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!

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!

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.

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.

“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.

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!

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!

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.

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)

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.

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.