melkor

Thanksgiving is coming along. After the wholesale produce adventure we've got our shopping list down quite a bit. We're heading down to the farmers market at the SF ferry building in a little while. We need to get some salad greens, pears, onions, potatoes, carrots, cellery, sweet potatoes, cranberries, apples, bread, eggs, and creme fresh. Aside from that list we need to pick up the bird on Monday or Tuesday and then we are set to go. I think we'll try a few different preps for the smoked salmon mousse tonight.

We made fourty-four freakin' quarts of pickels.

If Chris can swing by Napa in the helicopter and pick me up, I'm in.

It did seem a lot like a bad movie, but it was absolutely worth doing more than once.

No truffles, I'll look for them at the Ferry Market on Saturday. Besides, if they had them they would be sold by the case.

So having gone on an adventure to the SF produce market last night. We may have a few adjustments to the menu. I think we'll swap out one of our desserts with a meyer lemon something or other. Maybe add some meyer zest to the biscotti. The onion soup will get a bunch of shallots added to it. Any ideas on what to do with the several pounds of dill left after making 6 gallons of pickles?

You might want to look into this personal chef search engine. I've never used them, but their credentials look good.

Last night Pim, Malik, ms melkor, and I went on a grand adventure to investigate the existence of the San Francisco produce market. We'd previously seen their website, but there is no mention of who a target customer would be. So we all meet at first crush in the city. While we are waiting for 1am to roll around, we drain a bottle of 01 Ridge Lytton Springs (lots of fruit, chewy tannin, awful food wine - pretty good for just sipping). So this market is open from midnight until 10:30am, but the story we've heard is that it's not all set up until 1 or 2am and it's sparse by morning. 1am rolls around, we head down to the creepy warehouse district of the city, drive past a gigantic beverage distribution center and show up at the very large and very strange SF produce market. There is a one way road in, and a one way road out. Both sides of the road are lined with warehouses that are set back from the road a bit to allow the trucks to back up and load their pallets full of stuff (I did mention that we are the only idiots without a truck at 1am at a wholesale produce market, didn't I?). We park at the edge of the great sea of pavement, out of the way of the trucks as best we can. We climb up the edge of the loading dock, as we hadn't notice there was a ramp 50 feet to either side and we proceed to walk through all the stalls, poking at everything we can find. We find cases and cases of all things - spectacular citrus, awful pale hothouse tomatoes, salad greens, baby corn - still in its husks (which we mistake for lemongrass at first sight), mushrooms, peppers, asparagus, potatoes, onions, melons, all things that are in season anywhere on the planet. Our first attempt at purchasing is somewhat unsuccessful - Malik tries to buy a 4lb box of baby arugula ($6.50) and is told that without an account he is out of luck. Completely unfazed he walks next door where they are happy to sell him his arugula but their price is $8.50 for the four pound box. After inquring about the price difference he is told that this vendor charges more their his neighbor because 'he likes money'. What they have looks good, and I purchase a 4lb box of baby spinach for $9.50 - both are organic. Happy with our purchasing success we set off to explore the rest of the market, lugging boxes of greens with us. Ms melkor and I decide it would be a brilliant idea to purchase a box of pickling cucumbers, as we're running low on pickles and we have a pregnant neighbor to supply. We find a vendor who is happy to sell us a box, he tells us it will be $15, fair enough - when we've bought them in the past they cost around a buck a pound. Sounds like a deal, the box looks to be of a reasonable size. He takes our money, gives us change and a receipt and says in spanish to someone else on the dock 'something something something gringo' and the other guy hops up, grabs a handtruck and loads our newly acquired box of cucumbers into our car for us. We happen to notice that said box says that it contains fifty-two pounds of freaking cucumbers. We are very successful in getting in the way of countless forklifts, lots of hand trucks, and still we see no other people actually shopping. The way this works we eventually figure out, is that a grocery store or a restaurant will place an order by phone/fax and send a driver down in the middle of the night to pick up their ass-load of produce, hopefully without flattening the clueless people on foot. We end up completely filling the trunk of the car - 52lbs of kirby cucumbers ($15), 10lbs of meyer lemons ($18), 12 heads of live butter lettuce (??), 38lbs of valencia oranges ($9.50), 4lbs of baby dill ($7.50), 5lbs of shallots ($8), 4lbs of baby arugula ($8.50), 4lbs of baby spinach ($9.50). We're finished shopping, there are a hundred and twenty pounds of produce in the car, and it's low on gas so we stop at the corner to get more - Pim spots a large building across the street which is clearly a fish market, so we head off to investigate. We don't make it past the curb before realizing that the only place that smells worse than this fish market is red lobster. Back to the car and back to the city. We split up the boxes, though somehow ms melkor and I end up with far more stuff than we expected. Malik will be eating nothing but salads for the next month, Pim goes home with a handbag full of meyer lemons, and we make it back to our house around 3:30am. edit: fixed broken link.

Lets see... in the garage there are a few boxes full of useless kitchen gear: flour sifter bread maker recipe book holder those fork thingies that came with a roasting pan apple corer donut cutter non-remote meat thermometer ice spoon that came with an ice bucket (now used for wine) some awful t-fal pans "the chopper machine" - one of those useless push down chopping things I don't think I can pick a most useless, and I'm sure there are other things in the boxes, but wow do I have a lot of useless kitchen junk.

Crackers with peanutbutter - seriously, it's not a bad match for nouveau. Hardly the ideal dinner, but worth a try before people show up.

My biggest problem with the terroir argument is that it's used to justify the endless supply of absolute swill being produced in burgundy and elsewhere.

haha! I may also try and roast my potatoes in duck fat. What is the general consensus on stuffing; in the bird or not....

you don't have to thaw it It's also unlikely to come with a pop-up timer. Otherwise, it's more or less the same process.

You won't be able to find the chemicals they use to flavor the beans, so home roasting may not be a good option for you. One of the few exceptions is chocolate, which you can add by tossing some coco nibs in with the beans when you grind them.

Squeat, the Prosecco starts around 7am when we start cooking, it'll be long gone by 4pm We've got to get some of our produce on Saturday at the ferry market in SF. The turkey needs to be picked up Monday, that may be a challenge since I'm considering going out to tahoe to ski on Monday. The first of the family shows up Tuesday night, the rest on Wednesday. Hopefully canon will get my digital camera repaired and sent back in time to take some pics for this blog. This afternoon I'll go down to the wine shop (premier cru in emeryville) and pick up a few more bottles of the riesling were serving.

Before I moved out to CA the capriccio was one of my regular spots, it used to be great. I'm not sure what it's like now though, it's been a few years since I've been there.

Home roasting is easy, there's no reason to wait. Besides, the unroasted beans are significantly cheaper.

Sweet Marias rocks.

The second time you bake them, stand the biscotti upright. You don't need to flip them and they come out more crisp. What flavoring are you looking for? What recipes have you tried?

Gamay, White Zinfandel, and Sparkling Shiraz are all in the same camp. The vast majority of them are made for consumption by people who don't like wine. It's the exception when any of the three are made in a serious style - it's not that it can't be done, but that is rarely the case.

No idea, I've been looking for a similar sized cellar to keep some white/sparkling wines at serving temp. If you figure out what your going to get, be sure to post and let us know.

Gee, that was always my thoughts about Gamay... more than six months in the bottle and it was gone. There are some wines which are made from gamay and are intended to age, but they are only slightly less awful than nouveau.

I've long been on the quest for the perfect cup, my current blend is pretty well to my liking. Unfortunately the blend is made of the scraps of green coffee that were sitting around - some I have more of, others I'll substitute for. It's got a light chocolate tone to it, some fruityness, a little earthyness, and a fair amount of body. It's roughly made up of 10% aged toraja, 30% kenya, 30% yemeni moka, 30% Kona. I'm roasting it at a low temp (350 or so) for 25-30 minutes until it just hits second crack, blended before it goes into the roaster. It's brewed in a bodum eSantos electric vac-pot. I'm really pleased with the end result. What are the other home roasters using for their daily cup? What blend? How dark? Which roasting/brewing method(s)? edit: spelling.

My family is easy to work with. They eat pretty much anything we put in front of them. Greenbean casserole is out, but I've got no idea what the cranberry mess will end up as. My brother is the only one who really likes it, so he just makes it when he gets here - he's far too good in the kitchen to use the can. A year or two ago we tried the chestnut stuffing thing, got them from the farmers market, stuffed the turkey, did the whole thing - they were a huge pain in the ass and they didn't taste like much of anything. We'll have to have a post-thanksgiving get together to trade leftovers.

So the beef stock is in the freezer, it came out better than it usually does. I threw in some chunks of tri-tip that were in the freezer from 100 years ago, they seem to have given it a much beefier taste. Last years sweet potato casserole was too sweet, the nut topping and the sugar in the potato mixture ended up being much sweeter than I was looking for. So last night we made a test batch with a modified recipe. The sweet potatoes were tossed into the smoker after we were done cooking dinner in it - they were left there overnight. The end result is pretty good, a nice light smokiness fits in really well with the other flavors. This batch had no sugar added to the potatoes, next time we'll toss in a little brown sugar. Still no progress deciding on the 2nd canape, and we haven't given any thought to the confit salad yet. But otherwise things are going well.