small change

food matters

For the next month or so, I have to give up gluten, dairy, tomatoes, lemons, oranges, grapefruits, limes, pineapples (all foods that contain citric acid), and the most tragic of all, chocolate in order to identify the worst culprits implicated in my allergies.

Even before the skin and blood tests and before going on this elimination diet, I suddenly had this inkling (well, the runny nose and itchy eyes might have been an obvious clue of their own) that I may be allergic to chocolate. Chocolate has been a staple of my ever-changing diets all my life. Staple is too mundane a word for it. The small squares I indulged in daily have been little bits of sweet heaven for the taste buds. I have splurged on the best of the dark stuff, buying the organic dark kind that contains more than 85 percent of the delectable beans the way wine aficionados have been going about their business of rooting out the best for their wine cellars.

Overall, I happen to be the kind of person who tends to see the glass half empty, so the challenge here is one that goes beyond my gut. But then, it’s been common knowledge lately that the gut is a second brain, so the dare is on to make this “brain” not only less reactive, but also smarter so that it can help send the kind of messages that will also help the eyes see the glass half full. Like seeing this limited list of foods as an endless opportunity for creative cooking.

So given the above mandate, I don’t know why I wanted to throw a wrench in the deprivation works by attending the Marin Homegrown event at Studio 333, an art gallery in Sausalito on Saturday. This was a gathering for off-off Broadway foodies. The organizers describe these gatherings that take place in the SF Bay Area as a place for “culinary wizards” to showcase their magic, or in more prosaic terms:

The Homegrown Marin Market is a unique culinary club that serves as a launching pad for new food businesses, as well as an opportunity for those cooking just for enjoyment to share their creations with others.

I didn’t get to sample many of the foods, but here was a lot for the eyes to digest in what the gut couldn’t have, not even a beguiling taste of it. Since I forgot my camera, I can’t share these visual delights with you.

I did come away from it all, though, filled a plenty with ideas for my small experiments with granola and living foods bars. I was also a little more emboldened to be more than a taster at the next homegrown market…. Which means, that if I want to turn that dream into something more than a passing fancy, I better get busy in my culinary lab!

my day in crumbs

We had plans to go to the fair yesterday, but my younger son was put out of commission by a nasty combo of symptoms that were similar to the ones that felled my earlier last week. So we had a quiet Fourth at home, with most of the carnival color and fireworks taking place once again in my dehydrator. Just in time for the holiday, my raspberry, ginger, and lime granola finally dried to perfect (well to my taste, at least) crispiness. It took 2 days of dehydrating, but now I have about 3 quarts of sweet nuttiness, some of it hidden, strategically, so that it will last beyond the week.

  

I am about to make another batch, experimenting with different ingredients and taste combos this time. Since the dehydrator was empty yesterday, I threw in some sliced and marinated onions, making for an alternative to fried onion rings.

But we still had steak for dinner!

out to lunch

During the last few months most Saturday afternoons the spouse and I ended up in Oakland and Emeryville, over in the East Bay. A mere 25-minute drive form where we live, and yet, we might as well be in another country. That is exactly what I love about living in the San Francisco Bay Area. You drive a few dozen miles in any direction and you are truly somewhere else, not just in another town with a totally different character, but in a different climate, too, since temperatures can vary as much as 20 degrees from place to place, with skies turning from swealtering sunny to grim grey on account of fog that rolls randomly over the hills and through the Golden Gate.

During our outings in the East Bay, we passed Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe often, but today we stopped to have lunch there. This eatery is a stone’s throw  from Pixar Studios, which explains the odd combo of geeky-trendy and definitely well-tattooed regulars who hang out in the place. That and the fact that just about everybody in there had to be under 30. Now, I consider myself pretty geeky and, sometimes, trendy, too, even if I have no tattoos to show for either. The trouble is that I have been feeling like this, "with it," I suppose, pretty much for 30 years, so faced with the genuine article (an actual crowd of 30-year-olds), suddenly I felt very old.

Luckily, a few sips of the “Pressure Drop,” a tasty combo of Guinness with a shot of espresso, took care of both the pressure to be young and that dark drop in my mood. If I thought that people came to this cafe to bee seen or because it was the trendy thing to do, once I dove into my food I knew that the draw of the place had to be the hearty and very tasty fare. That the walls around the booths are lined with Barbie-like dolls in a band of blue light and all proclaim to be Rudy makes perfect sense, since good food like this can’t fail when it comes to appreciating the inner Rudy in us all!

The cafe’s website features a series of photos that illustrate the ambiance and the clientele pretty well, it seems to me.

fluffy food

Tough I am keeping a careful watch over my spending habits these days, the lure of a Vita-Mix managed to sneak into the deeper recesses of my pockets and lighten it of some cash in exchange for the promise of both delicious and healthy meals. A late holiday gift for all of us, I suppose that makes for a good rationalization, but the first batches of stuff that poured out from the container of this wonder machine, pleased the tongue beyond reason, flimsy or not.

So far, I made a couple of "hot" soups int he Vita-Mix with raw ingredients ran at the "hot soup" setting. This means that the ingredients got pulverized and heated up through the friction of the powerful engine of this thing. They come out whipped and light, foaming almost. The experience of eating it right away is not unlike what I think eating clouds would be like, especially if this was done by Alice in a diner in Wonderland.

Last night's soup was English peas, celery root, almond milk (from almonds I soaked for hours and then skinned), a little nutritional yeast, and some spices. I topped it with orange-flavored virgin olive oil. Then ate it with organic blue corn chips.

 

Getting the Vita-Mix also re-inspired me to make my "living foods" crackers in the dehydrator again. As I write this, there is a batch of walnut-flax cumin (and other secret ingredients!) flat bread "cooking" away in the Excalibur.

winding down

The year is almost done. I should be taking stock, picking over the highs and lows, pulling up posts that marked if not some event at least managed to capture something deep or ephemeral, something to be marked in some fashion. I should let it all steep to capture some of its flavor, should it have a single one.

I feel too drained to dig through the detritus of words and images. Instead of looking back, I will try to look forward by taking a day to ponder what new things I could attempt failing at next year.... Meanwhile, I'll just kick back with a pot of tea and watch as the leaves unfurl in what tea connoisseurs call the agony of leaves.

my thanksgiving

I know I should post a list of things I am thankful for, but I think it would bore you all to death, and, besides, it would go on too long, kind of like this sentence is about to do... so, I'll pick up from yesterday's post, where I outlined my plans for the day, to see what materialized from them.

Yoga class: now, that was absolutely delicious. There was quite the crowd in class today. Some of us brought children in town for the holidays, others turned up in this class for the first time, all of which had us mat to mat, sweating up an appetite. After class we lingered briefly, discussing holiday plans. When one of my yoga buddies heard that I had not prepared a pie, she insisted I follow her home and take one of the extra pumpkin pies she baked for her family.

By the time I got home, the spouse, who has been battling a cold/flu thing has come and gone to the grocery store and had a gluten-free berry pie waiting for me as well. Awash in courtesy pies, I started to cook up the rest of the meal. Baked a squash and yellow and red onions with sage. I also fried up some sage leaves to crumble on the squash later. I caramelized leeks for the broccoli rabe saute. I put the butter fish in foil with olive oil, leeks, sage and some white wine to bake. I prepared the salad, but left the steak to the spouse to cook.

And this is what we sat down to after the flurry of cooking was over.

Meanwhile, outside the haze was thickening fast, as people kept fire burning in the fireplaces, in spite of the “spare the air day” warning issued by authorities. And in spite of the temperatures in the balmy 60s. When I went out to feed the birds, my lungs felt as if they had been shoved into the thick of an LA freeway.

But it's Thanksgiving, so let the haze settle where it may then and go get myself some pie, even if there is now way to walk it off later in the airless suburbs.

glazed over

On Sunday, we went to the farmers' market at the Civic Center in Marin. I was still in the mood to cook, or rather to feed people and so share more conversation in their company, as I had done in New York so recently that the tastes of the meal my friend and I cooked for mutual friends lingered still on my tongue.

And so I cruised through the aisles of our splendidly bountiful market, each heaped to the gills with organic produce that shamelessly seduced the senses while making quite a cogent plea with the mind over the shameless prices it asked us for the pleasure to consume them. Of course, I had to remind myself, one doesn't go to this market to save one's health or the environment, for that matter. One goes, because, well, it's the market in a sense in which it evokes nostalgia about how life once was or could be some day: immediate but seasonal, unpredictable but deeply satisfactory for the senses, local and sustainable, and all sorts of other juxtapositions that can't be made about supermarkets.

Within 20 minutes of going from aisle to aisle, we were loaded down with bags of produce, bread and cheese, and fish, all of which we hauled to our car. During the drive home, I planned the menu, now that I had the ingredients. In the afternoon I cooked and cooked, and when dinnertime came around, well the son living with us had no interest in the dishes I made and cobbled together a meal of his own, the husband sat down with his plate at the counter with the newspaper spread out, and I retreated to the couch with my plate and turned on the television. That we all sat like this in the same room, made it the more absurd.

It's not that I forgot to invite people for dinner. It's more that the kind of impromptu meal we had in New York, where we went from having one person invited over for dinner in the morning to having four more come as the hours went by as an impossible event in the space of the suburbs where I live. That Marin used to be known as a New Age capital of sorts, with spontaneity ranking high on the list of crazy things seems ironic to me, because its never something I ever experienced here. Arranging dinner dates with people here seems to be a complicated affair that requires super skills with synchronizing calendars, all of which infuses each dinner I manage to organize with an element of formality that spoils both the cooking and the conversation for me, in spite of the great ingredients, the lovely climate, and the spacious dining room – elements that didn't feature so prominently in similar events I had when I lived in Vancouver or all the times I went to see my old friends, originally from Vancouver, in New York.

I met Pica at the Samovar Tea Lounge in the Mission-Castro yesterday. We sat outside, in glorious sunshine, sipping tea and enjoying every bite of our brunch dishes, which took some deliberations in the selection process, given all the delicious choices. I won’t even bother anyone about how long it took for me to finally settle on the pot of white tea, which was to be my beverage.

After our meal, we crossed the street to take a meander in the yarn store. Oh boy -- tea, food, and yarn. But best of all, all this in the company of a good friend!

Since I had to hightail it to a yoga workshop at the Iyengar Institute across town -- more like across the hills of San Francisco – Pica drove me there. In spite of a map and directions on my lap, my performance as a navigator left a lot to be desired, that is for sure. As we drove on -- upwards, that is, we entered a land of fog and dropping temperatures. Welcome to the wonders of the San Francisco Bay Area, where summer and winter can be had in one day!

Meanwhile, back at home (in the sunnier climate of Marin), the spouse and younger son were left in charge of painting a bedroom, which we all prepped the day before. Turns out that their painting skills were on par with my navigating skills, so I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow, on my day off: practicing my newly gleaned yoga skills of equilibrium with brush and roller in hand as a I go for covering up the bumpy rides of yesterday's rollers.

bar hopping for sushi

I haven’t been out to restaurants much these last few months, for the obvious reason. But the spouse and I ended up sampling the fares of two sushi restaurants right across the street from each other in San Rafael, CA this past weekend. The first one we ventured to because it was named as the best for some category or other. Perhaps sushi, but it couldn’t have been for Japanese food, because the title for that goes to the marvelous-but-pricey Sushi Ran in Sausalito – my mouth is watering just writing about it. Anyway, we went to check out Sushi To Dai For, early Friday night. and I mean early, like around old-folks early-bird-special early.

The restaurant was already almost full, but we didn’t mind being seated at an awkward table near all the foot traffic and a hot spot for echoes of every sort, from clanging dishes to children's wails Shortly after perusing the menu and getting excited about the prospect of eating black cod, I was informed by our waitress that the cod hasn’t been available for some two weeks. Two weeks? And it’s still on the menu? Hope spawns strange metaphors, all food for thought, but not for that other appetite.

Maybe because I was expecting too much from this experience what I got wasn’t exactly to “dai” for. It was good, that is true. The food that is. But the noise and the drafty place where we sat just didn’t make me want to go back. The biggest turn-off for me was that when I asked for match tea, I got a blank stare from our server. She didn’t seem to have a clue about it and suggested green tea. I accepted the offer, but got some hot water with a trace of green taste in it.

The spouse and I agreed to try the restaurant across the street, which first thought might have been our destination that night, the Umi Sushi and Grill, which seemed nearly empty when we walked past it on our way to the hopping scene at Sushi To Dai For.

And, the next night we did. The food was good, but what made it excellent was the service and the sense that you were truly a guest of people who cared not just about your satisfaction, but also about their relationship to the food they prepare. The owner-chef is a surfer in his time off – and this is obvious from the restaurant’s décor. His wife makes the best sesame ice cream, which I sampled at the end of the meal with my matcha tea, served ceremonial style.

Not that we have the funds to spare on dining out, but I am going back to try some of the other tempting items from the menu, with matcha tea, of course.

post feast

And so another Thanksgiving came and went. We celebrated quietly, thankful for all we have and for each other's company, but with only one son home for the holiday. We worried about relatives (my in-laws) in India, where they went to celebarte a wedding and find themselves in chaos.

We cooked up a feast, as if we had expected lots of guests. But no one else came. Still, we didn't spare the butter or cream, staples that went into the stuffing with chestnuts and apples, the mashed and whipped parsnip puree, and, with some truffle oil, under the skin of the turkey the spouse prepped and cooked, since yours truly is more or less (well, more and more) a vegetarian. There was going to be souffles for dessert, but the stuffing was good enough as a second helping to pass for dessert, so now it's time for that postprandial glass of wine (hoping that it will work its magic on all that butter and cream). So here is our menu in pictures:

Maybe this photo explains why I was not looking forward to diving into the turkey, cripsy skin and all that notwithstanding...

Sweet potatoes with fried sage leaves, mashed and whipped parsnip puree, roasted Brussels sprouts, all recipes (including for the turkey and stuffing) adapted from Gourmet's November issue....

Cranberry sauce made from fresh organic cranberries cooked with persimmons from my friend's tree...

All done now....