charlotteann

I promise I have been eating soup every day, but there hasn’t been much variety. A friend and I tried to make some peanut curry soup the other night, a recipe I found in Mollie Katzen’s The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest. She went to my school, you know. Anyway, it’s a vegetarian cook book and we agreed that the soup could have used some delicious chicken protein. The fried banana topping was probably the best part of the soup, which I have yet to photograph (it’s still sitting in some tupperware in the fridge). Aside from the peanut curry, I’ve been eating mostly ramen with various add-ons, like tofu, cilantro, scallions, Sriracha sauce, and mushrooms to help spice things up. Even without such relish I would still love that ramen, and at $0.39 a pop I can’t really complain.

San Francisco’s Tenderloin borders/engulfs/fades into Little Saigon, home to several banh mi shops, pho houses, and hole-in-the-wall markets. The quality and price of produce varies amongst these stores, but I’m usually looking for weird sauces and noodles. I picked up some tom yum soup paste a few weeks ago and while it’s extremely high in sodium, it really does taste like the stuff you’d get at a Thai restaurant. All the galanga, lemongrass, and whatever else is in there is all condensed into a brick red paste that smells faintly of shrimp (also in there). I added tofu, mushrooms, scallions, and cilantro. Before this challenge is over I plan to attempt to make my own tom yum, but probably not until I run out of ramen.

I also made a grilled cheese sandwich (possibly my next 30 day challenge…)

Time is money, and I have a lot of the former. This can be frustrating because in these dwindling days of summer vacation I often have nothing better to do than cook stuff and eat it. I’ll get an idea, spend some dollars on the ingredients, and make it. My spice cupboard is what it is today thanks to these one hit wonders throughout the past two years. But in light of yesterday’s credit card bill I am making an effort to eat all the stuff I already have. This means a lot more pasta and rice. And I mean a lot. I’m allowing myself to get fruits’n'veggies at the farmers’ market however, because I simply can’t eat buttered noodles every day. And I don’t want scurvy.

For lunch today I made pizzas on English muffins. I saw the tomato and basil spaghetti sauce, mozzarella, and fresh basil wasting away in my fridge and thought they might like to get together on dough generally reserved for breakfast. In fact, I had an English muffin this morning. They turned as well as can be expected.

English muffin mini pizzas (serves 2)

• 2 English muffins (split or cut in half)
• 1/3 cup grated mozzarella
• 4 tbsp red sauce
• olive oil
• fresh basil

First give your muffins a light toasting in the toaster oven. Remove them to your food prep area and turn the toaster oven to broiler mode and set it to 350 degrees. Spread the red sauce onto each half, about a tablespoon each. Sprinkle on the mozzarella and one or two drops of olive oil. You can add other things at this point (I put some onion slivers on one) but make sure they are small enough to get properly cooked. Place your little pizzas back into the toaster oven and let them cook until the cheese bubbles and starts to brown. Garnish with the basil and serve. Aren’t they cute?

No, no .. not yet anyway. I have been eating soup every day but not photographing it. Did you know that soup is really hard to photograph? It reflects light in weird ways, the steam will fog the lens, and the utter roundness of the bowl isn’t very interesting. I had some pho at Pho Tan Hoa the other day and it was delicious as usual. The other three days I consumed Maruchan instant ramen. Sometimes I add tofu, cilantro, Thai basil, and sriracha. No matter how you dress it up, it’s good.

In other news (because let’s face it, you might getting sick of soup) I dined at one of San Francisco’s recent additions to the pizza scene, Flour + Water. None of their pizzas featured meat save for sparsely scattered anchovies (one friend ordered the Pizza Bianca) and the salad menu was lacking in leafy greens. Maybe it was my fault for being in the mood for those things. Or maybe it’s because every pizza restaurant ever has those things and I had reasonable expectations, even from a menu that changes daily. So, anyway, pasta = back-up plan. All of their pastas are made fresh daily (yeah!) and mine was really good (I had the green something with pork cheek). The fried peppers were good albeit oily, and while I don’t care for sardines the presentation was nice. So yes, I enjoyed my pasta and our appetizer, but let’s get to my biggest gripe: the wine. Or rather, the wine glasses. Flour + Water probably had a decent list (I know next to nothing about Italian wines) but I really like my red wine served in a glass made for red wine. It’s unpleasant to try and stick your nose into a white wine glass and if I am going to shell out $12.50 for a drink I best be able to inhale its oaky nuances pain-free.

Yesterday I made cream of tomato soup based on a recipe in the aforementioned book “Soup” by Anne-Catherine Bley with photographs by Akiki Ida (please check out that website - you won’t regret it). I bought this book at Anthropologie sometime last year and never used it because I bought it at Anthropologie. I mean, they sell a lot of things dedicated to looking adorably feminine and “vintage” so I demoted my new cookbook to coffee table status and left it at that. My decision was validated later when I once tried the recipe for French lentil soup and it came out looking like purée of mud. Now that I no longer have a coffee table in my new apartment, “Soup” resurfaced and looked pretty good in the light of this challenge.

Here’s to fresh starts: the very first recipe in the book is for cream of tomato soup. I have no idea if I am allowed to replicate Bley’s recipe sans permission, but this blog isn’t really about recipes anyway. It’s about what I eat. The recipe calls for 2lbs of very ripe tomatoes or 28oz/796mL of canned tomatoes. I bought the canned stuff and my soup tasted an awful lot like canned tomatoes. Ashamed of my mistake, I braved the crowds of the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market this morning and bought 3lbs of real “#2″ tomatoes for $1.50. Those are for tomorrow, let’s get back to yesterday and today.

I bought all this bacon earlier this week and, lo and behold, bacon is something Bley suggests you add to your cream of tomato soup. She recommends spiking it with Marsala but I decided against this and added mozzarella instead. Melted mozzarella in your tomato soup is, in a word, bomb.

04 Cream of tomato soup with bacon and mozzarella

The amount of cream of tomato I created yesterday was good for three bowls. So today I again used the mozz and some fresh Italian basil (also purchased at the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market for $2.00) for a delicious lunch. I was delighted to discover that the soup lost most of its canned flavor overnight. I really hope this means my refrigerator is magic.

05Cream of tomato soup with mozzarella and fresh basil

The soup challenge continues! As promised (?) I have consumed a bowl of soup every day since August 12th, 2009 and I am so far still a big fan of soup. Let’s hope my enthusiasm does not wane with the moon. Or whatever. I purchased five different kinds of Koyo brand instant noodles at the SOMA Whole Foods Market the other day. They will not only be my soup for one sixth of this challenge, but also fodder for a blog entry later on comparing all the flavors, not to mention a discussion of instant ramens in their glorious entirety. But until that day comes, I must write of other things… Like my new iPhone! It’s sleek and buttonless and just plain awesome. Somewhat inspired by Greg’s tumblr I started my very own tumblr for daily, iPhone camera photos of the stuff I eat when I’m out there, doin’ my thing.

My last two bowls of soup (both vegetarian) were okay but, like these photographs, rather boring. That book acting as placemat (Anne-Catherin Bley’s “Soup”) has a recipe for cream of tomato soup with bacon. Cream of tomato soup is hardly rocket science, but I just bought some bacon and feel like I should try and cook something more challenging and wholesome than instant ramen.

02 Koyo brand instant ramen noodles (lemongrass and ginger flavor).

03 Udon noodles with tofu and cilantro in miso broth.

I am a big fan of soup. Growing up, Campbell’s chicken noodle was frequently requested of my mom and baby sitters. I remember the day I was educated and curious enough to examine the label and found myself feeling incredibly indignant, borderline outraged. How was it that a soup marketed as a cure for the common cold (or for slurping princesses or as being full of wholesome “stuff”) had such a high sodium content? I was all like, “Hey ma, isn’t sodium the same thing as salt?”

“Yeah.”

“And doesn’t that dry you out? Like … anti-water?”

“Hmm-mm.”

“THEN WHY ARE YOU FEEDING ME THIS!? I’m sick! I’m supposed to drink water, not SALT!”

Whatever her response, I know what mine would have been faced with such an incredulous, sniffly daughter: “That’s not the point, honey. The point is you feel better.” Right you are, mom! Soup caters to lots of grown up problems, too, like hangovers and breakups. I go for pho and tomato, respectively. Born a chicken noodle kind of girl, my arrival in the Bay Area nearly two years ago brought me around to different kinds of soup. Wonton, ramen, pho, udon, and a ridiculous variety of dried noodles with spice packets wrapped in vivid packaging all appeal to my senses and emotions. You probably noticed (you astute reader, you) that I mentioned soups with roots in the continent known as Asia - probably because I am slurping princess! I don’t have a problem per se with Western soups, but I prefer the clear-broth-with-noodles-and-sliced-ingredients thing to chunks-of-vegetables-and-meat-in-watery-paste thing.

So this month I am going to eat a bowl of soup every day. Two months ago I was looking for the best galette in San Francisco. I love galettes and all but I think I was setting myself up for disappointment. I love soup, too, and it’s definitely something I enjoy almost every day anyway so this month should be much more exciting. The soup pictured above as Soup No. 1 is Top Ramen "Oriental" flavor with chicken, mushrooms, and cilantro, accompanied by hot tea and sriracha hot sauce. It was good, but Top Ramen spice packets aren’t quite as punchy as other brands. I assume this is because a lot of white people eat Top Ramen, most notably my little sister who shunned my chicken noodle but was clearly on to something.

I caught my own food! The hunt wasn’t quite like that described in Michael Pollan’s third chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I won’t be writing about it as well or in such detail, so if you want to know how a lobsterman works, there’s a Wikipedia page just for you. I didn’t actually pull my future dinner out of the water (I’m not strong enough to haul water-logged buoys) but I did pick it out of the bucket and held it briefly while I stretched two fat rubber bands onto its claws before dropping it into another bucket. Once a lobster is captured it spends the rest of its life in some sort of bucket filled with seawater, including the one in which it will likely be boiled to death. Ocean, trap filled with rotting fish, bucket, pot, stomach, … you know the rest.
This is what lobsters eat:

After my time was up in Maine, I took a bus down to New York City to visit some old friends. I ate pizza in two boroughs, a sno-cone from a street vendor in Flatbush, and drank my very first Skittle bomb. Tragically, I also had some camera issues. My neutral density filter - it served me well in Maine - was stuck to my haze filter. Being somewhat paranoid, I refused to just take both off and leave the lens surface vulnerable to the elements. Almost all my photographs from New York are as a result vignetted, blurry, and underexposed. Oh well!
The lovely lady I was staying with made some delicious guacamole for me and her boyfriend to enjoy after we played a game of Scrabble, which I lost by a wide margin. I met another friend at The High Line for lunch, but I was a bit late thanks to the Q train and we ended up walking from 16th St. up to 34th St. so she wouldn’t be late to work. This was okay with me as it placed me rather conveniently near B&H, where the sales associate I cornered could not help me with my filter problem. So aside from not being able to take good photos, losing at Scrabble, and sweating profusely on several journeys between Manhattan and Brooklyn, I had a wonderful time.

My flight back to San Francisco involved a layover in Austin, Texas. I chose to scarf down two BBQ tacos from a Salt Lick “truck” located on the other side of a security checkpoint from the food court version. I walked between these two establishments at least three times, debating the best way to get a good deal on my airport food. This is why you read my blog; I go above and beyond. The Salt Lick (food court) charges about $12 for a plate of food, and about $14+ for a sandwich. You can also buy an entire brisket to bring with you on the plane, presumably as a gift for whomever you are visiting. Turned off by the outrageous prices for a stupid BBQ sandwich with a mushy side and the thought of being gifted an entire brisket purchased at an airport, I wandered over to the cart that sells the same meat on a tortilla for $3.99 a pop. I bought two tacos - the brisket (!) and pork - and a jubilantly labeled iced tea from Sweet Leaf Tea for about $11. I could have spent the same amount on only one kind of meat, but instead I got two. I win! The pork, which came with a scant amount of green cabbage, was definitely better than the brisket (go figure) and the tea was indeed sweet. As far as airport meals go, this one was actually decent. If you find yourself in a similar situation and want to drink a beer with your BBQ, go to the taco cart (closes at 6PM) because it is located right next to a stage, which has a real live band playing real live music in front of a bar. Don’t mess with Texas.