Team Beers

Among the best beers in the world, and enjoyed by three of my favorite beer nerds this weekend.

It was soooo good to have the dudes here, and I can’t wait to see them again in DC in a few weeks.

How we spent our evening:

And this was in addition to the nearly 5 dozen pretzels from this morning’s bakefest (thanks for the post, Olivia)!  All credit for these sweets goes to Juli – though we did contribute our sensational decorating skills.  I tried my hand at flooding, Shane made creepy faces, Juli made an amazing rabbi-snowman, and Dave – well, Dave made this guy:

I woke up this morning with pancakes on the brain.  Specifically, this pancake, which I read about the other week on Food 52.

Before I tell you about the pancake, however, let me tell you about two things that led to the making of the pancake.

First, there’s Food 52, which I started reading after hearing about The Essential New York Times Cookbook.  The cookbook represents five years of testing and research on the best and most noteworthy recipes published by the NYT since the 1850s.  The site grew out of the experience of testing for the cookbook and realizing that the best – and most meaningful – cooking takes place in the home.  I’ve only started to delve into its depths, but at its heart, Food 52 is a community that operates on these ground rules:

If you cook, your family will eat dinner together.
If you cook, you will naturally have a more sustainable household.
If you cook, you’ll set a lifelong example for your children.
If you cook, you’ll understand what goes into food and will eat more healthily.
If you cook, you’ll make your home an important place in your life.
If you cook, you’ll make others happy.
If you cook, people will remember you.

I don’t know about you, but each and every one of those rules resonates with me. They also bring me to the second thing that made our pancake possible: a giant cast iron skillet that arrived in the mail sometime last year, a gift from our friends Kevin and Jill in DC.  I may have mentioned this before, but Kevin is a cast iron wizard.  In the course of one meal at their house, Kevin prepared both a pork roast AND an apple pie in the same cast iron skillet.  I firmly believe that Kevin can make anything in his cast iron skillet, and that anything that comes out of his cast iron skillet will taste good.  More importantly, though, I feel like all of the rules above are embodied in Kevin and Jill’s approach towards cooking and food.  Their kitchen is a happy and healthy place, and they’re raising their small son to be an adventurous eater.  I have many warm memories from their dinner table, and I often wish that we lived closer so that we could share meals and games again.

This post wasn’t meant to be sentimental, though.  Breakfast is no time for sentimentality.  It is a time for preventing the morning grumbles with something delicious and simple to prepare.  Like this pancake: a few ingredients whisked together and poured in a very hot cast iron skillet, then baked til golden.  Shane spread homemade jam on his half, while I enjoyed mine with just powdered sugar.  As an entire meal, it was on the small side, but it was enough to get our day off to a really nice start.

Recipe:
David Eyre’s Pancake: 1966 from Food 52 and The Essential New York Times Cookbook

2006: 14 friends, 1 guest dog, 1 cat, 1 arm in a cast, 1 dropped cutting board, 2 sneaky surprise guests.

Photo by Keem

2007: 2 friends from Massachusetts and 1 from Illinois brave horrible holiday traffic to travel to DC, visit the zoo, play trains, and talk about DRUNK BEES.

2008: Day after Thanksgiving dinner, pork shoulder, colcannon, spinach quiche, fondue, queso, crafternoon

Photo by Soy

2009: Eating pie at Village Inn in Davenport even though we’re all stuffed from actual Thanksgiving

Photo by Soy

2010: To the farm! Featuring Baby 80

Back in the day, a very long time before I knew Shane, he was really into electronic music.  I’m not sure if his devotion to electronic music reached the same heights as my devotion to a certain Canadian band, but I do know that he was similarly involved in online communities related to his musical passions, most specifically the IDM mailing list.  His work trip to SF last fall provided the opportunity to finally meet Kiya, one of his friends from the IDM list – as well as a fellow aficionado of fine denim, good food, and good beer.  Calling Kiya a denim aficionado is a bit of an understatement.  He and his wife own amazing denim stores in SF, New York, and, most recently, Los Angeles.  He’s a dangerous – or fantastic – sort of friend to have when you are a gentleman of discriminating denim tastes.  Long story short: we were looking forward to hanging out with Kiya and his wife, and were delighted when they suggested dinner Monday night.

After a full day of walking and driving and photo taking, we were exceedingly happy to be picked up – along with our luggage – by Kiya and Demitra and whisked off in the direction of the Mission.  Our first stop for the night was Zeitgeist, an intense bar featuring the best Bloody Mary in the city.  As we walked in, Kiya told us that the bar goes through more beer than any other bar in the city, which I would believe based on the hipster population density on the patio.  True to form, my Bloody Mary was excellent – though a bit spicy for me – and packed to the brim with snacks:

Photo by fatniu

Alcohol blankets in place against the cool SF night, we were off to our next stop: dinner at Hog and Rocks. We were interested in having some good seafood while in SF, and Hog and Rocks specializes in ham and oysters, so it seemed like a perfect spot.  Hog and Rocks has only been open since mid-summer, and I’m guessing this interesting and moderately-priced spot is going to be a lot harder to get into by the time we get back to SF.

We were seated at the bar and directed to three menus: dinner, ham/oysters, and shot/beer. That’s right – shot and a beer. And not in the Irish car bomb sense – more like a pairing of a shot and a beer. All were priced at around $8 – an outstanding price in Ann Arbor, much less in an up-and-coming spot in SF. I had a shot of a very floral gin along with a Sam Adams Light – the ladies’ choice, obviously.  On to dinner, and to a serious consultation of the ham and oyster menu. We decided to order two small plates each, giving us lots of delicious things to sample over the course of the evening. My two came from the ham menu – an Italian speck served with melon, and a Spanish jamon serrano with olive oil, saba, and a nutty mahon cheese. Both were delicious and just the right size for a few bites each. From the main menu:

• Ham and cheese corn fritters – a little too doughy, but good dipped in a spicy mustard.
• Sea scallops crudo – didn’t realize that ‘crudo’ meant ‘basically raw’ – the plate wasn’t all that appetizing when it arrived, but the basil and citrus came together nicely with the jiggly scallop.
• Cast iron octopus – I’d had my cephalopod fill at Flour + Water, but this looked intriguing and apparently tasted even better.
• Chicken wing confit – the name was enough to convince Kiya that this might be the dinner of his dreams.  The wings were good, but not dream-worthy, though they did feature the house hot sauce.
• Cavatelli pasta with English peas, egg, and ham – really the stand-out dish for both of us – pure comfort food without the weight you’d expect from a pasta dish.  Along with last night’s succotash, I’m newly convinced that you can make a simple and lovely pasta the centerpiece of a meal without having to feel guilty and/or run a 5K the next morning.

I pocketed the ham menu to see if we can recreate some of the dishes for future snack dinners, though I doubt we’ll be trying the oysters at home.  With plans made for the next day’s Russian River trip, Kiya and Demitra delivered us to our Airbnb room, and we slept the sweet sleep of the tired and full.

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If you go:

Zeitgeist
199 Valencia St (Valencia and Duboce)
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 255-7505

Get a Bloody Mary, if that’s your thing. Demitra also highly recommended the tamales sold by the tamale lady on the patio.

Hog and Rocks
3431 19th St (19th & Mission)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 550-8627

Get a shot and a beer and some really excellent ham.

Another really lovely night of food and conversation but no photos!

While there were many delightful things to look forward to on this trip, one of the highlights for me was getting to have dinner with two of my college friends, Blaze and Heather.  We were all students at Rockford College, but didn’t meet until we went to Regents College in London in the spring of 2000.  As is the case with many college friends and study abroad friends, we had all manner of adventures together, then drifted apart in the years since.  Heather and I have managed quarterly emails, but I hadn’t seen either her or Blaze since leaving Rockford in 2003.

Tara, me, and Blaze at Hadrian’s wall, spring 2000

After some back and forth about reservations and commutes, we decided to meet for dinner at Flour + Water, which came highly recommended from Shana. Flour + Water is notoriously hard to get into, though, so we hedged our bet with other restaurants in the Mission. Blaze arrived at 5:30 and was told there’d be a two hour wait, so she put our names in and grabbed a table at Shotwell’s, a neighborhood bar a few blocks away.

I know I said that I want Church Key in our neighborhood, but Shotwell’s might be even better. This is a neighborhood place, you guys, in the way that only 100+ year old bars can be. No frills – just a bar on the corner where you might run into a friend while grabbing a quick beer on your way home from work. We did exactly that, and then were joined by Blaze’s husband Michael shortly before rolling over to Flour + Water.

Remember how I complained about waiting in line at Mama’s? Well let me tell you – Flour + Water was worth the wait. Absolutely. Even very hungry Shane agreed on this one.

Once inside Flour + Water, it’s apparent why we experienced a two hour wait. The space is small, and the eaters are happy. And happy, wine-drinking eaters might take two hours for a meal, especially one that came out of this oven:

Photo by *christopher*

We talked. We considered the wine list. We asked questions of the waitress. We settled on a bottle of wine to share, and on amazing things to eat. Shane invoked his extremely useful restaurant request: if I’m only going to eat here once in my life, what should I have? The salsiccia pizza, she said, or the farro farfalle with sweetbreads. So I ordered the former, and Shane got the latter. Worth. The. Wait. Shane’s pasta was exquisite, full of rich and delicate flavors, an entirely different experience than the sweetbreads we had at Restaurant Eve last summer. My pizza was fantastic – thin crust, flavorful sausage, and a curious and pungent drizzle of anchovies.

Photo by portmanteaus

Blaze and Michael both tried items from the antipasti menu – a stuffed squid and some sort of vegetable stew, both of which were passed around the table to our shared delight. I didn’t try Heather’s puttanesca, but it smelled amazingly fishy, the sort of dish that is done best close to the sea. Our wine – a blend of Sangiovese and Montepulciano – worked well with everything, and we probably could’ve finished a second bottle if we hadn’t already had drinks at Shotwell’s. Besides, there was the matter of dessert:

Photo by Premshree Pillai

A chocolate budino – halfway between pudding and crème brûlée – with a quenelle of Humphry Slocombe ice cream and a sprinkling of sea salt. So amazing.

Let’s not wait another 10 years to have dinner, friends, but if we do – this meal’s going to be hard to top.

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If you go:
Flour + Water
2401 Harrison St. (corner of Harrison & 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 826-7000

Flour + Water takes reservations for less than half of their dining room, so plan in advance or to wait a long time. I promise you won’t regret it.

Shotwell’s
3349 20th St (corner of Shotwell & 20th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 648-4104

People like to talk about the food from their back yard as being “deep local”. I’d call Shotwell’s “deep neighborhood”.

Our second day in San Francisco was the only one with a pre-planned agenda: lunch with my friend Erin Fae, then dinner with friends from college. Fearing the vagaries of changing hotels and public transit in a new city, I had planned our day down to departure times – which paradoxically made having a relaxing breakfast easier.  On Heather’s recommendation, we set out in search of coffee and Italian pastries for the authentic North Beach experience, ending up at Caffe Trieste. Like Mama’s, there was a line and few tables available – but unlike Mama’s, most of the people in the fast-moving line seemed to be commuters in search of their morning cuppa and a bite to eat.

I’m not sure how best to describe my breakfast. What would you call this thing?

It was about the size of a bagel, flaky on the outside but a little chewy on the inside, drizzled with a simple sugary glaze and with some sort of raspberry jam twisted irregularly throughout. Shane had a bear claw of sorts, and we both enjoyed our coffees and a newspaper.

As we were getting ready to leave, a woman sat down at the next table and asked if we’d ever plugged our laptops into a particular socket. Of course we hadn’t, but this interaction made us feel slightly less like tourists.  Hooray!

Once back at the hostel, we piled on the luggage and headed to our second residence of the trip – the Four Seasons.  As someone later commented, we’re probably the only people to have ever stayed at the Green Tortoise and the Four Seasons in the same trip. We expected to just drop our luggage, but our room was already ready (at 10am!), so instead we dropped our luggage in our fancy room and headed out to catch the Geary bus to Inner Richmond.

Erin’s been raving about the tea leaf salad at Burma Superstar since I made my first trip to SF in 2008. It’s a traditional Burmese dish, and theirs in particular was featured on the Food Network. The salad arrives nicely composed:

After a brief tour of the plate – lettuce, tomato, sesame seeds, chips of fried garlic, fermented tea leaves, and too many peanuts for Shane’s taste – the salad is tossed up at the table. Side note: we recently watched Follow That Bird, and now whenever I hear ‘tossed salad’, I picture the Grouch diner with Sandra Bernhard. But I digress. The salad was delicious, as was the rest of our lunch. I mean, look at Erin’s delighted face!

Erin had the eggplant with garlic sauce – a surprisingly luxurious dish with eggplant that nearly melted away into the tomato-garlic base. I tried a tofu and black bean dish served over Burmese fried rice – I didn’t love the rice, but I did love the nutty tofu. We really need to make more tofu at home, you guys. Shane really enjoyed his duck noodles, though I can’t remember much about them other than that he ate them right up!

Erin had two other destinations in mind for our jaunt out to Inner Richmond – Green Apple Books, which she described as SF’s answer to NYC’s Strand – and one of those Asian free-for-all stores packed from floor to ceiling with all manner of merchandise, most importantly socks! Socks of all shapes and colors and sizes! I exercised considerable restraint and only came home with one pair – black with pink stars.

By the time we wrapped up our lunch and fun errands, Erin had to attend to important Moving! To New Zealand! In Two Days! business, so we parted ways with lots of hugs.  Shane and I walked around Geary for a while longer, then headed back to our hotel to rest up before meeting Heather and Blaze for dinner.  When we got back to the hotel, we found a lovely honeymoon-y surprise!

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If you go:
Caffe Trieste
609 Vallejo St (Vallejo and Grant)
San Francisco, CA 94133
(415) 982-2605

Bring cash, and don’t bring your laptop.

Four Seasons San Francisco
757 Market St
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 633-3000

A lovely hotel experience, but only really worth it if someone else is paying. Put your shoes out at night for the free shoeshine.

Burma Superstar
309 Clement St
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415) 387-2147

The tea leaf salad isn’t overhyped. I wish we’d been able to go back for another meal or two.

Green Apple Books
506 Clement St
San Francisco, CA? 94118
(415) 387-2272

Huge used-and-new bookstore. Don’t miss the fiction and music annex next door!

I am so very disappointed that my photos from tonight’s dinner didn’t turn out.  Janet, among others, has been on me for months to improve my use of our DSLR, and tonight’s photos illustrate her point – I have a great deal to learn and, perhaps more importantly, remember.

Since I have no usable photos, I’ll have to ask you to close your eyes and imagine the scene.  Nine friends around a mid-century teak table with not one but two leaves added.  Serving dishes crowding every inch of the table not covered in mismatched linens, silverware, dinner plates, or half-empty Tom Collinses.  A pizza-like flatbread with slow roasted tomatoes, goat cheese, green onion, and shaved Parmiagiano-Reggiano.  A second flatbread with sauteed leeks, gorgonzola, and more shaved Parmiagiano.  Two grain salads: quinoa with green beans, and wheat berries with corn and green onion in a delicate dressing.  Pesto potato salad with green beans and toasted pine nuts.  Potato-quinoa croquettes with romesco dipping sauce.  A frittata with a bunch of veg.  Eggplant caviar with toasted pita (and secret roasted tomatoes added for extra oomph).

Chairs pushed back from the table.  Bottles of Sah’tea and Shane’s stout passed around for sampling.   Chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and a discussion of Mad Men.  Speculation about whether the inhalation of quick-setting concrete might result in sore lungs.  Stories about stuffed animals and grade school lunches.  A lot of laughter, and perhaps an Elton John song.

Let’s do this again, and soon.

Who would’ve thought you could go from this:

to this:

with really not THAT much effort? OK, it did involve ten minutes of kneading. And also clearing out my fridge so that 2 1/2 dozen bagels could do their thing:

2 minutes boiling in the pot, a bit of an egg wash, and some expert decorating before the bagels went into the oven:

And then we tucked in to a gorgeous brunch – prosciutto and Olivia’s tea-cured salmon, thick slices of tomato and thin ones of cucumber and red onion, cream cheese and two kinds of melon. Mimosas with mango or apricot nectar. Good friends and good conversation. And amazing bagels:

Recipe:
Peter Reinhart’s Bagels from Smitten Kitchen

Photo by bichromephoto

I’ll be honest – I spent most of today looking forward to cocktails at the second meeting of the Knights of the West Side. I even did a little research as to what constitutes a classic cocktail, mostly to determine whether or not I should be able to order a Vesper martini. By the time we we got to Knight’s, though, I chickened out. I guess I didn’t want to have to explain a drink that I’d never had before? Either way, I had a dirty martini, while Shane and Matt had Tom Collinses (Toms Collins?), which I think is now the Official Drink of Knights of the West Side.

Side note: I’m still a little fuzzy on the punctuation of Knights of the West Side. Is it Knights, plural, because there’s more than one person going to Knight’s? Or is it Knight’s, with the same punctuation as the restaurant, which is named after the owner?  Regardless, we enjoyed our drinks and a quality old-timey steakhouse meal: pot roast, new potatoes and carrots, a salad, and gorgeous golden dinner rolls, so hot out of the warmer that we could barely tear them open.  We left full and happy – good food, and good friends.