walk to eat, eat to walk (bloated memories of san francisco)

When we weren't tied up with Slow Food events, A and I busied ourselves with our own food events. Our first night in town, following a long afternoon of panels, we pursued a tip for a local pub run by Dave McLean, the brewer who oversaw the beer component of Slow Food Nation. Magnolia looks like the product of an old Dead Head who unwittingly became editor for McSweeney's. Their menus are a slick mash-up of Victorian hierarchy typography with hidden Grateful Dead lyrics and wacked-out contemporary watercolors printed on an LSD blotter grid. Along with some existential cartoons about a man explaining the reality of a bone to his dog, the website gives a pretty good sense of what I'm talking about. Top this design-conscious psychedelia with a rehabbed vintage bar and some great farm-to-table food, and you've got a solid restaurant. We had wild board head cheese, Louisiana boudin sausage with garlicky grilled eggplant and an amazing goat cheese praline cake. And the beer wasn't bad, either. I went for an "Out with the Old Ale," a beer aged in bourbon barrels with a strong, sweet kick that knocked me out. After one or two those, it was hard to find the bus out of the Haight.


Not to be discouraged by a busy day of events on Saturday, we rounded up a few of our friends from the Portland Slow Food chapter and marched them down to the Mission in search of Tartine. It was a classic P & A vacation activity - walking an unspecified (long) distance to taste something, then turning in the other direction and walking elsewhere to eat some more. From a block away, we recognized the bakery by the line out the door. Luckily, once we tasted their offerings, the walk and the wait were all worthwhile. Theirs was the single most custardy bread pudding I've ever tasted - bathed in a tangy sauce of raspberries and peaches. The standout, though, was the orange-scented and caramelly morning bun. While standing in line, we spied back into the kitchen, getting a sense of what makes these pastries so damn good. Hint: it might have something to do with the cubic feet of butter stacked on the counters.


After a round of mid-day Slow Food activities (visits to the garden, market, and street food bazaars), we took a walk down to the water through Chinatown and North Beach. Along the way, A fell prey to the shrewdest lemonade stand racket I've ever seen - those kids set up shop halfway up the steep incline to Coit Tower!

That evening, after a predictably bleak (though really strong) Slow Food film festival, we met back up with two of our friends to try Farmer Brown, a farm-to-table soul food that focuses on sourcing their ingredients from black farmers around the Bay Area. A and I shared some crispy catfish with candied yams and a tangy bean salad. The table favorite, though, was anything that we could douse with the addictive jalapeno-honey sauce - particularly their sweet little cornbread muffins.


Early Sunday morning, we left our hotel to check out Liguria Bakery in North Beach, on a tip from the owners of Pastaworks. We'd scoped it out the day before and noticed their hours: from 8 until they run out product, never later than 2 pm. Now what baked good could inspire such morning devotion to sell out each day? Focaccia. Amazing focaccia. That's right: they make one product and they do it well. The women running the shop were cranky, deliberate, and totally impatient with us trying to decide between the six flavors they offered. The scene was so very Italian. We took a slab of the plain and a slab of the garlic out to the nearby park for a simple breakfast. While A was pretty taken by the elderly Chinese women doing calisthenics in the park, I was pretty taken by the incredibly chewy loaf with its wonderfully sweet garlic topping. A little focaccia, a little coffee and I was ready to check out the Taste pavilions at Slow Food Nation.

On Sunday evening, after we leveled out from the caffeine and booze-induced stupor of Taste, we felt like it was time for one last meal in town. Where better to go after a weekend of Slow Food than Zuni Cafe? We are huge fans of chef Judy Rodgers' cookbook - I can't think of many other chefs who write so eloquently as to sound as though they are in the kitchen alongside you. It is filled with wonderful insights into method and preparation - every time I open the book, I feel like I learn a new, eminently practical technique. The dishes featured in the book make up a cuisine of brilliant, simple flavors that are coaxed to reach their height. The restaurant is even more impressive.


The food at Zuni is always an incredibly simple demonstration of the tastes of a few ingredients. We had two simple starters: a mix of grilled peppers with ripe cherry tomatoes and a fritto misto of onion, lemon and agretti. A and I then shared a bowl of corn soup that perfectly captured that late-season sweetness; there are few better things you can do with corn than a simple soup. Our friends shared a bowl of polenta with mascarpone, an incredibly basic dish that is cooked so well that it becomes decadently smooth and savory. I think I'm going to need to brush up on Judy Rodger's explanation of polenta cookery. Out of the main courses, I think that my squab may have captured the most attention for its beautiful juxtaposition of tastes - zante grapes, grilled polenta, and fennel gave a nice balance to the roasted bird. To finish, A and I ordered a Sicilian sweet bun stuffed with almond and sour cherry granitas and fresh nectarines. It was a perfectly refreshing end to a full weekend of over-eating.

walk to eat, eat to walk (fond memories of slow food nation)

That pithy little axiom has definitely become our vacation M.O. If we were to start a travel agency, it'd likely be emblazoned on our brochures. Then again, if A and I were to start a travel agency, I don't think we'd find too many customers eager for a grueling schedule of zig-zagging back-and-forth across a city in search of something to eat. Maybe we need a different business plan.

Still, it suits us just fine (even if it runs a little contrary to most people's idea of "relaxation") and for our recent trip to San Francisco, we found a few kindred spirits (or at least good sports) to drag along with us. We'd gone down to the Bay Area to document Slow Food Nation, the first national celebration of American food culture, but managed to fit in a few side meals explorations as well.

I won't delve too much into the details of Slow Food Nation here - for that, you can see A's post on the Slow Food Portland blog - but I will mention a few of our favorite moments from the event:

As soon as we got into the city, we dove right into the fracas. We checked out a panel on "re-localizing" food, which was a bit of a let-down, given how familiar all the discussion was. I did come away with a great story about sustainable foie-gras, which I'm planning on writing about later. The second panel definitely upped the ante with a staggering raft of stories about brutal American farm labor conditions. A did a really good job of capturing that panel on the Slow Food Portland site.


The weekend was packed with Slow Food events - a congress for leaders, a networking day for activists, a marketplace, a victory garden, a tasting hall, and a street food bazaar. Most of it centered on the front lawn of City Hall, where we explored the large farmer's market of growers who were showcasing just one item. Everyone was over-the-top generous with their products, and we took full advantage of that. We tasted handfuls of heirloom apples, blenheim apricot jam, and some really amazing goat's milk caramel. One stand was selling pawpaw, one of the oldest native fruits in America. It tasted very tropical, somewhere between a guava and an avocado with huge, glossy black seeds. I don't think it fairly deserves the name "Ozark banana."


This seriously was the weekend of a hundred hams: domestic prosciutto, salame picante, mortadella, Kentucky country ham, Tennesee country ham, country ham with sweet corn relish, country ham with lard biscuits and raspberry jam. People are seriously obsessive about their country ham, but I suppose it makes sense to be so irrational over such a buttery, salty delight. We did manage to taste some non-pork foods as well; from the street food vendors, we tried doha papdi chaat (yogurt, chickpeas, tamarind and fried crisps), huaraches con chorizo (admittedly pig-inflected), and A got her free-range, grass fed hot dog, which may have been her weekend highlight.

On Sunday, we had tickets to Taste, a pier filled with themed food pavilions serving samples of artisanal American foods from around the country. It was delicious, but horrible for my poor buffet etiquette. When I end up in a scenario that involves both food and "lines," I get a cruel, game-day mentality of win-at-all-costs. It is no longer about enjoyment, only quantity. We ate a god-awful amount of food and certainly got our tickets-worth, but ended up with a weirdly-queasy buzz because of my neuroses-driven choices.


The whole experience was based on a system of points for tastes - you received 20 upon entry that you could trade for food samples, ranging in cost from 1 to 3 points. I was panicked. "We won't be able to try everything!" I pleaded to A. Then I noticed that the two pavilions that should have had the strictest limits, in fact had the least: coffee and spirits. The sustainable coffee booth was all-you-can-drink, so we quickly had a three-coffee cupping, followed by four half-shot macchiatos from different US baristas. Smart. The spirits pavilion, too, was a low-ticket, all-you-can-drink booth. I made sure that A and I got our fill. We sipped on estate tequila, a Bloody Mary that reversed my hatred of tomato juice, a few gin cocktails, and a taster of absinthe. We were well on our way. You can imagine what a great base all of that caffeine and booze made for the rest of the samples.


In truth, we got to try an unbelievable amount of products. From the pickles pavilion, we had some sublime sweet-corn relish on top of, you guessed it, country ham. We also tried green-tomato chutney, four types of classic cucumber pickles and had our pictures taken in a pickle barrel. The honey and preserves pavilion was similarly great, with some amazing bites like an apricot and green almond preserve and lavender-honey cupcakes. Oregon producers (like our beloved Ayer's Creek) were featured front-and-center, alongside delicious-sounding recipes, including one for Sweet Potato and Sour Cherry butter that I need to make next year.


It was particularly cool that a lot of the booths showcased the process of making their featured foods - in the chocolate pavilion, we tried four single-origin dark chocolates, but we also had a tasting of four phases of the chocolate refining process. Luckily, we could head back to the spirits pavilion to wash the flavor of those middle steps of chocolate-making out of our mouth. From the ice cream booth, we had six types of ice cream (including sorbets, gelato, and yogurts), but the fig ice stands out the most for how pure the flavor of the fruit was. We had stuffed Indian naan from the bread pavilion, mortadella ham with sauerkraut from the charcuterie vendors, and five kinds of aged, raw milk cheeses. But lest you think we didn't get our fill, we also had three cured hams, four sustainable seafood dishes and a buffalo and red-bean chili. All this, and we didn't even finish using up our points! Chalk that one up to efficient and liberal use of the spirits pavilion.

As much as we did attend, we didn't spend our entire weekend in Slow Food events. After all, we were in San Francisco, which has some pretty good food of its own. Next post up, I'll share some of the other (still food-related) things we did in town...

kitchen nightmares

Lately, our kitchen was feeling like a bad slapstick comedy. With all of the bounty that summer brings, we'd been spending 90% of our free hours in the galley-style space - jostling and bumping like doddering fools. It didn't help that with all the steam from the jam jars processing on our stove, we'd been wanting to leave our back door open to let some air in. You see, in our old kitchen the back door sat between the largest counter and bread board (where we want to chop the food) and our stove (where we want to put the chopped food). This meant that cooking with the door open involved an elaborate dance. Often, I would sit behind the door stirring whatever was bubbling on the stove top, while P chopped behind the door. When he wanted to get into a drawer, or if I wanted to open the oven, he had to first move away from the door, we had to close the door, and then we could proceed. Needless to say, we're not always the most coordinated and this dance often resulted in one of two disasters: something would spill (requiring an even more elaborate dance to clean it up), or one us would get hurt.

Being the more hurried (and perhaps the more careless) of the two of us, I was often the one who got hurt. There was the time that I stepped back into the hot cast iron skillet P was carrying to the sink; the time I burned my hand on the oven door trying to open it enough to check something without closing the door and/or squishing P; or the time(s) that I opened a drawer into my shins, again because I was too impatient to ask P to move, close the door, etc.

My co-workers were beginning to notice and I was getting tired of watching their faces take on expressions of horror when I casually replied, "Oh, that's just where P hit me with the molten cast iron skillet the other night," to their inquiries about my scar. It was clear - something had to change.

Conveniently enough, our patience with our kitchen finally ran out at a time when I was obsessively searching craigslist to find a new place. My craigslist strategy follows: I open the PDX craigslist rental site in my browser and search under specific criteria (by neighborhood, price range, and a pet policy that accepts cats), then I leave this tab open and refresh it, oh, every five seconds or so. You haven't tried this? Maybe it seems a little neurotic to you? Well, my special strategy landed us with an absolutely, positively, fantastic new place. So there. I found it two and a half weeks ago and here we are, moved in. In addition to its many attributes (more space, more light, a basement where P can keep his letterpress so that we don't have to perform a different, but equally elaborate, dance whenever he wants to print something), I am convinced that the one, shining feature that sold us on the place was the kitchen.

It is, quite simply, amazing. Where the old space was cramped, this kitchen is open and liberating. Where our old kitchen was dank and tended to hold in moisture (we constantly battled mold, even on our appliances), the new kitchen is dry, airy and filled with light. P and I can stand in the new kitchen preparing food and talk to friends at the same time, without having to bring those poor souls into the already cramped space in order to hear them. Seriously: among its other benefits, this kitchen may improve my social life. It is a kitchen in which one might prepare half of a pig and not break a sweat (or break up a marriage). If only we had half a pig. Which brings me to the second best feature of our new apartment: a chest freezer will fit quite nicely in one of the upstairs storage rooms. Now perhaps I can have my pig and cook it too.