charlotteann

Quite possibly the most discussed topic in the world, the weather influences everything we do. Obviously. I had something sort of prepared to write about the weather but I’ve already bored myself, so I won’t burden you, dear readers. The idea was that the recent boon of heat had me preparing decidedly “summery” food. Temperatures exceeded 90 degrees (f) in San Francisco this week and we all complained about it. We loved it, but we complained nevertheless. We spent our unemployed days in the park instead of in cheap coffee shops, and we bared our pale skin after applying SPF 75 sunblock. We also went to the farmers’ market to purchase lemons in order to indulge a particularly intense craving for lemonade.

Since today is half over and still overcast, my enthusiasm to write about how fabulous this lemonade was on a hot summer’s day is waning quickly. But I shall do my best.

The coldest summer in 40 years came to an abrupt, record-setting end at the beginning of this week and anyone who had to go to work was probably pretty bummed out. But I don’t feel bad for them because they have jobs. Anyway, I got really sweaty and gross from the heat and just felt like a glass of lemonade. I wandered down to the farmers’ market in shorts of all things and loaded up my bag with summery things like strawberries, lemons, figs, and tomatoes. I also bought an enormous bunch of basil that had seen better days but I needed it for Super Summer Salad Event: Insalata Caprese!

Raw tomatoes are another not-favorite of mine (like eggs). I met someone recently who shares my distaste for raw tomatoes. Or rather, they shared my distaste because they had systematically forced their taste buds to reverse their opinion and start loving tomatoes. Why? Who knows. Maybe because tomatoes are like, but not as bad as, eggs when it comes to things like sandwiches: they’re all over the place and it would behoove oneself to tolerate them. Otherwise you’ll be saying “no tomatoes” for the rest of your life. What a waste of time. But with a homemade caprese salad, I discovered I can handle a thick slice of raw tomato because it’s smothered in balsamic vinegar and olive oil and topped with basil and mozzarella (in case you didn’t know). Is this the beginning of a taste bud-turning journey? Will I someday enjoy raw tomatoes on my sandwich? Only time will tell…

Somewhat ironically, considering yesterday’s blog post written from my environmental soapbox, I had beef for dinner. It wasn’t grass-fed and I bought it from a major chain grocery store. I’m a hypocrite! I know! If it makes you (because it certainly makes me) feel better I eat beef maybe once a month. Having grown up in Montana this is a considerable change from my early years when we ate all kinds of cow on all kinds of days. I think cows are adorable and they taste great, so I have respect for the animal and try not to eat it unless it grew up eating grass like nature intended. Except last night. Last night I made an exception because I am poor and I wanted beef. Are you sick of me justifying my actions yet?

Tasty!

I lifted this recipe from several websites because a google search for “miso marinated steak” resulted in several hits for nearly identical miso-wasabi marinades. “How strange,” thought I, and wondered: Does this mean there is some kind of miso-wasabi standard out there, handed down from the Japanese god of all things that come in paste form? Decide for yourself if this recipe is divine:

Wasabi-Miso Marinated Steak with Soba and Green Onion
adapted from numerous websites/handed down from the paste gods

For the marinade:

Whisk together all of the marinade ingredients in a bowl. Place the mixture into a plastic bag with the steak and allow to marinate for two hours in the refrigerator, turning it over after an hour.

As it marinates, prepare the soba noodles according to package instructions. After rinsing the noodles in cold water, cover and place the colander over a bowl before placing in the refrigerator. This will allow the noodles to chill and drain further.

After two hours, remove the steak from the bag and save the marinade. Get your broiler going and adjust the rack according to your steak’s thickness. Actually, this is an area I know very little about, so hopefully you know your own broiler and where to put the rack. Technically speaking, I just wing it. I also prefer to use my cast iron skillet in lieu of the broiler pan because it’s about 80 million times easier to clean. As the broiler heats up (with your pan or skillet in place), slice the green onions and remove the soba noodles from the ol’ ice box.

When the broiler is ready and your cooking pan of choice is hot, place the steak on it. You can baste the steak with the reserved marinade if you like. I didn’t because I don’t have a baster. Cooking time will vary on steak thickness and your preference for rareness. I think my steak (about an 1 1/2 ” thick) cooked for about 10 minutes, with a quick flip after 7 minutes, and came out a little too medium for me but still juicy.

Slice the steak thin and place on top of soba noodles and garnish with green onions. I would suggest drizzling some pan juices, but I didn’t have any. Instead I used the juice that collected on the cutting board while I sliced the steak. I also added some soy sauce. Enjoy!

I went to pick up sea shells for a new project I’m working on and ended up going home close to tears. As I was walking, scaring sea gulls away so I could photograph the crabs they were picking at, I started noticing these multi-colored bits of sea foam. The tide was going out rapidly and leaving behind tiny crab bodies, sand dollars, and these oily bubbles. I assumed it was oil or gasoline, and out in the distance to the North I could see an enormous, anchored ship. Again, not sure the two were related directly, but they’re certainly related in some way and it makes me really, really sad.

Someone posted a comment a long time ago asking me for my thoughts on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I apologize for not addressing it sooner, but like my experience at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach it makes me incredibly upset. I avoided all photographs of the situation because they made me cry. Stupid reason perhaps to not spend time learning about one of the worst environmental disasters in human history, although I have spent many an hour reading critical texts on environmentalism for a class. A class that eventually led me to believe that we are literally destroying the Earth. If our political leaders don’t blow us up first, nature will reset the balance and most of us will die.

Climate change, pollution, unsafe drinking water, drought, famine, disease, hurricanes, fires, and everything else are getting worse. There are simply too many of us and we’re still making babies, especially in places where women have no political power or financial autonomy. While placing blame is pointless - we’re all in this together, this planet belongs to all of us and we all have to be environmentalists - I find myself taking up Valerie Solanas’ viewpoint to some extent. Patriarchy sucks. I don’t think men are inherently disposed to wrecking stuff, but the societies and cultures they dominate have been structured around promoting ideals of dominance, brute strength, and superiority over women and other species. So let’s go back to school yard rules: share. Only we’d be sharing wealth, resources, healthcare, nutritious food and clean water, education, and habitat instead of toys and the swings.

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Exposing your life to the internet is commonplace these days. I barely remember the years before my mom brought home our first dial-up modem, which I used to play some online game for the movie Casper starring Bill Pullman (<3) and Christina Ricci in 1995. I remember watching the images load line by line, the "secret" buttons revealed by their alt tags. A few years later I gave up on HyperCard in favor of HTML and well, here I am. And here’s my cat!

Her name is Ellie, short for Eleanor, and I got her almost exactly two years ago. It’s very possible it was this very Caturday in 2008 that I brought home that soft, cuddly 5 month-old kitten. I knew she was mine when she fell asleep in my arms at the shelter. Well, this place wasn’t exactly a shelter. It was kind of like a pet supply store that had rescue animals running amok and barking and defecating all over the place and all over each other. Luckily they closed after I found Ellie. Who, as you may have noticed, has unusual coloring. She is a dilute tortoiseshell, which means she is a softer version of the real thing. Not just in terms of coloring apparently, because this cat is softer than a chinchilla.

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I love this stuff. I know I’ve said it before several times on this blog and certainly in person. I don’t think people think of me as being a fiend for ramen as much as they think of me as a nut for pizza or Chinese food, but my appetite for this stuff is becoming insatiable. So insatiable I am willing to risk indigestion by putting %80 of a bowl of ramen for dinner on top of a large, late lunch. Whether its gluttony or hedonism, I enjoy ramen at restaurants and in the comfort of my own apartment at least twice a week. And last week a friend and I finally had our second ramen dinner together at Norikonoko in Berkeley, CA.

A fellow ramen f(r)iend

I had brought this friend to my personal favorite, Tanpopo in San Francisco’s Japantown, where we enjoyed two enormous bowls of awesome before he suggested we try his favorite spot. After our dining experience at Norikonoko it looks as though we’ll be trying to one-up each other, a challenge for which I am more than excited (and think I am winning already, hah!). Norikonoko is a very cozy restaurant with a sliding door and maybe ten tables. It’s a bit beyond the hubbub of that mess of retail stores and coffee shops that exist for UC Berkeley students on Telegraph avenue inside of a dark wood grotto of restaurants and shops. Although ramen isn’t exactly a main feature on the menu (I’d say the robata dinners had that spot), there were four options available. In my experience, the fewer options you have for a particular dish the better: the restaurant isn’t trying to please everyone and (hopefully) as a result prepares those few variations very well.

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I used to think that old saying “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” was a load of you-know-what. Unashamedly I admit I held this opinion because most breakfast menus in America feature and expound upon the disgusting egg. I find eggs inedible and anything but incredible. This leaves me ordering a bunch of sides (bacon, hashbrowns, home fries, toast, etc.) with a side of longing for the ability to ask the chef to make a sausage, onion, mushroom, and cheese omelet without the omelet. Omelet ingredients are often inventive, enticing, and seemingly delicious. Oh, if only they weren’t wrapped up in floppy egg blanket! San Francisco restaurants have come through for me on this issue, however, as they often offer scrambled tofu as an egg substitute, if only with an unfair surcharge. But whatever – I don’t go out for breakfast all that often and recently I have been experimenting in my morning kitchen.

Home fries, cat

Ellie, my cat, is sometimes the one who wakes me up. Usually it’s the glorious morning summertime light beaming in through my gossamer curtains, but sometimes the cat decides that 8:00 AM is the perfect time for a litter box party and I wake to sounds of litter being scratched around and tossed over the sides of the box onto my floor. Cute, sort of.

Eggs are cheap but I am pretty sure potatoes are cheaper. I really like home fries and hashbrown scrambles so I’ve been merging the two in my cast iron skillet and scrilleting up some potatoes, mushrooms, onions, and herbs with butter or oil. Lately I’ve been going through sticks of butter like I was saving for hibernation or something, but so far no weight gain. I’ll get to that part later (hint: the litter box story was foreshadowing).

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It’s true, I do. Paris was really awesome and I really enjoyed spending the 2006-2007 school year abroad there. I mean, it’s Paris. How can you not miss it? Well, not everyone loves it, and not everyone loves the French. Some of you out there hate the French, whether for a good or bad reason. Although I have to say, in my slightly biased opinion that most of the reasons are bad. And all of those reasons - good and bad - just seem like total clichés to me. I can’t even write about them without feeling like a tool, so I won’t. I will just talk about galettes.

Galette with ham and gruyère cheese

A galette, also known as a savory crêpe or a buckwheat crêpe, is really awesome like Paris but you can eat it. It’s like eating Paris. Actually, the galette originates in Bretagne (Brittany) where buckwheat was a cheap alternative to regular wheat, which was taxed. Buckwheat arrived via the crusaders from Asia. I guess religious wars can have their perks.

When we visited Bretagne and Normandy, we ate so many apples and apple-based dishes I can barely remember Mont St. Michel or the D-Day beaches. But when I was in Paris, I took a photography course near the Jussieu métro that serves the nearby Université Denis Diderot. Consequently, a crêpe-making superstar serves throngs of students across the street from the métro entrance. I unfortunately never learned this woman’s name, but she was incredibly kind and sold me several enormous, cheap galettes au jambon-fromage. The classic of course is the galette complète which contains cheese, ham, and an egg. I dislike eggs. My life is incomplete without them I know, so save your energy.

Following the recipe in Culinaria France by Andre Domine (recipe below) I whipped up a batch of galette batter substituting melted butter for lard. Moments later (like I was really going to let it sit overnight) I was enjoying the earthy flavor of buckwheat coupled with grated gruyère and Black Forest ham. Salty, gooey, good.

And now for the photos!

Butter on hand as the crêpe pan heats up

Sliced ham. Yum.

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So I braved the crowds on Saturday at the Ferry Plaza Famers’ Market. Among the bridge and tunnelers, the tourists, and the other locals who slept in, were scads of fabulous looking produce. Although the Ferry Plaza market has more variety in terms of vendors and prepared foods, it’s more expensive than the Civic Center market I usually visit on Sundays. I bought carrots, onions, potatoes, fresh herbs, arugula, an eggplant, mushrooms, and wheat grass for the cat. Then I went home and tried to style them into a still life.

Unfortunately, I am no stylist. The composition is fine, I think, but the balance of the original colors is totally off. Thus, a black and white image is born! I eventually gave up trying to arrange my produce and gave in to the rumble in my tummy and made a delicious salad.

I know what you’re thinking, “Charlotte, you should TOTALLY give up photography and get into graphic design cuz you’re sooo talented, obvi!”

But seriously, there is a multitude of take-out options in my neighborhood and I rarely take advantage of any save the pizza place down the street after a night of responsible alcohol consumption. The affectionately so-called Tendernob lies somewhere between the Tenderloin (smells like pee) and Nob Hill (smells like money) features many different cuisines, especially if you are willing to expand its borders to the upper blocks of the ‘Loin. There are Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, and Indian restaurants scattered among the dive bars and liquor stores. A few blocks up and you see more Thai, pizza, the famous Pearl’s burgers, and even an Indonesian place catering to the hotels and Academy of Art students. And me, I live here. When I’m lazy I’ll make instant ramen instead of getting take-out, but when I’m sick and the dishes are piling up and I haven’t showered in two days, I’ll spend the dough on a couple entrées if only for comfort’s sake.

Enter the Osha Thai Noodle Café on Geary St., a mere two blocks from my building. Osha is a family-owned thing, and this nearest location is apparently the original amongst the seven locations in San Francisco. It’s open until 3 AM on Fridays and Saturdays and every time I’ve walked by on such an evening it’s packed. In fact, it usually looks busy. A fact I coupled with a recent article from 7×7: The 2010 Eat+Drink Reader’s Choice Awards to pick Osha for this maiden voyage of Take-Out Tuesday. In short, it was not so good. In length, allow me to explain using words and pictures.

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It’s been a little over two weeks since my 10-day vacation to Portland, Oregon. I wish I had tried more of the street food vendors but overall I think I ate pretty well. Apizza Scholl’s was at the top of my food to-do list, which didn’t have much else on it as specific: food served from a truck, local fare, and noodles (obvs). I accomplished all of these things, and more! But for the sake of brevity and an inflated sense of content on this blog, I will not be covering everything I ate and photographed in one post. No, I shall draw it out, probably over the next two weeks. Let’s start with breakfast!

I already mentioned the totally delicious breakfast I had at Jam on Hawthorne, but let’s talk about the pho I had for my morning repast a couple days later at Pho Gia in Northeast Portland.

Pho Tai

It was really quite good but a bit heavy on the noodles and light on the beef.

Noodle overload!

Plenty of yelp reviewers had mentioned the clovey sweetness of Pho Gia’s broth and I agree but without issue. Aside from over-noodling, my only other problem was with the onions: having not been entirely severed from the core (?) the slices were all stuck together and difficult to separate. Is that too nitpicky? I don’t think so. Enjoying pho should be easy and uninhibited. After slurping as many noodles and spoonfuls of broth I could possibly contain, I drank my ca phe sua da (good, but not especially strong).

All done!

So that’s it for today, kids. I’ll be back soon with tales of the not-so-good noodles, the meat stuffed with other meat, and, of course, the pizza.