We got back from our flying visit to Obama country late Tuesday.

 
Weather when we landed was spitting. (Oh, please give us more rain before the dry summer months kick in.)

We caught the Super Shuttle in from the airport. His nibs had signed and paid online (cheaper that way) before we left home. There were two other guys in the van before us and we wondered where we'd be taken on our way home. Super Shuttle is a fantastic random way to see parts of the City that we don't usually see.

Both guys -- turned out -- lived in the Sunset, just a few blocks from each other. One was like at 26th and Noriega, the other at 27th and Judah, maybe?

After dropping the second guy off, the driver drove like a bat outta hell to get from the Sunset to Telegraph Hill, through the park, up Park Presidio to 101 to Lombard then over on Larkin and up Union, down Montgomery.

Home again, home again. Drop the bags on the floor. Pick up the mail that's sitting where it fell after the mail carrier stuffed it through the door slot.

By now it was past 7:30p and our usual behavior would've been to walk down to Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store and order a large carafe of cheap red wine and two orders of canneloni. Soul soothing food for tired people. Ymmm. But there was this drizz, see? and I was tired and ... I can make dinner quicker than we could walk the four blocks down to Mario's and wait for our order. Not to mention I didn't feel like walking uphill home after dinner.

Dinner Tues

Preheat oven to 375dF or so. Set the rice cooker cooking rice. Fish from the freezer, thawed in the microwave. Place on aluminum foil. Sprinkle with mixed herbs. Squeeze half lemon on top. Wrap up and put in oven for 15min. (~$3)

Prep broccoli and put in microwave for 3min. (~$0.50)

Hmmm. Hmmm. Start sorting through mail. 15min up. Check fish. Put back in for another five minutes. Check broccoli. Zap for another minute. Rice is done. Fish is done. Broccoli is done. Dinner is served ~ twenty-five minutes after we decided not to walk down to Mario's.

Cost: maybe $4 for the two of us. ($0.50 for broccoli. $0.20 for rice, maybe? $0.20 for lemon. $3 for fish. ... Cheaper than Mario's, that's for sure.)

Dinner Wedn

Last night I just wanted something simple. Still lagging from the trip. His nibs had stopped off in Chinatown on his way back from his doctor's appointment and stocked up on fresh veggies and fruit. What sounded good?

Hardboil two eggs. Well, three eggs, really. Save one for an egg salad sandwich Thursday or Friday. Peel and chop two eggs.

[How to boil an egg. Place egg in small pot. Cover with cold water. Place pot on burner. When water boils, turn off heat, put lid on pot and wait ten minutes. After ten minutes, pour hot water from pot and cool egg(s) by filling pot with cold water.]

Rinse bag of spinach from Chinatown. Shake dry. Put in large heat-proof bowl. Cost: $0.50

Toss chopped egg on top. Cost: $0.40 +/- for two eggs.

Take about 1/3 lb bacon and cut into small bits. Fry. Cost: ~$0.70 (bacon 4lbs/$8 @ Costco)

While waiting for bacon to crisp, slice a chunk of sour batard in half, butter, sprinkle with garlic herb sprinkle, put back together, butterside<->butterside, wrap in aluminum foil and heat in 400dF oven. Cost: ~$0.60

Take fried bacon bits out of frying pan and toss onto spinach in bowl. Pour off all but 3T of bacon fat. (Save remainder of bacon fat in refrigerator dish with bacon fat already saved there for another day. ...)

Add 2T olive oil to bacon fat in frypan. Heat. Add 1/2 onion, chopped. Brown. Add ~ 3T balsamic vinegar and scrape up bits from bottom of frypan. Cost olive oil/onion/vinegar ~ $0.50

When hot through, pour onion/vinegar/fat over spinach/egg/bacon and toss. Serve with garlic bread.

Cost for tasty, nutritious (well, except for the bacon and bacon fat) dinner for two: $3, if that.

Home again, home again. Let's take a boat to Bermuda. Let's grab a plane to Saint Paul. Let's take a kayak to Quincy or Nyack. Let's get away from it all.

But it's oh. so. nice. to come home.

Labels: food, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:19 AM|| |

Simple really.

We buy fish at Costco in big cheaper-by-the-pound lots and then divvy it up into 1/2lb. bags for the freezer.

Cost of fish ~$3.

1C of dry white wine. (Doesn't need to be the pricey stuff, but at least make it something you'd drink out of a glass without spewing. Peter Vella Chardonnay out of the box we stash in the hall closet for just such uses.)

Chopped onion. I used maybe half an onion. (onion $0.39/lb in Chinatown)

Add wine and onion to saute pan and heat to boiling. Add fish. Cook until fish flakes easily with a fork. Take fish out of pan and put in a glass baking dish.

While the fish is cooking. Melt a cube [1/2C] of butter in a measuring cup in the microwave. Butter melted? Fish done and removed to baking dish? Good.

Boil down the wine and onion until reduced to about 1/3C. Add the hot wine/onion reduction to the melted butter in the measuring cup.

Separate two egg yolks.
(We used the egg whites in the scrambled eggs this morning. ...)

Put two egg yolks in blender and whirl. You see where we're going right? While the yolks are whirling, pour the wine/onion/melted-butter mix into the blender and whirl until it all thickens up. Call this a Hollandaise variant if you must.

Pour the sauce over the fish that's in the baking dish. Sprinkle with a bit of shredded Parmesan cheese. On top of that, sprinkle a dusting of paprika.

Put under a broiler until the sauce browns lightly.

Served with rice and asparagus, which happens to be 99c/pound in Chinatown and local, not shipped in from Chile or some such place. We had about half a pound between us.

Total cost something like $4, maybe $4.50 for the two of us.

Delish. Hard on the arteries, but delish.

Labels: food, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:35 PM|| |

Ah, jeez.

I don't watch TV. Period. None. Zip. Even if I did, I don't think I get the Fox Network in the subset of available channels that comes with our barebones ($2.80/mo in addition to my computer connection) from Comcast.

After SG's comment (see title of this post), I hied off to Google with a /kitchen nightmares gordon ramsay/ search.

First up: the Fox Kitchen Nightmares Web site. Entertaining little itty-bitty less-than-a-minute clips.

After some poking and prying around in YouTube, HotDiggity! a stash of episodes (which I have, with great reluctance, set aside until later. ... His nibs doesn't care to be forced to listen to YouTube clips I'm playing while he's plunked in the chair of the desk face-to-face with me. ... Later!)

Thanks, SG! I just caught up on the season finale of Project Runway yesterday and was wondering what I'd do ... Gordon Ramsay it is!

Labels: food, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:24 PM|| |

comment on the cookbooks post:

Mainly, though, I don't use cookbooks for meals any more. Everything we eat seems to be variations on about ten themes. Gordon Ramsay always advises his victims on Kitchen Nightmares to simplify, and it's good advice.

Of course cookbooks are not only, or sometimes hardly at all, for cooking. From the pure book POV I love David, and Claudia Roden. I have a fat tome of classic techniques in Italian cooking by Antonio Bugialli, which is only for thumbing through.

We pretty much stopped cooking from cookbooks when the youngsters were in the house. No time for browsing through cookbooks when you are working and raising, and it's disappointing to spend time prepping something that's downed in ten minutes and appreciated just as much as if you'd made them their favorite meatloaf. We had dishes we knew they liked that we varied in one way or another but yeah, ten themes is probably accurate for our cooking repertoire then too.

I like cookbooks, whether I'm cooking from them or not. I sit and read them and I'm in another world, a world with cuttlefish on the table or an endless number of cabbage recipes, or no eggs-milk-butter. You can tell a lot about how people live by looking at the cookbooks written for them.

A friend once asked, "But really. How many cookbooks do you need?" What can I answer to something like that?

Cookbooks aren't just something for checking out a recipe for mu-shu pork or Char Siu Bao or gingersnaps. No, when I need a recipe, it's usually not a specific cookbook I head for. I pull out five cookbooks and find five recipes and mix them up, or I go to the Web and do something similar with Google.

Cookbooks are for dreaming over, for sitting curled up in a chair with a breeze coming in off the Bay with a pad of sticky notes, marking pages with possibilities for future dishes or snacks or desserts.

Dinner the other night (and last night as leftovers) was a variant on shrimp à la king, made without recipes. Simple, ready?

Olive oil. A small red onion. Garlic.
Bell pepper strips from Trader Joe's, mélange à trois green/yellow/red: frozen. (16oz bag)
Medium-sized shrimp from Trader Joe's: cleaned, cooked, frozen. (16oz? bag)

Butter. Flour. Heavy whipping cream.
Parmesan cheese. Pale dry sherry.

Olive oil in pan. Heat. Add garlic and sliced onion. Cook until browned. Add red-yellow-green pepper strips. Cook some more. Add shrimp and stir until shrimp is hot. Set aside.

Butter in pan. Add flour for roux. Add cream for Béchamel sauce. Toss in shredded Parmesan cheese and sherry and then fiddle with cream and cheese/sherry until you have a nice thick not-too-cheesy sauce. Grind of pepper. Stir sherry sauce into shrimp/pepper medley. Serve with rice.

Total cost ~ $10, if that. From that we had two dinners, or four meals. It was delicious.

Would I have known to toss those things together if I hadn't already made seafood enchiladas =and= chicken with the sherry Parmesan sauce? Would I have tossed the melange à trois peppers with the shrimps if there hadn't been a shrimp à la king in my past? I don't know. I think, like many things, it's easier to cook without recipes, once you have enough time booked using someone's tried and true directions.

Natural cooks do not spring from Zeus' brow.

Oh, how I love cookbooks.

Update: "So, what are you planning for dinner?"
"I dunno. Haven't decided yet. Have any preferences?"
"I'd like meatloaf."

Meatloaf for dinner tonight -- "Cottage Cheese Meat Loaf," to be exact.

Labels: books, food, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:15 PM|| |

comment on the cookbooks post:

I love the spillover effect. Do you use double-sided tape?

I assume you mean the paper bits behind the picture of the younger younger guys?

Those bits are on a French board, or whatever you call it, that hangs over the edge of the counter. Had to hang over because if I gave it a 90deg turn, it wouldn't fit under the upper shelf.

French board: padded board with criss-crossed ribbons that you tuck your bits of whatever under. Seems to me Sabrina had one where she kept her memorabilia and spent tickets and pictures and invitations and whatever.

The original plan -- still in general play -- was to use this board for restaurant business cards and menus for places we might want to return to. The cards would not only remind us of places we'd liked but also provide reservation # and address information.

Alas, as we've found, this town has thousands of restaurants and they are constantly changing chefs or closing or deciding they want to be small plates or deciding they want to change direction or ...

Keeping business cards and/or menus doesn't mean the restaurant will be the same or even in business should we decide we want to go again.

We try to keep up. Every Wednesday The Inside Scoop column in the Chron food section covers the who's leaving, who's arriving foodista gossip. Cortez on Geary (yummy food) just sold. New owner says food and chef will stay the same. Sure. Michelle Mah (formerly of Ponzu) will be the chef at Midi, which is taking over the Perry's space on Sutter. Bruno Viscovi has sold Albona Ristorante Istriano to his nephew and the chef who's been there ten years. Nothing will change. Sure the food won't change, but you won't have Bruno going over the menu with you in caring detail, telling you exactly how the soup was prepared and which vegetables go in the beef stock. sigh. Shuna Lydon left Sens before we had a chance to taste her desserts. Scott Howard closed recently. A loss.

And the knives dance. 'Round and 'round we go.

Labels: food, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:24 PM|| |

Mark Bitten is asking for help updating his "50 Cookbooks I'd Rather Not Live Without" cookbooks list.

417 comments so far.

I don't know what I'd do if I had to choose my fifty favorite cookbooks. I have bookcases filled with cookbooks elsewhere and maybe a foot-plus of cookbooks above the bar sink here. Are the cookbooks here the ones I'd rather not live without? Are there fifty of them?

On the shelf above the bar sink:
[* means that this blog post accomplished its purpose of making me think about the cookbooks I have here and I'm taking this book elsewhere and freeing up some shelf room ...]

• The Microwave Guide and Cookbook (no author given) *
  
  
• Eliason, Harward, Westover - Make-A-Mix Cookery - a classic used constantly while raising my family. I still pull it out to make cream cheese swirls, a coffee roll with cream cheese filling sort of like a cheese Danish, which I make for Easter brunch and other special occasions.
  
  
• More Make-A-Mix Cookery ... vol 2. of the classic
  
  
• Sunset Chinese Cook Book - this book falls open to the kung pao chicken recipe page, now stained and splattered and no longer attached to the binding it's been used so much
  
  
• Sunset Cooking Bold & Fearless: a cook book for men *
  
  
• Sunset Cook Book of Favorite Recipes *
  
  
• Betty Crocker's Bisquick Cookbook * - used constantly while raising kids. I'd make the biscuit mix from Make-A-Mix Cookery and use the Bisquick recipes from this book
  
  
• Shinojima - Authentic Japanese Cuisine for Beginners - picked up on our trip to Japan last year. [or not. When I was going through it, I noticed the price information on the back was in $$$. Picked up where, then?] I need to sit down with it to see if it deserves to be kept in the limited space here. [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
  
  
• Mabel C. Lai - Chinese Cuisine Made Easy - "Hot & Spicy Soup" (p32) 'nuff said. I always need to check how many golden needles, wooden ears and bamboo shoots the recipe takes. Gee, I haven't made the soup in a long time. Need to get some fresh tofu and check the cupboards for golden needles, wooden ears and bamboo shoots. The "Ginger Broccoli Beef" recipe is exceptional too.
  
  
• Ranck, Good - Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook: feasting with your slow cooker - another classic.
  
  
• Shirley - Wonderful ways to prepare chicken - bought for $1.95 at some Gemco/KMart-like store more years ago than I can remember. (c1979). "Piquant Chicken" (made with honey, lemon juice and ginger) is a favorite. "Chicken Diva" (with a sherry-Parmesan white sauce and broccoli) is another. "Sherry Creamed Chicken." Maybe chicken tonight. Hm.
  
  
• Sunset Recipes for Ground Beef - falls open to the splattered page showing "Cottage Cheese Meat Loaf." The recipe not only includes cottage cheese but also uses rolled oats instead of bread cubes. Delish. When the young ones were MUCH younger, I'd cook the meatloaf with carrots, beans and/or peas mixed in as the accompanying vegetable. I tend not to look at the other recipes for meatloaf (24 variations ...) but say, "Almond Studded Curry Loaf" using Major Grey's chutney sounds not half bad. Am I in a rut?
  
  
• Killeen - 101 Secrets of Gourmet Chefs: unusual recipes from great California restaurants *
  
  
• Goldstein - From Our House to Yours: comfort food to give and share - provenance unknown. I need to sit down with this one. I really liked Joyce Goldstein's cooking at Square One decades back and enjoy her articles in the Chron food section. [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
  
  
• Duchess of Devonshire - Chatsworth Cookery Book. Signed. Picked this book up when we were back visiting the relatives last fall. Need to sit down with this book too. Should it be taking up space here? [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
  
  
• America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - a new classic. I love this stuff.
  
  
• Rombauer, Becker - Joy of Cooking. 'nuff said. I love the nitty gritty detail but don't much love the "see White Sauce 111, 341" and "Please read About Doughnuts, 244" sorts of forward and back references in practically every recipe. Still. If you've never quite got the hang of preparing sweetbreads, the Rombauer clan will set you straight. Superb indexing.
  
  
• The Best of Bon Appetit (1979) - Ginger Cream Chicken (p69) (madeira, ginger, chopped up candied ginger, cream -- what's not to like?)
  
  
• Cooking Light 5 Ingredient 15 Minute Cookbook - Goodwill purchase. I don't know if I've ever cooked from this book. I need to sit down with this book.
  
  
• America's Best Lost Recipes - I adore Christopher Kimball and his crew at Cook's Magazine and America's Test Kitchen and all the affiliated incarnations.
  
  
• Betty Crocker's Cookbook - the classic. The cookbook I used most after I moved out on my own. Splattered. Marked. Oooh. Here's a piece of folded paper with a recipe for "Rasa Malaysia Portuguese Egg Tarts" Those were exceptionally tasty. BCC is my go-to book when I can't remember how long to cook a roast because it's been so long since we had one.
  
  
• The Silver Spoon from Phaidon Press. 1263pp. Can't remember where this one came from either, but like the America's Test Kitchen books, it's just a fun read. Perch: four recipes. Octopus: six recipes Catfish and tench: four recipes. Cuttlefish: six recipes. How can you not like a cookbook with recipes for "Heart Kabobs" and "Cream of Fennel Soup with Smoked Salmon"?
  
  
• Eichelbaum - Cooking for Heart & Soul: 100 delicious lowfat recipes from San Francisco's top chefs * a cookbook to benefit the San Francisco Food Bank - this was a prize from a drawing at a Food Bank event. I need to sit down with this one. [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
  
  
• Bon Appetit - Too Busy to Cook? Also kept (it seems ... page falls open) for the Ginger Cream Chicken recipe. That is one delicious recipe. I make it these days with boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts, but then I make most of my chicken recipes with thighs instead of breasts. I don't hack up whole chickens like I did back when now that there are only two of us to feed so we have neither chicken breasts nor chicken livers as much as we did then. A large bag of chicken thighs from Costco is in the freezer and we take what we need for whatever we're cooking. Buy a new bag when the current bag is getting near gone.
  
  
• seven different editions of the Presto pressure cooker recipe book and a Wards Cooker (pressure cooker) recipe book from 1947 and a Wards Magic Seal Pressure Saucepan recipe book. How many books do I need to look up how long to cook artichokes or beets or pot roast in a pressure cooker? I think I need to re-think this stash.
  
  
• Royal Cook Book (from the Royal Baking Powder Co)(1925) - classics like "Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake" "Lady Baltimore Cake" "Royal Sponge Cake" but also a bunch of recipes that don't use baking powder at all. I'm assuming the Royal Baking Powder company wanted a free giveaway that the fickle homemaker would hold on to, that would keep their name front and center even if she didn't =yet= use their baking powder..
  
  
• Recipe Finder Index - a critical item back in the days before I could find a recipe for just about anything on the Web. Once the number of cookbooks in the house reached a certain point, there were times when I was all,"Oh, I'd like to make that sausage pie thing with spinach and basil again but which cookbook has the recipe?" The Finder Index is broken into categories (Appetizers & Snacks, Beverages, Desserts -- Pies). Space for recipe name, source & page#, date tried, and notes. I'd forgotten about most of these: "Nanking Liver" from the New Poor Poet Cookbook, "German style Kidneys" from Sunset Cooking with Wine, "Migg's Fish" from the Southern Junior League Cookbook, "Sherried Chicken Livers" from Sumptuous Indulgence on a Shoestring.
  
  
• Law - Pacific Light Cooking. Another Goodwill purchase. Need to look at this one.
  
  
• Child, Bertholle, Beck - Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A classic. I have no idea why it falls open to the section with onion recipes. Looks like something spilt there once upon a time. Heavily stained page: "Navarin Printanier" [Lamb Stew with Spring Vegetables] I love this cookbook for its sense and its recipes and the way they laid out the pages. Its sequel is over with the other cookbooks,as is Simca's Cuisine and two and a half shelves of books on French cooking: Beck, Child, Pepin, others.
  
  
• Dailey - The Best Pressure Cookbook Ever - so why all the Presto recipe books? Oh, look! There's yet another Presto recipe book inside! That settles it. The batch listed earlier is going elsewhere.
  
  
• McLaren - Pan-Pacific Cook Book: savory bits from the world's fare (1915) e.g. #63 Tchi - a Russian national soup. "Chop fine half of a small cabbage and a large onion and fry in dripping for a few moments; stir in two tablespoons of flour. Cook for three minutes, then add slowly two quarts of beef stock. Simmer for half an hour, add a few forcemeat or sausage balls and a wineglass of white wine. Simmer twenty minutes more and serve." Fun. His nibs' great great aunt was involved with committee work for the 1915 Fair so we pick up books and whatever we can find about it, if they can be had for a reasonable price. This cookbook was $15.
  
  
• The Daily Echo (Halifax) - Good Housekeeping Everyday Cook Book. Very beat up. Of uncertain age. Falling to bits. First six pages gone, which is probably where the date information was. Recipes provided by the Daily Echo, plus handwritten recipes inside in various hands and pasted-in recipes cut from papers or magazines. A look into the past.
  
  
• Small-ish book with many pages, separated by alpha dividers. May have been intended as an address book but used instead for recipes. Recipes written in different hands. Provenance? Recipes assigned to letters higgly-piggly. "Pots de creme" recipe under "P" and a different "Pot de Creme" recipe under "D" for "dessert" Also under "D" "Iced Tea" ... "drinks," I suppose. Also in "D" "Daiquiri" with a note, "Edie, Ethel and Emily liked"
  
  
• Robertson, Flinders, Godfrey - Laurel's Kitchen. (1976). This book was my second go-to book after Betty Crocker. Vegetarian. The younger ones consider "Chillaquillas" (or ChileeKillees, as we called them) comfort food. Cheap, tasty, good.
  
  
• Ayer y Hoy de la Cocina Navarra - with a handy dandy translation of the recipes into English. A goodie gift from the Kingdom of Navarra during a meet the winemakers of Navarre event. I need to check out the recipes. This book probably belongs elsewhere.
  
  and last but not least
  
  
• Stewart - The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook. 1200 recipes. Tasty.

What does that add up to? Thirty-plus. I'll weed through the ones I set aside and take them elsewhere, opening up space for other cookbooks I'd be happier to have close by. For now, here's what the shelves above the bar sink look like.

Labels: books, food, life, photographs

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:46 PM|| |

Five in the fridge. Tagged by Paula.

We ate out last night: winemaker's dinner at Spruce Restaurant on Sacramento. Walked down to Sansome. Caught the 10 to Sacramento. Caught the 1 California at Sacramento and rode allz the way to California and Spruce. Walked up Spruce a block, hung a right. Spruce Restaurant is between Locust and Spruce on Sacramento. Took us forty minutes door-to-door, which made us half an hour early. We hung out in the bar.

Dinner was delish. Klaus-Peter Keller was in America for the first time. He provided eight different German wines. Dade Thieriot (of DeeVine wines, which was sponsoring Keller and the dinner) brought two old Rieslings from his cellar. Well, more about all that later. So. No dinner at home last night.

Dinner on Tuesday was at La Trappe (corner of Columbus and Greenwich) because I had a hankering for their moules frites and they aren't open on Mondays so I had to wait. Moules. Frites. Koningshoeven La Trappe Quadrupel. Probably more about that later too. So. No dinner at home since Monday.

Here's the fridge (after that long explanation)



Messy, eh? The instant coffee in the back is for a frequent guest. Lots of leftovers. We had dinner guests on Saturday. And bits and pieces from other meals which, when the stars align, come together for another meal. Not tonight, though. Tonight is Good Eats and Zinfandel with ZAP over at Fort Mason.

Here, front and center, though, is evidence of my split personality. [1] Trader Joe's Heavy Whipping Cream. The best when you're making scrambled eggs or omelets.

Two shelves down? Trader Joe's 1% milk, which I put in my mug of espresso, which I drink as I'm eating the fat-laden eggs. Cheese on the eggs too, did I mention? Sometimes bacon too. Oh, noze! Oh, yesss!

... on the mornings I'm not having oatmeal (real oatmeal, the kind you cook on the stove and let sit for three minutes to firm up) with raisins and 1% milk.



[2] Here's the 1% milk I mentioned. The yellow dish has bacon fat from bacon cooked for something and saved. Sometimes I fry the potato skin from the night before's baked potato in bacon fat and serve with egg for breakfast. The red dish right behind it has duck fat for similar fattery. The 1% milk, though, is good for me.

The bottled water in the back has been there for months. We're tap-water people. San Francisco's public water comes straight from the Sierras. That's why we dammed up Hetch Hetchy back a hundred years or so after all. Might as well drink the water. The dam's not coming down.

The Trader Joe's grapefruit juice is for the days his nibs has to leave for work at 7:10A and doesn't have time for a leisurely breakfast and his usual grapefruit dismantling.



[3] Fish sauce, just soze you know we're Californians.



[4] Salumi from Boccalone. Don't know if I mentioned that the older younger guy and his partner gave his nibs a 3-month subscription to Boccalone's Tasty Salted Pig Parts club. We go by 2d and 4th Saturdays of the month and pick up a small box with TSPPs. This Saturday we're due for more and we haven't finished the last. (Evidence above.)

And so good for you! Chris Cosentino (he of Incanto Restaurant, where we pick the box up, and Boccalone and, of course, Offal Good) tells us that pork is the new vegetable.

Not Paula's idea of terrific, I think, but there you go.



[5] Top shelf needs restocking. Currently one bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and one of Chardonnay. Room for three more bottles. Next shelf again shows our Trader Joe's dependence. Eggs. Sour cream. Cottage cheese. Crumbled bleu cheese. Also non-TJ cut onion, cut lemon, some other cheese (bleu variety).

The lower drawers are filled with veggies from Chinatown and mixed greens from Costco. The freezer is filled with frozen stuff. A pint of coffee ice cream takes about three months to get through. By the end it's crystally and only good for putting in the morning espresso.

Oh, and for those who wonder, yes, there are a lot of zip-lock bags in that fridge. We wash and reuse the zip-lock bags, unless they've been used for holding meats, so we're not quite as dismissive of "where do plastics come from, eh?" as it may seem.

And that's the refrigerator of Sal and five things therein.

Next!

Labels: food, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:41 AM|| |

Went to a Vintners' Club event at the Bankers' Club on 08Jan. ... a pinot tasting.

Interesting!

We went because his nibs lurves pinot noir and because David Bruce was going to speak.

One of his nibs' students at UCSB (who grew up just a stone skip from the bucolic ville we used to call home) is someone with whom we still hang out and whose ballpark tickets HipLiz sometimes buys.

This guy, as a teenager, spent his weekends at his dermatologist's Santa Cruz mountains home (dermatologist being Dr. David), digging dirt to plant the vines that became David Bruce's foray into pinot making.

Here's me looking very grumpy ... ah... focussed.

Look at those glasses! We had twelve pinot noirs to taste. They were lined up and poured before we came in: six up, six down.

I am such a naïf. I could say, "Here are my top three. Here is my least favorite."

Ask me to rate the intermediate eight wines, given forty-five minutes?

No can do.

But we had fun. ...

Each person (who wanted) sent in their scores.

Each table put together their tasting notes.

The guy clockwise plus one was the winemaker for one of the wines being tasted (Domaine Chandon Reserve. Russian River Valley) and served as table chair.

I'd rated his wine [2] but the accumulated crowd wasn't so generous.

The experience was interesting. What was really interesting was looking at the accumulated scores. Here's a top scorer: five people rated it #1; five people rated it #2; six people rated it #12.

Whah?

It really is all about what you like in a wine.

Really!

So for the Vintners' Club events, you rate the wines you're tasting with no regard to what your spouse, best friend or most erudite wine snob might think.

Then you go 'round the table and seat#2 says, "This was my favorite wine because ..." and everyone else goes round and says "Well ... this is what I thought of the wine ..."

Next person (seat #3) says, "This was my favorite wine because ..." (or my least favorite wine or my second favorite wine because someone else already mentioned my favorite wine.) ...

... until all the twelve wines have been discussed.

David Bruce (the gentleman on the left in the photo)... scored highest when the overall wine scores were totted up, and well he should.

We had a splendid time.

Afterwards, we said farewell to the amazing views from the Bankers Club and said farewell to our co-conspirators and headed up hill and home, stopping off at Boccadillos on Montgomery for some tasty pig parts before we walked the rest of the way ... home

Labels: culture, food, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:04 PM|| |

Welcome to FoodieBytes - eat something new

Choose your city (Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, DC) and fill in "what" you are looking to eat.

Choose "San Francisco"
Enter: foie gras

Read entries for 142 (mas o menos) restaurants that serve foie gras in San Francisco (mostly, found one listed in Larkspur). Some restaurants are listed multiple times for multiple items on the menu. Brief (lunch, appetizer, &c.) indication of where on the menu, brief detail ("with stone fruit mostarda and cornbread") and a click to View Menu.

Don't know how current the menus are as the listings included an entry for Monte Cristo which died a while back.

[via Eater SF]

Labels: food, San Francisco, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:12 PM|| |

We've been gone on a short run-away that started Sunday morning when we left for an AIWF crab feed at the Silverado Brewing Company, outside St. Helena.

The menu consisted of wine, beer, bubbly, and a plate each with salad, bread, and pasta plus a portion of hot Dungeness crab, followed by another piece of hot crab and another and another until they had to toss us out of there because another party had the banquet room booked. Cookies for dessert.

At some point when we were wrist deep in cracked crab, Michael Fradelizio, owner and operator, gave his impassioned pitch about how for seven years he's been running the brewing company, a restaurant that eschews hydrogenated fat and serves free-range chicken and Niman Ranch all-natural meats, how he spent time and effort to eliminate high fructose corn syrup from the premises (including having to find substitutes for bottled catsup and the like) and how he wouldn't serve his patrons anything that he wouldn't serve his family.

His food was great. I loved his attitude. The crab was delish with a peppery finish.

From Silverado Brewing, we headed a short piece north to Calistoga, and checked into our room. Later, we walked down Lincoln Avenue as we browsed on our way to dinner, sticking our noses into shops, checking menus posted outside restaurants, staying a spell at Copperfield's, where we bought a book, natch.

We wanted to eat somewhere we hadn't before. We chose Pacifico Restaurante Mexicano (1237 Lincoln Ave., Calistoga) because his nibs wanted a light supper after all the crab. Hah. His chicken mole included half a chicken under the mole sauce. My chile rellenos was also a healthy, tasty dish. We were ready to snooze.

Next morning we headed off to Santa Rosa to meet up with old friends for lunch at Monti's (prime rib sandwich, yum!) after which we off-loaded sixteen boxes of books from our car into their van for delivery to the Point Arena Library.

Book exchange complete, we headed upland to Fort Bragg. (101 to Dry Creek Road, past Lake Sonoma

 

to Stewarts Point and then up 1 to Fort Bragg) The weather was windy and rainy. The road was windy. At one point on Skaggs Spring Rd/Stewarts Point Rd we stopped the car and his nibs got out to help some locals who were using their chain saw to take a fallen tree out of the road.

"Those County guys just sitting up there in their truck with their flashers on?"
"Yup."
"hurrmmmph."

The "County guys" eventually joined the group that was busy dragging branches and stumps off the road. One of them stood and watched. The other dragged a couple branches then stood and watched as well. They claimed to have no chain saw themselves. Said they were waiting for another County truck to arrive with a chain saw. ... Eventually, the guy with the chain saw busted his saw as the fallen tree slipped down the bank. Luckily a lane's-width of the road was clear and with an "after you" "no, after you" the cars and trucks made their ways through the gap and off to their destinations.

We arrived at our B&B (The Country Inn Bed and Breakfast) on Main Street in Fort Bragg in the pouring rain, after five. We carried our bag in and settled in for a bit before heading off to dinner at Mendo Bistro, our reason for going to Fort Bragg in the first place. We drove to dinner even though the distance was only about four blocks because the rain was savage and we didn't want to get soaked.

Mendo Bistro is open seven days a week from 5-9 p.m. upstairs at the Company Store, Main and Redwood. We showed up some time after six and ordered. When we saw Nicholas Petti come up the stairs, we asked our server to tell him we wanted to talk with him.

"Hi," he said.
"Hi, I'm Sal," I said just as Nicholas was saying, "You're Sal."

I'd warned him we were coming back again and had promised we'd snag him this time so he'd know the face of the person he'd exchanged e-mails with. We chatted for a bit as we were scarfing up his crab cakes. Oh, those crab cakes ...

Turned out we'd lucked into the first evening Nicholas'crab cakes had been on his menu this season.

Delish, delish, delish. Fat, soft, 99% crab, served with a light tarragon aioli and a vinegary tart cabbage salad. The crab cake ingredients are simply crab, a bit of bread crumbs (not much) and finely-chopped green onions with the tarragon aioli to hold everything together. We both started with crab cakes.

His nibs had Grilled Venison Leg with Chestnut Spaetzle and Cranberry Sauce. The spaetzle reminded me that I make spaetzle far too seldom. Spaetzle is comfort food for his nibs. The cranberry sauce was a smooth, not chunky, sauce with what might have been five-spice seasoning. Tasty. I had the special which was chicken stuffed with wild mushroms with a wild mushroom sauce. The chicken was juicy and flavorful. Delish. Both entrees came with seasonal vegetables. Mine had mashed potatoes. Takes a brave chef to put brussel sprouts on a plate. We happen to love brussel sprouts. We had a bottle of the Costa Vineyards Pinot Noir (MB serves only local county wines) with dinner.

For dessert, I chose a small glass of Esterlina port because I tend to get headaches if I eat sweet desserts after having wine with dinner. His nibs opted, with my encouragement, for the Candy Cap Mushroom Creme Brulee with Spicy Chocolate Bark. After one snitched taste from his serving, I kicked myself for deciding to have port instead of ordering the creme brulee. The dessert was perfect -- a rich, smooth custard topped with burnt sugar, which you'd expect, but the addition of the Candy Cap mushrooms gave the dessert a subtle mapley-wintery-earthy taste that's hard to describe.

This Is A Dessert Worthy Of Five Stars.

And Nicholas Petti was even nicer than he needed to be.

Next morning, our innkeeper served us coffee, squeezed orange juice and a breakfast frittata with slices of cantaloupe alongside. The frittata was excellent, a nice blend of bread, egg, sausage, apple and cinnamon. She served the frittata with a small jug of maple syrup, but honestly, it was sweet enough all on its own.

After breakfast, we headed north in the fog with me freaking out as we rounded curves on the highway at the edge of the coast. As the road got narrower, we turned around and came back to Fort Bragg through Inglenook and Cleone and then on to Caspar and Caspar South and the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse where we stopped a spell

 

and walked down to the restored Point Cabrillo lighthouse

 

and chatted with the volunteer there, then up to the museum in a former assistant lightkeeper's house.

 

The folks who restored and run the lighthouse and museum rent out one of the lightkeeper's houses if you want to be away from it all. Not cheap, but what a getaway that would be!

From Point Cabrillo, we carried on to the Mendocino Headlands and Little River Beach and Big River Beach, then circled back to Mendocino for some holiday shopping. I found the perfect gift for one of our giftees.

We rested up a bit at the Country Inn before we headed out to dinner. The question was, did we want to eat elsewhere or were the crab cakes and Candy Cap mushroom creme brulee calling too loudly?

We walked into town, stopping in at the North Coast Brewing Company to sample some of their wares. Tuesday was $1 taco night and the tacos did smell yummy. The place was full of locals -- a gang of six guys who seemed to be grabbing a dinner after work, two older couples, a couple sets of young couples. A guy at the bar had three glasses of Old Rasputin in front of him as he read MERCHANT OF DEATH. (Three glasses isn't really =that= many as 10 oz is the largest glass of Old Rasputin they'll serve.)

But in the end we couldn't resist returning to Mendo Bistro. We both, again, had crab cakes for an appetizer. We both had the Candy Cap mushroom creme brulee for dessert. This evening, though, his nibs opted for the fish of the evening (yellowfin, iirc), grilled, with Dijon-Tarragon Cream. I had the Braised Short Ribs served with Root Vegetable Hash and brussel sprouts. We shared a bottle of Navarro Pinot Noir. Neither of us was disappointed with our choices. Far from it. We have not had anything but tasty food at Mendo Bistro and Nicholas serves up healthy portions as well. Yummy. Good value. Worth a trip north.

The next morning at the Country Inn, our innkeeper served baked eggs on a bed of artichoke hearts with sourdough toast and garlic-rosemary country-fried potatoes with coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

I heartily recommend the Country Inn. Our room was comfortable and clean. If we'd wanted to indulge, there's a hot tub out on the deck. It's a short walk to the center of town and (of course) Mendo Bistro. The breakfasts were superb. We took advantage of the Inn's special which we found on the Web: book two nights Sunday through Thursday and your room (without a fireplace) is $50/night. Wow.

We drove straight home on Wednesday because we had to be somewhere at 4:30p. -- straight across 20 to Willits and then down 101 to San Francisco. Total time, including a stop for gasoline, three and a half hours.

Why don't we do this more often?

Labels: California, food, life, photographs

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:46 AM|| |

For Miz UV who writes about Cupcakes, Cats, Shooz, Miscellaneous Obsessions, and Assorted Multislackery here be a link to the San Francisco Cupcake Tour with pictures!


[via EaterSF]

Labels: food, photographs, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:38 PM|| |

We walked the 1.7mi or so down to Postrio for a 7p dinner so we could use a gift certificate we placed the winning bid on at a non-profit event last June. The certificate was good for a chef's tasting menu for two. We splurged on the wine pairing with the meal and were well into dinner when I felt my chair give a shake.

"Earthquake," I said to his nibs. He nodded.

My chair shook again. "A good earthquake," I said. He nodded again.

My chair shook a third time and we looked up to see the inside of the light fixture above us begin to sway. The light fixture itself was locked in solid.

The shaking stopped and as we always do, we began to guess what the magnitude had been. I guessed a 3.2 somewhere in the near East Bay.

No one in the restaurant seemed fazed by it all. The women sitting next to us mentioned it to the waiter. "You probably just had too much to drink," he replied.

re the magnitude Turns out I was nowhere near: the quake was a a magnitude 5.6. 5 miles NNE of Alum Rock, CA (in East San Jose, up in the hills where I grew up). 9.2 km (5.7 miles) deep. Lasted quite a while too. We didn't feel the quake as strongly as we would've if the quake had been shallower.

We haven't had anything as strong as a magnitude 5.6 in quite a while.

Hadn't seen this at the USGS site before. His nibs says he'd seen it: it's a relatively recent addition to their set of earthquake goodies:

Real-time Forecast of Earthquake Hazard: Maps showing the probability of strong shaking at any location in California within the next 24-hours.

The Web is a wonder.

Update: According to the Chron, the quake was the strongest since the Loma Prieta in October 1989. I thought so last night, but couldn't find any verification for the gut feel. The Chron also quotes folks saying that this quake, which happened right where the Calaveras splits from the Hayward, might have consequences for spots further north on the fault lines. Batten down those hatches!

Labels: food, life, quakes, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:11 PM|| |

Joyce Gemperlein's Chefs At Home for the Wall Street Journal (20 Oct 2007) focuses on David Kinch of Manresa (Los Gatos, CA) with Dishing Up the Fall Harvest. Recipes included.

Which reminds me, we haven't been to Manresa since we moved up here full-time. THREE YEARS. It's been three years. Used to be easier when we lived at least part time just a couple miles up the road, but now any Manresa dinner plans involve a fifty mile trek coming and going and it's a bit of an excursion.

... but we have a dinner chit that we were high bidder for at a charity auction earlier this year.

We need to make plans.

[from a link at Eater SF]

Labels: food, news

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:02 PM|| |

Soze F-Su, we had the Bixby Creek Gang in house.

Saturday, two of the gang were pre-engaged to be with friends on the WWII Liberty ship USS Jeremiah O'Brien to have a day on the water with CB Hannegan's providing BBQ food and Blue Angels & al. as entertainment.

They left the place soon after 7A to walk down to Piers 30-32 where the JO'B was picking up passengers. Three of us walked down the steps with them to Sansome, to see them on their way and because I had a bag of greencycle to drop off in the green bin at the bottom of the steps.

After breakfast, the rest of us went down to the Ferry Building for the Farmers' Market, then through Chinatown to check out the fruits and vegetables, then on to the rooftop of a tall building at the corner of Broadway and Laguna to watch the air show, getting there just after noon, when the Parade of Ships came into the Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge.

I've added Saturday's pics to the earlier Blue Angels gallery. The smudges are still there on Saturday's photo set (drat!) but (hooray!) we ordered a Canon A570 IS an hour or two ago with a discount coupon and free shipping. Arriving on Wednesday, if all goes well.



The first added pics show the USS Jeremiah O'Brien under way from Piers 30-32 to their staging station outside the Golden Gate for the Parade of Ships, which started at noon. A tug and one of the fire ships, spraying water, followed closely behind.



Quick cutaway to a gorgeous hawk that was circling overhead and settling in nearby trees along the Filbert Steps.

Next stream of shots are from the rooftop in Pacific Heights, showing the Parade of Ships, which included a number of American and Canadian military ships with the Jeremiah O'Brien cruising through as the finale.



The Blue Angels flew from 3-4 p.m. Photos kick in at #109/163.

Preceding them were a bunch of fast jets, helicopter search and rescue teams and acrobatic aircraft.

The pilots did amazing things with formation flying, corkscrews, climbs and dives, tearing at each other at full speed only to pull to either side just in time to whiz by, avoiding a collision. ... sometimes while flying upside down!

Fun to watch, but a job I don't aspire to. (Good thing!)



And all the while, everyday shipping traffic kept coming into and out of the Bay. We wondered what the crews thought of the action overhead.



The Coast Guard kept the hundreds of sailboats and powerboats that were out on the Bay away from certain areas and we couldn't figure out why until at one point one of the Blue Angels buzzed so low, it created a huge wake in the waters.

Zoom! ZooM!



Crowds of people watched the action from building rooftops. The crowds down on the waterfront were enormous.

SFC video of the Blue Angels

And then the day was over. We moseyed on home by way of Fort Mason, Aquatic Park, up Columbus with a stop at XOX Truffles for sustenance and home-again home-again riggety-jig.

Total day's walk: 6 miles.

Beautiful weekend.

Sunday, the Bixby Creek Grandees joined us and a bit later one couple left. We sat around eating and talking for a while while we mulled over our options for the day: Strictly Bluegrass? Castro Street Fair? Burning Man installation?

Eventually, we walked down to the Embarcadero to catch the F-Line out to Valencia Street, but the cars going toward the Castro were packed, too packed to stop. "WHY?" we thought. "Isn't everyone headed to the waterfront for the Sunday air show?"

We walked over to Market Street and caught the F-Line there, figuring that anyone headed in that direction was probably headed for the Ferry Building, but no, the cars were still crowded, but at least less crowded and willing to stop for the six of us.

The cars remained crowded. Sure people got off, but more people got on and the cars remained packed the entire way.

It wasn't until just before we got off at Church and Market, and someone asked us how many more stops until Castro, that we realized that, duh, Sunday was the Castro Street Fair and everyone who wasn't watching the Blue Angels was heading to the Castro, on the F-Line.

Our first stop was 2223 Restaurant because the niece of the wife husband of a cousin (or some such relationship) of one of the gang has her oil paintings showing at the gallery for the next two months.

After checking out the oils, we walked down to Valencia because (and the afternoon had been set up to accommodate) one of the gang had heard tell of but never been to Borderlands. We stopped on our way to Borderlands at Paxton Gate because I adore the place and like to take unsuspecting visitors there.

From Paxton Gate on to Borderlands where I bought a signed HB copy of Christopher Moore's A DIRTY JOB -- a book with characters based on some creatures you can find at Paxton Gate -- and TNH's MAKING BOOK (which I'm pretty sure I have somewhere, but I can't find it) and the someone who had initiated the trip in the first place bought three other books and ... well, then pokey-poke into shops and bookstores in the neighborhood, killing time until Destino opened.

A pair of the gang has plans to visit Machu Picchu next spring and had asked a day or two earlier whether we could recommend a Peruvian restaurant in the city. Better than that, we told them Sunday, if we're all doing a fieldtrip out to 2223 and Borderlands, we can have dinner at Destino before we head back.

So we did.

And it was good.

And we got home and sorted out who was taking what food home, and binoculars and jackets and what-not. Get the cars out of the parking spaces. Bye-bye. And to bed for us.

I love these people. We should do this more often.

Labels: art, bookstores, food, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:05 PM|| |

But for the most extraordinary example of shifting names we must go to the aubergine, once known also as the brinjal in India. The story starts with Sanskrit vatin-gana "the plant that cures the wind", which became the Arabic al-badinjan. This moved into Europe, again via Moorish Spain: one offshoot — keeping the Arabic article prefixed — became alberengena in Spanish and on to aubergine in French; another transformation became the botanical Latin melongena through losing the article and changing the "b" to an "m"; this then turned into the Italian melanzana and then to mela insana (the "mad apple"). Another branch, again without the "al", became bringella in Portugal, whose traders took the plant, and their version of the name, full circle back to India, where it became brinjal in Anglo-Indian circles (the usual term among English speakers in India today is the Hindi baingan, or aubergine). In another branch of its history, the Portuguese word turned up in the West Indies, where it was again, but differently, corrupted to brown-jolly. All names for the same plant.

[ref: Michael Quinion at World Wide Words]

Question, though. Why is the same beast called an eggplant in the USofA?

Ah, okay. [ref: Wikipedia] "The name eggplant developed in the United States, Australia, and Canada because the fruits of some 18th century European cultivars were yellow or white and resembled goose or hen's eggs."

That makes a ton of sense.

And so ends the etymology detour for the morning.

Labels: food, wordstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:41 AM|| |

His nibs is relieved that I'm not doing my usual last minute thing.

Everything's packed except the notebooks, pens and reading material. I always pack too many notebooks (well, I need a blank notebook for trip notes, one for note-notes, one for to-do thoughts and lists, one for what-will-I-do-with-myself-when-we-get-home plans).

And I tend to pack too many books 'cause I don't know if I'll be wanting to read mysteries or history or Middlemarch or self-awareness or Dalai Lama or ...

Auntie K shows up tomorrow afternoon and the plan is for his nibs to help her lug all her stuff down here and then for them to meet up with me and we'll swop tools for her boyz (picked up from my dad's workshop yesterday) from my Mini to her car trunk. Following that chore, she gets the grande tour of the book stacks. Then she comes back here and settles in.

A walk down hill to dinner at Firenze By Night (a first for all of us) and then we'll tuck under the covers while visions of sugar plums and all that.

Thursday morning we kiss the cat (if we can drag her out from under the bed), wave bye-bye and head off to the airport in the shuttle.

When we get back, The Book pops up to the top of the priority list.

My clear-the-house sort-the-books organize-the-bookmarks procrastinating projects will be hobbled and put out to pasture.

Onward and upward.

Really.

Labels: books, food, life, San Francisco, travel

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:23 PM|| |

Need to go fix breakfast/lunch/whatever and step back away from blogs like The food pornographer

Labels: blog, food

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:57 PM|| |

Is it getting to that time of year again? I wouldn't know, lacking a (sniff) sunny space to raise zucchini.

But for those of you who do have a sunny space and are using it to raise zucchini, Heidi Swanson offers up My Special Zucchini Bread Recipe at 101 Cookbooks.

(Added bonus: Today's 101cookbooks blog entry features Quinoa and Grilled Zucchini.)

Bon appetit!

Labels: blog, food, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:47 AM|| |

Simi Wine Dinner at Fior d'Italia, or the dinner that wasn't.

As I was shifting and sorting books yesterday, I was looking forward to the Simi Wine winemaker's dinner at Fior d'Italia. I'd even gone to the site earlier in the day to doublecheck which winery was being featured. There it was (and still is!): "Simi Vineyards, Sonoma. July 26. Special Guest, Steve Reeder"

I got home from book sorting. His nibs got home soon after. We skinned off our Levis (mine black, his blue) and put on clothes that were more dinner-like and walked down the hill, arriving at Fior d'Italia a little after 6:30 p.m., which is when the dinner was to start.

The front door had a sign on it to use the door to the bar and come in that way, so we did. The bar was PACKED. We found our way to the main dining room, but there was obviously a banquet planned there, not the winemaker dinner. We wandered around trying to find someone to talk to, trying to find something that looked like a winemaker dinner.

We finally grabbed a waiter who knew nothing about a winemaker dinner, who grabbed another waiter who said there wasn't one after all and finally the guy who runs the dining room and banquet rooms showed up and said, "Yes, it's been canceled. We tried to get hold of ... who are you?"

We told him.

"Yes. We left multiple messages for you this afternoon starting after 1 p.m. Didn't you get them?"

Well, no, we said. We'd got in, changed clothes, came straight down without checking the answering machine soze not to be late.

"Well," he said. (The waiter who'd told us the dinner was canceled was in the process of trying to convince us to -- for the same price the winemaker dinner would've been -- try their extravagant multi-course paired-with-wine special dinner.) "Stay for dinner. We'll take 20% off the bill."

So we stayed. Dinner was fine. A deal at 20% off. Some parts of it were excellent, but not so excellent I'd rave to friends that they must try it. Mostly, we agreed between the two of us that it would be a good place to bring friends who weren't adventurous diners. Loads of food.

The antipasti had cured olives, melon and prosciutto, jumbo shrimp with a rustic tomato sauce, crab with a homemade mayonnaise, mozzarella/basil/tomato. Antipasti was followed by Caesar salad, which was followed by tricolor pasta: gnocchi with tomato sauce, tortellini with Alfredo sauce, penne with a not-intense (tourist-version) basil pesto. The main plate was also a medley: fillet mignon with a brown sauce (I'm sure they have a more elegant name for it), veal scallopine and salmon with a dill sauce. Dessert was tiramisu, which was different from any I've ever had. Served in a hot fudge sundae glass, it was a sweetened mascarpone mousse-like dish with the lady finger soaked in coffee liqueur embedded in the mascarpone and mini chocolate chips on top. A different bit of wine