melkor

People all over the world leave raw meat in a tub marinating outside overnight to sell the next day. Partly cooked shawarma left out overnight sounds like no big deal to me, I say suck it up and eat where the food tastes best.

That is a bad bad sign! you did the right thing by not going there again. ← I don't think I'd write a place off just for poor food handling practices. I happily eat off the street anywhere in the world - the shawarma joint wannabechef mentions has got to be cleaner than most of the street food vendors I've visited. Restaurants don't stay in business if they make people sick. Besides, you've got a much better chance of getting sick at a perfectly clean oyster shack.

Tenderloin is pretty flavorless to begin with, I'd go with a really flavorful preparation for it. My first choice would be Vietnamese shaking beef (bo luc lac) - marinate the meat in some fish sauce, garlic, salt, oil, and a pinch of sugar while it comes up to room temp (half an hour or an hour). Mix some slices of red onion, vinegar, soy sauce, salt, and pepper and set them aside. Cook the meat in a hot pan, toss the onions with some watercress and serve the meat on top. Make a dipping sauce with lime juice, salt, and black pepper mixed together.

I add it to stock when I'm making duck demi-glace, always good to have more gelatin.

Thanks again - the blog has been fun to do, though at times it would be nice to have a pocket sized camera so I could comfortably take restaurant food photos. ludja: I really like the south Indian food in the south bay, Shalimar is my favorite anywhere in the bay area for north Indian. doc: I'll find the recipe and send it your way.

Citron cheesecake and espresso to finish the night and the blog. Thanks for reading along for the week!

We spent the day down around Union Square helping a friend get his shop ready to open. Lunch at Canteen, dinner at R & G Lounge. I'm too lazy to post the details but I've suckered MsMelkor into doing it. In the meantime there's a cheesecake in the fridge we should have for dessert.

MsMelkor made french toast for breakfast this morning having made the challah last night. The apples are from the tree in the yard, cooked in some butter, maple syrup, and brown sugar. I did all the hard work for this morning's breakfast - making the lattes

I usually get them at Tower market, though Whole Foods and others also sell them - a quick google search shows them available here but I don't know anything about the vendor. If you've got a Whole Foods near by I'd ask there. Dinon is the brand I usually buy. It's a 3 quart Bourgeat saucier - I love that pan, it's what I grab off the rack most often. It's a pain to keep the copper clean and the handle gets hot, but it's a great shape and it's really responsive.

Steak au poivre, cauliflower gratin, and sauteed carrots for dinner tonight with a bottle of 98 Pichon Lalande. Cooking with cognac is always fun

The white anchovies are usually called boquerones - there are two different brands available in the bay area, though I can't recall the name of either one. One is Spanish, the other Italian - both are good, the Italian one is easier to find. They're anchovy fillets cured in oil and vinegar. We use them in place of the salt packed or canned ones when cooking and they're good in salads, as a snack, and on pizza.

We're back from running around town gathering groceries. Rose finn and German butterball potatoes, sunchokes, cauliflower, bread, fresh sheep milk ricotta, and creme fraiche at the ferry building farmers market. Milk, cottage cheese, cream cheese, bananas, cream, and eggs at Tower. Flatiron steak and a chicken from Guerra's meat. After unpacking the groceries we threw together a quick lunch: grilled cheese made with comte, raclette, and p'tit basque cheeses, della fattoria campagne bread. Salad with a lemon vinaigrette, shaved buddha's hand citron, and cured white anchovies.

A quick breakfast before heading to the market this morning: lamb hash made from the leftover braised lamb shanks, sauteed spinach, and poached eggs. The parsley is taking over our herb garden so we've been using it in everything. We were nearly out of milk so our morning lattes ended up being cappuccinos. Off to the market, more later.

Dinner at the ritz sans camera was excellent. Apparently they're going to email us the menu - we had the 9 course tasting menu with wine pairings - I've had a bit more wine than would allow for an accurate report. I can say that the white truffle icecream is crazy good. The restaurant either as a hotel restaurant or a separate establishment is very good. I'm off for the night.

If I die young, I can blame all the captain crunch I ate when I moved out of my parents place. The trivet I made with some junk from home depot - a rounded piece of molding and a piece of pine shelving I think it was. This will indeed be my first trip to the SF Ritz, I've been meaning to go for a while but something has always come up. We cook all sorts of stuff at home - there are great ethnic markets all over the city so we cook whatever seems best for the ingredients we've got. There's a great Asian supermarket a few blocks away, sorta like 99 Ranch - when we're lazy we just walk there then make some Vietnamese food or a curry or whatever. It all depends on the ingredients we've got on hand.

Lunch hasn't happened yet - all hell broke loose at work, at this point I'm just going to snack on some leftovers.

Shalimar rocks. I've never set foot in the Shalimar restroom, and I've got no desire to change that. That neighborhood really has some of the best food in the city. Pagolac, Bodega Bistro, Shalimar, Thai House Express, Baguette Express... All delicious and cheap.

Everyone should live near or in a big city at some point. I absolutely loved living in the middle of nowhere in NY, I had an old triumph spitfire with a tarp for a roof that I'd get running in the spring and fall to cruise down the mountain roads. There was never any traffic and I had 25 acres with a waterfall in my yard. Now it's a pain in the ass to find parking, I've got a 500 square foot yard and 1/3 as much living space but I've got access to incredible ingredients year round, great restaurants at every price point from the $2.50 bahn mi joints up to the French Laundry. I need to drive 15 or 20 minutes from my house before I get to any good twisty roads, but my current convertible has an actual roof and I can drive with the top down in February. At some point I'll move back to somewhere rural, probably Oregon or Washington - I don't think I'm ready to live somewhere with serious snow again. In the meantime, I'm having a blast in SF. I'm not sure if my photos will come out tonight at dinner - the Shalimar pics are taken in about as low light as my camera is happy with (1600 ISO, f/1.8, around 1/50 exposure). If the Ritz is much darker I'm likely to end up with blurry pictures or flat color. While I love setting things on fire when I'm cooking, the biggest change I found in my sauces was when I started obsessively straining them. I use a thick muslin cloth to strain stocks and reduced wine through - it catches the sediment wine throws off when it boils, and whatever crap I missed when I had previously strained the stock. The stock needs to be hot for it to go through the cloth, otherwise the gelatin is left behind and the texture of the sauce suffers. Once the sauce is simmering I use one of those bent strainers they have at shabu-shabu joints to skim whatever collects on the surface.

I've got no idea what else to use for an avatar. A picture of a 30 year old guy with a little British convertible would make less sense than farmer Doak over there. Scored a table at the Dining Room at the Ritz for dinner tonight, so I think this week ends up being the week I cook least at home. Had a reasonably good latte this morning, though the machine decided to spray ground coffee everywhere when the PF was removed. I probably should do a chemical backflush more often. I did one after coating the coffee station with ground coffee. Tomorrow we're headed to the market and we'll probably have some people over for dinner. I'm on my own for lunch today - in the fridge I've got a little of that ragu I made earlier in the week and some leftover braised lamb. I've got some salad greens, a few roasted potatoes, and the usual pantry veg (leeks, carrots, onions, shallots, etc). There's some rock fish and duck breasts in the freezer. Anyone have any bright ideas for my lunch? I'm swamped at work today.

Shalimar at Jones & Geary (next to the prostitutes and crack dealers) in the tenderloin. Since apparently cooking in your own kitchen makes you go bananas (like the menu says) we had to have dinner out again. We end up at Shalimar every few weeks - they've got the best tandoori chicken in the city and Thursdays they've got goat curry. Tonight while we drank a bottle of kerner from British Columbia the five of us ate (in the same order as the photos): goat karahi, tandoori chicken, seekh kabab (beef), naan, saag, chicken karahi, and bhuna gosht (lamb). Delicious as always, and with tax and tip the tab was fifteen bucks per person. They don't charge corkage, but they also don't have any wine glasses or a corkscrew. It felt strange for a while to bring our own glasses to a restaurant... I'm not sure when it stopped feeling strange, but it has.

Work dragged me back to the east bay again today - a quick steak frite at cafe rouge in Berkeley and a visit to the office in Oakland. I'm glad to be back on this side of the bridge before traffic turns into a disaster at rush hour. Dinner tonight is either going to be leftovers or Pakistani food at my favorite dive in the tenderloin. I'm leaning towards going out. I should take some pictures of the garden or my pantry or something, I haven't cooked much this week - this blog feels like it's dragging.

I'm happy with how the lamb turned out. Last time I made it I finished it in a 500*F oven for half an hour to reheat it and crisp the outside - this time I was roasting potatoes and carrots at the same time so I used 450*F. It needed a few more minutes or the higher temp, this batch the silverskin didn't crisp enough to be delicious. I learned previously that the flash point of cauliflower is less than 550*F so having set my oven on fire once roasting veg I've been keeping them temp under 500 for everything except pizza. I'm really happy with how the sauce turned out - great texture and shine, good depth, and it was just plain tasty. A bottle of 2000 Deydier Chateauneuf du Pape worked well with the lamb, less well with the broccoli, but that wasn't really a surprise. There's some leftover lamb and carrots, I should probably mash some potatoes to make a shepherds pie with it. Off to make a pair of lattes and check that the oval bread pudding isn't poisonous.

I've been using a high ISO setting for most of the pictures, I'm using available light, but sadly my camera isn't really point and shoot. I went through half a dozen point and shoot pocket sized cameras and managed to break them all in interesting ways. One flew off the roof of a car in Australia and was driven over by a jeep, another filled with sand when we were driving a dunebuggy in the oregon dunes, the screen cracked on another. With this camera I figure since it's too big to fit in my pocket I won't break it that way and since it has several lenses, even if I drop it into the ocean, at least I'll still have the lenses that weren't attached. I've got two of the cheesecloth bags, they cost a couple of bucks at the grocery store - they're sold as jelly bags. I wash them by hand in the sink, it takes all of 30 seconds.

← Of course, the one in the rectagular dish isn't poisonous. How about the one in the oval dish, melkor? I'm enjoying your blog, melkor. I can't help conclude that you seem to embody the whole philosophy/lifestyle of "California Cuisine", namely, ... the freshest, local, seasonal produce, simply prepared ... From roasting your own coffee beans to local fishing and foraging, I was wondering whether you grew up that way in upstate New York. Perhaps, there was a culinary epiphany of sorts. When did you first become familiar with California Cuisine, and Alice Waters & Chez Panisse?? ← I haven't yet tried the oval one, we finished off the smaller one last night. I think I'll need to sample the oval one with my morning latte when I get around to making it. I grew up with a garden in the back yard, my mother has been making maple syrup from the half dozen trees in her yard for almost as long as I can remember. I didn't so much have a culinary epiphany as much as I went through a brief culinary dark age. After I moved out of my parents house I lived for several years on snickers, frozen pizza, kraft mac and cheese, and hotdogs. After a few years of that I went back to buying the best ingredients I could find and afford at the time. I used to buy half my produce at a farm stand on the way from Saugerties to Catskill in Story Corners. The other half came from a small produce market in Woodstock on the right side on the way into town. I got meat from a reasonably good butcher in Woodstock, half a mile or so down the street from the produce market. I think that people who love food shop, cook, and eat like that no matter where they live. The only reason it's considered California cuisine is because it's the only thing available at most of the restaurants here. It's a given that the little bistro you visit in the french country side is shopping locally and buying what's in season. Those sorts of places are harder to find in the rest of the US because good fresh ingredients are only available for part of the year and restaurants are always working to be consistent. It's financially difficult to only be open for half the year, but it's nearly impossible to serve completely different food six months of the year. The Madison Wisconsin farmers market is a perfect example of that - it's as good or better than anything we have in San Francisco and Madison is the only place I've ever had my eyes freeze shut because it's so cold. Good produce is only available for part of the year in most places, but I think you appreciate it more when you spend the winter without it. I love living somewhere that I can get incredible ingredients year round, and I agree with the Chez Panisse theory that it's my job as a cook not to screw them up. I'm just as happy to fly to San Diego to fish for yellowtail as I am fishing locally. I'm on a quest to find some foie gras from Au Bon Canard in Wisconsin. I'm less focused on local, and more on getting whatever is best and within my budget - but most of the time what's best is also what's local. Most ingredients do really poorly in transit. I think the real impact Alice Waters has had on food is that she's exposed a huge number of people to good ingredients and what can be done with them at home. The food at Chez Panisse is good, but nothing you shouldn't be able to make at home if you've got great ingredients.

All the dinner prep is done, everything is either in the fridge or on a cooling rack waiting for me to get back from the airport to chuck it in the oven or finish it on a burner. The all-used-up veg, along with the cloth I strained the sauce through. Sauce reduction along with the finished sauce. Veg prep - the carrots and potatoes are getting roasted to finish them, the broccoli (which completely lost its purple tint as a number of you had said it would) is being sauteed with some lemon zest and a little garlic to finish it. Apple bread pudding - vanilla, cream, milk, sugar, brown sugar, stale bread, eggs, salt, and some apples. I'd post a more complete description of how it's made but I need to run out the door to the airport. Well, maybe not immediately - I did have time to check that the bread pudding wasn't poisonous.