I realized today that I have a thing for swiping extra packets of the various sauces at fast food places.Most of the time it’s because they’re odd or interesting. I actually grabbed a handful of jalapeño relish from a place before because I had never seen it. Other times it’s because if we went out and bought even a small jar of some of the sauces we’d have to throw it out before we were able to finish it.

Salt and pepper I don’t need to swipe since we only use kosher salt and pepper is easy to get. Oh the other hand things like Chinese mustard or tartar sauce we’d never go through an entire jar of the stuff before it goes bad. I also like some of the stranger sauces because who knows? Some day you’ll ask yourself what a french fry tastes like when you dip it in duck sauce [not too bad actually].

Maybe you only need a little packet of thousand island dressing for you hamburger so you can feel like you’ve just gone to McDonalds and had a Big Mac. I like to think of myself as being frugal and saving a bit of money. Mustard and ketchup we never use very often so it’s nice to be able to pull a hermetically sealed packet from the fridge only when you need it. We have a couple of friends who whenever they come over we have a tradition of ordering some Hawaiian food. I’ve finally gotten my wife to understand that if we just use the plastic utensils they give us and recycle them afterwards we won’t have so many pieces of silverware to wash [that's the rational way of saying I'm lazy].

The day I start filling my pockets with packets of mayonnaise is the day I’ll need to be locked up though.

Gung Hay Fat Choi!

I wish all of my readers a very healthy, happy and prosperous Chinese New Year! I unfortunately will not be giving out any red envelopes other than the picture in today’s post. I wish all of us in San Francisco a prosperous new year and that the economy turns itself around and that the job market begins to work in our favor in the year of the Dragon.

Times have been tough for many of us and the year of the Dragon which we are now entering is the most auspicious year of the the 12 year Chinese astrological cycle. This will be a year of increased spending as it is considered to be good to have a child born during the year of the dragon.

If you have anything that you sell that would be useful to parents then this is the year to get started. While the parade itself won’t be until February 11th, today is officially declared a holiday in San Francisco  since my daughter has the day off from school.

My wife and I can never remember getting Chinese New Year off from school as a holiday and I haven’t heard a single firecracker go off in months. I have seen an uptick in the local neighborhood activity in the strongly Chinese-centric areas of the Sunset with Noriega between 33rd and 30th avenues being a place that has been more crowded than Chinatown over the past few days.

The traditional Chinese New Year Parade on the other hand has been scheduled for February 11th in San Francisco, so perhaps things will get busier around then. My the year of the dragon be prosperous for all of us!

Rose has been getting a lot of attention lately in her support for our Mayor Ed Lee. She may need to to think before she speaks though. She was quoted as saying, I want to help MY community. To me that is wrong. It’s about THE community not a person’s racial community. If I were to say oh, I don’t know, I want to support the white people then someone would invoke Godwin’s Law and link me with Hitler and the KKK.

Rose Pak, the Chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce is fighting to help her people in Chinatown. I respect that. Chinatown needs help. It’s broken down in many places and needs a big upgrade, but at the same time to focus on a very small group of people who have very little political clout [not Klout] her efforts sound a bit like Don Quixote. If you want to get the Chinese vote in San Francisco, you have to get out of Chinatown where there are very few registered voters. If you want the Chinese vote you need to go places like the Richmond or the Sunset District. THAT is where the Chinese voters are.

This is actually beside the point. Rose Pak’s work to me is dividing San Francisco. There is no political person of another race in San Francisco who is trying to give political power to their race other than Rose Pak. OK, she’s friends with Willie Brown, but that’s from a political perspective. I have yet to hear about Rose and Willie having a meet up that didn’t involve tea and Chinese food. Rose has been referred to by many as the Iron Queen of Chinese Politics. That’s fine if you’re in China, but she’s not. She’s in San Francisco which is a part of America and in my mind we should all be American’s first and what other culture you’ve come from second.

I learned this when talking to a friend from Ireland. I told him I was Italian and Austrian and he said, I thought you were American? Well I am, but my family came from Italy and Austria, granted that was a couple of hundred years ago and I can barely speak German and my Italian is atrocious. I do like spaghetti and spaetzle, but I also like to eat a burrito or Indian food and I don’t focus on the color of a person’s skin unless that’s their only motivation for getting up in the morning.

Rose would do best to help THE community of San Francisco than to just focus on the Chinese. Chinese already make up 33% of San Francisco’s population. I think you’ve done a good job, now it’s time to move on work on helping the other 67%.

If you head to West Sunset Playground on the weekends with your kids you’ll likely see a large line up of mostly Chinese women dance exercising to a mix of Chinese pop music or slightly upbeat house sounding music.

Most of the women are in their late 40′s or older it appears to me though I can’t tell because for some reason Asian’s tend to hold onto their youth for much longer than the rest of us. Dancing is a good method of exercise, but this is nothing like the wild dancing you’ll see at a rave. This is a much slower and actually choreographed looking form of dance. Think of it as like country line dancing with Chinese music.

Unfortunately for us, this isn’t the best time to take our daughter to the playground because she loves to watch the dancing and let’s herself go and wants to join in. She runs around the playground for a couple of minutes and goes into hyperdrive running for the dancers. She’s at an age where music makes her move and when she see’s others dancing it makes her want to join in. In some ways I wish my Cantonese/Mandarin was better so that I could talk with the few that are directing the dancing, but that wasn’t high on the list of things to learn when I was a kid. All I ever learned was how to say hello, goodbye, thank you and a few other ways that would get your face slapped. As a side note, growing up in the Sunset district I’ve learned how to get my face slapped in twelve different languages.

But let’s get back to the dancers. They are the regulars which started out as a weekend Tai-chi group and has added in a few more side groups on the weekends. The men sometimes are there to butch things up practicing martial arts in a group. One day there was a group of Chinese fan dancers [which is a little known martial art where the fan thingies between the paper used to be knives]. You pretty much never know what to expect there other than the dancers on the weekends, but it is definitely an interesting cultural display that you don’t really see anywhere else. I tried shooting video of them so you could enjoy the full experience, but unfortunately my iPhone doesn’t have any steady cam features so it would look like the video was shot by an alcoholic going through withdrawals.

The Chinese dancers are a fun event to see every weekend at West Sunset playground if you’re looking for something different to do and if you have a kid or two the playground that has had a recent redo is a great place to visit. ??????

Egg Fu Yung or Foo Yung or however people want to spell it is considered to be a traditional Chinese food. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Like Chop Suey, it was an invention of Chinese immigrants, but in this case Egg Fu Yung was created by a Jewish immigrant who frequented Chinese restaurants in San Francisco.

I haven’t been able to discover his name, but in the process found out that in 1874 the San Francisco Call had an ad boasting Egg Fu Yung as the highlight of the menu. This is the first reference to the dish in history. In China there is a dish called Fu Yung which is similar, but not exactly the same. I remembered once someone saying that if you want the best Chinese food to ask a Jew. That started me thinking why and this led me to Egg Fu Yung being a Jewish dish.

Jewish people and Chinese people have had something in common for many years. On Sunday’s the Christians go to church and have home cooked meals. The Jews, tend to go out for Chinese food. Back in the old days you didn’t see very many Christian people of Chinese decent so they had no problem keeping their restaurants open on Sundays. Back when many Jewish people where orthodox they had to adhere to Kashrut dietary laws which meant there could be no mixture of dairy with the meat products. Chinese food was the perfect choice since you won’t find chow main alfredo on a Chinese menu. When I thought about this I realized that you don’t find cheese in any Chinese dishes let alone cream sauces. The only time I’ve seen any dairy at a Chinese restaurant was when I accidentally ate one of those tiny black peppers  that was so hot it through me into a coughing fit and the waiter brought me a glass of milk while laughing at me in a kind of schadenfreude way.

An orthodox Jewish person would be guaranteed that anything they ordered from a Chinese restaurants menu could hold up to their dietary laws. I suppose this would also link in the Chinese Muslim restaurant in San Francisco because Kashrut is very similar to the Muslim’s Halal.

So back to the Jewish origin of Egg Fu Yung. Today it’s usually an omelette with ham in it, but back in 1874 a Jewish lover of Chinese Food suggested they make him an omelette with duck and vegetables mixed in. The cook threw it together and the original Egg Fu Yung came into being. Well, it was probably a little before that because for it to be the highlight of the menu in 1874 word had to have gotten around about it.

San Francisco has the largest Chinatown outside of China and while many of the dishes you find in the Chinese restaurants are touted as being traditional or authentic, that’s not necessarily true. When the Chinese came to America they didn’t have access to the same ingredients that they had back home so they adapted their cuisine to what they could find here. Chinese food being considered exotic to the white Americans back in the earlier parts of the 20th century caused more changes to the cuisine to help people with a, well, whiter palate eat them which would in turn make the restaurant owner more money.

Today things have changed a bit since more of the original ingredients are available, but the palate of Americans as well as Chinese-Americans still like Egg Fu Yung and Sweet and Sour Pork the way it was originally made in the good old USA.

So there’s an old joke that I’m going to paraphrase to start this article that I heard years ago. It goes like this, I’ve written many books, but I’ve never been called an writer. I’ve sung many songs, but I’ve never been called a singer, I make one comment about a practice that’s destroying our oceans that a Chinese politician is in favor of and…. The original was funnier, but the end result is true.

Ever since I posted my articles on why the process of shark finning is bad for our ocean’s environment I have been called a racist by someone using Leland Yee’s twitter account, I have received telephone calls from his campaign managers and Saturday night, I start getting trolled once again on twitter by someone using the name @generic_ This person had a blog on Tumblr where they have passed themselves off as a straight, white, liberal, atheist. They even have a myspace page [really? myspace?] and have posted a picture of a, well, generic white guy. They also mentioned that they did the graphics for Necessary Conversations, a video blog or podcast that is hosted by Beth Spotswood and Melissa Griffin [who incidentally I was up against in the Best Local Politics Blog contest with SF Weekly]. When I look at the site I see that a Cameron Eng is listed as the being in charge of the graphics for the show.

NOTE: I have been informed by a reader that the person posting as @generic_ is not Cameron Eng and is indeed a male caucasian who is trying to win favor with Jim Stearns Group in order to get a job so he attacks anyone who says anything bad about a client of Stearns Consulting. My apologies to Cameron Eng for any possible inferences.  While I can’t say for sure that @generic_ is indeed Cameron Eng things at this point in time do seem to be pointing in that direction. I found out my information by dropping the URL into archive.org which is an interesting website for getting information on website histories. I still will be reserved on who the real identity of this person was, but I can say that I’ve never been called a racist by any person other than Leland Yee’s camp and @generic_ who from his posts seems to also be in favor of Leland Yee for Mayor, so I guess anyone who isn’t in favor of Leland Yee for mayor is a racist in @generic_‘s book. Which then means, Rose Pak can also ride in my racist boat along with Mayor Ed Lee and everyone else running for Mayor.

I would like to take this time to apologize to the citizen’s of California and San Francisco for my previous statements. I am sorry that only people of Chinese decent eat shark fin soup, but at the same time glad, because if the entire world consumed it our oceans would be in extreme danger. In the video I posted on Saturday, Gordon Ramsey noted that the shark fin collectors get $28/pound for the fins and $2/pound for the rest of the shark. There is only one dish made with shark fins and that is shark fin soup. Because it is expensive to purchase in a Chinese restaurant it makes it worth it to the fishermen to harvest only the fins and throw back the cheaper meat that no one wants. If you have a boat that could haul in a ton of sharks would you want to take the whole shark, or just the fins which would give you 14 times the value of the shark? You’d go for the fins.

I do agree with Leland Yee’s comment about AB376 that why not ban the entire shark and not just the fins? I believe they should ban fishing for sharks. The problem was that there are very few restaurants in California that have shark on the menu and very few places that you can even find shark meat for sale. Leland Yee’s camp and @generic_ sited the fallacy that you can buy shark meat at CostCo — You can’t. They haven’t sold it for over 10 years because no one was buying it. A trip to Lucky’s, Andronico’s, Whole foods and Safeway shows that there is no shark available in their fish departments. The people who authored the bill knew that and that is why they focused on the fins. Shark is even noted as a do not buy and unhealthy fish to eat by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

My comments have been focused on two things:

1. 1. Shark finning is an outrageous practice that is causing serious damage to the oceans by depleting the top predator.
2. 2. Shark meat in any form isn’t the healthiest meat to eat being high in methyl mercury due to ocean pollution. It is even recommended as a fish that you should not eat by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

I received an email from Senator Leland Yee yesterday about his outrage of the funding of a $750,000 grant for a Brooklyn artist to create sculptures for Muni who in the 70′s made a film where he made an art film in which he adopted a dog and chained it to a fence and then shot the dog.

I have to admit that I had heard of the film, but never saw it, but not only am I disgusted by the idea of this film, but so was the man who made it. He remarked that what he did was wrong and it was the stupidity of his youth that made him unable to see the bigger picture, yet at the same time, we have a California state Senator who while being disgusted by the shooting of a dog, sees nothing wrong with the dismembering of a shark and throwing its writhing, living body back into the ocean to die as being a Chinese cultural tradition.

To quote Senator Yee from his email:

This week, Ed Lee and the SFMTA approved spending $750,000 of taxpayer money on a central subway contract for Brooklyn artist Tom Otterness, who made a 1977 film in which he chained a dog to a fence and then shot and killed that dog on camera.

Yes, you read that correctly. He chained a dog to a fence and then shot and killed that dog.

This is a completely unacceptable use of taxpayer dollars.

I woke up early this morning to find a youtube video had been sent to me by an old friend of mine, Dave King. This is a video of Chef Gordon Ramsey tasting Shark Fin Soup for the first time to see what all the fuss was about. Not only do you get a chef’s analysis of the soup, but Ramsey also goes out to see how the shark fins are acquired. Warning for those friends of mine who are defenders of animal rights, while sharks aren’t all warm and fuzzy like a dog or a cat [which also happen to be eaten as a part of "traditional Chinese culture"  in China that I have written about before] this video does show the finning of sharks, in which case you might want to stop the video after Chef Ramsey leaves the restaurant.

Senator Yee, who is a candidate for mayor of San Francisco [which I might add he filed for just a week after being re-elected as Senator of California] has a problem with animal abuse as long as the animal being abused isn’t a shark. He talks about how shark meat is available everywhere, yet you can’t find it anywhere and the basis if AB 376 is an attack on “Traditional Asian Culture” when Chinese citizens are the only Asians who consume shark fin soup. In reality, this email isn’t an attack on a man who shot a dog, but an attack upon another fellow Chinese citizen of San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee. While as you all know I am not in favor of our interim Mayor running for re-election because it goes against the promise he had made that he would not run for re-election, I also do not like the focus that our Chinese candidates for Mayor are using to focus on getting the Chinatown vote. While Chinese make up 33% of San Francisco’s population, only 18% of them actually vote and the majority of the Chinese population isn’t living in Chinatown, but the majority of non-voting Chinese is.

Supervisor John Avalos and Attorney Dennis Herrera are making huge jumps in polls because of the fact that they are focusing on the population of San Francisco, not a small eight block area of San Francisco. We need a Mayor that will focus on all of the districts to bring about change. From the Sunset to the Bayview, from the Mission to North Beach and yes, also Chinatown, but not appearing to be only in favor of helping Chinatown.

Now with that being said, on to the movie: