Originally a U.S. Army post built in late 1800′s for coastal defense during the Civil War [good job guys!], Fort Mason expanded in 1912 to include docks and storage for shipping overseas soldiers and equipment for wars. It hasn’t really changed too much since then since it was finally decommission and handed over to the National Parks Service in the 1970′s.

While there have been some minor improvements, it’s still pretty much storage facilities except for the few rooms that can be rented out for events, Greens, The Blue Bear School of Music and the Italian American Museum. I’m sure there’s more there, but I just haven’t come across it other than attending a meeting of the San Francisco Aquarium Society a few months ago and attending traffic school there several years ago.

The buildings are starting to look rather worn out though and something needs to be done to bring these 13 acres of land to be more useful to the city other than a parking place for Off-The-Grid food trucks every Friday night. Now Fort Mason Revisited has asked 20 design firms to come up with designs to revamp the place and I say good for them. Yes, there’s lots of historical nature to the place having been used by the military during all the wars up to and including the Korean War, but it now needs a big change to serve the people of San Francisco.

Of the 20 firms selected, they have until June 15 to say whether or not they’re in and then three of the firms will be selected to start work this summer. There’s no telling what will come of the place, but I hoping for the best. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a place that’s built off of modern designs with added solar and wind power to electrify the place. The city is also in the process of trying to extend the F line to Fort Mason through an unused rail tunnel in upper Fort Mason. I think that would be a good idea and I believe they should retain some of the nautical themes that have been in place so it coincides with all the boats docked next to it.

Dan Gordon of Gordon-Biersch invented garlic fries when he was studying in Germany. Sadly though when he came back to the US and opened up the first Gordon-Biersch restaurant with Dean Biersch it wasn’t in San Francisco, but in Palo Alto. Garlic fries though didn’t get much attention until they opened up their San Francisco restaurant and started selling them at AT&T Park and that was the day that baseball and garlic fries got married together.

Everyone has garlic fries now and it’s no wonder because they’re so easy to make. It’s a 3-2-1 recipe that even an idiot can make. Take 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of chopped garlic and 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley whip it all together and toss it on some freshly deep fried potato bits. Gilroy who hosts it’s own garlic festival sells them as well, but they from what I’ve heard bake, not deep fry the potatoes.

Nothing is as good in it’s greasy goodness as a deep fried strip of potato. Crispy and crunchy on the outside and moist and tender on the inside. When you add the oil, garlic and parsley to it, it just becomes even better. It wasn’t until the late 90′s that garlic fries made an introduction onto the San Francisco food scene and they made an instant hit. I don’t get to eat them too often because when I do I tend to eat too many and my wife banishes me to the other room for a three days because I tend to reek of garlic. It is a fate that is understandably worth it for me since I happen to love garlic and will add it to just about anything. The secret to adding the garlic to the fries is a wide bowl with the fries in it then you toss in the mixture then you have to learn that special one hand flick of the wrist that tosses them up and over, like you see a professional chef flip an omelette. It takes a bit of practice, but you don’t want to stir them around because then you break up the fries. The flick/flip does the job much better.

I do remember in the 80′s there was a shop at Ghiradelli Square called Pomme Frites that sold french fries with a variety of dipping sauces, many of them based off the Belgian tradition of mayonnaise on fries [don't knock it until you've tried it], but there was no garlic in any of their sauce blends. It seems odd to me since now it just seems like such an obvious addition to add to the fries.

I have a small deep fryer that I’ll probably use to test my own riff on this dish. The trick supposedly in making the best fries to fry them twice and starting with russet potatoes that you’ve skinned and soaked in cold water for one to eight hours before cutting them into 1/4″ strips. First at a low temperature of 325° to oil cook them, then drain and flash fry them at a higher temperature of 375° to sear the outsides while keeping the insides moist and crispy. The sizzle when they hit the oil is actually the water inside the potatoes coming out of the fries so if you’ve cooked them to the point they stopped sizzling the water is out and the oil gets sucked in through reverse osmosis and those are some bad greasy fries.

I’m glad to see that San Francisco isn’t resting on it’s laurels with rice-a-roni, sourdough bread and dungeness crab. I’m glad that we can come up with a few new traditions in food that we can claim as ours and that change the world around us. Hell, even Trader Joe’s sells them now, but they’re still no comparison to the original.

While I have a Germanic last name, I grew up in an Italian household. My family traces it’s roots back to Genoa in the Ligurian provence of Italy. As a kid what we ate was considered ethnic food. For most kids my age Italian food consisted of Spaghetti-O’s. For us it was pesto. It was something no one had heard of and you never saw it on the menu’s in Italian restaurants.

I learned how to make from my Mom who learned it from her Mom, etc, etc. When my Dad lost his job and we were low on cash we had pesto with tagliarini pasta at least once a week. Tagliarini is kind of like fettucini only thinner. When basil was in season she’d go to the farmer’s market down on Alemany and get a box sometimes two boxes and then the chaos would begin. I got the job of stripping the leaves off while my Mom and Grandmother would pull out their wooden bowls and mesaluna’s and start chopping the basil. It wasn’t the real way you’re supposed to make it as it was normally ground with a mortar and pestle, but these were more modern times pre-cuisinart. I loved it and ate it up by the piles. A couple of nights as a kid I had it before going to a Boy Scout meeting and apparently all the garlic that was in there became very apparent to everyone in the auditorium.

After I got done with the leaves it was time to grind the pignoli [pine nuts] and chop the garlic…lots of garlic. I think I had the easiest jobs of all. While pulling the leaves off the stems was tedious it wasn’t anything compared to chopping the leaves with the archaic double bladed knives that probably dated back to the 20′s. When the chopping was done my Grandmother would put the chopped leaves into a large bowl and slowly pour in olive oil [not the traditional Ligurian extra virgin olive oil, but good enough] and slowly stirred the chopped basil and oil until it got a creamy texture. Then I got to add the pignoli and garlic and finish up the stirring. My Mom would then start jarring up the extra and that would go into our downstairs freezer.

We always saved the last bit for dinner that night and my Dad who used to work down in the Marina would be told to drop by Lucca’s and get some fresh tagliarini for dinner. Typically you add some parmesan cheese to the mix, but my Mom and Grandmother always liked to let us decide how much cheese we wanted on it. This tradition carried on for years until a day in the 21st century my Mom wanted some pesto, but didn’t have it in her to go through the process. I suggested we try the food processor and of course she balked.

So I bought a bunch of basil picked the leaves and threw it into the food processor we had at my house. I tossed in about 5-6 cloves of garlic and a little olive oil and turned it on. Slowly adding a little bit more and more until it looked about right, but I left out the pignoli because I was lazy and they’re kind of expensive. We found some fresh tagliarini at a local upscale grocer who I won’t mention and brought it over to her house to make dinner one night.

Where’s the pine nuts? OK, I should have expected that. How’d you make it? You don’t have all the…wait! You made it in a food processor? Yes ma, that’s what I did, so do you like it? She liked it and started doing it that way herself.

Now pesto is everywhere. It’s in mayonnaise, on pizza’s someone will probably make a pesto chocolate bar soon. I see it all the time at the supermarket, but I’ve tried it a couple of times and I still go back to making it myself. It’s cheaper, fresher and just reminds me of good times in my past. Incidentally, if you substitute Italian parsley for the basil you get a great South American steak sauce called chimichurri that I’ve written about previously.

Seeing as it’s the weekend I can move away from San Francisco and talk about a term coined by Dr. Gerald Zirnstein, Pink Slime. It’s a term used to describe boneless lean beef trimmings that are ground up and processed as an additive to regular ground meat. Since the term is a pejorative one to denigrate this product I thought I’d do a little background research about this horrific meat product that is on everyone’s lips nowadays.

When I first heard the term it was used to reference ground up chicken that  being used to make chicken nuggets. There was no reference to it being used in ground beef, but apparently now I’ve found at least a dozen articles on it yesterday. There are two companies making this product and they are BPI and Cargill. Most of the articles while not mentioning BPI are focusing on it because they use Ammonium hydroxide to sterilize the meat because they are trimmings usually considered not fit for human consumption. This isn’t added to the meat, but the meat is washed and rinsed in it. The meat which people are saying isn’t fit for human consumption wouldn’t really be allowed for humans to eat, so it’s more like meat humans don’t normally eat. To those in the nose to tail brand of eating this is what is known as offal. When you slice open a cow the insides containing intestines, liver, kidneys, heart, etc are what come out and there are very few people that are meat eaters that go for this [except for the few liver and onions types or the steak and kidney pie types]. This is edible, but takes a bit of cleaning up before you cook it. Cargill by the way uses anti-microbial treatments to make it safer to eat not ammonium hydroxide.

Now if you go for the muscle parts of the meat that most of us eat there’s nothing used to sterilize it which is part of the reason we get food poisoning, mad cow and all those other diseases. Pink slime is a sterile, processed meat product. Sounds awful doesn’t it? Let’s talk about Tofu for a minute. It’s a processed, fermented soybean product that doesn’t occur in nature. If we called it processed rotting bean paste it wouldn’t be a good advertising tag line. Would you purchase bee barf? I bet you have. That’s called honey. A study was done in New York where they walked around Central Park telling everyone about the horrors of consuming dihydromonoxide. It’s present in everything we consume and if you consume too much of it, it will kill you. As it turns out, the public doesn’t know basic chemistry enough to understand that what they were talking about was H20, i.e. water.

I am not saying that beef innards are high on my list of things to eat. I’ve never eaten sweetbreads [nice name for a sales pitch] nor have I had kidneys or liver [I may have had foie gras once], but the grinding together of these innards and sterilizing them still leaves them as being 100% beef in origin. I remember a local hamburger joint when I was a kid that sold 25¢ hamburgers that everyone said used sawdust as a meat filler. THAT would be a questionable additive. Come to think of it I have eaten 100% beef hot dogs so I’m sure there were some innards mixed in.

Jamie Oliver who I enjoy watching demonstrated the way he thought Pink Slime was made by grinding meat and dumping ammonia on it saying this was how it’s made. That’s not true. The innards and trimmings when ground are exposed to ammonia gas then washed [BPI] or exposed to antibiotics [Cargill]. Much different than what was being told to us. There was a study published about the perils of Pink Slime which was later pulled as having some serious errors and that it was not harmful to human consumption.

What we have is people reading food labels and seeing ingredients that don’t sound like they’re fit for human consumption and then isolating them then writing up everything about the horrors of what this will do to you supposedly. Pretty much everything we eat today has been processed in one form or another. You don’t know what portions of the cow go into your ground beef. A can of soup usually has more than half you daily salt intake. Many of your store bought fresh baked cookies contain anti-freeze to make them soft. I’m not even sure if the picture I used up above is truly Pink Slime. It’s been associated with it, but I have yet to see a video that proves this to be true. Most of the fast food restaurants have stopped including Pink Slime because of the public outcry, but if you buy a beef and bean burrito from your local 7-11 look at the ingredients and I’m sure you’ll see beef heart as the source of beef. I shudder to think what their nacho cheese is made of. It always looked like yellow Elmer’s glue to me.

In the end, it’s not something I’d choose to eat, but the vilifying of an ingredient that when you take a look at it isn’t as horrible as it sounds by the name someone has applied to it just gets my yellow journalism radar turned up to 11. Now it’s time for me to go and have a cup of rotten dried leaves steeped in boiling dihyromonoxide with a spoonful of bee barf [That's tea].

Since I’ve been talking about burritos it seems only fitting to continue on with Mexican food for another day and I thought what better to talk about than a sorely missed restaurant in Mission La Rondalla and their specialty dish, Birria de Chivo.

For those who don’t speak Spanish, Birria de Chivo is goat stew [sometimes complete with goat head]. Me being allergic to lamb I decided it would be fitting for me to give it a go one day. I had never eaten goat before so this would be a new experience. I didn’t realize how popular a dish this was until the day after when I was talking with some of my Mexican friends at work who laughed at me for just ordering it and not adding in, lean and clean.

When my bowl arrived it had an over powering smell of well, goat. The other Hispanics at the restaurant looked at me with a bit of surprise. I guess they didn’t expect a white person to ever order it. On my first bite I tasted a bit of the peppers and well, goat. Everything about this dish was goat. I felt like I was in a barnyard, but it had a very hearty rustic feel down to the bones in the stew. The part that caught me off guard was the fat and gristle in the stew. After eating about half the dish and having the rest boxed up to take home and after talking to my friend José the next day I learned what lean and clean meant. No bones, no fat, no gristle. I never thought while eating this where do they buy goat meat in San Francisco? I’ve been to many of the Mexican carnecerias in the city and I’ve never seen Chivo in the meat cases. Sometimes it’s better not to ask questions.

Sadly, La Rondalla went out of business sometime ago and for that I’m sad because it was the first place after a long night out partying that I had my first vegetarian burrito thanks to the girl I was dating at the time. I don’t know of any other places in the city that sell Birria de Chivo, but at least I know that if I find one an order it again I’ll remember to add lean and clean to the order. I was glad I stepped a little outside my comfort zone for a day.

After posting Friday’s article I received some feedback that leads me to believe there is a burrito war brewing. The so called California Burrito which is indigenous to San Diego does not represent the California burrito in an way. The California burrito that San Diego lays claim to started around 1995 actually originating in Las Vegas before moving to San Diego. It generally consists of meat, guacamole or avocado, sour cream and french fries [the original Vegas version used tater tots].

If you look back farther as I mentioned in my Friday article the original burrito made in California for public consumption started life in 1961 at El Faro, but that was made with corn tortillas. The actually Mission style burrito using a flour tortilla originated in 1969 at La Cumbre and is representative of the size of your forearm or bigger things that we know as burritos today.

Prior to all of this the burrito originally got its start in Tuscon, Arizona in the 20′s from a man who carried his food on a donkey [el burro] because they resembled the rolled sacks that donkey’s carried on their sides he called them burritos [little donkeys]. There wasn’t much to them except a tortilla and some meat. Nothing like we expect to find today. Making it’s way farther West the immigrant farm workers in the central valley would pack there lunches in a similar way adding a few other things to the meat such as salsa, beans, rice maybe an avocado slice that they picked and pocketed.

As the farm workers moved north they hit the San Francisco Bay Area where many of them settled in the Mission district and never lost their love for the food that gave them energy when they were out in the fields. This is where the San Francisco or Mission style burrito originated. I do remember back in my youth in the 70′s that if you wanted real Mexican food you had to go to Mission District. The prepackaged burritos you would find at a 7-11 had chopped up beef [usually beef heart] and some beans. This was more like what you might find in Mexico than here in the Mission District.

Now here is where the war part comes in. I always knew growing up that SF had a rivalry with LA. Apparently now that all the party animals have left LA for Vegas San Diego wants in on the game. In doing some research over the weekend I found that San Diego claims to have the best burritos giving it the right to the name California Style burrito. Apparently no one informed us or any of the foodie people who write for magazines about this. As it turns out the french fries in a burrito isn’t a uniform thing in San Diego as well. There are several places in San Diego that serve California Style burritos, but not all of them. Some San Diegans moved up to our territory and opened Taqueria Los Coyotes which serves the California Style burrito. I wrote an article on them previously. For some reason people in San Diego are appalled at the size of our burritos which is odd because theirs are about the same size as ours. They also don’t seem to like all the crap we put in our burritos. I guess they never thought of asking to hold the rice, etc.

I will still stand by my statement that a California Style burrito refers to those made in San Francisco that are attempted to be copied around the world. On my one trip to Mexico they even had a taqueria offering California Style burritos that were made in the same way they were made in San Francisco, no french fries. If you go to any taqueria in California and order a burrito it’s more like what you find in San Francisco where it started. Perhaps I should just let the whole California Style thing go by the wayside because if you’re into burritos you know that San Francisco has the best.

Sorry I’ve been out of it this week, but I threw my back out and have been for the most part, well on my back with a heating pad to try and not act like a 70 year old man when I walk.

My wife pointed out a show in the IFC called Young, Broke and Beautiful that is done by a guy I have met and been featured on his website — Broke Ass Stuart. I met him at the SF Weekly Webby Awards because he is generally in San Francisco, or New York, but now with his show he travels around a lot. Not too bad for being a broke ass. Today’s subject though was a minor part of his show in San Diego where he made that comment, a California Burrito has to have french fries. [cue record scratch]. No that is not correct. A San Diego, CA Burrito may need french fries, but not a California burrito and I am going to go into the history of burritos in California because they’ve gotten a claim to fame in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In Mexico a burrito is usually only beans and meat wrapped in a flour tortilla. It’s a simple hand held meal that’s easy to deal with. Not a balanced meal for the most part, but it’s a meal. When California transferred it’s ownership from Spain to the United States things changed a bit. California is a very agricultural state and we have lots of other things that the Mexican’s who now where American’s could add to the simple burrito. Cheese, Guacamole [probably from the tree in So Cal that was the birth of the Haas avocado], salsa, rice sometimes lettuce [which should never really be put in a burrito]. California being the green state greened up the burrito and that then was referred to in Mexico as the California burrito. Never was there any mention of putting french fries in a burrito. I did write an article about a place in SF that was making what they called the California burrito with french fries, but they got the idea from San Diego. El Burrito Express makes a BajaCal burrito with fries and we know that Baja California is down south so that would make sense since it’s closer to San Diego. Here in San Francisco you can even find the occasional peas, carrots or corn added into your burrito, but I shudder to think of that and just stick with the beans, meat, cheese guacamole and sour cream [I don't like rice in my burritos].

If I further need to make my point the California burrito was invented in San Francisco in 1961 at El Faro and was first referred to as the Mission Style burrito and then the California burrito. The San Diego with french fries was first documented in 1995. San Francisco started the size of your calf style burrito as most of them before you could get one hand around with some extra room. It almost became comical when you could get a super burrito in some places that was bigger around than a kid’s thigh. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that San Francisco also came up with the Super Burrito as well.

Apparently the San Francisco Bay Area seems to also have the least expensive burritos in the world. Someone who’s name I couldn’t find who writes for SFGate.com seeks out burritos around the world and found awful burritos in Scotland at $15 each [does the burrito come with Haggis?] To the $10 tasteless burritos in Australia. I’m happy to say that I can get a regular cheese burrito for under $4 [when I'm in a broke kind of way] or with meat for under $5. If you like burritos, you need to come to San Francisco to try the best. Hell, you can even get vegan burritos here.

Shout out to Phil at @ebxsf!