Month: April 2012

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Political Advertising in San Francisco

I was watching the Daily Show the other day because that’s where I turn when I want to see Fox News. They had an interesting piece on an ad being run by Rick Santorum called, Obamaville. We never get to see ads like this in San Francisco and it made start to think why and I think I’ve come up with an answer.

First off, San Francisco is so far to the left that people [except for Tony Hall] of the Republican kind call themselves Conservative or Moderate. The R word is something Tony Hall has the guts to utter in a public meeting place. It made me think about my parents who were Republicans until the Nixon impeachment. They were nothing like the Republicans of today such as Rick Santorum who called President Obama a snob for wanting kids to go to college. My parents would have given me a big old beat down if I said I didn’t want to go to college. Then there’s Mitt Romney who when asked if he knew any NASCAR racers said, no, but I know several of the team owners. That says rich snob to me.

You won’t see any ads for the re-election of Obama because he knows he’s got us in the bag. He did make a quick stop here for a fund raiser, but you won’t see any ads here because he knows he’s got us in his pocket. The Republicans on the other side don’t bother because they know they don’t have a chance in the Bay Area. Meg Whitman and Carli Fiorina tanked here. California while having a red section in the great white north and deep south is a dark blue state and the Bay Area is the darkest blue part of it. The only time we see political ads is when we have a Mayoral race or possibly a Governor’s race.

People who want to get into politics in San Francisco should know that using the R word won’t help you one bit. District 4’s former supervisor Ed Jew was a Republican who switched to the Democratic Party to get a chance on winning which he did, moved to Burlingame and now is serving 64 months in prison for bribery and extortion. I’m not saying Republicans are all corrupt. Whitman and Fiorino aren’t in jail. Oh wait, Meg had that undocumented housekeeper and Carli had the creepy demon sheep ad which turned against her. Not enough to imprison a person on, but not the way to run politics in the Bay Area.

For those who haven’t seen it I thought I’d give you a taste of Rick Santorum’s ad campaign tactics. Note that every person in the ad is a blue collar white person and that whenever Obama is referenced they’re actually showing pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not Barack Obama. Rick Santorum’s ad has, well, Santorum all over it. While we may live in the bubble, if the Republican’s keep up their current tactics, in the next five years they’ll turn into a footnote of history like the Whig party.

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The Lazy Gardener

Spring has sprung and if you aren’t living in an apartment it’s time to take a look at your garden if you have one. Gardening was my Dad’s pastime and he used to love it spending most of his weekends out in our backyard picking weeds and planting flowers. For me, I’ve discovered that while I’m good at landscaping I pretty much suck at gardening.

Before we lived here the wife and I lived in a house we rented near the beach. We didn’t really have a garden there because our landlord lived in a cottage house in the back so we focused on houseplants. We bought several and they did quite well because they were easy to take care of. We had this one that we bought called an aeonium that was a small succulent that I think we paid $1.99 for that sat on our windowsill and was basically forgotten for several years. When it came time to move we were pulling all our stuff together and found it sitting on the windowsill. It was still alive, barely. It hadn’t grown at all sitting in a small dry clump of dirt, but we decided to bring it with us.

Oddly enough for some strange reason, probably that we didn’t have as much room in the house my wife got the idea of sticking it outside. Within a a month it had become twice the size it was when we got it [about 3″] within 6 months it was over 3′ tall and had to be transplanted several times. We had it in such a large pot that on windy nights we would find that it had blown over and a piece had broken off. We have a terraced backyard with brick bulkheads filled with dirt so for the hell of it I stuck the broken off piece in the dirt. It grew. The bulkhead planters my Dad used to plant annual flowers in and that wasn’t something I wanted to get into dropping money into every year.

We bought a few more of the small aeoniums and planted them in the bulkheads and watched them grow. When they flower they keep their flowers for a month or two. The best part about them is they are truly a plant for the lazy gardner. If you water them, they grow. If you don’t water them, they grow. They can take direct sun or shade. They don’t have any pests or plant diseases like my roses out in front are constantly attacked by. They just sit there and make your yard look nice without any hassle. If you want to take a vacation somewhere for a month or two, go ahead they’ll be fine when you come back. If they start getting too big, lop off the big pieces and stick them in the ground.

Very few people around me have gardens anymore. The lawns in front are dried up and the backyards are usually dirt overgrown with weeds. A backyard like that isn’t a place you want to bring your friends out to when you have a nice day and want to have a barbecue. You can have a home that looks like a million dollars on the inside, but if the outside looks like a garbage dump it’s just wasted space. We used to have lawn on one of the terraces in the back, but it was too much of pain for my Dad to mow so he let it go and it became just dirt. I bought some landscape fabric and covered everything up and covered it with small blue river rock and made a pathway with red lava rock to the stairs down to the next terrace. We still get weeds every once in awhile, but they’re just easier to get rid of. We took what used to be the flower beds on either side and added in aeoniums and jade plants which also don’t have a care about San Francisco weather. I can’t even remember the last time I bothered to water outside. We do have two camellia bushes that were planted long before I was born so they probably have roots tapping into some underground lake at this point in time.

If you have a garden, put it to use. Drop some landscape fabric and toss some river rock and plant some aeoniums or jade plants and you’ll definitely bring up the value of your house. Please don’t use it to run your clotheslines to hang your nasty old granny panties out to dry like our neighbors do.

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Garlic Fries…HOME RUN!

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.

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How I Miss The Elephant Train

You have to have lived in San Francisco for awhile to remember the elephant train that ran at the San Francisco Zoo. Later becoming the zebra train for some odd reason, I still miss the original zebra train tours around the zoo.

I think they cost about 75¢ at the time which tells you about how old I am. You would hop on by the Children’s Zoo and ride around the entire zoo getting a little lesson on all the animals that you’d see. It was a good way to start your trip to the zoo, then you could walk around and take your time. For elderly people who had trouble walking around the zoo it made it much more accessible. While to many the zoo seems large today, it was even larger back then when they were using more of their space.

I have heard, but can’t confirm that it original ran from Playland at the beach to the zoo back in the day when it didn’t cost anything to get in. It was also said to have been used at one time to help students get around at SF State University, which if people thought of the place as a zoo that would give them proof.

I do remember going on field trips to the zoo and that was always the best way to move the kids around the zoo quickly and then get them back to the school. Field trips like that made going to school fun back then. It’s hard to find pictures of the trains now and I couldn’t even find one of the zebra train that replaced it. It’s even harder to find any information about them, but I believe the zoo stopped them in the early 80’s. I can’t even find out when they started using them there. There’s actually more information out there about the Little Puffer train, but doesn’t mention that it runs on a shorter track today than it used to. There’s a lot of stuff out there about the old zoo like Storyland which every kid had to see back then. Sure it was a little beat up and run down when I was a kid, but it was still fun to see all your nursery rhymes and storybook characters in 3D.

I’m a bit out of shape and when we got back from taking our daughter to the zoo today I was out of breath and sweating. I think that’s part of the reason I really miss the elephant train.