Sometimes PB&J just won't cut it

My breakfasts are usually fairly simple: peanut butter on toast, cream cheese on a bagel, fried egg in a tortilla. And the one I had this morning while walking to my bus stop was no exception to this rule of simplicity. It tasted different, though, like Sunday brunch.

If you hate the idea of eggs with anything sweet on them, then read no further. I know that there are a class of people who do not like their food to mix - sauce and rice, broccoli and pasta, eggs and syrup. I am not one of those people, so this breakfast doesn't make my stomach turn. However, if you are, then this is not for you.

Toast an Eggo Nutri-Grain waffle, or your favorite kind of frozen waffle. Don't use homemade - they aren't sturdy enough (I'm not partial to Eggos on a regular basis, but they are particularly suited to rushed mornings). Now, put it in the toaster. Foam up some butter in a frying pan. Crack an egg into it. Break the yolk, if you want (I like to do this while I'm hard frying an egg so that the layers are more evenly dispersed). Sprinkle with salt and fresh pepper. When done to your liking, slide it onto the waffle (which came out of the toaster while the egg was frying, and now has syrup on it).

Et, voila! Sunday morning on Monday morning. Or Tuesday. If you don't go overboard with the syrup, you can eat it on the way to the bus. Or in your car.

Big afternoon.

We had an Italian cook-off yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, the wine, pasta, and daylight savings time change have conspired to rob me of the will to live (or more specifically, type). Suffice to say, it was fantastic. We had all varieties of baked and boiled pasta, some delicious calzones, and a beautiful chocolate torte. Perhaps I will post the winners and some pictures here tomorrow, when I have my strength back.

Rejection song.

I got a rejection letter from UCSF yesterday. I'm feeling okay about it, in spurts, but it's really heart breaking to be told that you aren't wanted. The situation clearly called for a mourning dinner.

The new place down the street, Lolo, has gotten mixed reviews, but I've always been intrigued by the menu. So off we went. Nate and Josh and friend and I arrived around 8 and two tables were efficiently pushed together for us. We ordered a lot of food, so it's probably easiest to do this in list form.

Huitlacoche dumplings: umm, eww. Corn mold tastes like mold. And the "white corn foam" tasted like cold masa with a bunch of air bubbles.

Shrimp "tacos": these were fun. The tortilla was actually a big slice of jicama, and the whole thing was very refreshing.

Octopus tiradito: the standout. Sharp dressing, thin, pretty slices of octopus. We lapped it up.

Venison carpaccio: eh. The meat was tender and sweet, but it was too sweet. Not enough salt, which Josh continuously reminded us of by making motions like a salt shaker. He never asked for any salt, though. However, I think he identified the insidiously sweet spice, which may have been mace.

Three meat bites: warm and salty, which always gets points. But beyond that, not a winner. Little meat patties of beef, lamb, and bacon atop toast.

Salmon something or other: interesting. Breaded chunks of salmon that were raw in the middle. For a person that doesn't like cooked salmon, this was a happy medium, so I liked it for that.

An Argentinian Malbec: just made me happy that Josh has now been wrong twice about Argentinian wine. Ha.

I think that's all we had. Really, the "ehs" far exceeded the standouts, making me think we won't be repeating our visit. But a fun evening nonetheless.

Thanks for helping me laugh away the sting of rejection, guys.

Food for giants.

A brief note on the gluttony of Super Bowl Sunday.

Kara and Josh arrived. We threw some celery into the blender to make Southern Exposures. Nate found the recipe in the Chronicle on Friday, courtesy of Daniel Hyatt of Alembic. They were...weird. It was hard to find the right balance between gin and celery juice and they wound up a little...thick? But interesting and maybe even refreshing, if you had only one.

We also consumed a large quantity of chili with Casa Sanchez's organic tortilla chips. Before you think this is a shameless plug for all things organic, know that their organic chips are infinitesimally better than the non-organic ones. The chili was from the day before, and invovled black beans, pork, chipotle peppers and beer. I added some cheese to make it more dip-like. I also smashed a couple of avocados with Papalote's famous salsa. We made quick work of that.

After Nate and Kara moved on to the game, and Josh and I moved onto beer, we put some chicken wings in the oven. And then had the brilliant idea to start some spareribs, so that they would be ready in time for House.

The Giants, as we all know, prevailed, and we ate enough food for both teams. We ate all of the wings and most of the ribs, and somewhere around 8pm I thought we needed a snack of nachos composed of chicken and chili and cheese. I ate most of those myself.

And that, my friends, is gluttony at its finest. The game was pretty interesting too, I hear.

Dan Dan Mien

We had a pile of not-so-fresh egg noodles in the fridge, procured during last week's expedition to Ocean View Supermarket. What to make? Nate's vote for chow mein didn't sound particularly appealing, and then I had a brainstorm. Dan dan noodles! Embarrassingly, the dan dan noodles I had my most recent experience with are not particularly authentic - the Marco Polo noodles from Long Life at the Metreon. These are the ground pork and cucumber version, and in the Long Life incarnation they have a slightly sweet sauce. Aside from this they are unremarkable. The other place I have had them is PF Chang's, where they are actually called Dan Dan noodles, and are ground pork and cucumbers with a spicy/salty sauce. I am mildly embarrassed that this is my only experience with the dish, as both of these noodle purveyors are poo-pooed (to borrow a Nate phrase) on the illustrious Chowhound. But it is, and I find them comforting, regardless of the inauthenticity.

On to the food-making. I found a PF Chang's copycat recipe for Dan Dan Noodles and began heating the wok. The sauce consisted of sherry, soy sauce, chicken broth, oyster sauce and something I'm surely forgetting. An aside on the sherry - the sheer volume of cooking wine sold at Ocean View is enough to boggle the mind and confuse any customer that does not read Chinese. This goes into the wok where the pork and ground chile is frying. And on and on.

We tuck into the noodles in front of a rerun of Mythbusters and begin enjoying the combination of crisp cucumbers, salty pork and chewy noodles. Really salty pork. Too salty. How can this be? I walk into the kitchen and there lies the answer - a full can of chicken broth that I forgot to include in the sauce. Instead of a 1:4 ratio of soy sauce to chicken broth we were probably working at a 2:1. Blech. I still feel like I swallowed sea water and that was two days ago.

The quest for open-ended lumpia ends.

I have been looking for open ended lumpia for sometime. Occasionally they appear in food trays at the office, but they did not appear at a crucial moment a few months ago, when Nate's mother made lumpia at our house. Hers are very delicious, but they have closed ends.

To my delight, Ocean View Supermarket on Alemany has many different kinds of prepared lumpia in their freezer case. Including the kind with the open ends! The brand was Pampanga's Best. I asked Nate if that was a good brand. Yes, he said, Pampanga is known for delicious food. Lovely, I remarked - but is this brand good? Yes, he said, it's Pampanga's Best! What a confusing name.

And now I see that I have been fooling myself to think that these open ended lumpia were any different than their closed counterparts. They are just halved! Only one end is open. They were very good - but not, as Nate pointed out, as good as his mom's.

Back by popular demand.

If by popular demand, I mean at the request of one person.

There was a showdown at San Tung last night. Original dry fried chicken: wings vs. diced. I was on the side of the wings and Kara was trumpeting the virtues of the diced. I'm not sure how the rest of our party aligned itself - or whether they were interested at all. As I expected, the wings triumphed. They are richer and their coating has a more pleasing crunch. An easy victory.

Unfortunately, not everything we ate was so exciting. The mu shu's extra pancake was hard. Like, crispy cracker crunchy hard. I, the martyr, ate it anyway, like a tostada. And the spinach with bean threads, which looked so appetizing on another table, was rather uninteresting. Apparently bean threads have very little flavor.

However, we were surprised by both the hot and sour soup and the tomato beef chow mein. These dishes sound so boring that you might be sleeping already, but they were not. The soup was peppery and had a nice helping of tree fungus (my favorite) and the chow mein was heavy on the garlic. Which can only be a good thing.

On an unrelated note, the January issue of Gourmet is engrossing. I parked myself on the couch for an hour on Saturday and read it cover to cover. "What is Southern?" According to Gourmet, a lot of fantastic recipes and beautiful photographs. I've made one recipe so far, the buttermilk cookies. Make them, now. You will want to eat all of them at once, so make sure there are a few other people around when you open the oven. And please, let the edges brown. The sugar turns into caramelized deliciousness.