enough to point and click.

2008-05-14T01:31:00.002+04:30

Just a couple little notes:

Here's Hank on halibut cheeks (and the rest of the halibut)

Dinner at Incanto last night. I think I'll regale you with that little tale tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, we're going to the cocktail party at the ferry building. Are you going? I hope so!

2008-05-13T01:51:00.004+04:30

I think it’s only fair, since I obsessed at least twice on this blog about preparation for the dinner I served Saturday, to tell you how it went. Well. It went well. But not without a hitch!

I finally settled on an idea for the duck, but the real wrench was Friday after work finding out that my fishmonger did not get a catch of fresh anchovies. My plan was to do an overnight cure and serve them Zuni-style with nicoise olives, reggiano, and celery. But there was no time to canvass the city looking for fresh anchovies, so I resolved to go to the market Saturday morning and improvise.

Here’s the final menu:

Mango Bellini
Duck Rillettes Crostini
Halibut Cheek with Sea Urchin Roe and a Slice of Mango
Stinging Nettle Tagliatelle with Goat Sugo and Goat Cheese
Duck Two Ways: Seared Breast, Cabernet Reduction, Beluga Lentils; Duck-Fried Duck, Biscuit, Long-cooked Greens
Bay Leaf Panna Cotta, Candied Kumquats

Sea urchin roe. How did this happen?! How did I find myself at two in the afternoon, while the sugo bubbled away white wine and the Royals were losing, with a scary sea urchin and a knife? Like many good foolish things, a mixture of impetuosity and naïveté. On the BART to the ferry building I tried and tried to decide on something that would be seasonal and awesome and also light enough to ease my guests into all that pasta and meat and duck fat. Gazing over the beautiful spring produce, I thought to make a simple spring pea sformatino with some pea shoots and a thin slice of bottarga, that magical paste that eloquently accompanied the sformatino at Da Delfina.

Okay, so bottarga. Problem being the Italian deli and then the next fancy foods store I went into inside gave me blank looks, leading me to wonder if I was, like, radically mispronouncing bottarga (totally possible). I went into the fish market with the full knowledge that it was very unlikely that they would carry it, but it was worth a shot. And inside, they had these gorgeous halibut cheeks for at least a not-homely price. And sea urchin. I had a bag of halibut cheeks, I remembered the roe reminding me of a mango, so all right.

Sea urchin! In 2005, I spent a month in Greece. One of the first days there, my friend and guide Siarita took us swimming outside of Athens. She picked an urchin straight out of the sea, cut into it then and there, and expertly coaxed the sections of orange roe from the cavity, directly into her mouth. In my very stupid vegetarian way, I passed on trying it. This was my opportunity for atonement.

Still, I had no idea what to do with the thing. I did what any late-twenty-something American with a problem would do: I consulted YouTube. YouTube, the go to resource for R Kelly parodies, instructions on how to tie a cravat, and videos of young Japanese people ripping apart sea urchins on the beach.

It was fairly easy, in the end. I cut into the shell at the top, which is either the mouth or the anus (a distinction normally much more important), carefully chipped off the top, and with as much delicacy as I had in me, pulled the five orange gonads out with a spoon. The number was sheer luck: I was cooking for five, so each of us could taste one of the thick, delicious organs.

Everything else went pretty well, i.e. nothing caught on fire and nobody stormed away from the table, bitter at being a guinea pig in my lab of sea urchin horrors. I was especially happy with the goat sugo, which I let bubble for eight hours on the stove while the Royals lost and sea urchins were dismembered before my very eyes.

But I am sad to report that the bay leaf panna cotta? Totally did not work. I took Sam’s suggestion to heart and let the buttermilk steep with bay leaves, and I even added several sprigs of thyme to the cream in a vain attempt to convey any herbaceousness whatsoever. Luckily, buttermilk panna cotta is pretty good no matter what, and the kumquats were an adequate companion. If I could just be a fly on the wall in the kitchen at Incanto, I could do this better. Or, you know, if the pastry chef at Incanto wants to comment on this blog, anonymous comments are totally welcomed, and, in this case, encouraged!

2008-05-08T20:44:00.003+04:30

Monday will mark two years since one of my best friends, Parker Zane Allen, passed away. He died of lung cancer. He was only 26. Parker was a tremendous prose writer, and we met as peers when I was working on my undergraduate degree in creative writing. His last work, titled Dating Tips From the Gangland Massacre of the Heart, is a brilliant and beautiful collection of short pieces that together constitute a sort of history of one man’s adventures in love and relationship, but mediated by the objects around which those adventures took place. We do love, after all, in rooms, and parks, and cars, and hallways. And we do it with cassette tapes, and rope, and we do it with food.

Parker was also an amazing cook. When I started becoming interested in food and cooking, he was one of the only friends I had to talk with about it. He had worked in bakeries and restaurants since he was a teenager, and knew a lot about baking, and a lot about cooking. He taught me the five sauces!

I really think of Parker every day, and miss him terribly. Thinking of him obviously around this time of year.

Food makes rare appearances in Dating Tips, but below is one I think finds an appropriate place on the food blog. Until a publisher can be found for this really terrific work, this book exists as a little gift from one friend to another.

RICE

White, little, steam

Hot oil on the hand. She's cooking and you're cutting vegetables right next to her. You curse and drop the knife onto the board and there's a piece of zucchini stuck to the blade and the noise is just like a door shutting hard and the sliver of zucchini is so thin you can see the kitchen light shine on the metal so near underneath.

You say fuck a few times and it's punctuated by the wet sound of your sucking on the olive oil burning your skin.

Aw hell, she says and puts her hand on you, and she's still holding the spatula. The garlic hisses in the pan. You think of your skin making the same noise. You think of how awkward her hand feels with the lump of plastic between her and you, and you tell her to get that fucking shit away from me, you're getting more oil on me, even though she isn't, even though if she did it wouldn't really be hot, it would just be oil and that's really not a bother. Even if it got on your clothes. You don't really care about things like that anyway.
She made you a drink with vodka to make dinner with and your ice has melted down to little nuggets that all fit at the top of your glass. It's really hot in here. There's mist all over the windows, it's like car sex windows. It's like winter-breath. You go to the window and your drink makes noises, the sound only cheap glasses make, the kind where the glass would ring if it weren't so cramped. You still got your hand in your mouth. You trade it for a cigarette and you open the window. It makes a noise like a heavy drawer, like there's something really big out there.

It's just a spot on your hand, it's malformed, kind of like one of the ice cubes in your drink, kind of like an island country. But it's little and red and will be gone before you know it. You take a sip from your drink and it's hard and sweet all at once, but the alcohol feels nice, it feels like you swallowed a hum. You blow out a breath of smoke and you hear her chopping in the kitchen. This would be a good time to remember that you forgot to turn on the rice.

2008-05-06T19:43:00.002+04:30

For both ec- and gastronomic reasons, Alli and I like to bring a lunch to our day jobs, and for time reasons we often like to make more dinner than we should or could eat and call what’s leftover “lunch.” Well and good, right? But sometimes I feel almost a literal embarrassment at the riches; like, let me set the scene for you:

I’m in day job office kitchen, sitting at day job office kitchen table, eating a lunch of buttery beluga lentils, sautéed Mariquita agretti, and seared duck breast with a red wine sauce. Yum. Enter co-worker, with bag from Subway.

Co-worker: “Oh, what are you having for lunch?”

Brandon: (stammer, cough, blush) Just some…er…leftover…buttery beluga lentils, sautéed agretti, and seared duck breast with a red wine sauce.”

Co-worker: “…”

That’s often how it goes. This also has caused Alli discomfort—though I do get a kick of how she described being really embarrassed at work one time eating leftover braised oxtails: “It’s boy food!”

Discuss. Or to tide you over:

The bacon they truly crave, a response to PETA from Chef Chris Cosentino

A classic, on beefsteak. (Careful, this one's a PDF)

2008-05-05T22:36:00.003+04:30

I’m hosting a dinner on Saturday night. Now, despite the fact that this dinner is for my girlfriend, a coworker and his boyfriend, and an ex-coworker, all of whom are 1) awesome, 2) into food, 3) palatally adventurous, which should be a recipe for keywords like “casual,” “low key,” etc., I am already in full obsessive mode about it. And instead of obsessing privately, I figure, fuck, I have a food blog! So I can just obsess in public!

As mentioned, I’m almost totally eschewing the tried-and-true stick-with-what-you-do-best mantra. And rehearsing, and testing, and failing, and succeeding. But even this is complicated because I keep changing my mind about the menu; and not just the menu, but the belle of the ball (at least in theory), the, you know, last non-dessert course.

I’m pretty sure about the rest, though I reserve the right to panic on Friday night (or even Saturday morning) and pull a Rauschenbergian erasure on the whole thing. I’m pretty sure that the meal will start with a variation on the sidecar and leek tartare, followed by my take on Judy Rodger’s house-cured anchovies with nicoise olives, thinly sliced celery, and reggiano. I wanted to follow that with a springtime pasta, so I’m intending to make a stinging nettle tagliatelle and make a sugo, I think primarily with goat, that’s going to cook all day long. And at the very end I’m going to serve that goddamned bay leaf panna cotta, which will just scream bay leaf with every bite. Knock wood.

So, sound okay? Okay. But it’s the plate in between goat sugo and bay leaf panna cotta that I’ve gone back and forth about so many times. I decided that I wanted to do some kind of mixed grill, or low-rent-Michael-Mina rip off. At first I was going to try to work with my friend rabbit. I love rabbit, and I especially love rabbit cooked by Tuscans in Tuscany. Rabbit cooked by Brandon in the Mission is all right, but I kept getting the screaming night sweats about it not being all right enough. So, now, I’m pretty sure I’m going to present my friend duck.

As of the time of this post, I am not sure what I’ll do. I hope that it will involve the beautiful beluga lentils we bought at Rainbow Grocery this weekend, and I hope that it will involve sautéed arugula rabe. And I’m starting to have this perverse fantasy of making a duck liver pupusa. But there’s one thing I do know. Somewhere on that plate will be thin slices of duck breast cooked rare with a wine sauce.

Yesterday for supper I gave that a shot. This shot (of my shot) is my way of confessing that the breast was really medium rare, but which gave me a better sense of how to do it right Saturday. It was so simple, but (salivating blogger). I scored the skin of two breasts to make diamond patterns, seasoned them well, then sautéed them skin-side down over medium-high heat until the skin was brown and crisp, then turned the breasts and let them cook for four minutes. And that was it. This one will have another chance to shine, Saturday night. But its playmates are yet to be determined.

2008-05-02T22:52:00.003+04:30

When life hands you slightly sub-par pork tenderloin, make…just be really happy you signed up for Boccalone’s Tasty Salted Pig Parts! I can’t really figure out what happened to the gorgeous bright pink tenderloin I bought Sunday, but when it came out of the refrigerator Monday evening, it had decidedly decided to forgo being dinner, despite my intentions to roast it perfectly and serve it medium rare, sliced thinly, with a potentially excellent mustard-tarragon sauce.

But with one pig part having to go in the bin, it was a perfect opportunity to use Boccalone’s breakfast sausages. Everybody likes breakfast for dinner, right? The sausages were marvelous, with the slight sweetness you’d want from a breakfast sausage but complicated by orange juice and zest, which really made it. They would have been delicious, no doubt, with a poached egg and mimosa—but they did just fine with this goat-cheese quinoa and steamed Mariquita carrots tossed in butter and dill. I even went for a little tiny touch of that excellent mustard that would have gone into the potentially excellent mustard-tarragon sauce.

Alli was probably relieved for the breakfast sausages. Without those, I would have pushed hard for Boccalone Coppa di testa sandwiches. Mmmm. Coppa di testa sandwich.

We’re still new to each other, blog, but I feel okay confessing to you that I made the ~~grave, youthful, (forgive me, blog!) mistake of being~~ was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life. That’s 38%, roughly. God. But I am doing my best to make up for lost time, and Boccalone is really helping me out in this respect. Still, at the end of the day, that’s about four thousand days that I could have had duck confit instead of some unpleasant Tofurkey.

2008-04-30T20:57:00.003+04:30

I love cooking the whole fish. Alli bought this beautiful rainbow trout from the Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley for dinner, and I thought about it all day. But I also thought about a time that I wasn’t so into the whole fish, namely my entire childhood.

I grew up in a small town northwest of Kansas City, Missouri. We lived in “town”, but my grandparents lived on a farm a few miles east. The farm had bison, cows, a few pigs, beefalo (offspring of cow and bison), and a pond. I spent countless weekends on the farm as a kid, and long swaths of every summer, and a lot of that time sitting on the dock or standing on the banks of the pond fishing. The pond had crappie, some perch, was rumored to contain bass, but was mostly the home to catfish. I loved to fish; it was a great way to spend time with my grandfather, who would wake me up in the middle of the night so we could crawl down with our flashlights to see if the reels twitched. I could spend part of the morning hunting worms in the soil around the house, and the rest of the day dodging dragonflies and cowpies and hoping for a bite.

The problem was, ironically, getting the bite. My grandfather had a strict policy of you-catch-it you-clean-it, and so the fun ended at the precise moment it was supposed to come to its fruition, when the fish was on the hook. I could reel it in, but once the fish started flopping and suffocating in the dirt, I didn’t know what to do. I hated the feel of its skin, I hated having to pull the hook out of its cheek while it looked at me with its bulging, help-me eyes. And I really hated having to slice its belly open so its guts came out. The last time I did it, I found I had a mother cat with its eggs, and that was the end of my young fishing career.

Prior to that, though, once the fish was finally dead and cleaned, my grandmother would take over. She didn’t vary too much in her approach. Two inches of hot vegetable oil in a pan, the catfish filleted and those fillets covered in bread crumbs, and fried to oblivion.

That’s not how we cooked this rainbow trout last night. Just as one illustration (of many possible, don’t get me started on the vegetable [lack thereof] situation or the now-horrible reflections on the torture enacted upon perfectly beautiful steaks) of the difference between my gastronomical upbringing and my adult life. For this little (big) guy, I rinsed and dried the cavity well. After seasoning it, I put two very generous swabs of butter in the cavity and half a bunch of leftover tarragon. I cut our penultimate Meyer lemon into thin slices and covered the fish with them, then wrapped it en (tinfoil) papillote and baked it for 25 minutes at 375 degrees. With a little bit off braised red chard (to complement the pink flesh with a deep red and green), it was a perfect Spring dinner.

It came with its guts already out of the picture, thanks very much!

2008-04-29T22:30:00.005+04:30

I love this short recipe and narrative by Thomas Keller, "My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken." Thanks to Carol for the link.

And here's Mariquita Farm's Andy on Agretti.

2008-04-29T01:50:00.002+04:30

It’s part of my personality to take failure hard, so I am happy to say that I’m mostly free of that when it comes to failures in the kitchen. That’s assisted by the fact that most of the failures end up not only edible but, you know, pretty decent. The homemade pasta’s a little too dente? It’s still good! The gnocchi alla Romana that turned out like cheesy mush? I don’t hold anything against cheesy mush!!

But when there’s guests coming, I obsess a little. I have a really hard time with the very-good-idea-of-a-rule that you should make those dishes for guests that are tried and true, that are good and get better every time you make them, dishes you could make half asleep. Whenever I have the chance to cook for a group, that’s when I want to make exactly the opposite: what I’ve never made, have no idea how to make, are way beyond my comfort zone, dishes that will probably fall flat, and inevitably involve me approaching my fish and poultry person asking for something that nobody’s bought for two years. But anyway, this way I get to practice them.

In preparation for a dinner in a couple weeks, to my credit, I did come up with a seemingly simple idea for dessert: a bay leaf panna cotta with kumquats. (The dish belongs to Incanto, I’m just trying to rent it.) I’ve been really happy with desserts of the herbaceous or floral families lately, and think it will be a fairly light and different ending to the menu. But there’s a catch, and that is (guilty!) I don’t really know how to infuse cream with herbs. Last summer I tried at least three times to replicate the basil zabaglione we had with fresh strawberries at Delfina. Mariquita farms kept us in strawberries and basil, and I kept producing adequate-tasting but not-very-basil-ly zabagliones.

Time for a test run. I put together the most basic recipe for a panna cotta I could assemble from the cookbooks. I placed 2 ¼ tsp. gelatin in a small bowl and covered it with 1/8 c. cold water, and set the bowl aside.

Then, in a saucepan, I brought 1 ½ c. heavy cream, 3/8 c. sugar, 2 sections of zest from Mariquita Meyer Lemons, and bay leaves, to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Here’s the first crisis—how many bay leaves? Dried bay leaves, will they cut it?, or should I use finely ground bay leaf? Once the mixture had been brought to a simmer, I removed the pan from the heat and let it sit. But how long would it take? How long did it need to steep? I gave it half an hour, whisked in the gelatin and whisked vigorously to incorporate the gelatin smoothly. I removed the herb and zest, stirred in 2 ½ c. buttermilk, and strained the whole mixture through a sieve, filled small ramekins, and chilled them to set.

And the result? Good panna cotta! It was very smooth, creamy, delicious. It jiggled on the plate when I walked it from the refrigerator to the table just the way I wanted it to jiggle. But it was, alas, just, you know, not a bay leaf panna cotta. The buttermilk shone, but it did not have even the subtle herbaceous notes I was going for. Clearly there is some technique that I don’t have done—which is why I turn to you, six readers, to wonder if you have any feedback or suggestions?

2008-04-25T23:12:00.005+04:30

I went to Delfina restaurant in the Mission for the first time because person after person raved about it. But I went to Da Delfina ristorante in Tuscany because of a blog post. This one, to be specific.

Solociccia and Da Delfina were the only two places we made reservations for our whole trip, and our first night in Tuscany we drove to Artimino. The adventure began as soon as the journey there. Being technologically-dependent Americans, we MapQuested the route from the villa we were staying in (poor us) to the village of Artimino, apparently very near Firenze. The MapQuest promised us a thirty minute drive. The hosts at our villa said it would be at least an hour. We got dressed.

It was a disaster. Traffic circle after cursed traffic circle. And when we saw signs indicating that we were about to drive all the way into Firenze proper, panic. But as the sun started to go down, by a combination of cartological prowess and sheer luck, we found signs for Artimino. And promptly passed the lone road up the hill and went into some kind of forest where the road went from two lanes to one lane to no lanes. We persevered, and finally (finally!) made it to the top of the hill where the beautiful restaurant sat.

I had made reservations online for 7:00, using a sort of fake pieced-together Italian derived half from Babelfish and half from my Latin studies. Uh huh. So at 6:58 we walked from the car (the only one in the lot) up toward the restaurant. Inside, the staff of Da Delfina sat around a table eating dinner and talking and drinking wine. Okay, so we were early. We walked around the parking lot a little bit, looked at the stars, debated whether or not we should go in now or in five minutes or in ten minutes, and were both exhausted from the traffic-circle purgatory we had just been through.

At 7:15 I thought, okay, we can go in. We trepidly walked back to the door, and in. Forks froze, conversation stopped, and they all looked at us like, wtf? A young woman came up to us and I tried to stammer that I had a prenotazione in Itanglish. She asked what time, and I said 7:00. She said, impossible. This is bad. I gave her my name, and she looked on the roster of reservations, on which my name emphatically did not appear. This is the part where my stomach really sank—not only had we intruded upon a family dinner in this beautiful restaurant, not only had we driven for 90 minutes through insane traffic circles and into boar-laden (right?) woods, but now we were not even going to be able to eat at the restaurant for which we had gone to all the trouble.

But my stomach could rise again—she said I could make a reservation right then, and asked what time. 7:30? Sure thing. So we grazied her and went back out and sat in the car for 13 minutes and then gave it a couple extra minutes and then went back in at 7:33 for dinner. We were still the only ones there. She led us into the back dining room and we sat down at the table with a tiny scrap of paper that read “Brown, 19:30” on it. And then she gave us menus and left. And then we sat there.

The menu was terrific. My cockiness about being able to understand Italian food words took a blow, but hey, even that was terrific. The only weird thing was that we discussed the menu together at length, trying to decide what to order, and nobody came to check on us. Later, in hindsight, the only reason this seemed weird is that once again we were the dumb Americans barging in on their party. In the United States, if a server sits you and leaves you alone for 20 minutes, one automatically assumes that the server is out to get us and for which we must exact revenge in the form of depreciated gratuity. At Da Delfina, they were probably just having dessert and giving us time to figure it out. Or more likely, actually, they were doing something totally, beautifully logical: they were waiting for more people to arrive. Another couple came in and were seated next to us, and then a bigger party. And then it was like the gun went off and it was okay to go! Carlo came over and asked for our order.

We knew we were ordering too much food, but couldn’t stop ourselves. We had to order the Sformato di ceci con bottarga because it was at Delfina in the Mission that I had fallen in love with sformati. We had to order the Ribollita because if you have “Ribolitta Da Delfina” at Delfina in the Mission, then you have to order Ribolitta at Da Delfina in Artimino.

I wondered if Carlo knew the English word for cerva, the tempting ingredient in Pappardelle con ragu di cerva. He didn’t. But thankfully a deer’s head jutted out of the wall above our heads, so he could just gesture, and kindly smile: “cerva.” Uh huh. We ordered Fegatelli spiedo because it was at Delfina in the Mission that I had eaten a chicken liver spiedini that, still, is the only thing I’ve ever eaten which has brought tears to my eyes (the difference being that Da Delfina’s spiedo used pork liver, and was gigantic and amazing, but gigantic). And to add insult to injury, we ordered Contrafilleto in vino.

The sformato was made of chick peas, and had all of the creamy texture and savory depth I was hoping for. The bottarga was interesting—I didn’t know what it was—a strange pinkish, soft chip topping the sformato. (It’s grey mullet roe). Dish after dish came out, and it was all tremendous. We were all done after the pappardelle and the delicious, deep venison ragu. And then a huge piece of meat and gigantic pig livers came out. Which is why we smartly declined dessert, and stuck with a piccolo grappa and caffe. Our server (in sharp red tux) brought us some anyway, slices of a rosemary-walnut torta, with the texture of a pancake.

After we had done as much as we could do, we paid and steeled ourselves for what we knew could be a journey of many hours and traffic circles in the dark Tuscan night. It seemed altogether more conceivable, though, after that meal. On the way out, I tried to tell Carlo that we lived near Delfina in the Mission—capito, he said, capito. He communicated to me, and I don’t know how I can be so sure of this but I am sure, that normally Da Delfina is bustling with people (it was, in fact, pretty bustling by the time we left). Capito, I said (yeah right), capito.

As Alli came out the door Carlo followed her. He handed her an ashtray, it looked handmade and painted and read Da Delfina. Artimino. He said, “Signora, signora….don’t smoke.” We took our treasure and made it home in record time.

post script--I didn't take photos inside Da Delfina for the same reason I didn't at Solociccia the next night--part of me wishes I had them, sure, but in the moment, it would have seemed totally inappropriate to pull the camera out and photograph this stuff. I hope you and I will both forgive me and understand. Thank you.

2008-04-23T02:37:00.001+04:30

A few months ago I went with a couple friends on a cocktail tour. We started the night (okay, who am I kidding, more like the late afternoon) at Nopa, whose cocktails are tremendous in their own right. We had ambition, but our itinerary was vague and open to spontaneous revision, as any properly executed cocktail tour should be. So when the bartender at Nopa heard we were on a cocktail tour, he used persuasive speech to convince us that we had to try Alembic, on Haight Street.

Haight Street. Ugh. For the first four years I lived in San Francisco, I lived blocks away from it, and in the sleepy panhandle where my apartment was, Haight St. was pretty much it for staples. I had my first legal drink (Old Granddad) at a bar on Haight St., 75% of my dinners out, and certainly I had to trudge behind gawking tourists every single time I wanted to do any of it. And not just any tourists. Whatever sort of actual counterculture may have dwelt in the vicinity is beyond long gone—there’s not even a memory. It’s like Disneyland for middle class wannabe gutter punk / hippies and Kansans with a fantasy. Anyway, I was dubious.

In a way, though, despite the fact that Alembic is an amazing place, it doesn’t feel like it should be on Haight St. Alli and I say this to each other every time we go. I don’t know where it should be, except that I would continually lobby for a Mission branch out of selfish desire.

There’s a lot I could say about it: the bar snacks and actual dinner menu are exciting, the décor is charming, etc. But the real draw? The drinks. That first night I had a cocktail (no longer on the menu, sadly!) with whiskey and pine needle liqueur. Pine needle liqueur. It started with earth and oak and ended up literally with forest floor. Fantastic.

We went Saturday night and split two drinks. The first was a special, again, not on the regular menu. It featured an aged tequila, bitters, and smoked maple syrup. A terrific thing about Alembic is that by paying attention to their menu and combinations you can really learn a lot about complementary flavors with spirits. A standard on their menu combines a smoky element with tequila, and it really shone again here. For our second drink, we were pressed for time and decided to try one of the 15-20 gins they have on their menu. I told the bartender that I enjoyed floral, aromatic gins like Hendrick’s. He suggested we try Miller’s. A revelation! Impeccably smooth, with a bouquet of pure cucumber. Wonderful.

But after several visits, there is one drink that tops them all, and that is the Southern Exposure. The first time Alli and I had one, all other cocktails crumbled. It touched all the taste zones, and the savoriness and weirdness of the celery makes it 1) eminently drinkable (dangerous)! but 2) probably the most hunger-inducing cocktail possible. The recipe was printed in the newspaper, so I feel okay reproducing it here. We’ve tried it a couple of times with imperfect results—but even the imperfect version of this cocktail is a thing of beauty.

Southern Exposure

Makes 1 drink

1 1/2 ounces Junipero gin
-- Juice of half lime
3/4 ounce simple syrup
3/4 ounce fresh celery juice
7 or 8 mint leaves

Instructions: Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, shake vigorously for 20 seconds in sixteenth-note triplets. Double strain into chilled cocktail glass, wash your shaker and glass, garnish with single mint leaf, wipe sweaty brow, smile.

2008-04-16T23:05:00.003+04:30

The Scene At Boccalone

Even before eating at Incanto, I admired chef Chris Cosentino’s website and blog for his its demonstration of passion for meat, which includes the respectful raising, treatment, and slaughter of animals and using as much of them as possible. Eating there is really terrific. The menu, consisting of “rustic Italian cooking”, does highlight offal and “unusual” cuts of meat, but is truly diverse and can accommodate any diet. We’ve only been once, and we had a long and tremendous meal that included a flight of Toscana wines, stuffed peppers (it was late summer), a pig trotter cake, sublime chicken liver ravioli with aged balsamic, and a roasted goat leg with, if I remember, a sort of salsa verde, and finally a bay leaf panna cotta (which was also delicious, and testament to the range of Incanto’s staff).

So with this experience in mind, I’ve wanted to join the Salumi Society at Boccalone for months, the salumi company founded by Cosentino and Mark Pastore, the owners of Incanto. I mean, “tasty salted pig parts.” Uh huh. I don’t know what took me so long! But finally I signed up, and Saturday hopped the bus up to Noe Valley to pick up my first box.

While in the neighborhood, I visited the N.V. Farmer’s Market for some greens. The Market is kind of, what do you expect in Noe Valley?, cute, I guess. More strollers than vendors. I will confess that I was a little over-served of Franziskaner and bourbon the night before, and it was freaking hot on Saturday, and I was grouchy about the strollers and the dogs. I had to remind myself, though, that I was the visitor and should smile. So I smiled.

When I finally made it to Incanto, everything got better. First of all, as pictured below, the first thing you encounter is a table full of meat! That brightens anyone-not-vegetarian’s day. Three meats were out for sample, Ciccioli, or braised scraps of lean pork meat and skin, seasoned with garlic and rosemary; a delicious salami of “three peppers”, and prosciutto cotto, a treat I have a hard time passing up in any context. Terry, the staff on hand, gave me my box and went through it with me, describing all of the products and the best ways to use them. He was really affable, and maybe it was the weather but everybody seemed really happy to be in a room surrounded by tasty salted pig parts at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

There weren’t a lot of people there so early, but I imagine it becomes a little bit of a scene on “salumi Saturdays”. I really recommend checking it out! The box, by the way, came with a fennel-brown sugar salami (amazing), coppa di testa (head cheese, my first ever, so still waiting for sandwich time), capocollo (cured meat from the pig’s neck), and Italian sausages, which I roasted last night and served with cassoulet-style cannellini beans and Happy Boy farms rainbow chard, purchased from the Noe Valley Farmer’s market while dodging three strollers and a pack of dogs.

2008-04-14T23:14:00.005+04:30

Ribollita means “re-cooked.” Essentially a soup consisting of stale bread, vegetables, and beans, it fits into the category of classic “peasant” dishes. That’s the conventional story about ribollita anyway. The first real version I had was at Delfina, and “Ribollita ‘Da Delfina’” was not what one might expect if one expects soup. Ribollita ‘Da Delfina’ is a dense, dark brown cake; the bread, vegetables, and beans had virtually melted into one another, and left only their traces in color and texture: a sliver of orange carrot, a patch of cakiness from the bread. It was delicious, and also, I thought, an amazing vehicle for battuti, or mirepoix, or aromatics, however you want to say it.

Reading around recipes for ribollita mostly seem to refer to something more like a conventional soup. However, the two or three times I had ribollita in Tuscany, it was always in the dense, cakey style that Delfina used. When I decided to make ribollita for supper this weekend, I consulted recipes that I had in my library, but was so excited to find that Davina Cucina had printed Romeo Colzi’s Ribollita recipe, the “signature dish” and Trattoria Mario. I should say only briefly here that Trattoria Mario is one of my favorite places on this earth, and I not only begged Alli to go there for lunch every single day we were in Firenze, but likely weakened my case by never shutting up about Trattoria Mario. And we had had the ribollita at Trattoria Mario, and it was tremendous.

Ribollita takes at least two days to make. And part of the foundation is, of course, the bread. I decided that I wanted to try and use Tuscan-style bread for my ribollita. That might be against better judgment, because Tuscan bread is, uh, horrible (every place, even Tuscany, ought to be allowed one serious gastronomical disaster, no?). Again, this is not the moment to explore the myth and reality behind Tuscan bakers’ decision to make saltless bread. This is just the moment to reiterate that I enjoy bread with flavor, thanks, and Tuscan bread doesn’t have it.

But for ribollita, I thought it would be a fun experiment, so Friday night after work I made the dough for saltless bread. I combined 1 package active dry yeast with a little bit of lukewarm water until it looked foamy and smelled ready. To that I added 2 cups of warm water, mixed well, and added 5 cups of all purpose flour. I kneaded this dough by hand, and it only needed a little bit of extra flour for dusting, less than ¼ cup. I put this dough in a large bowl, covered with plastic wrap, in the refrigerator. Within an hour it had swelled, and by the next morning, despite my punching it down before bed, it was gigantic! It was as if salt had been a restraining force in all previous breads. I let the dough return to room temperature, and kneaded it a second time; then formed a (gigantic) loaf, put it on a sheet covered in parchment paper, and let it rise one last time, for an hour. I baked the loaf in a 395 degree oven for 30 minutes. It came out beautiful, and as it cooled on the rack it made a lot of noise!

The idea of the bread in ribollita is that it’s leftover and thus stale. So obviously it is a little weird to make fresh bread that one has no intention of eating at all; in that spirit I figured I must try at least one tiny slice of the inevitably disgusting flavorless loaf cooling in front of me. And, honestly? It was pretty good. It was way more flavorful than any bread I had in Tuscany. It was kind of an honest white sandwich bread, and hot out of the oven? No complaints. Anyway, it was doomed.

The second part of ribollita is to make the soup, also done the day before it’s reboiled. The soup is made by cooking 1 lb. of white beans until soft and saving the liquid. Then, sauté 2 finely chopped red onions in olive oil in a heavy-bottomed, large pot. When the onions are soft, after about 20 minutes, add a ladle of cooking water from the beans and let it stew for a minute or a two. Then add 1 thinly sliced head of cabbage (the recipe suggests whatever is seasonal—I went for a dark purple cabbage in homage to the hue at least of cavolo nero), 4 thinly sliced celery stalks, 4 thinly sliced carrots, ½ a cup of chopped parsley, and a bunch of basil, its leaves torn. This cooks for 20 minutes, covered. Then add half of the beans, and puree the other half. Add the puree, and leftover liquid from the beans. Stir. Add 2 tbsp. tomato paste, pinches of oregano, and season to taste with salt, pepper, and red pepper. At this point, the recipe calls for “water”. Since I knew I wanted my ribollita to end up very thick and dense, I added only enough water to cover the vegetables by ½ inch. I brought this to a boil and let it simmer for 90 minutes. Once it cooled, it too went into the refrigerator overnight.

Finally, yesterday, with the soup’s flavors mingled and the saltless bread stale, it was time to make ribollita. I reheated the soup very slowly over low-medium heat until periodic bubbles rose to the surface, and then added the bread, torn into chunks and placed in layers. I used almost that whole gigantic loaf of bread, and then as I brought the soup to a boil, stirred constantly until the bread broke apart and became what the recipe called a “cream.” The recipe also suggested that one could add more water or bean broth at this point, but I wanted this soup to cook down into the cakey texture I had loved so much at Delfina and Trattoria Mario.

After the soup had simmered for an hour or so, I poured it into a glass roasting pan, drizzled olive oil on the top, and browned it in a very hot oven for 10 minutes. The result? It was really, really good. The vegetables had disintegrated, except for, as I remembered, traces of orange carrot and black specks which were remnants of the cabbage. The texture was thick, and the flavor very deep.

Really the only downside to the entire experience was that it turned into summer for a weekend in San Francisco and, at 80 degrees outside and what felt like 120 inside, it was just far too hot to eat ribollita. But as a dish that’s entirely forgiving of variation and instincts on the part of whoever cooks it, it was totally pleasurable to make and eat. Which we’ll be doing for, you know, at least four days, so we’re lucky for that! And we do live in San Francisco, after all, so it could easily be wintry enough any minute, and the re-reboiled ribollita a perfect comforting accompaniment to a freezing day.

2008-04-12T00:51:00.003+04:30

(I want to occasionally write about local and non-local food places that I love on the blog. They're not paying me.)

I am really fortunate to have an outstanding resource for fish and poultry right in my own neighborhood (Bob’s fish market at the Mission Market on 22^nd street and Mission), but one thing that I’ve always found lacking in the Mission is a great butcher.

When I visited the Antica Macelleria in Panzano, I totally had a fleeting fantasy of being the one to open that shop, part-butcher shop, part-meat library, part social gathering place. The fantasy buzz faded, though, and gave way to images of hipsters getting wasted on the house wine, a line of homeless people forming to eat free arista rather than the plates at Glide, and, you know, abject failure stemming from a faulty business plan.

Avedano's Holly Park Meat Market isn’t the Antica Macelleria, nor is it truly in the Mission, but it is a really remarkable place, and I am glad for its existence. I first read about the shop in Meatpaper, an SF-based magazine devoted to “meat culture”, which included an interview with the three women who founded and operate Avedano's.

In addition to a few baskets of really beautiful produce and jars of interesting condiments and jams, as well as a couple small refrigerators with cheese, cured meats (some from Boccalone), and pates, the long case always has something exciting. Very fresh fish, whole and filleted; sustainably sourced beef, lamb, pork, poultry, and usually something like fresh duck breasts or fresh quail. But what’s even better is the flexibility and service. I called a couple weeks ago needing a bone-in pork loin chop, and even though they had one in the store they could cut for me, the counter person told me I could always call with a couple days notice and they could set me up. I noticed when I went in to pick up the pork a grass-fed veal liver in the case. If I hadn’t already done a lot of prep for the pork, it would have been really fun to work with that!

I’m really already close to living the dream. Maybe I’ll move to Bernal Heights or Avedano's will open Avedano's 2 on South Van Ness, and I can start having my paychecks direct deposited there. Meanwhile, hurrah for women-owned butcher shops within (kind of long) walking distance, and hurrah for Avedano's!

2008-04-11T03:34:00.003+04:30

Without much provocation, you might find me singing the praises of Two Small Farms CSA, a box brought about by a collaboration between High Ground Organics and Mariquita Farms, both near Santa Cruz. We subscribed to the TSF box for most of last summer and fall, and suffered through the winter, when the CSA goes dark for a couple of months. One of the many terrific things about TSF is the dedication the farmers have to exploring new crops, heirloom varietals of seeds, and vegetables popular in European and Latin American markets but widely unknown, and used by American home cooks. For example, last week we got cardoons, which Alli and I saw in markets in Italy but had never eaten, much less cooked.

But the real prize of the infant spring season for me was the greens called agretti that showed up two weeks ago. Agretti, also known as barba di frate (“the friar’s beard”) looked like chives but even grassier, and when cooked were utterly delicious and interesting: a little sour, as the name implies, but a perfect vehicle for scant salt, red pepper, and olive oil. Our farmer claims that agretti are the edible, baby form of tumbleweeds. Far out!

Another, more predictable (hippie) aspect of the farm service is that at the pick-up spot near our house there’s a box for trades. Inevitably there’s going to be somebody who, whatever, hates fennel or something, so they can drop their fennel in the box and pick up arugula, which somebody else hated. We don’t really hate anything, but how stoked was I when, yesterday, I found two bags of agretti in the trade box!! Ciao, delicious but omnipresent salad greens.

2008-04-11T02:58:00.004+04:30

Since becoming seriously interested in cooking and food over the last couple of years, I have been lucky and/or financially reckless enough to eat at some pretty amazing restaurants. So it’s with some hesitation but not really reservation that I say that the best restaurant experience I have ever had was at a restaurant called Solociccia, in Panzano in Chianti last month.

I found it almost by accident. I knew that I wanted to visit Panzano, and the butcher shop owned by Dario Cecchini, made famous by Bill Buford’s book Heat. Buford presents a portrait, or possibly a caricature, of Cecchini as a madman who was possibly the most knowledgeable butcher in the world. The “mad” part, by the way, had a lot to do with Cecchini’s obsession with Dante, and his ability to recite from the Commedia at length. But the description of the shop, and the butcher, and the town, was intriguing. When I was doing research about how to find the shop and Panzano in Chianti, I found that Dario had opened a restaurant, called Solociccia, or “only meat.” The website had one link, called “RULES” in English. The rules:

“This is not a restaurant. It is the home of a butcher. All that you will eat is the fruit of my work and that of my family. You will not choose from a menu, though you will be treated well, and with great respect, if you return the favor. You will eat at a communal table, together in “convivio.” There will be six meat courses, chosen at my discretion, with seasonal vegetables, white beans with olive oil, foccacia bread, wine cake, coffee, and after dinner liquors. All of the above is to be had for 30 euro, with nearly two hours at our table, at the end of which you will turn over your seat to the next guests. We do not serve steak. We are open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings with seatings at 7:00 and 9:00 pm, on Sunday we sit down for lunch at 1:00 pm. In closing, please be aware that everything: the food, the wine the space and we ourselves are for better or worse…thoroughly Tuscan. P.S. Please feel free to bring your own wine without corkage fee. Welcome. (If you dare!).”

Uh huh.

So I made reservations.

We planned on visiting Panzano and the shop a little before our dinner but as we were driving towards where we were staying I saw a sign for Panzano, 6 kilometers away! And I persuaded Alli to go. The shop was amazing. It was small. Walking in, to the left was the butcher’s case which had several cuts of meat, olives, and a huge bowl full of lardo (Alli’s favorite). On the other side, a long table, with huge serving platters, holding meatballs and spicy jam, tons of lardo and baguette, finocchiona, and huge decanters of wine and glasses. Next to that was a stool with the massive arista pictured here. Dario himself was having his picture taken by some Brits, and when they left he grumbled a little and then went over to slice the arista. I asked him if they were porchetta, and he explained in fair English that porchetta is the whole pig, but this was arista (I would learn how utterly delicious arista is later, at other places). The other person working was a young woman, and I think she noticed that Alli and I were a little hesitant, so she came over and poured us glasses of wine, and said, Eat! So we did. And it was superlative, all of it.

So I had a feeling that Solociccia was not going to be disappointing.

We went the next night, driving on a dirt road (that in the States would have no name, but was called Santa Maria Macerata), and got to Panzano early. We hung out at a bar across the street and had a couple aperitifs, and then went over. One thing the RULES didn’t state is that there are only two tables, in two separate rooms. And also that the meal doesn’t begin until everyone is there. We walked in behind a group of four young Americans, and for one second I wondered if we hadn’t ended up at a fake restaurant, you know, a tourist trap for blithering foodies who thought they had found Disneyland Toscana. It wasn’t to be. We were seated at a table with eight Italians, two couples, a pair of women (aunt, niece or something), and a pair of older men.

On the table already were a couple of courses: pinzimonio di verdure dell’orto, or I guess seasonal vegetables. This was thinly sliced fennel, carrots, ack, I’m forgetting, other things. Also the pane di Panzano, or typically saltless Tuscan bread. We were the only ones who had taken Dario up on the wine-with-no-corkage, so the waiter handed me a corkscrew and two glasses. I opened up a very delicious bottle of Classico. Quickly, once everyone at our table was seated, a bell rang and the waiter walked over to a stainless steel dumbwaiter on the wall. This bell would come to mean only good things: rumblings from the meat basement. He brought us the first course, crostini di sugo all’uso di Natale. I can’t find an adequate translation, but essentially they were fluffy pieces of bread completely covered in a meat sauce. The crostini were served on two large platters, and the waiter handed them to people at the table to take as much as they wanted, and then pass. Everyone did. The crostini were far from subtle, and they were terrific. And maybe that’s the first time I really realized that something we were in for something different at Solociccia. Not only the take-some-and-pass-it-down thing, though I can hardly see that working out too well at the Cracker Barrel or any other all-you-can-and-by-can-we-mean-can-eat hovel. It was the presentation. Or the lack of presentation. It’s bread and meat sauce. That’s it. Eat it.

Our waiter when he brought the courses announced the name of the course and then came over to Alli and I and tried to provide a translation, which was very appreciated if sometimes misleading. The people at the table, who had started by pretty much chatting with their dinner partner, started to all talk to each other. They laughed a lot. One of the couples had a dog with them. Now and then Alli caught them feeding the dog from the table. Luckiest dog, uh, ever.

Ring ring went the dumbwaiter and the next course was brought out, fritto del macellaio, which I think I can translate as “Fried stuff a butcher makes.” Amazing, totally not greasy but altogether fried onion, whole sage leaves (a revelation), chicken fried pork cutlets, and small breaded meatballs that burst with lemon when you bit into them. When the waiter came with the third course and announced the name, ramerino in culo, everyone laughed. We laughed too but didn’t know why. The waiter told us, “it means, uh, um, rosemary…rosemary in the behind.” So the third dish, Rosemary In The Ass, was a small ball of ground beef, with a rosemary sprig stuck in one end, and the other end seared, for what was obviously a very brief amount of time; enough to make one side slightly gray. The ass end, with the rosemary sprig, was raw. And awesome.

Another thing to point out, we weren’t too full already, like we would be in an American restaurant. The genius of take-what-you-want-pass-it-down is that you really can just take what you want. I only needed a few bites of fried things a butcher makes, and I really only needed one raw beef ball. Don’t get me wrong—they were perfect, but it was also perfect to have a little bite (I’m reminded by way of a negative example of a really nice lunch place I went to one time in Healdsburg at which I ordered chicken livers, because, you know, I’m all about them. The owner himself brought them to me and said, “And here’s the best thing on the menu” and I’m all about them except it was a gigantic plate full of chicken livers in a thick balsamic sauce which, again, were awesome, but I could eat about ¼ of it.)

It did already feel, though, like a bit of a marathon by the time muscolini alla salvia came out, a braised pork butt (Alli pointed out that it reminded her of carnitas) with tons of sage. And then possibly my favorite course, tenerumi in insalata, which the waiter said was “Boiled beef with salsa,” but deserves a better explanation. Tenerumi are tendons, and the beef parts were cartilaginous but not squishy, and seasoned lightly, so the flavor of the tendons came out and provided a foil to the salsa verde-ish insalata of fennel, celery, carrots, and onions. Finally, we were served braciole rifatte, which unlike the American braciole (braJOL), consisted of thin slices of breaded beef in a spicy tomato sauce full of capers.

Okay.

So we ate all the courses and they were all terrific, and all the plates were still on the table in case anybody wanted to revisit anything, which people did as they pleased. When everything was done, a basket of olive oil cake was brought over and everyone had a slice. The hostess asked us if wanted caffe. Half of us did. Then she brought three liters of liquor and put them on the table and gave everybody a clean glass.

All right. Imagine this happening, uh, anywhere in the United States. Having trouble? Right. The bottles were three different kinds of liqueur, one was grappa, another slightly sweet but unidentifiable, another totally unidentifiable but our favorite. Everybody tried all three, and while I definitely sensed at the end of this round of drinks that everybody was a little bit tipsy, nobody, like, had a chugging contest or asked their friend to turn them upside down for a keg stand. It was moderately consumed. It was consumed in the way it was meant to be consumed: take what you want, pass it down. You didn’t pay for it, necessarily, so there wasn’t an anxiety to finish. It was the perfect ending.

I think the best way to illustrate how profoundly unique this was, though, is to say that when I walked out of the little room with our table in it, I was completely shocked to find that we had to pay for our meal. I don’t mean that I didn’t know beforehand that the meal cost 30 euro, after all, that was in the rules. But at some point in the almost two hours we spent at the butcher’s table, Alli and I both forgot that we were even at a restaurant.

At some point, Dario charged into our room to ask everyone tutti bene? Bene bene bene, that was the chorus. He smiled tipsily, acknowledged that all was indeed good, and left. And it was good, all of it.