how i really plan my day

Chow has an interesting thread going about when people eat, what and why. My response is below:

weekdays: oatmeal with raisins around 9 am at work, occasionally a snack of cheese and crackers or fruit mid-morning, lunch of leftovers at my desk anytime between 11 and 2, snack of yogurt and raisins or crackers mid-afternoon, snack of popcorn or cheese and crackers (i like cheese and crackers, you see) at home around 6, dinner around 8, usually rice or pasta based with a glass of wine. on rare occasion, will have a cookie or a few spoonfuls of salted caramel (thank you, bi-rite) ice cream after dinner. i don't love sweets.

weekends: decaf coffee with milk and sugar whenever i wake up. eggs of some sort an hour or so afterwards. snack (popcorn, fruit, or chips) in the early afternoon or lunch depending on when i woke up. dinner out or take away, usually around 7/8.

i eat when hungry, out of necessity. i get very cranky, nauseous, and tired if i don't eat as soon as i am hungry. however, the food choices are usually purely for pleasure, although i like to use up the contents of my csa box for health reasons. hopefully those vegetable experiments turn out pleasurable as well.

Something to talk about

I've eaten two foods in the last two weeks that forced me to sign onto this blog. The first, french fries from Magnolia gastropub on Haight. The second, halibut and gazpacho from Cortez.

Magnolia is delightful. It's a real pub, not in the completely dark and wooden English sense, but in the Californian sense. There are big tables and wood pillars, but there are also lots of windows and light. The beer is great, even at 2 pm on a hungover Sunday. Actually, I'm not sure that the people who were actually hung over that Sunday (my twin brothers and their friend) would concur, as one of them didn't even have a beer. But my pale ale was refreshing and alcoholic enough to put a fun spin on the rest of the day.

So, the beer is good and the sandwiches are good. Really good, actually. Their Cubano has spinach on it, which may seem like heresy, but the house made (I assume, as they're too delicious to come from a market) pickles will quell any uprising. What is great at Magnolia, and I mean really great, are the fries. They are crispy, maybe double fried, maybe parboiled in advance of frying to dry them out a bit. And then tossed in parsley. They are officially the best fries I've had in my 27 years.

So, go to Magnolia, have a beer and some fries, and disfrute.

And then, when you're done with the pub atmosphere, head to Cortez for dinner. Cortez makes a regular appearance here, as it should in any diner's playlist. Cortez is consistently interesting, with well-crafted drinks and attentive service. Friday was no different, although our entrees were almost unforgivably late coming out of the kitchen. But then our server comp-ed us dessert and two glasses of Moscato, and all was forgotten.

On to the standouts. I had halibut with a beautiful crust, perched atop skinned cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and croutons. And after the server set down my dish, he poured a moat of perfectly salty gazpacho around the fish. Honestly, I was a little concerned about the hot fish and cold soup and the potential tackiness of it all. But it was so good that it inspired me to make gazpacho this weekend. An inspiration I should have ignored (or at least I should have followed a recipe).

And then there was dessert. Pistachio crusted french toast with pancetta ice cream, washed down with Moscato d'Asti. The french toasts were more like nut crusted beignets and the bacon ice cream was all that it promised to be.

Thank you Cortez, for making me feel like a grown up.

Heaven.

Yogurt, lamb, and rice. Boring, you say? Pedestrian?

No, it's heaven.

This little piece of the sky can be found at Fattoush on Church and 26th St. An unassuming Middle Eastern restaurant, this place holds the recipe for my new favorite dish, Mansaf.

According to Wikipedia, Mansaf is the national dish of Jordan. I'm glad to hear this, as it definitely needs an official designation.

I'm not going to attempt to describe it, except to say that it tastes like three of my favorite things: cheese, rice, and butter. However, Mansaf is truly more that the sum of its parts. Try it and you'll see.

While you're there, have the cold meze platter, full of wonderful spreads and fresh falafel (not cold). The mango laban is good, like a thin lassi. And then order the crazy pink hairy dessert, for fun. It's actually quite delicious (if Nate is not around to make unfavorable comparisons to it).

Getting away from it all.

In wine country. Nate says it doesn't really count as camping (because we ate lunch in town) but Kara, Shaina, and I slept in tents by Lake Sonoma this weekend. It was awesome. No cars, no pollution, no stinky smells (except for those in the outhouse).

Some highlights:

Friday night, I built a fire! It lasted for several hours, and on it we cooked preformed burgers from Big John's Market. They had little cubes of cheese in them and lots of Worcestershire sauce. So good and easy. They would have been even better on buns, but we ate them on regular bread, because that's what we had. And we were roughing it, you know.

Saturday morning, I swam in the lake. I did somersaults and headstands and tried to float. I lost myself in the water until my myopic eyes thought that K + S were making faces at me and wanted me to get out. I love swimming. That's one way that SF and I are not compatible - no good swimming 'round these parts.

Saturday lunch. Best BLT ever. On toasted white bread. At a place in Cloverdale called the Owl Cafe. The coleslaw was also amazing and had just the right amount of dry mustard in it.

Saturday snack. Orange freeze. Like a root beer freeze, but with orange soda. We got our sodas at Pick's Drive-in, also in Cloverdale, and sat on the picnic tables in our shorts. It was like being ten and going to Dairy Queen after swim practice or Grama's house.

Really, the whole weekend was like being ten, with the warmth and the swimming and the junk food and the girl talk. It was wonderful. Thanks ladies.

third time's a charm

Beretta was fabulous, as usual. The only fault I can find with the place is that the drinks are so good, it's very challenging to leave without having at least two. And really, is that a fault?

I'd say no, considering how delicious the drinks are. One of them, the Lonsdale, is so wonderful that we are trying to steal the recipe. Our server was going to ferret it out for us, until she realized that might not be good for business. Next time we go, we'll sit at the bar and order Lonsdales until we've figured it out. It includes apple, gin, lemon, honey, and basil, but it's the proportions I'm after. And is the apple in juice form? Fresh squeezed (I'm sure)?

The food is not too shabby, either. Burrata on pizza? Yes, please. Pork wrapped in pancetta sitting atop green beans (which were swimming in butter and wine)? Don't mind if I do. And grilled asparagus. I'm trying to avoid saying something silly here, like "Finger lickin' good," but it seems I cannot help myself.

See, Beretta drives me to distraction. I think I'll have to make it a regular habit.

Where does your food come from?

So, a bunch of people recently had salmonellosis. The FDA thinks that the bugs are from tomatoes, although they are starting to change their minds a little. Problem is, no-one knows where the tomatoes came from. Why? Because tomatoes are imported from god-knows-where to US distribution centers, where they're repacked and sent to stores, etc. And what does the FDA say about this? Let's track the tomatoes better. What do I say about this? Let's get our tomatoes from a farm. Let's have them picked ripe, not green, let's have them go from the vine, to the picker's hands, to a box, to my doorstep.

Now, before you suggest that I get off (or fall off) my high horse, know that I buy fast food and don't always eat at restaurants that grow their own veggies in the backyard. But, in an ideal world, I wouldn't (eat fast food) and would (eat as locally as possible). Why does the government's answer to all of these food contamination problems involve even more money, oversight, and centralization, when so many problems can be solved by going smaller?

Coco500 has fried green beans

And truffled zucchini flower flatbread. They are awesome. Also good but not awesome was the duck liver terrine and the tomato braised pork shoulder.

Nate and I had eyes bigger than our stomachs last night and ordered two small plates, a large plate and one flatbread (after consuming lots of wine and white cheddar Cheezits at home). We finished about half of the food. Our waiter chastised us. When we ordered dessert (!?) he said that he wouldn't bring it to us unless we promised to finish it. Well, it was hard not to, given its deliciousness. Cherry gelee with buttermilk panna cotta and nice little shortbreads on the side. A fifty-fifty, it was called. And really, just the perfect mix.

Now I'm enjoying a fancy lunch of leftover truffled flat bread and cottage cheese (eaten separately) while I type a report and try not to think about wedding dresses.