an open cupboard

I’m somewhat giddy with lightheaded delirium today, a result of the change-of-season cold that I caught. Rather than attempt to write a moderately coherent post, I’m putting up some random photos taken in the back yard with my little beast of a camera. Enjoy!

P.S. These are thumbnails. Click to view the full-size photo.

Have you ever missed something that may never have existed? I sometimes feel like I’m living in the wrong place, maybe the wrong time. I feel like things were better once, but I can’t remember when that was.

A recently e-mailed me a music video by Arik Einstein, a noted Israeli musician whose music was popular in the sixties and seventies. He continues to make music today, and this video spans his career in a way. In it, you can see modern Tel Aviv contrasted with its black and white images from the days when Arik was a young musician. His younger, cartoon self wanders around the city, which morphs from old to new in his wake. Einstein sings about life as it was back then, but insists that he’s isn’t quite nostalgic, just enjoying his memories. In the end, he meets his younger self, an ephemeral cartoon image, monochromatic and stuck in the past along with yesterday’s Tel Aviv.

Here’s the video, along with my rough translation of the lyrics.

not quite nostalgia

“Eden” Cinema, Eddie Cantor,
Something funny with Roman soldiers.
Menahem Mendel, Aleppo Pistachio [film character],
Skies strewn with a million stars.

The cabin of “the Tent,” the scent of the sea,
A lone sail blanches on the horizon.
Amiram field, the sand is so hot,
“The deer,” Emil, Eyal, and Ofer.

It isn’t quite nostalgia,
It’s just kinda nice to reminisce.
I’d rather not analyze the reasons,
It comes and goes fleetingly.

Shimshon’s club [a local football league], David Ben-Gurion,
Sprinting on Kakal Boulevard.
Shmulik solves a riddle on the radio,
And the crimson thread is always LaSalle street.

It isn’t quite nostalgia,
It’s just kinda nice to reminisce.
I’d rather not analyze the reasons,
It comes and goes fleetingly.

Marlene Dietrich, Lily, legs,
Frank Sinatra now and forever.
Marcello Mastroianni, Edison Jerusalem [old movie theater],
Burt Lancaster, everyone’s hero.

It isn’t quite nostalgia,
It’s just kinda nice to reminisce.
I’d rather not analyze the reasons,
It comes and goes fleetingly.

Las Palmeras is our current favorite place to eat in San Francisco’s Mission district. Offering both Mexican and Salvadoran food, Las Palmeras is a simple, inexpensive restaurant. This is not the sort of place you go to for the decor, although the Frida Kahlo prints are nice to look at (I always have to fight the urge to straighten the crooked one on the center wall). On the weekend, the clientele is mostly local families out for a meal while strolling musicians strum traditional tunes on a guitar. The service is casual but effective. There’s no hovering, but the food arrives promptly and a server stops by periodically to make sure everything is OK.

But service and ambience are, frankly, irrelevant. The food is the draw. My favorite dish so far is the yuca frita con chicharron, or fried cassava root with pork, a typical Salvadoran dish, according to the menu. This dish is a perfect marriage of flavors and textures. Chunks of yuca are deep fried, leaving them soft yet firm on the inside, and crisp and golden on the outside. The pork pieces are similarly deep-fried a crisp brown, remaining tender on the inside. While the pork is salty, the yuca is slightly sweet with a potato-like texture that offsets the density of the pork. A slightly piquant red sauce complements the dish perfectly, as does a mound of pickled cabbage salad that cuts the fat in the dish and refreshes the palate. When fried to perfection, yuca frita con chicharron is great fun to eat and not very greasy at all. Of the three times I’ve eaten this dish at Las Palmeras, I was disappointed once when the pork was dry on the inside and the yuca was greasy. I don’t know whether this was a result of a problem with the fryer, or an inexperienced replacement cook. In any case, it seems to have been a one-off occurrence. Yuca frita con chicharron remains my favorite item on the menu.

Another dish I’ve enjoyed at Las Palmeras is salpicon, a kind of salad made of shredded beef with chopped mint, onions, and radishes served with rice and lime. This dish is a joy. The combination of mint and beef is a vibrant delight, the mint enlivens the entire dish and the onions and radish add a bit of crunch and bite. A good squeeze of lime brings the dish together, adding tanginess and that distinctive lime flavor. Simple rice is a good foil for this complex combination of tastes. The only thing I found missing was a bit of heat, green or red chilis would have added another layer of complexity to this lovely dish. I don’t know whether this version of salpicon was adjusted to the relatively mild tastebuds of most gringos, or if that’s just the way they make salpicon in El Salvador. On the other hand, my favorite Thai dish is a salad made of very similar ingredients, so I may have been projecting southeast Asian sensibilities onto an entirely different cuisine. Still, the salpicon was very tasty.

A hot mug of corn starch atole is a fine finale to the meal, especially on a cold, windy San Francisco night. This is a thick, sweet, warming drink that sticks to your ribs. Las Palmeras serves atole with corn kernels and a spoon so you can eat it like a pudding or sip it slowly.

Finally, the bill is very reasonable. Our dinner for two, including salpicon, chili relleno, a pupusa, warm tortillas, and a mug of atole came out to $28, including a 20% tip (plus a tip for the musician). Las Palmeras is a good place to go for a simple, tasty Salvadoran meal.

Las Palmeras
2723 Mission Street
(between 23rd & 24th streets)
San Francisco, CA 94110

415-285-7796
Open daily, 8:30am-9:30pm
Cash only

Meet Jabba the Hut’s little known third cousin, Sheba the Shack. This is quite possibly the worst photo of our otherwise beautiful cat. It was taken at a rather undignified moment, when A spontaneously scooped her up in his arms and held her like a baby. She hates that. I don’t think she likes the camera, either. Hence, this is one displeased little Sheba, making faces and looking scary. I think she’d make a good mafiosa if she had a few thugs at her disposal.

Falafel’s lesser known little sister is sabikh. Sabikh is a pita sandwich with fried eggplant, a sliced boiled egg, chunks of steamed potatoes, salad, hummus, tahini sauce, and amba, a sort of sour mango pickle sauce. Traditionally, sabikh was eaten by Iraqi Jews on Saturday morning. According to lore, the sandwich didn’t really have a name back in Iraq. It was named sabikh by the Iraqi immgrants who opened the first kiosk in Israel to sell the sandwich. Filling, tasty, and messy, sabikh is a favorite street food among Israelis today.

Sabikh is inherently fun to eat. With its abundance of ingredients, it’s an everything but the kitchen sink type of sandwich. Every bite yields a combination of flavors and textures, and often a dribble of tahini down your chin. Keeping the full-to-bursting pita in one piece is always a delicate balance. (The trick here is to use slightly thick, soft, pliable pita, not the sort of thin cardboardy stuff you find at the supermarket).

Sabikh was one of A‘s favorite street foods when we lived in Israel. So on the morning of his recent birthday, I made sabikh with homemade pita. Sabikh makes a tasty breakfast served with Middle Eastern cucumber and tomato salad. And pita is much easier to make than you’d think. You can finish the meal with a small glass of strong Turkish coffee, or sweet mint tea.

sabikh with middle eastern cucumber and tomato salad

Hanit has a recipe for pita here, which you can halve. Or you could make the entire recipe and freeze the remainder for later.

1 small or medium eggplant, preferably the multi-cleft heirloom variety known in the Middle East as “baladi”
2 hard boiled eggs, sliced or coarsely chopped
good quality plain hummus, such as Sabra brand, or homemade
prepared tahini sauce (prepare according to instructions on the jar of tahini paste)
2 steamed potatoes coarsely chopped, or several bite-sized steamed potatoes
amba (optional)
2 good quality pitas
Middle Eastern cucumber and tomato salad (recipe below)

• Place a heavy frying pan on medium heat and melt a good tablespoon or two of coconut oil in the pan. Alternatively, you could use olive oil (not extra virgin).
• Fry the eggplant slices until browned on both sides. Remove from pan and drain.
• Slice the tops off the pitas so that you now have two D-shaped pocket. Gently separate the walls of the pockets to make them easier to stuff.
• Invert the sliced pita tops and nestle them at the bottom of each pita. These pita tops reinforce the sabikh, preventing dripping from the bottom (for a while, anyway).
• Hold the bottom of a pita, gently squeezing the rounded edge in your hand so that the pocket opens.
• Smear a bit of hummus in the pita, then add the eggplant, eggs, potatoes, and salad.
• Drizzle tahini sauce and amba into the pita.
• Serve with salad on the side.

Serves 2

middle eastern cucumber and tomato salad

Middle Eastern cucumber and tomato salad resembles salsa in that its ingredients are diced very small, creating a cohesive cross between a salad and a chunky sauce. The tartness of the lemon juice, the bite of the olive oil, and the freshness of the parsley meld with the sweet juices of the tomatoes and the crispness of the cucumbers. It just isn’t the same if you chop the vegetables any other way except a tiny dice. A salsa style salad is made to be eaten in a pita.

2 Mediterranean, Persian, or small pickling cucumbers
2 medium sized very fresh tomatoes
parsley
1 lemon, sliced
good olive oil, preferably Middle Eastern or Greek
salt and pepper to taste

• Trim the ends of the cucumbers.
• Dice the cucumbers and tomatoes. You want a very small dice, say, a quarter of an inch.
• Finely mince a handful of parsley and add to the cucumbers and tomatoes.
• Squeeze some lemon juice over the salad, and drizzle a good glug of olive oil.
• Season to taste with salt and pepper.
• Taste and correct dressing.

Serves 2

N.B. If you’re in NYC, you can get sabikh at Taïm. If you’re in the San Francisco bay area, you’re out of luck. But you can get Sabra hummus at Berkeley Bowl, and baladi eggplants at the Ferry Building farmer’s market. Check the farm stand across from Point Reyes Preserves.

beurre d’isigny sainte-mère

I recently bought a tub of fancy French butter from the local high-falutin’ shop. It was on sale for three dollars, so I picked it up (kind of a bargain for fancy butter, and I couldn’t resist the cute wooden basket in which it was packaged). I hadn’t realized that butter can have its own AOC, but apparently it can in France. I took it home, intending to have a little schmear on a slice of sourdough. I ended up eating several schmears, and even tasting it plain. It’s that good. Naturally, the butter disappeared pretty quickly, as I used it on bread as well as in every meal I cooked until it was gone. There’s nothing quite so heavenly as spinach, chicken, anything at all cooked in really good butter.

where to get it: your local gourmet food shop, Todaro Bros., Wally’s, Amazon, Sainsbury’s (U.K.)

wine grapes

While shopping at Berkeley Bowl one day, I happened upon some pinot noir and cabernet grapes. These grapes are smaller, darker, and much more intensely flavored than ordinary table grapes. They also have seeds, which you may not mind eating as they have a slightly acidic taste that complements the natural sweetness of the fruit. Wine grapes have tremendous culinary potential. You could stuff a chicken with grapes and garlic cloves for a roast. You could use them with lamb in a tagine. You could dry them outdoors or in the oven for some really flavorful homemade raisins. Or you could just snack on them along with some almonds.

where to get it: If you live near an area featuring vineyards, you can look for wine grapes at the local farmer’s market or perhaps at the vintner’s.

broccoli with butter and grapes

This is more of a non-recipe, as it’s so easy to prepare. The butter and grapes really make the dish (and the garlic doesn’t hurt). You could substitute spinach, asparagus, or even artichoke hearts for the broccoli. Remember, the grapes do have seeds. You can discard them while eating or just eat them along with the fruit.

1-2 heads fresh broccoli or broccolini, chopped into longish florets
very good butter, copious amounts
wine grapes or ordinary grapes
1 clove garlic
salt and pepper to taste

• Steam the broccoli until it’s nearly ready. It should almost turn bright green, but not quite.
• Melt the butter in a heavy skillet on a medium to low flame. Toss the broccoli in the butter, allowing it to cook a little and absorb the butter.
• Throw in as many grapes as you like.
• Press the garlic clove over the broccoli and stir. Cook to slightly soften the grapes and mellow the garlic, about a minute or two.
• Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve right away.

This is a jar of tomato sauce I canned last night. It somehow escaped the shelf near the stove and took a scenic photo of itself in the garden. I don’t know how it managed to carry my camera.

Everyone’s been canning tomatoes lately, and I’ve been meaning to can some sauce for a couple of months now. It always seems like such a scary, convoluted, exhausting process such that the thought of home canning is much more attractive than the canning itself. Unlike ordinary cooking, there’s no instant gratification. In fact there’s a danger of no gratification at all. If you don’t seal and process everything just so, you may wind up with several jars of wildly partying bacteria. Let’s hear it for botulism!

But last Saturday I saw the most beautiful early girl tomatoes at the farmer’s market. Again. How could I pass them up? They smelled like summer, and tasted vaguely of honey. They were firm and bright and small. They were perfect. How could I not preserve some of these beauties for winter?

I bought about three pounds, which resulted in a little more than 1.5 pints of thick-ish sauce. I didn’t bother skinning or de-seeding the tomatoes. I like a chunky tomato sauce, and I find that the skin adds a little texture. The tomatoes are very sweet, so a little extra acidity from the seeds doesn’t make much difference.

Here is my recipe for a very simple tomato sauce, which is by no means definitive. My goal was to make a plain, yet flavorful, base sauce to which other ingredients may be added after opening a jar, such as fresh herbs, cheese, or ground meat.

very simple tomato sauce

2-3 TBS butter
5-6 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 lb quartered early girl tomatoes
salt and pepper to taste
dried herbs

• Melt the butter in a medium sized saucepan on a low-medium flame.
• Add the chopped garlic to the pan and stir.
• When the butter begins to bubble and the garlic has started to turn golden, add the tomatoes.
• Simmer and stir.
• Crumble in dried herbs to taste (I used at least a dozen sprigs of thyme, dropping the leaves into the pot by running the sprigs between my thumb and forefinger).
• Continue simmering, stirring occasionally. Remove from flame when the sauce has reached the consistency you like.
• Season to taste with salt and pepper.

That’s it. Once you’ve prepared the sauce, you’re halfway done. The canning part isn’t quite as complicated as it seems, especially considering that homemakers have been doing it for hundreds of years. That thought reassured me.

A few tips from a home canning novice:

• Read about home canning before you try it. Specifically, read about how to can the specific food you’ll be working with. You can get a book from the library, or just do a web search.
• The National Center for Home Canning is a good resource. Andrea’s Recipe Box is another. (Such detailed instructions! You can tell she’s an instructional designer.)
• Wash several jars and lids before you begin. You can wash them in the dishwasher, then boil the jars (not the lids) to sterilize them. I don’t have a jar lifter, so I sterilize a set of tongs along with the jars. I then use the tongs to remove the sterilized jars from the canning pot.
• Prepare more jars than you think you will need, so that you don’t run out.
• Get a jar of citric acid. According to the National Center for Home Canning, citric acid is useful for canning foods that require a little extra acidity.
• Read, re-read, and re-re-read the canning instructions before commencing canning. Print out instructions and have them with you in the kitchen for reference. I just noticed a few steps I skipped (oops).
• If it doesn’t work out, there’s always next year. But you can freeze a small batch just in case.