Author: Eric Kauschen

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“Vinny” the Garbage Man

So Monday night we have to put out our garbage. Twice in the last six months for some reason they haven’t picked up our garbage. I call and they tell me that they’ll pick it up the next day. OK, fine by me, but today we had a knock on the door…

The guy who’s picking up our trash says to my wife that the next time they don’t pick up our trash and have to come back the next day that they’re going to charge us $20. Does this sound like a shake down to you? I put it out, you pick it up. I put it out, you don’t pick it up that’s not my problem. I’m paying you to pick it up.

I called up Sunset Scavengers [kind of sounds like their seagulls doesn’t it?] and the woman I talked to was typing up a ticket for me to the Supervisor and she’s a nice woman, but she speaks what she’s typing and says, Didn’t pick up garbage twice in last six months, driver said there would be $20 charge next time, what the f*ck is going on here?

Well, it wasn’t the best customer service, but I have to agree with her.I think if this happens again I’ll have to ask my wife to ask the guy’s name and it’ll probably be Vinny.

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Potrero Hill

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything in awhile and that’s because I’ve taken a real job that I have to do a 9am to close to 5pm almost everyday in the office. I know that sounds vague, but for someone who has had a bit of hipster life without the bad clothes for the last three years it’s a big change. Most of the companies I’ve worked for have been work from home or work is like home so it’s a bit different for me now and to add to that I work in a part of town that I never went to before 9pm.

I work in the Potrero Hill district of SF and after a week and a half I’m starting to get a better feel for the area. It’s a mix of industrial, commercial and residential which is a lot different than the Sunset District, oh and the sun shines there on a daily basis. When I can drive into work I get free parking and can get there in 20 minutes. When I take the bus it takes me 45 minutes to an hour to get there.

Getting used to heat during the day is something new to me. My nordic blood of the Sunset makes me sweat when the temperature passes 60°. I worked in SOMA for a short period where the heat got up into the 80’s every day and all of us were sweaty messes, but that was a print shop this place is a little more upscale and you have to sort of look like you’re working at a business so it’s a different area.

Not just in that aspect, but also in the fact that in the area around 16th and DeHaro where I work you won’t find a corner store anywhere so you pretty much need to bring in everything you need to work with you. Great when I drive in, but kind of a hassle on the bus.

When I used to come out here was about 20 years ago when the music scene had declined to the point that the Bottom of the Hill was the only place left for bands to play. Now there’s Thee Parkside for bands, but I’ve never been there. Other than that there’s very little else to draw me to this part of town. The only grocery store is Whole Foods that is ridiculously expensive, but there’s tons of really nice upscale condos all over the place, so the Potrero has a ying and yang aspect to it.

There are lots of restaurants and you’ll see lots of hipsters sitting out in front in the sun eating their lunch, but you also have a few, but small number of crazy types walking down the block yelling at the top of their lungs. Most of the businesses are also a bit on the upscale side as well even though they’re in old building from the early part of the 20th century.

This is a new experience for me, so it’s going to take me a while to being out here. It’s definitely a part of San Francisco I haven’t really experienced before and I have to say when I get on 280 South at Mariposa my car literally bounces up and down and I’m still trying to figure out why.

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The Streets of San Francisco

Yes, it’s time for a rant again. San Francisco streets need lots of work. We aren’t back east where there’s lots of snow so they don’t need to update the roads as much here, but the street outside my house was last repaved in the early 70’s or maybe even the late 60’s. We have more potholes than pot dispensaries and those white circles spray painted around the smaller potholes are done by the SF Bike Coalition to keep bikers from being thrown into on coming traffic.

I am really beginning to hate driving in San Francisco. It isn’t pleasant and every bump in the road is making my teeth rattle. Giving that I also live in the Sunset district where the streets were built on sand makes roads shift up and down just to give you a bumpier ride. Heavily trafficked roads are the worst because they can’t always shut them down because of congestion and when they do getting anywhere seems impossible.

I drove in to my first day of work yesterday and had my nerves rattled pretty bad by all the potholes I hit along the way let alone the fix it bits that made my car bounce up and down. At time I thought my shocks might need adjusting, but since my car only has 44k on it the shocks should be fine. All the bumps do cause your wheels to need to be realigned every year or so unlike in other cities where they have smoother roads.

If you drive to Daly City just a few minutes from where I live the roads are like glass. You have to work hard to find a rough patch there, but in San Francisco just driving the speed limit makes you feel like your car is going to fall apart. Speaking of which I’ve had cars that have lost nuts and bolts because of how rattling the streets can be.

So please Mayor Ed Lee, lets do something to make the streets safer to drive on instead of having cops pull people over for driving 32mph in a 25mph zone.

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Mississippi Mud Cake

This was yet another recipe my Mom was well known for.  It’s super sweet, super chocolatey and just plain old super good. Note the melted oleo in the frosting which for those of you who aren’t over 40 is margarine. It’ll definitely add some lard on you ass if you make it too often, but it’s really good.

Mississippi Mud Cake

Cream 2 cups sugar and 1 cup salad oil.  Add 4 eggs (two at a time, beating well)

Sift 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 cup cocoa, 1/2 teaspoon salt, add to above mixture

Add 2 teaspoons vanilla,  3/4 cup nuts

Mix well

Pour into a 9″ x 13” greased and floured pan

Bake 350 degrees 30 minutes then spread 7 oz jar marshmallow cream over top while warm.

Frosting:

1 box powdered sugar

1/2 cup cocoa and mix with

1 cups melted oleo.

Add:

1/2 cup canned milk and 1 teaspoon vanilla Stir in

3/4 cup nuts chopped and spread on cake.

Cut in squares and serve like brownies.

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Jon Lord Has Died

A man very dear to my heart has died. Jon Lord, the keyboardist for Deep Purple died today of heart attack on top of having pancreatic cancer. He was the person who influenced me enough to play the piano and then move on to synthesizers. I still have a program on my keyboard that I made called Jon Lord that specifically reproduced his Hammond B-3 organ with all the grit and distortion. I can still to this day play his solos from Highway Star or the intro to Child in Time. I will miss the fact that he is no longer around to play music, but at 71 he had a good life I hope. He was one of my musical heroes that I unfortunately never got to meet. The following is about him from sfgate.com and the story does him justice.

Jon Lord, the keyboardist of the pioneering British hard-rock band Deep Purple, died Monday in London. He was 71.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said his manager, Bruce Payne. Mr. Lord announced last year that he had cancer.

In songs from the late 1960s and early ’70s like “Smoke on the Water,” “Hush” and the epic “Child in Time,” Deep Purple laid much of the groundwork for heavy metal, drawing a blunter and fiercer sound out of the blues-based riffs common in the British invasion’s first wave.

Mr. Lord’s Hammond B-3 organ – with its signal routed through a Marshall amplifier to give it a distorted tang – was key to Deep Purple’s style. It locked into formation withRitchie Blackmore‘s guitar, Roger Glover‘s bass and Ian Paice‘s drums, forging catchy lines like the four-note motif of “Smoke on the Water” that helped the band sell tens of millions of albums around the world.

But Mr. Lord did more than pound out chords. His fast, wandering solos reflected a lifelong interest in lyrical classical music, and in the band’s early years he composed several large-scale pieces for the group, including “Concerto for Group and Orchestra,” which was recorded with the Royal Philharmonic in London in 1969.

Born in Leicester, England, on June 9, 1941, Mr. Lord studied classical piano from a young age and became a fan of piano rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis as well as jazz organists like Jimmy Smith. After moving to London in 1959, he played in various jazz, blues and pop groups throughout the 1960s, until in 1968 the first incarnation of Deep Purple was formed in Hertford.

After its first singer, Rod Evans, left in 1969, the group recruited Ian Gillan, who had sung in “Jesus Christ Superstar” and had the vocal prowess to match the band. In the early 1970s the group released a string of hit albums, including “Deep Purple in Rock,” “Machine Head” and the live “Made in Japan.”

Mr. Lord remained in the group despite numerous personnel changes until it finally disbanded in 1976. He then formed Paice, Ashton and Lord, a short-lived group with Deep Purple’s drummer and the singer Tony Ashton, and joined an early version of the band Whitesnake. Deep Purple reunited in 1984, and Mr. Lord stayed until 2002; since then he has continued his composing career and collaborated with musicians includingAnni-Frid Lyngstad of Abba.

He is survived by his wife, Vicky, and two daughters, Amy Cherrington and Sara Lord. His first marriage to Judith Feldman ended in divorce.

In a recent interview, Mr. Lord demonstrated how he tailored the organ’s sound for Deep Purple.

“Lovely a sound as it was, it wasn’t quite giving me what I wanted,” he said. “I could hear another sound in my head – something harder, something more throaty.”

“You tap straight in and put it through a straight speaker,” he added, “and you get a beast.”

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Country Captain Chicken

This was a dish my Mom was known for and it was the one dish that was requested the most by friends and family when they would come over. I thought it was an original dish or handed down through the family, which it might have, but apparently it’s a rather common dish in the South coming from British Captains who had spent time in India.

This isn’t the type of Indian food you’ll find today it was an Americanized [re: white bread] version of Indian food cooked as a stew. My Mom always served it with little bowls of coconut, almond, raisins and chopped green onion that you could sprinkle on to your taste, but just went for the chicken and rice. That was enough for me as a kid.

My Mom always liked to spice this dish up a lot and I think she usually added the 2-3 teaspoons of curry using tablespoons. It’s a very tasty dish and something that while it has lots of ingredients isn’t really that hard to prepare.

Country Captain Chicken

1 fryer chicken cut up

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/4 cup butter

1 medium onion chopped

1 small green pepper chopped

1 clove garlic crushed

2 to 3 teaspoons curry powder

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1 can (16 oz) stewed tomatoes

1/4 cup currants or raisins

Hot cooked rice

Toasted blanched almonds

Chutney

Sprinkle chicken on both sides with salt and pepper.  Melt butter in skillet- brown chicken on both sides.  Remove chicken and add onion, green pepper, garlic, curry powder, thyme.  Cook until onion is tender.  Add tomatoes, currants and chicken.  Cook covered until chicken is tender.

Serve over rice with almonds and chutney

Makes 4 servings

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This Week Will Be About Food

I haven’t written too much about food recently, but I came across a book my wife and I were putting together that was a collection of my Mom’s recipes and I fell in love with food again. For those of you who knew her she was best remembered for her cooking.

I think because she was a stay at home mom that after I started going to school she had time on her hands and spent the time cooking. She would make gallons of bolognese sauce and freeze in old milk cartons, make cookies and cakes every week and all my friends that would come to the house always wanted to come by to taste what she made that day.

When we had parties she’d get up in the morning and start cooking. There would be appetizers like her bourbon barbecue hot dogs, mushroom toast rounds, spinach dip, crab molds. She wouldn’t just put out chips and dip she always went all the way.

Her food was old school compared to what you’d get today. It was pretty homey feeling when you’d eat it though and it made you feel good to take a bite of it. So this week I’ll be sharing some of her recipes that made me feel good as a kid growing up in San Francisco.

The first is one I grew with. It was the only way my Mom could get me to eat mushrooms and you’ll see why when you read the ingredients. I made this for a party once and after the first couple of batches I didn’t have a chance to get them into the oven because people were just spreading it on the bread and eating it up. I think you’ll like this one.

Mushroom Toast Rounds

Slice sour French rolls or onion bagels into thin slices. [I prefer baguettes]  Spread each round with the following mixture:

1/2 cup Best Foods Mayonaise

1/2 Cup Parmesan cheese

6 finely chopped mushrooms

1 teaspoon minced onions (instant) only if using French rolls. [I add a couple of cloves of garlic instead]
Place on baking sheet and broil until bubbly.

Variation: use chopped mushroom stems in above mixture and stuff mushroom caps.  Broil until tender.

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Weather In A San Francisco Summer

Summer is here and it’s time for weird weather. San Francisco has four distinct microclimates, the fog belt [where I live], the banana belt [Mission area and everything East], Wind belt [downtown which is made possible by all the high rises funneling the air and the Marine Belt [just around the Golden Gate Bridge and extending down to the Embarcadero.

I had the chance to travel to the Potrero District [banana belt] this morning. I left the house to overcast foggy 55° weather and hopped in my car and started to drive East. Suddenly I noticed it starting to get brighter. I had to pull out my sunglasses and when I arrived out on Rhode Island street it was perfect blue skies and sunny. As I opened the door to my car I was hit by 73° according to my iPhone. That’s almost a 20° difference within a half hour’s drive.

There are even sub-microclimates, but for people who move to San Francisco they have to learn the city to understand it best. The first thing you need to learn is layers. In the Sunset District my Dad would go out in the backyard on weekends in the morning to work the garden. He’d have a tank top, t-shirt, sweatshirt and jacket on. As the day wore on the clothes would soon start to come off. Then around 3pm he’d have to start putting them all back on again.

While the Sunset has a bit of temperament about it’s weather, it’s not constantly foggy. We’re actually getting more sunny days than we used to, but I remember my brief stint living in the mission and I don’t think I owned a single long sleeved shirt unless it was for work downtown. Sure it will get overcast upon occasion in the Mission and Potrero, but you never see fog like you do in the outer Sunset and Richmond Districts. Now at least I know if I’m in need of some sun on a cold foggy day in San Francisco all I have to do is head East for a few miles.

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Bayview Opera House

My friend Angelina Armani was in town last night and contacted me to tell me that she and her boyfriend Robert Hall would be videotaping a performance by Kevn Kinney of Southern rock band Drivin and Cryin at the Bayview Opera House. That was enough to give me an excuse to check out a piece of San Francisco history few people know about.

The funniest part when I drove up and met everyone was that they were talking about chicken and waffles that they just had for dinner. Apparently, they didn’t know about the Bayview part of town. Kevn greeted me with a hey brother, you from this part of town? The first thing that popped out of my mouth was, you just had chicken and waffles for dinner, do I look like I’m from this part of town? Not being unaware of soul food [yet I still can’t figure out the combination of chicken and waffles] we both ended up having a laugh after my comment.

Built in 1888, the Bayview Opera House is small in comparison to other opera houses you might find elsewhere.It underwent a refurbishment recently and I can tell you that from walking around the outside and inside that it is definitely a centerpiece to the Bayview-HuntersPoint community. This area was originally considered to be a part of South San Francisco.

The odd part is that while it was called an opera house there was never any operas performed there. Built as part of a Masonic Lodge it was home to vaudeville acts like Pawnee Bill’s Medicine Show and other traveling type of groups, but it was a place that the people of San Francisco would visit for a night out on the town which would make sense since there was a brewery on the opposite corner where they could fuel up for whatever form of entertainment was happening that night. While I can’t find much  more about the history of the place it is today a place that serves the African-American community with arts programs, yoga and helps bring the community together.

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Happy Independence Day!

Welcome to the 4th of July were the U.S.A. celebrates it’s independence from the tyranny of the United Kingdom with a Chinese tradition — fireworks. It’s also the one day of the year where you can have an open beer in your hand before noon and no one looks at you funny. Many of you will be going down to Crissy Field or Fisherman’s Wharf with the thousands of others to be crowded together to watch the fun. I will not.

I did the Crissy Field thing once and while it was fun there were too many people drinking too much to get in a portapotty to give back the beer and afterwards the drive out was so slow that I have to say I have never seen so many people jumping out of their cars and running off to the side of the road to pee. Nope, I’m not going to drive through a river of hot urine just watch some fireworks. There’s plenty of other places to see them minus the urine and drunkards.

The first thing is you need to get high. No I’m not talking about smoking pot, but get as high up in the air as you can. Twin Peaks is a good place as you can see Crissy Field as well as Oakland and Union City’s shows. This place does get a little crowded though so get there early. Oddly enough on a warmish day like today when you go up there at night the heat of the day rises so be prepared to have shorts and tank top handy as San Francisco radiates back all the heat of the day.

Grandview Park is another good place in the Inner Sunset and you only have to walk partly up the steps to see it. This was our usual place, but tonight I think I’m going to try the Northwest corner of the Sunset Reservoir. I’ve heard lots of people recommend it and it’s closer to my house. The parking in all these other places is much easier to get in and out of and they’re also nice if you have kids that are scared by the loud banging.

Fisherman’s Wharf I did one year which is a good place if you want to get closer without being boxed in at Crissy Field. You can even hop on the Metro and enjoy the fireworks from the Embarcadero and if you’re quick you can hop back on to before the rest of the crowd does.

If you want an alternative fireworks festival go down to Ocean Beach. The outer Sunset and Richmond district seem to have a number of pyrophiliacs and while not as big as the Crissy field show there are still some pretty big rockets going up in the air out here. I do remember one year there was an older Chinese man with his granddaughter set up at the school yard of A. P. Gianinni Junior High that was sending up some definitely not safe and sane stuff that was pretty impressive. He was there for over an hour. Local schoolyards seem to be a hit or miss attraction for people. The police generally leave you alone there unless you’re tossing M-80’s around because there isn’t too much to burn on the asphalt play areas. The good old days of driving to Daly City to buy your own fireworks are pretty much gone. I’m not sure if Pacifica is still selling the old Red Devil fireworks of my youth, but at least I’ve given you a few ways to see something tonight while you’re eating your burgers and slugging down too many beers.