supertaster

Mitchell's Ice Cream

It always looks like a ridiculously long line at Mitchell's, which is why it took so long for me accept the fact that if I wanted to try the famed local favorite I would have to buck up and prepare for a long wait. Hubby dropped me off on the corner so I could get a place in line while he looked for parking. As I ripped off ticket number 68, I saw they were only up to 54. Sigh.

I decided I should figure out what I would order, and what I'd order for him if he didn't show up before my number was up: Thai iced tea (ice cream, that is) for me, and Mexican chocolate for him. I settled in for a long wait. Saw him drive by three times, circling the block like a vulture. Other drivers double-parked in front of the store. Finally he showed up as they were calling 62, and it was just a few more minutes until, at last, it was our turn. A quick sample of the two flavors confirmed our choices, and then finally... ice cream nirvana.

It turned out to be everything I expect in ice cream -- dense and rich -- with the surprise of delightfully unusual flavors. I was shivering while I licked my cone, and had to finish it in the car so I didn't come down with pneumonia. Half an hour or so of standing in line outside in San Francisco summer evening chill was still worth it, but next time I'm wearing a warmer jacket.

688 San Jose Ave (at 29th), 415 648 2300

Pizzeria Delfina

When you move from one region to another, there's always some local delicacy you have to give up. When I moved from my hometown of Philadelphia, I realized I would never find a real cheesesteak anywhere else. In New Haven, Connecticut, the item is pizza. I knew I wouldn't find the same pizza anywhere else -- brick oven fired, thin but toothsome crust, sauce of sweet plum tomatoes, a light hand with the toppings -- but I didn't think it would get as bad as it apparently had several months after my move to San Francisco.

I live down the street from Goat Hill Pizza, a local favorite, but sadly I never found it satisfying. To me the pizza always tastes like it's made from canned ingredients: canned tomato paste for the sauce, canned black olives, canned artichoke hearts, etc. The aroma of baking pizza crust always smells good when wafts by as I pass on the street, but the crust itself never seems to live up to the promise. It's usually over-baked and too hard, turning finishing my half of the pizza into a chore.

I've tried Amici (not bad, a little greasy, avoid the unpleasantly dense sausage) and North Beach (good sauce, fresh toppings -- but they don't bother to sauté the onions and peppers) and had pretty much decided that this was as good as it was going to get. Then I started hearing that real Italian pizza was to be had at a little place in the Mission around the corner from Tartine. I happened to be in the neighborhood and checked out the menu -- housemade fennel sausage, white clam pizza, broccoli rabe pizza, margherita --it seemed like the real deal.

The seed was planted.

Last Friday it had blossomed into a fully-formed thought: "We're going to Delfina for dinner tomorrow," I told the husband. And we did. We started with asparagus with a lemon, crumbled hard boiled egg yolk, bread crumb, and olive oil dressing. It had the right mixture of tang of lemon, mellowed and made more substantial by the egg and olive oil, and the crunch of light, crispy breadcrumbs. We split the Salsiccia pizza, which featured their house made sausage. It was perfect. Light, crisp crust with juicy, fennel-studded sausage and just the right amount of sauce, cheese, and thinly sliced red pepper and red onion to complement it. We consumed it all in a reverent, near-total silence.

My quest for pizza in the Bay Area is finally over.

3611 18th St (between Guerrero and Dolores), 415 437 6800

Roasted tomatoes with shrimp and feta

This past spring has been particularly fruitful for work, which unfortunately means a long dry season for Supertaster. Apologies to my fellow supertasting readers (all two of you) for such a long hiatus. I've still been eating and cooking, of course, and following is a recipe I found myself making a few times because of its unsurpassed combination of speed, ease, and taste. I think it originally may have come from Bon Appetit, but am not sure as my copy is handwritten on a piece of notepaper. This is a great recipe if you're craving tomato flavor but tomato season isn't quite underway -- the roasting intensifies the flavor of even bland winter supermarket tomatoes.

5 large tomatoes cut into eighths
3 T olive oil
2 T minced garlic
3/4 t kosher salt
3/4 t black pepper
1-1/2 lbs. medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/2 c chopped fresh parsley
2 T lemon juice
1 c feta, crumbled

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Place tomatoes in a large baking dish. Spoon olive oil and garlic over. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss.

Place on top rack of oven, roast 20 min. Remove from overn and stir in shrimp, parsley, and lemon juice. Sprinkle with feta. Put back in oven for 10-15 min or until shrimp are cooked.

Serves 6.

*Modifications and notes*

I usually use the Trader Joe's pre-cooked, shelled, deveined frozen shrimp, which makes this even faster, but necessitates some modifications since it comes in 1-lb. bags. Use 4 tomatoes, but keep all the other quantities the same. After adding the thawed shrimp, put the baking dish back into the oven just long enough for everything to heat through, about 3 min.

I also usually make the full recipe for two people to eat and then have leftovers another day. If you do this, save some chopped parsley and sprinkle it over the reheated shrimp when you eat them the next time. The fresh parsley perks up the dish a little the second time around.

Another time-saver -- crumbled feta. I've used the 6-oz. container from Trader Joe's and though it's not the full 1 c that the recipe calls for, it works fine.

Don't cheat and use bottled lemon juice. Freshly squeezed lemon juice makes a big difference here as there are so few ingredients.

Meyer lemon curd

The other day, someone gave me a handful of Meyer lemons grown from their own backyard lemon tree. I had never tried Meyer lemons before, since there's only ever one kind of lemon available at Safeway or Trader Joe's, the only places I've been shopping these days.

I wanted to try something special with them, rather than just substitute them for regular lemons in something in which you'd never notice their presence. Searching Epicurious for "Meyer lemon" turned up a handful of recipes ranging from the complex (Crab fritters with herb salad and Meyer lemon aioli) to the even more complex (Moroccan chicken with preserved Meyer lemons and green olives, which actually comprises two recipes for one dish). Not for the faint-hearted or the short on time. I settled on Meyer lemon curd: 3 out of 4 fork rating; 89% who tried it would make it again; only 4 ingredients, all of which I had on hand; and most importantly, 20 minutes from start to finish.

I printed the recipe and left it on the kitchen counter to try over the weekend. Late one night as I was cleaning up after dinner, it caught my eye and reading through it one more time I was seized by the desire to try it right then and there. Twenty minutes! I could do that right now and eat it tomorrow, never mind the weekend. So between glimpses of women's snowboard cross and men's figure skating long program, I made my first Meyer lemon curd. It did take longer than 20 minutes with the t.v. watching, but it was definitely simple. And so delicious. Like lemon meringue with loads of butter.

The recipe suggested it could be used as a cake or tart filling, which I can imagine would be excellent, and which I may have to try because I have about two cups of it now. I have made a dent in it already, though, since I've been spreading it by the glopful on my toast. I don't think it will be much of a chore to finish it off.

Supertasty Christmas loot

What does a supertaster want for Christmas? Cookbooks and food-related writing, please! I was pleased to get both this year, in the form of The Quick Recipe, and The San Francisco Food Lover's Guide.

Last year I got both a subscription to Cook's Illustrated magazine and their book, The New Best Recipe, for Christmas, and got so hooked on their recipes and deliciously geeky scientific method approach to finding the perfect recipe that when I saw they came out with a quick recipe collection I knew I had to have it. I've already browsed through half of it, and it looks tasty. First of all, it looks like you really could make these recipes in the amount of time they specify. Most cookbooks seem to underestimate the amount of time it takes a regular person in a non-test kitchen without a staff on hand to do prep work to make anything. I almost always take 30-50% longer to make anything in a cookbook. But maybe not these.

Second, it looks like food I would actually make. Maybe not Roast Pork Tenderloins with Figs and Balsamic Sauce on a weeknight after work, but even that wouldn't be so hard for a mid-week dinner if I did a little prep the day before. But for every recipe on that scale, there are four or five more like Penne with White Beans, Pancetta, and Arugula, which takes 20 min. I think I'll dive in and try something next week and see how it really goes.

Patricia Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Guide I spied on a friend's shelf and was immediately charmed by its loving descriptions of restaurants, markets, cafés, and bakeries all over the Bay Area. I found The Oakville Grocery and Vella Cheese Co. by scanning its Wine Country chapter and thereby fortified a trip to Sonoma and Napa last spring. Now that I'm a native, I decided I needed my own copy and am now happily exploring the foodie side of the city via my armchair. Starting with my own neighborhood (Potrero Hill) and checking Unterman's opinions of the local places against my own, I am moving out to adjacent neighborhoods next (The Mission), and am looking forward to spending the next months reading and eating my way around the city.

Burma Superstar

When the husband and I were visiting SF last April to see if we really wanted to live here, the friend we were staying with took us here for lunch. It couldn't have been better calculated to impress upon us the diversity of Bay Area food, although I'm pretty sure our friend's intent was benign. When a college friend called us up to have dinner while he was in the city for a conference the other day and requested something "pan-Asian, maybe Southeast Asian" I knew we had to take him here.

I had remembered it being way way out in the Richmond district, but when I looked it up on the map I realized it was only a few blocks away from another restaurant I had been to a few times, a Korean barbeque place (post on this one coming in the future) that's only about a 10 minute drive from where I live. As hubby, friend, and I were trolling Clement Street looking for parking, our friend marvelled at the variety of Asian markets and restaurants in this area that wasn't even Chinatown, and I had a moment of smug San Franciscan pride.

The restaurant was surprisingly crowded for a Monday night, which I hadn't expected since the last time I had eaten there it was almost empty at lunchtime. It didn't take too long to get seated, just long enough for us to appreciate the smells and sights of the other diners' meals. I couldn't remember exactly what we had ordered before, so we just ordered one item out of most of the categories on the menu: one appetizer, one salad, one curry, one noodle dish, and one vegetable dish. When they started coming to the table I remembered a few of the dishes from my previous lunch.

What we ate:

Burmese samosas -- Not too far off from the Indian variety, but with slightly different seasonings and with a totally different dipping sauce, based on tangy, vinegary chili peppers.

La pat dok (tea leaf salad) -- The highlight of the meal, in my opinion. The server brough it to the table untossed, explained what each of the ingredients was, squeezed some fresh lemon juice onto it, then tossed it all together. What an incredible combination of crunchy, tangy, salty, bitter, citrus, nutty, sharp, and fresh! I remembered this one instantly from before as the one dish that made me open my eyes and feel like I had reached my own culinary terra incognita.

Burmese style curry -- Had this one before, too, (or rather the hubby had it and I tasted -- often). Flavors still excellent, but the lamb seemed a bit tough.

Tofu kebat -- A stir fry with tomatoes, onions, chilis and mint leaves. Seemed a little acidic from the tomatoes, but my taste buds may be off since I'm still getting over a cold.

Garlic noodles -- Good springy, chewy noodle texture. This was served with a sauce similar to the samosa dipping sauce. I don't know anything about eating Burmese food, but I sprinkled it all over the noodles. Mmmm.

Dessert -- A warm, almost pudding-like chocolate cake in a ramekin topped with a scoop of ginger ice cream and chunks of crystallized ginger, garnished with slices of strawberry. Probaby not Burmese, but wow, soooo good.

Now that I know it's not too far out of reach I'll be coming more often. Superstar gets the Supertaster thumbs-up.

309 Clement (at 4th Ave.), 415.387.2147

PB wench

To begin, let me assure all true-believers that the To-Fu Master has not lost a beet, his vivace tempeh does not flag, & his superpowered waistline still snaps back wash after wash. From the depths of all that is mighty, I offer you

PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH à la East Village, New York

As much peanut butter as you can stomach
Slice of fresh bread

Spread peanut butter on bread. Maintain open face. Pause (Ay, there's the rub). Eat.

Ah, but this is no ordinary sandwich. Hurrah for the Whole Foods flagship at Union Square in the big, gritty, bustling city of New York, where local calls are billed on the minute & where I can flip off with reflexive alacrity a pushy senior who nosed her gas guzzler through right-of-way pedestrian traffic (that is, a hard swerve in front of me as I crossed the street on a WALK light)! There, I wended my way through NYU brats, fashionista, part-time models on the DL, desperate housewives, & the like, until I reached the downstairs station for freshly grinding nuts, tucked beside personal beauty products: shaaa?! honey-roasted peanut butter (among other options that include chocolate-chip PB — one or the other is usually low or empty). Next score was a fragrant honey whole-grain boule just carted out steaming from the bakery guts. Then I sped home, without incident, & promptly crafted the PB wench's delight.

Wish you were here.

Sunday brunch

Yesterday I had my first brunch guest -- or any guest for a meal, for that matter -- since moving to the Bay Area. When thinking about the menu, I had a few things to consider. First, my guest is vegetarian. Second, I am not a morning person, and want to do the minimum amount of preparation the morning of the brunch.

I remembered a friend of mine had once made a breakfast strata for brunch, and she said it was incredibly easy. You put it together the night before, leave it assembled in the fridge overnight, then bake it the next morning. Sounded perfect. Her strata had sausage in it, but I found a recipe for a spinach and gruyere one in The New Best Recipe, my current favorite cookbook.

It was actually about as easy as I thought it would be. Basically it's like a lasagna, but instead of layering noodles, filling, cheese, and tomato sauce, it's bread, filling, cheese, and an egg-half and half mixture. It took less than an hour to prepare on Saturday, and then I was all set for the next day.

I decided to try Margaret's scones again to go with the strata, and cut the recipe quantity by a third so that it would fit in my food processor. I seem to be cursed, because it looked like it was working beautifully -- I had the wedges cut and brushed with egg-milk mixture and everything -- then realized the cranberries were still sitting in a cup on the other side of the counter. D'oh! I had to mash everything together again to incorporate the cranberries, so I think the dough may have been a bit overworked. Still not too bad when they came out. Just not as tender and crumbly as I would have liked. One day I'll make this recipe without a mishap!

Of course, making scones required getting up early-ish, somewhat defeating the purpose of the make-ahead breakfast strata. They dovetailed pretty well, though. First I made the scones and put them in the oven. I pulled the strata out of the fridge to let it come closer to room temperature as the scones were baking. When the scones came out the strata went in. I then had almost an hour to get dressed and tidy up before the strata was done.

Then when my guest arrived, all I had to do was make a pot of tea, set the scones on the table, serve up the strata, and eat.

Take that, ramen!

Our To-Fu master has been shy about posting despite repeated encouragement. Below is a quick lunch or light dinner recipe he sent me last month. I'm allergic to tree nuts, which is why he substituted peanuts for walnuts.

- - - - - - - - - -

This is about as fast as homecooking can get. Perfect for lunch & much cheaper than eating out or eating take-out; the carbs keep you going. The original one I developed used walnuts :( Serve as is or with a heap of jalapeño sauerkraut (or kim chee).

###

8 oz soba noodles (subst: whole wheat spaghettini or vermicelli)
1/2 c lightly chopped peanuts (optional: toast before chopping)
2 tsp toasted sesame seed oil
sea salt, coarsely crushed, to taste
pepper

Bring water to boil; salt. Toss in noodles & cook for 3-5 minutes. Drain & toss well with sesame seed oil & pepper, to taste. Sprinkle with sea salt.

Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving

My company threw a Thanksgiving potluck yesterday, one week before the date. Besides the usual turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes, there were also some unusual Thanksgiving selections. Ethiopian food, sushi, shrimp and crab cakes to name a few. (Do Ethiopians celebrate thanksgiving?) Everything was very tasty, and everyone was stuffed.

I fretted for the past week over what I should make -- how much time do I have? do I care about impressing the CEO? what recipe do I want to try on a big group of guinea pigs? In the end, I settled on cornbread and cranberry sauce.  Both were under-represented on the potluck sign-up sheet, and both very simple to make.

Because I've started a cranberry theme here, let's talk about the cranberry sauce. I used this recipe from epicurious.com. It turned out good. The orange is very subtle and the cranberry flavor is great. The ginger is also subtle but provides a little kick. The only thing I would change is maybe add a little less crystallized ginger and a tiny bit less sugar. (I like my cranberry sauce just a bit more tart.) I would also cut the recipe in half. As it is, I'll be spreading it on sandwiches for days! So if you're looking for something simple to bring to a Thanksgiving feast, this may be your item.