We On Award Tour

When asked why I moved back to SF, I hardly know where to start.

There was the lack of density in the East Bay, and the distance between neighborhoods and commercial areas required more driving than I liked.  There was the lack of decent local grocery stores and the fact that so many local stores, even corner markets, closed so early. There were the deserted streets, how I saw more cats than people on my 10 minute walk to BART and BART was such a long haul and expensive to boot.

But the simplest explanation, and the reason that encompasses so many of the others, is that I realized the value of living close to the things I love.

During this first month back in the City, I’ve returned to many of the places and events I love in San Francisco.

We moved back right in time for our favorite outdoor music festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and, of course, we stopped by Arizmendi Bakery while we were in the neighborhood.

We ate at Nopalito and bought books at Green Apple. We browsed the vintage furniture stores on Valencia Street. We saw Dave Eggers interview Nick Hornby at City Arts & Lectures. We got a Mariquita Farms mystery box, dropped off right across the street from our house. We ate a lot of ice cream.

Everything is close by now. After work one day, I picked up bread at Tartine (we’ve bought Tartine bread at least once a week despite the fact that our SF apartment lacks the counter space necessary for Tartine’s giant loaves). Then I picked up some groceries at BiRite, spontaneously popped into Pizzeria Delfina for dinner and still had time to catch a movie downtown.

And there are always new places to go, too. The Sunday Inner Sunset farmers market started while we were on the other side of the Bay. I got to Four Barrel Coffee at long last. A visit to Flora Grubb Gardens brought me to an area of the City I’d never been before. At Contigo, we found a friend from the farmers market manning the flatbread station and were reminded that SF can be like a small town at times.

It’s all here. And now, so are we.

Now I’m Getting Souped Up

In San Francisco, any time is a good time for soup. Even warm days here often end with cool, soup-worthy nights. On one warm Friday afternoon, I enjoyed a margarita on our front steps and when the fog rolled in, I went inside and had a bowl of Tuscan ribollita.  In SF, summer and winter may be just a few hours apart.

As well as good soup weather, we also have lots of good soup fixings. At the farmers market, I’ve been buying thick, gelatinous chicken broth from Marin Sun Farms or Mountain Ranch. This stock is completely different from the boxes of broth I used to rely on. You have to scoop this stuff out with a spoon; it doesn’t ‘pour’. It’d be icky if it wasn’t so delicious.

We also have shelling beans available this time of year. Dirty Girl sells fresh cannellinis or cranberry beans (borlotti beans). Shelling beans are delicious cooked up on their own and doused with olive oil. They’re also a lovely foil for Fatted Calf’s tonno di maiale. But I especially like using shelling beans for soup because they cook up so quickly.

This not to say that dried beans are to be avoided. Dried beans have inspired most of the soups I’ve been eating lately. Heirloom Beans, the cookbook by Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo, is to thank for the ribollita, the minestone, and the white bean and chard soup with a poached egg and crispy bits of stale bread.

Stale bread is now something I consider an essential soup ingredient, and it’s an easy way to use up the last, somewhat stale bits of Tartine’s country bread. A slab of buttered bread will always be a delicious accompaniment to a bowl of soup, but a chunk of stale bread at the bottom of your soup bowl, broth-sodden and disintegrating, offers something else entirely. It adds body and texture, and if you rub it first with garlic, it adds flavor, too.

One of my go-to soups and a soup that first got me hooked on this delicious stale bread trick is Mark Bittman’s white bean and escarole soup. It’s a dead-simple recipe that I keep coming back to — something about the base of anchovies, garlic and chiles really elevates it. I’ve edited the recipe and listed it below because his list of ingredients includes items like duck or port that are never mentioned in the cooking instructions.

Escarole, White Bean Soup

• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon sliced garlic
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 4 anchovy fillets, or to taste (Bittman says this is optional. It’s not. It’s essential.)
• 1 fresh or dried chili, stemmed, seeded and minced, or 1 teaspoon dried red chili flakes, or to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound escarole
• 3 cups chicken stock or water
• 1 cup (or more) white beans, such as cannellini
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put half the oil, half the garlic, anchovies and chilies in a pot over medium heat. Stir occasionally until garlic begins to color.

Add escarole and stir; add beans and stock or water and adjust heat so mixture simmers steadily. Cover and cook about 15 minutes.

Stir in rest of garlic and cook another minute. Drizzle with reserved olive oil, and serve over slices of stale bread, rubbed with garlic or showered with parmesan cheese. (Bittman includes the bread as a “variation”. Pay no attention to Bittman. The bread is a crucial element of the soup).

Don’t Let This Fading Summer Pass You By

With our trip to Italy and our subsequent move back to SF, I wasn’t sure that I’d have time for what had become one of my favorite late summer rituals: making and freezing tomato sauce for the tomato-less months ahead.

We were still overseas when Mariquita Farms had their annual tomato u-pick. Although the farm drops off produce in SF fairly regularly, nearly every time they were in town, we weren’t able to pick up 20 pounds of tomatoes, much less prepare few quarts of tomato sauce.

One problem with our SF apartment has been the stove, a gorgeous old Wedgewood with four burners, two ovens (something I never thought necessary until I had one) and a persistent gas leak. After three visits from PG&E, after having the gas to the stove turned off twice because the stove repair person wasn’t, initially, able to eliminate the leaks, our stove appears to be back in business (fingers crossed).

And just in time: last week, Mariquita made their last SF tomato delivery of 2009 and I was lucky enough to get a flat of their San Marzano tomatoes (and lucky enough to have Mr. WholeHog to go pick up the tomatoes).

By the weekend, we found that for the first time in weeks, we had some free time and a working stove so we set to work making sauce. We rewarded ourselves with with pasta with the homemade sauce that night for dinner, while the rest of the sauce went to the freezer.

I haven’t been feeling ready for fall lately, but making tomato sauce and seeing those bright red jars set aside for the winter months, I felt like I was starting to shut the door on summer.

Fall Fever

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal.”

From the excellent McSweeney’s essay, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

This essay put into words exactly what I’d been trying to write about for the past few weeks. What is it that causes people to bust out their pumpkins as soon as the calendar turns to October? What is it about fall that inspires such devotion, such a need to acknowledge the season?

Other seasons don’t get the same attention. No one hangs decorative icicles from their SF home to mark the onset of winter. No one runs outside in SF wearing shorts when June arrives. But if it’s October, then Decorate Gourd Season takes hold –  and SF doesn’t want to miss out.

When you’ve suffered through months of hot weather, I can understand that you might welcome a new crispness in the air. But in San Francisco, there’s little sign of fall in October. Sure it gets dark a little earlier, but we don’t have trees turning vibrant colors. We don’t hear fallen leaves crunching beneath our feet. October is the end of San Francisco’s short summer so temperatures usually rise in October rather than drop.

But a lack of fall elements doesn’t deter the Decorative Gourd Army. If the calendar says it’s fall, then they have to mark it. As the McSweeney’s piece says, it’s about looking ’so seasonal’.

When I see fall decor appear in San Francisco in October, I get the same uncomfortable feeling I get when Christmas cards appear in stores this month. I thought I was alone in this feeling, that maybe I was some sort of fall scrooge, until I read the fantastic McSweeney’s piece (and laughed until I cried).

Another excerpt, because it really is a masterpiece:

“I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up.“

Go read it now.

Outer Ice Cream Triangle

Officially, our new SF neighborhood is Noe Valley, or maybe even Outer Noe Valley. But a more accurate name for our new neighborhood might be Outer Ice Cream Triangle (shown below).

View Larger Map

We are just a block or two off the hypotenuse that stretches from BiRite Creamery to Mitchell’s and it’s almost too easy to slip down to Humphry Slocombe.

Since we moved to Outer Ice Cream Triangle, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting each establishment and indulging in some truly memorable cones:

• Mexican Chocolate (Mitchell’s)
• Brown Sugar Yogurt (Humphry)
• Apple Pie (BiRite)
• Brown Sugar Ice cream with ginger-caramel swirl (Birite)
• Pumpkin Five-Spice (Humphry)
• Rosemary’s Baby (rosemary, pine nut and sea salt – at Humphry, of course)

(Now I know that list looks like complete gluttony, but a single does come with two flavors at BiRite and Humphry.)

If you are headed to Humphry Slocombe (you should be on your way already — did I mention that the lines are far shorter than BiRite’s or Mitchell’s?), other WholeHog-approved flavors include: Secret Breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes), Salt and Pepper, Salted Licorice, Rootbeer, Ancho Chocolate, and Peanut Butter Curry.

We Found the Light

Many San Francisco homes have fireplaces. Or at least they have the makings of a fireplace: the mantel and the hearth are still there, but the actual place where a fire would burn is just an empty space.

In our last SF apartment, we put a shelf in our empty fireplace and used it to hold some of our books. My sister uses her fireplace to hold her record player. Perhaps because they had so many grandkids, my grandparents kept a crate of dolls in their fireplace.

Our new SF apartment, however, has what may be the best replacement for a fireplace: a working gas heater.

It looks right, providing that essential image of fire, and it actually does provide some heat without filling our place with smoke (although I do miss that satisfying crackling sound that comes from a real fire).

It’s just one of the many things I’m appreciating about our new apartment, especially as our nights turn colder.

Reading Rainbow: Vacation Reads

Vacation us one of the few times of  year that I read as much as I used to. I’ve read five books since Tahoe in July: Olive Kittredge, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Farm City, Zeitoun, and My Life in France. (I also got about two-thirds of the way through Don DeLillo’s Falling Man but I’m not sure I’ll pick it back up. Although I loved the excerpt of Falling Man in The New Yorker, the book has mostly confirmed that I’m not a DeLillo fan.)

My favorite was Olive Kittredge. I’m a sucker for interconnected stories, and I also have a real weakness for books that I think of as “quiet books”, books where the drama stems from elements of everyday life: a parent coping with a child that chooses a different life than they expected, maybe, or the confusion of finding oneself alone after many years of marriage.

Olive Kittredge doesn’t have to create drama through a traumatic event like a kidnapping, a drowning, or some sort of abuse, instead Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel makes normal life riveting. The stories that make up Olive Kittredge offer a  look at marriage, shown from many different perspectives and at many different stages. The book also focuses on the often-lonely lives of older people, people who are no longer defined by their roles as mother or wife, daughter or son. (Reading Olive Kittredge made me much more sympathetic to some of my older relatives.)

My other fiction choice, Oscar Wao, was ultimately disappointing. Those who haven’t read much Latin American/Caribbean fiction will probably enjoy it more than I did, but aside from the copious Eggers-style footnotes, I found much of the storyline similar to that of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, or Edwidge Danicat’s novels and stories.

I thought I’d already heard every hell that Hurricane Katrina wrought — and then I read Zeitoun.

Zeitoun tells a story that the media missed: the story of one man, a pillar of the community, who stays in New Orleans despite the calls to evacuate because as a popular local contractor, he feels responsible for his home and the many homes in the area that he worked on. But what unfolds after the levees fall sends Zeitoun and his family on a totally different American journey.

Dave Eggers latest is nowhere near as brutal (or as moving) as What is the What, but it’s just as compelling a story. Worth reading.

As a farmer-obsessed reader, Farm City was an easy choice. I was charmed initially by how the first part of the book echoed moments of my own childhood. (Like author Novella Carpenter, my parents were novice farmers for a time. Like Novella as the book begins, we had a cardboard box of baby chicks under our kitchen table.) But Novella took her farm far beyond poultry: she harvests honey from her bees. She raises rabbits and eventually struggles to keep up with the appetite and the strength of two huge pigs. While my parents brought chickens to their rural one-acre “ranch-ette” as my grandfather called it, Novella’s farm is in Oakland — and her adventures as an urban farmer are entertaining and inspiring.

I love the idea that a perfect meal or a trip to a new place can change one’s life but I don’t often think of it as reality. Julia Child, though, had just this experience as she documents in My Life in France. Her life was changed by a meal (sole meuniere) and a place (France).

I felt a little strange about bringing it with me to Italy (shouldn’t I be reading something called My Life in Italy?) and I still cringe at buying a best seller (especially at a time when so many other best sellers are vampire books), but My Life in France turned out to be a perfect travel book because it celebrates all the things one hopes to find when traveling: new people, new foods, and, often, a new lease on life.

The Test is Over

On Monday, for the first time in nearly 10 months, I woke up in San Francisco.

Yes, before we left for Italy, we signed a lease on a flat in Noe Valley. Timing-wise, it was ridiculous. We went to Italy for two weeks, came back and immediately started packing.  But despite the work that moving inevitably involves (even when you hire movers and have parents to help), I’ve been pretty blissed out about being back in the City.

It’s just so darn pretty here. Instead of riding BART alongside highways and over industrial areas, I take the J Church now which takes an almost comically lovely route past Victorian homes and along the brilliant green Dolores Park where you get a view of the city skyline.

I’m inspired by this city in a way I didn’t adequately appreciate until I didn’t live here.

But this isn’t meant to be a list of all that I prefer about San Francisco. In fact, thanks to Julia Child’s book, My Life in France, I’m thinking more positively about Oakland.

Despite the title, My Life in France isn’t just about France. In the book, Julia and her husband, Paul, also live in Germany, Norway and the U.S. and I couldn’t help but notice that she found something to appreciate about every place she lived.

She acknowledged that France was her true home (she called it her ‘spiritual home’ but I loathe the word spiritual), but in Germany, she relished the sausages and the beer. In Norway, she appreciated the excellent fish. And, of course, in France, she delighted in almost everything.

Reading her enthusiasm for all the places she lived encouraged me think a little differently about my life in Oakland. It wasn’t my ideal home, but there were things I liked about it.

My bike rides may never be as idyllic as they were in the East Bay, riding through lower Rockridge and down the wide, leafy Elmwood streets. Even the short ride to the Temescal Farmers Market went down quiet streets lined with mostly charming little houses. And I really appreciated being just a quick bike-ride away from a decent farmers market.

I’ll miss being able to pop into Bakesale Betty for one of their excellent fried chicken sandwiches (I made sure to have one before moving). I still want to try more of their pies since I liked the blueberry pie we had on the Fourth of July (and I especially liked that we were able to spontaneously bike over and pick up a pie on a holiday).

For more fried chicken, I’d love to go back to Brown Sugar Kitchen, a great, old-diner feeling place in the midst of a very industrial area. I really liked the combination of  fried chicken, a cornmeal waffle and apple cider-syrup: fat, salt and sugar all on one plate.

La Farine is no Tartine, but it was convenient and rarely crowded and there’s a certain comfort in knowing that a slice of lemon cheesecake is just a few blocks away.

Aside from food, service in the East Bay was often unbelievably nice. Even though Bakesale Betty often had Tartine-style lines, there was none of the Tartine-style attitude or indifference.

One of the things that initially drew me to the East Bay was the Craftsman homes (in fact, it still calls me. On returning to Oakland since the move, I still thought to myself, “This looks like a nice place to live.”)  But I didn’t realize how many stunning Art Deco buildings are in downtown Oakland, like the green I. Magnin building.

I’m tempted to joke about the Fox theater sign (what city needs a giant neon sign to tell you where you are?!), but the truth is, it’s awesome. I also love the Tribune sign and tower. It feels like something out of a comic book.

There’s a small part of me that feels like perhaps we didn’t give the East Bay the chance it deserved, but I mostly feel like we knew immediately that it wasn’t right for us and the nearly 10 months we spent there were plenty.

The differences are immediate. The hardware store in our SF neighborhood is open on Sundays, and the corner market is open at 10:30pm. Across the street, a chef picks vegetables from a rooftop garden. A man sits on the corner and plays guitar at night.

That first morning back in SF, I woke up coughing and congested so I stayed home from work. I sat on the couch, left by the movers in the middle of the living room, surrounded by boxes and packing material and a ladder. From my landlord’s basement recording studio, I could hear the faint sounds of bluegrass music. I could hear the J Church streetcar clatter down Church Street. To some people, maybe these sounds would be disruptive. But to my ears, it was the happy sound of other people, of life, nearby.

Police Blotters – September 2009

• 12:58 a.m. — A caller reported seeing a mountain lion. No mountain lion was spotted, but a dog the color of a mountain lion was seen.
• 11:52 a.m. — A caller reported needing Animal Control to assist with an injured buffalo.
• 1:15 p.m. – A caller reported that a man brought drugs into his house the night before and vandalized a wind chime.
• 9:05 a.m. — A man reported his neighbor whistles at his fiancee when she uses the restroom.
• 9:08 p.m. — A man reported a bear had gotten into his daughter’s chicken coop the last two nights. It was gone, but he was concerned it would return. He said California Fish and Game would not respond unless the bear was on his property, and he was going to sit in his vehicle and wait for the bear to return. He was planning to use a flashlight to scare it off. He was advised not to wait for the bear and to stay indoors. He said the deputy didn’t know his daughter in regard to the importance of her chicken coops, and said he was 94 years old and “if a bear decided to retire him, then so be it.” He said he would call back if the bear showed up.
• 8:23 a.m. — A woman reported hearing someone in her residence. She said someone was in her attic the night before. She said she had located and turned in a terrorist six years ago and the FBI had been staying in her attic since then. Last night, they got drunk and were making noise. The house was searched and no one was located.
• 7:39 p.m. — A man reported people were in his living room who would not leave. There were three or four men and two women who did not speak English and who would go outside and hide, then come back in. His medication was adjusted.
• 8:42 p.m. — A caller reported people were firing shots over a wheelbarrow. A person threatened to shoot the caller earlier in the evening over the wheelbarrow. The suspect was leaving in an SUV with the wheelbarrow on top. The caller agreed to put his gun away and would wait for a deputy. Neither party wanted “to be the victim.”