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Recipe for the rain / Escabeche

23 February 2010 in food, ideas | No comments

Escabeche

(Also known as those pickled vegetables from the taco truck.) ... Mara made some this weekend, and I’ve basically been living on it for the last three days. The recipe originated in The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, but we found a previously adapted version at Simply Recipes. ¡Horale! ¡Vamos a do this!

Ingredients

1 lb jalapeño (and serrano if you wish) chile peppers
1/3 cup olive oil
2 – 3 medium white or yellow onions, thickly sliced
2 – 3 medium carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
Florets from half a small cauliflower (optional)
1 head garlic, cloves separated but not peeled
4 cups apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp Kosher salt or sea salt
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 sprigs of fresh marjoram or 1/4 teaspoon dried
4 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1/4 teaspoon dried
1 Tbsp sugar

Method

  1. Wash the chiles, leaving the stems intact. Cut a cross in the tip end of each chile so that the vinegar will be able to penetrate the chile.

  2. Heat oil in a large, deep skillet. Add the chiles, onions, carrots, cauliflower if using, and garlic. Fry over medium heat for about 10 minutes, turning them over occasionally.

  3. Add the vinegar, salt, herbs, and sugar and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes for serranos or 10 minutes for jalapeños. Make sure the chiles are entirely cooked through before canning.

  4. Pack 4 pint-sized sterilized jars with the chiles and vegetables. Top with the vinegar and seal. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Once opened, can keep for one to two months in the refrigerator.

Beefsteak!

19 January 2010 in food, new york | 1 comment

Even though I’m generally a West Coast kind of guy, I devour books about New York — its chaotic beginnings as a lawless, crazy quilt of neighborhoods and gangs; its transformation into a massive modern city; the peculiar dynamics of its organic growth. If New York didn’t destroy me everytime I visit, I think I’d probably live there.

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker’s Twitter stream pointed me to an excellent Joseph Mitchell essay about a (mostly) vanished New York tradition, the beefsteak. Mitchell laid out the basics in his classic 1939 essay, “All You Can Hold For Five Bucks:”

The foundation of a good beefsteak is an overflowing amount of meat and beer. The tickets usually cost five bucks, and the rule is “All you can hold for five bucks.” If you’re able to hold a little more when you start home, you haven’t been to a beefsteak, you’ve been to a banquet that they called a beefsteak. From Up in the Old Hotel, an amazing collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker essays

We’ve missed out on the beefsteak’s prime, so to speak, but the Beacon Restaurant started a new tradition 10 years ago. The New York Sun’s account of the 2004 edition includes courses very much like those Mitchell describes — tiny hamburgers, bacon-wrapped lamb kidneys, double-thick lamb chops, and of course steak — “huge roasted Certified Angus shell loins that had been cut into thick slabs and doused with melted butter.”

This year’s beefsteak is in February. I’m intrigued, though I’m sure it will destroy me.

Yeah / Yoshi’s Gourmet steez

5 August 2008 in food, san francisco | No comments

A couple of weekends ago, I visited the site of an Airstream trailer that Yoshi and I shared outside Stinson Beach, California. The trailer is long gone, but the spot is still the same: Overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a scraggly lawn at the end of a farm road. We spent many a night sitting on a homemade couch out under the stars, listening to an increasingly crusty Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain tape, hanging out with farm people, and getting into adventures. They were simpler times, so the adventures were simpler. One time, police showed up and asked Yoshi if he knew anything about the ritual animal sacrifices happening in the area. Naked toddlers often woke him up by tickling his eyelashes with wildflowers.

Yoshi's Gourmet article
Look at our boy now! Gourmet Magazine. Articles about obscure vegetables. Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool. What’s next? Condos in Queens? Indo for weeks? Sold out seats to hear Yoshi Yamada speak?

The article is vintage Yamada, reminding me of the many excellent, excellent letters and postcards that I’ve accumulated over the years:

I have not put ramps in my pipe, but I have smoked them — and also roasted, sautéed, blanched, pickled, braised, and puréed them. I have eaten them raw and dirty, and I have cleaned so many in a row that I almost wished for winter again. This year I may take a few home to put under my pillow, just because … my precious.

Not sure that I’ve eaten a ramp, but I bet they’d be tasty with a ritually sacrificed animal. Mmm. Ritual sacrifice.

Check, Please / Behind the music (and wine)

5 August 2008 in food, reviews, san francisco | No comments

I always meant to write about my close encounter with public television fame — the only kind that’s worth pursuing, if you ask me — but somehow I got waylaid by summertime, its various parties and good ol times. But I’ve got a sec, so I should just spill it before the good times take hold again.

Check Please - Sitting at the tableTime spent combing hair: zero minutes. Time spent ironing shirt: zero minutes. Number of heart attacks my mom would have if she saw this: countless.


Check, Please! Bay Area is a restaurant review show on our local public television station, KQED Channel 9 (what!). On each show, three Bay Area residents sit around a table and discuss their thoughts and feelings about three local restaurants. At the beginning of the process, each person gets to choose a favorite1 restaurant; then, each participant goes to all three restaurants; THEN, everyone assembles at KQED studios to discuss them in front real TV cameras.

So, yeah, it all started back in June.

Mara and I were at Pauline’s Pizza, eating dinner with some friends when we saw Leslie Sbrocco, the host of Check Please. We’re Check Please superfans, so we couldn’t resist the urge to approach Leslie and creep her out with our extensive knowledge of the show. Later, Leslie and her dining companion (who turned out the be the producer) stopped by our table and asked us to apply to be on the show. Somehow, I was the one who applied, even though Mara would have been 10 times better. Somehow, I was accepted, for reasons that are still unclear to me.

As I mentioned in the footnote, I chose a taco truck as my favorite restaurant, and this was a slight — SLIGHT — departure from those chosen by my cohorts — a fancy Noe Valley bistro, and a classic Financial District steakhouse. Therefore, my entire preparation for the show involve crafting arguments about why they needed to give the taco truck another try. “The ecology of taquerias is rich and diverse,” I would instruct them; “each one has its own specialty, a thing it does better than all others, and it takes time to fully explore this richness.” (Anyway, you can read more of this BS in my review on KQED’s website).

Turns out, my cohorts loved the taco truck. I was speechless, really. I had nothing productive to say to people who agreed with me. It could have been the wine. (IT’S REAL, by the way). And I drank too much of it, too much for a non-wine drinker, too much for 11am on a weekday (when we taped it), too much to generate extemporaneous bon mots worthy of PUBLIC TV.

Why even bother describing it? You can see for yourselves. It’s all over the Internet.


My YouTube debut: Tipsy on public TV. Awesome. Doesn’t get better this. Get used to it, America! You haven’t seen the last of me.

If you’re curious about what the blogosphere had to say about my taco truck recommendation, you need only get a load of this review from a guy named Ely, also from KQED’s site:

Dont eat from El Tonayense, I had a beef burrito that made me sick! The meat was too oily and mix in with fatty fat peices. The burrito was tiny and the ingridients had little favor.

My bad.

1 Check Please kinda repeatedly implies that each restaurant reviewed is the “favorite” restaurant of the person who suggested it. I chose a taco truck.

Urban farming / My robot bees are pregnant

26 April 2008 in food, urban | No comments


[Danger: I could only get the video to play in IE. Not sure if it’s my particular array of Firefox add-ons that are blocking its mojo, or what.]

So every few weeks I sift through the mostly asinine archives of SFist, and today, against all odds, I found something interesting: A llittle blurb about urban beekeeping in San Francisco with a link to a CurrentTV short.

The director profiles this guy Jon Ralston, someone I vaguely recall from my time in the bee club. He’s younger (in beekeeping age, anyway) and takes a very similar approach to beekeeping that I did: Just get a hive, put it in your backyard, let the bees do what they do until someone complains. Worked for me until my landlord stumbled upon it during a very active day (that turned into a swarm), and became terrified.

I also identify with Jon’s reasons for getting into beekeeping in the first place — feeling closer to the outdoors, and having a source of cheap gifts. He seems like an interesting guy, and he’s got a funny blog, too: My robot is pregnant.

I live inside your television

11 April 2008 in food, reviews, san francisco | No comments

Doug LeMoine - Check Please - Looking at the cameraYou may recognize me from somewhere, somewhere like YOUR TIVO.



Pretty much the only thing the director told me: “Don’t look at the camera.” Dang.

More on my explosion onto the local public television restaurant-reviewing stage sometime soon; until then you can check out my episode of the Check Please Bay Area here.

There’s gotta be a burrito place somewhere near here.

11 April 2008 in food, san francisco | No comments

Taquerias_of_San_Francisco



Via Burritophile, an awesome resource for all things burrito.