Rock and rock oatmeal

I'll bet Keith Richards eats a lot of oatmeal. There has to be a balance in his life hiding somewhere, counteracting the hard-riding lifestyle, right?

I'd had five solid days and nights of corporate 'hospitality', rife with open bars staffed by polyester tuxedos, with boxed conference lunches designed to offend the fewest possible palates, and with an endless stream of fried this-and-thats served on paper napkins under the glow of projected corporate logos. The ubiquitous steamship round roast, more appropriate in the Flintstone's drive-in than under a heat lamp, the sterno-fueled quesadilla reheating stations, the pallid fry-tinted mountains of sliders, eggrolls, pasta salads and little thumb-sized pastry tarts filled with various salty meats or glazed fruit -- it was an overload. I'd steered well clear of the syrupy Crayola-hued cocktails served via ice-sculpture luge to the brays of delight by the herd of onlookers, but despite my attempts to derive a sane diet from the onslaught of decadence, my week had left me listless and fatigued.

On my last day in town, with the few hours left before I'd be boarding my flight home, I waddled across the street from my hotel in San Diego's squeaky-clean Gaslamp district to Mary Jane's Coffee Shop. Only after a few sips of my coffee did I make the connection between the Jim Morrison playing overhead, the edgy decor and the kitschy flatscreens playing episodes of The Brady Bunch in the cafe booths; I realized that this diner is actually attached to the Hard Rock Hotel. And as it turns out, this temple to debaucherous loud living gave me just what I needed - a simple bowl of oatmeal.

Sometimes a little bland nutritive comfort is exactly what an hors-d'oeuvre-addled body needs. Porridge is as simple as it gets, and is too humble to be reformulated, infused, or otherwise glamorized. It's plain and simple horsefeed, and even to call it 'vanilla' would be a moniker too ambitious. Oatmeal doesn't want to be craved. It just wants to provide nourishment. Quietly.

And so it did, with just a couple of raisins and some Paint It, Black to give me a wholesome start to my day, and to give me a culinary breath of fresh air. Keith would be proud.

An oasis of real food in Texas

The times are a changin' in Austin

After my first trip in three years to Austin, Texas, I can report that something exciting is happening to the culinary landscape. Now I should mention here that I grew up in Texas, and will never lose the soft spot in my heart for real barbecue brisket, breakfast tacos, and, yes..even Whataburger.

However, my personal food awakening only really took hold after I left. So admittedly, my food memories of this place, where gourmet food was always imported and everyday food was factory-made, pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic food landscape in my backyard of Northern California, where sublime gastro-experiences are ubiquitous.

But this recent visit back to the central time zone showed me that there is a food revolution going on throughout the country, not just on the coasts, and that awareness is being raised in areas that have traditionally been challenging environments in which to find or even grow good honest real food.

If anyplace in Texas was going to embrace slow food first, it was going to be Austin, the 'hole in the doughnut' of a state otherwise suffering from a sociopolitical image problem. I'm proud to have lived in this fine city during the mayoral election in which Leslie Cochran, a transgender homeless activist, garnered almost 8% of the popular vote.

Needless to say, Austinites are comfortable with progressive thought. Austin is the home of Whole Foods, now expanding across the country (and goodness, even into the UK). It's the home to Central Market, another bastion of gourmet goodness, being kept as a Texan secret for the time being. But the list continues - Real Ale Brewing Company in Blanco, Texas is carrying the torch for handcrafted brewing, Tito's Vodka, made just outside Austin, is the first legal distilled spirit to come from the state, is made in small batches smooth enough to drink with just a splash of soda, and Sweet Leaf Tea is honest and simple and has a tirade against high fructose corn syrup on their website. Who would have expected it?
Cissi's Market on South Congress is a little cornucopia of gourmet goodness, with Jo's coffees, grass-fed beef from Bastrop Cattle Company, 'happy chicken' eggs, the full lineup of Real Ale Company's offerings, plus locally-sourced produce and prepared foods.

Just down the street at Farm to Market Grocery, more local produce abounds, from soaps and pickles and hot sauces. Their supplier list shows the zeitgeist of Texan natural foods in its full breadth.
The selection might be limited and the produce case might be small, but this is the kind of enthusiasm needed to get this movement off the ground. All just a little more proof that supporting the producers who support the cause is the only way to make changes in our food systems. Keep up the good work, y'all!

Well-dressed preserves

In my own preserving, I've used Kerr jars, the kind that are available at supermarkets and hardware stores. Unlike most products, preserving jars, at least in the United States, appear to have no 'bargain' version and 'luxury' version; there's just the standard utilitarian Kerr/Ball jar, unchanged for decades. 

But on a recent trip to Sur La Table, I spotted a curious little cardboard flat of jars that I didn't recognize. I bent over to inspect them, and found that yes, someone had come up with a cleverly designed and fashionable alternative. No metal rings, no razor-sharp metal discs, just a glass jar, a glass lid, and a rubber gasket. I looked up this company, called Weck, and kept their name in my mind, intending to call upon them when my current stash of glass runs out, or when I decide my preserves have become gift-worthy. 

Now I see that Pim, of the venerable Chez Pim blog, has also discovered these photogenic cute little German jars. She's filled them with candied kumquats, and they look positively charming.

Ramos, Please Rid Us Of Your Fizz

It's called a Ramos Fizz. This little relic of a cocktail reared its ugly Victorian head during a otherwise pleasant sunny brunch this weekend at The Ramp in San Francisco, where a friend of mine spotted it on the menu and made the ill-advised decision to summon one from the bar.

It's gin, lemon and lime juice, sugar, orange flower water, cream and egg white, all together in filthy blended foamy matrimony, a grisly, tart, sweet and eggy marriage made in cocktail hell.

Everyone at the table had a brief sip, then my friend choked through a couple more sips, before it was finally relegated to the far end of the table. It sat alone scowling and festering in the sun and, in a fleeting bit of disgusting protest, curdled and separated into a two distinct foamy white and greenish clear layers. Ugh.

Breakfast sausage in High Definition

"Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone." - Oscar Wilde

Flavor is a lot like TV. In isolation and in the warm glow of ignorance, a normal CRT television portrays an acceptably faithful depiction of the world. Greens look green, reds look red, and everything is perfectly unremarkably nice. But take a journey out into the world and glimpse an HD television, and suddenly the universe is a different place. After you've witnessed the raw,visceral screamingly bright pore-level detail oozing from a wall-sized HD demi-god, your rounded glass simulacrum will never elicit anything but ennui.

I have tasted HD breakfast sausage, and until I took it out of the package, I didn't realize the depth of my own ignorance of this morning staple.

The packaging was already promising. I'm a sucker for compelling typography, so the blood red block characters on plain straw-colored background betold authentic meaty goodness before I grabbed it eagerly from the cooler case. Those big letters spelled Boccalone, which means 'big mouth' in colloquial Italian. It's the most recent project of Chris Cosentino (of my neighborhood's Incanto and Iron Chef America fame) and his business partner Mark Pastore. Boccalone first came to my attention a few months ago when, walking past Incanto, I saw a little sign touting something about a CSA for meat. Meat, delivered on a weekly basis - it's a brilliant triumph of civilization, and I'm amazed it hadn't been thought of earlier.

The Boccalone project has now expanded past the signup list of initial members into a full-on brand of delicious meat products, both fresh and cured, available from grocery stores and markets like Avedano's Holly Park Market in Bernal Heights here in San Francisco, where I got my mitts on some. It's all done correctly, using natural methods, humanely-sourced meat, and the flavors are so real that it makes Jimmy Dean taste like a sage-flavored sponge.

I could tell of the tales of pancetta or guanciale or salted pork liver, but this particular morning's foray into Boccalone's world came from their Easton Breakfast Sausage. Why Easton? Apparently it was famous for a time on the east coast between the Civil and Second World Wars, when Cosentino's English-descended kin produced Easton's Newport Sausage in Rhode Island. The inclusion of adventurous and fashionable bitter orange zest among the other potent herbs makes me wonder whether the original recipe has been updated since those early days, but regardless, this is a sausage that makes its presence known in the kitchen. I opened the package and immediately encountered an earthy and tart aroma, a more powerfully..well, meaty note than accompanies most grocery-standard meat products.


After a visit to the cast-iron frying pan in a little oil, the little Eastons joined the plate with a couple of slices of toast and another citrus diva, my own homemade marmalade, to bring me breakfast in breathtaking high fidelity.

Indulging curiosity at Scharffen Berger

I've now boldly walked in the footsteps of Curious George.

And whereas the images we remember from children's books are typically met with jarring contrast to their real-world equivalents, Berkeley's Scharffen Berger lives up to the expectation, long reinforced by childhood stories, that chocolate factories are quirky and fantastical places. Instead of a massive faceless production line hidden out in a low-rent Nowheresville, the Scharffen Berger factory is tucked into a small old brick building in a tree-lined neighborhood, and it's jammed full of antique European machines, plodding along noisily in their decadently inefficient and low-yield ways to produce the good stuff. And they let people in for tours.

One of the few real chocolatiers chocolate makers in the country, Scharffen Berger has only recently passed their ten-year mark, but early in their history, established themselves as something special. A 'best in the country' endorsement from the late Julia Child, followed by a more recent acquisition by Hershey (shhh!), and Scharffen Berger has taken the title as American chocolate bellwether.

Apparently, the secret has to do with sourcing properly fermented cacao, being very picky about it, and tailoring each tiny batch carefully, eschewing the more efficient quick-to-market methods employed by brands with larger market share to preserve. Oh, and ensuring that even their milk chocolate, long a boo-hooed lowbrow cousin style to the revered dark chocolate, has a higher percentage of cocoa solids than several of their dark chocolates - that doesn't hurt.

Having sat through several How It's Made tours and demonstrations for countless other foods, I was pleased to see that the Scharffen Berger tour is designed to enlighten even the most obsessed foodie. I had heard faint murmurs about this fermentation of cacao, but didn't know much about the process. To my delight, our Scharffen Berger guide provided a well-informed description, followed by photos, followed by actual beans to touch, and was able to answer questions intelligently!

He led us on a hairnetted walkthrough, reportedly the only one in the country that allows photos, then left us free to indulge our whims in the shop. No quick slick video and a high-pressure cattle prod into the gift shop here...although the siren song of chocolate pretty much does the job itself.

This is a passion-driven example of real food, well-deserving of its accolades, and with a factory as fun as its product. Other food manufacturers, take note!

Joy in a mundane onion

Sometimes super-fresh produce surprises me.

Since moving to Northern California, I've been gradually expanding the breadth of my culinary knowledge, and learning more about what peaks of perfection food can attain when it's brought from earth to table in the shortest and most seasonal time possible. This continues, as it did during a recent Saturday morning trip to the Alemany Farmers' Market, where I rediscovered onions.

From my earliest encounters with onions, I remember their papery skin as a flaky nuisance. Left in the bottom of plastic bags that brought onions home from any childhood grocery run was a little crumbly mess of onion dandruff, dusty shards of crispy detritus that were just part of the onion deal. I never considered this to be a flaw, or even something I would wish away; this was simply a feature of onion-ness.



But look at this bombshell! Tight, taut and brightly colored, with a wispy ribbon of coiled skin wrapped seductively at the end. Red onions elsewhere - even here in this fertile land - are the most likely to be flaky and discolored, much moreso than their well-behaved white and yellow siblings. But here, harvested the evening before in Fresno and rushed to Alemany in the morning, was proof that even humble onions can outperform expectations when they're given proper attention, instead of neglectful decay and time spent in a withered pile in the supermarket.

Little onion, it's a pleasure to meet you.