Tag: food porn

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Why you gotta love San Francisco

There are a lot of reasons to love San Francisco, but I think one of the biggest is the food you can get here. You can travel around the world’s cuisines without leaving this city squeezed into a 7 mile by 7 mile peninsula. An Austrian friend of mine, Karin on her first trip to San Francisco gave me a wicked little smile when I said you can find any kind of food here. “I will offer you a challenge then.” OK, that was a rather Germanic way of putting it, but even though she was born and raised in Austria she’s of Syrian decent.

“Can you get authentic Syrian food?” I stopped for a second. What the hell exactly is Syrian food? I still don’t know for sure, but I imagine it must involve slow cooked tagines of animal parts served in a spicy sauce. Time to google. Yep, we have seven Syrian restaurants in San Francisco. We never got to try one to see how authentic they were, but even so you can still find any kind of food you want here. We of course have the fresh seafood down at the wharf. House of Prime Rib offers up some wonderous slabs of beef, but those are things you expect to find. The Italian food in North Beach is still great and has moved outside of North Beach to possibly permeate the city. Steak houses are a dime a dozen around here. Where you have to go to find some odder, uncommon foods is the local neighborhoods. Want a little tongue with your burrito? Head to the Mission. Chinese food that the squeamish don’t want to ask what’s in the broth of the soup. Head to Chinatown. Middle eastern and Indian food is everywhere from Yumma’s and Sunrise deli in the Sunset District to Saha Arabic Fusion and Shalimar downtown or Kan Zaman in the Haight. We even have a pizza place that rumor has it, imports its water from New York and brought it’s pizza oven from there as well.

In the picture that goes along with this article is one I took that yesterday at a local grocery store in the Sunset District. This is what I expect to see in a grocery store in the Mission District, not the Sunset. As a matter of fact they had almost an entire aisle dedicated to Hispanic ingredients right down to the candles with Jesus and Saint Mary on them.

I can get most countries cuisines without even leaving the Sunset district, although German and French food is getting harder to find, but there’s always Ethiopian food ready at New Eritrea on Irving Street. We have three Hawaiian restaurants within 5 minutes of my house serving up a plate lunch just like the surfers in Hawaii feast on after a morning of surfing, yet not one of them is near the beach. We got food here and you gotta love it. Now I think I’ll run out for some Southern BBQ today.

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I am NOT a food blogger!

I recently have had the unfortunate experience of seeing quite a few food bloggers on television. This is not a good thing because if they are any indication of what food bloggers are like, I am not a food blogger. Most of them seem to have no luck with the opposite sex, can’t cook and the food they write about while tasty, has them all on high blood pressure and cholesterol meds.

This is not what I am. I love food, I write about food some times, but I don’t write about food I’ve bought at a restaurant all the time, I write about food I cook. Yes, I may have a couple extra pounds on me, but seeing as I’m getting closer to 50 that’s not so unusual and I know people in their 30’s who have more of themselves to love than me.

I grew up in the kitchen. I have a picture of myself at about 3 with an apron on standing on a chair washing dishes in the sink. This is probably because that’s where you always start out — as a dishwasher. I remember around 7 I got to move up helping my Mom mix cookie dough and bake the cookies and at 10 I was helping out my Dad at the BBQ. My family is from an Italian and German background, mostly Italian so it’s always about the food. While I’m a city boy we always spent the summers up in the Sierra foothills in what most city people would call a “red-neck” town. All the guys got a gun for their 16th birthday and you could sit out on the porch in the evening and watch the raccoons, skunks and deer walk right past your house. One of the things I learned from this was an appreciation of nature and vegetables. We used to drive out to Joe Malfino’s farm and get about 10-20 pounds of Italian red onions that his father brought the seeds over from Italy when he came here. Nothing is as sweet as one of those onions and my Dad used to show off to my friends when we’d get back my cutting an onion and having them taste it raw. When we’d be driving home we’d always stop at a place called Sloughouse that had the sweetest yellow corn you could ever imagine. When we’d get back home my Dad and I would plant radishes, carrots and swiss chard out in our foggy back yard which was kind of a way of bringing country life to the city.

I learned a lot from those times growing up. I was a city boy for most of the year, but in the summer I’d have to be a country boy picking the walnuts, figs and apples off the trees at my Aunts house or maybe we’d go over to a cousin’s place were we would be wrestling with the pigs and milking the cows and picking the freshly laid eggs from the hen house. For most of the people that was work, for me it was fun because I got to do something my friends in the city never got to. I remember my Aunt’s friends coming by and dropping off boxes of peaches and other fruits that were maybe off the tree for a couple hours at most.

Now I’m carrying on the tradition by cooking like I learned from my family and adding my own side to things. I’m moving out of the Italian/German comfort zone and playing around with South American, Indian, African dishes just to see what new I can come up with. I’ve wanted to be a chef many times, but some of my acquaintances such as Bruce Hill and Joe Zelinsky have said, “You work long hours, with no overtime and you barely make above minimum wage.” I think I’ll have to pass then, because I want to be able to buy the food I cook at home.

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Learning how to shop again

Well I hate to say it, but my Mom died about 3 months ago. It was kind of weird because she died at home, but in the end it was a good thing because she had been suffering for along time and could barely get around and hadn’t left the house for months. This is all a side story that I can save for another time, but the oddest thing that struck me after this was how we shopped.

Since there were things my Mom would need we’d have to find a way to separate things into 2 carts or in the top and bottom of a cart depending on how much stuff we were buying. My Mom used to invite friends over and of course she’d have to feed them so we always had extras on hand. Now we didn’t have to do that anymore which left us with one less piece of confusion. The other thing we realized is that a dozen eggs will last us a month and there were things that were low on our list to eat that we didn’t need anymore.

One of the biggest things we noticed is that we don’t need an 18 cubic foot standalone freezer in the garage anymore. We don’t need to buy 10 lbs of ground meat at Costco because that would last us 6 months (but we still like Costco incase I get the go ahead for that new HD flatscreen in 3D. We also don’t make 10 gallons of minestrone soup or beans and hamhocks anymore so we don’t need a place to store 1/2 gallon empty milk containers  that have been refilled with that kind of stuff. We might get a 7 cubic foot freezer for downstairs just because a pizza won’t fit in our side by side fridge/freezer upstairs and it’s nice to have a few things on hand so we don’t have to shop all the time.

We still find ourselves reaching for the jumbo pack of something and then realize that it’s only going to go bad before we’ve finished it. We have a new learning curve to go through now because before it was just the two of us, then the three of us, then the four of us when our daughter was born. Now it’s just back to the two of us plus our daughter and we don’t have another mouth to feed that was the equivalent of an 800 pound gorilla.

I’m not going to miss the mini tacos or taquitos as they were pretty horrible anyway. I’m not going to miss having 50 rolls of paper towels in the garage which led me to impose an embargo. I’m not going to miss the 100+ jars of spices that I couldn’t remember what they were used for let alone the 30 year old jar of coconut on rack in the sun (no we didn’t bother to open that.) I am trying to find a way to deep fry the lumpia so that my wife doesn’t gag at the smell of the fryer afterwards (suggestions willingly accepted), but I think I will miss the scallops that I learned to like in the last few months.

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The California Burrito is not a California Burrito

As I woke up this morning bleary eyed and slightly incoherent I noticed an article on our local sfgate.com about the “California Burrito.” WTF?!?! I guess I’m getting old, but when the burrito came north from Mexico it was  beans and rice with a little mystery meat and maybe a little cheese. Californians and Californian-Mexicans wanted a little more since our state has an abundance of produce so they took beans, rice, cheese, guacamole, salsa, sour cream plus the meat of your choice and sometimes a few more veggies [El Toro Taqueria adds peas and carrots to their burrito which is just wrong to me, but I don’t want to get off track]. This became known as the California Burrito.

Now some foodie terrorists in San Diego have infiltrated San Francisco and introduced what they call the “California Burrito.” It got carne asada [steak for you gringos], guacamole, sour cream and FRENCH FRIES! French fries in a burrito?! I’m sorry, that’s just wrong. It’s like a Mexican version of Primante’s in Philadelphia that puts fries on their sandwiches for the truck drivers to eat on the go. In San Francisco, the burrito is like ambrosia any taqueria you go into sells more burritos than tacos first off and the clientele covers just about every race we have in the city. We know burritos. San Diego which probably has a larger hispanic population than SF apparently does not. What’s next? Hot dog burritos? The culprit here is a place called Taqueria Los Coyotes. I suspect it will start showing up in more places just like the baja fish taco did. Fish tacos I don’t have a problem with since they started in Baja and moved here pretty much unchanged. But fries in a burrito I’m not so sure about.

Now I’ll have to eat my words and try one before I condemn it fully. I still have to say though that the best burrito is found outside the Mission District. [Ducks and runs for cover]