Eating my way through San Francisco

Despite the many delicious and thought provoking meals I had in San Francisco, I feel like there are many more to be had. Despite that nagging feeling that I’ve missed something good, I can ease my mind by remembering that nary a wasted bite crossed my lips. Armed with a pile of suggestions from various San Fran natives, visitors and my wonderful hosts–who happen to be lovers of the dining world as well–I set out to the south for a few good meals.

Straight off the plane we were swooped up and deposited at the front door of the Alembic, where the hostess touted to us the new menu. Service was beyond stellar, with the very same hostess keeping us just updated enough about the status of our table during the hour long wait, stretching and straining to try to make us as comfortable as possible. Once we got our feet in the door, we began exploring the cocktail list, a combination of classics prepared with prowess and new inventions which certainly provided our palates with their own excellent adventures. I waited too long to write this post and now am unable to recall the exact names of each one, but nary a bad one in the bunch, and with four people ordering multiple drinks, we sampled quite the selection. But as a lover of the edibles more than the imbibables, it was the food that truly won me over. We started with the blackboard special, a salt and pepper grass shrimp appetizer. Like little tiny chips made of shrimp, these savory crustaceans had us inhaling them like fraternity brothers with midnight pizza delivery. High on the delight of a brand-new to us delicacy, we ventured forth into the menu. I would never allow any bone marrow or steak tartare to go unordered, so those were in. We tacked on a few pork belly sliders for good measure and ricotta fritters. While the bone marrow was delicious, I’m not sure there was anything particularly spectacular about it, in fact it might have been slightly underdone. That said, it still had all the wonderful features of bone marrow, the thick, rich, stickiness of meat, combined with the creamy, melty features of butter. The bread was crunchy and the perfect palate clearing foil. The steak tartare was another traditional preparation, this one perfectly executed. Even the picky eater in the group had to admit that the textures and tastes of this dish were nothing short of stupendous. The dessert was a bit of a let down, not because it wasn’t delicious (it was) but simply because we expected more of a breaded, fried ricotta fritter, while this was really more like a doughnut made with ricotta inside. As I said, delectable none-the-less.

The next morning we awoke and were escorted to the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market. I talk a little bit about everything I bought here, so I won’t say much except that I adored the wine bar. There isn’t much better than sitting down at the high tables at 9:30 am and sharing a bottle of sparkling rose wine with friends while people watching the crowds. Life is good.

Later that afternoon, sufficiently recovered from the morning to be able to eat real food, we ventured over to Richmond to stop in for a late lunch at Burma Superstar. Unprepared, I was unsure of what sort of stuff we would be getting. We started out with a pitcher of an actually rather lovely Sangria–a Burmese spin put on it with various unexpected fruits –always nice to find an average drink to have a surprise twist. For food we started with their apparently famous Tea Leaf Salad. I’d never had a tea leaf salad before, but once I stopped attempting to discern the flavor of the fermented tea leaves, gave up and embraced the salad as a whole entity, crunchy little tidbits and all, I found it to be curiously strong–though not at all like an Altoid–more that the flavor and the crunch really resounded and made a strong statement. “I am salad, hear me roar,” is what I imagine it saying, staking out salad’s rightful place at the center of the meal. The tableside mixing service was cute, though not exactly necessary. We moved through the menu, picking and choosing from a lamb curry, rice studded with raisins, and a tofu tower that tasted much better than the terrible name would imply. The flavors of Burmese food were not as unfamiliar, in general, as I would have thought. Having extensive experience in Chinese, Thai and Indian food, meant that it was not the flavors, but the individual dishes that struck me as original. For anyone who loves those cuisines, this is definitely a good way to go, as it is sort of a greatest hits mash up of them.

Later that night we headed to our big dinner at Nopa. This was chosen for the dinner spot after I had heard good things, my host had mentioned it was high on her list to try and a former local food critic called it the place to go if you could only pick one. I was sold. The menu, I will say, though, was not one that grabbed you, drew you in and forced you to come. It was more of a simple, oh that could be good, kind of menu.

Sitting at the bar, drinking cocktails, waiting for our reservation–wait back up, drinking more amazing SF cocktails, what is up with all of the amazing cocktails here?–We watched food coming out of the kitchen and I changed my tune a little from my original “meh” at the menu. One of those! I say, we will order that–it turned out to be a lovely flatbread. We ordered an array of appetizers, but I was sold after the first taste of the amuse bouche touched my lips. Diving into the menu, first up were the little fried fish, yes, actually called that on the menu, absolute treasures, making audible crunches as you broke through the outer layer of fried tastiness and releasing all the smelt flavor, a wonderful flavor to all the fish lovers out there. We split a few appetizers as our main and each small plain dish exceeded by so much the expectations set by the menu, that it was almost like ordering via random drawing. Think you know what a baked giant white bean will taste like? Think again. You call what you ate in the past cauliflower, no siree, this, my friends is cauliflower. Again and again, they showed us new ways to look at foods that I thought I knew. Was it transcendent? A meal I’ll never forget? No, I’ve already forgotten what that terrific amuse bouche even was–but it was a restaurant that made me re-evaluate presumptions I make about my food knowledge and what I order, and I appreciated that. Along with great service and delicious wines, it turned out to be quite a lovely dinner.

The next morning we woke up refreshed and ready–Okay, that’s a lie. After Nopa we hit up a bar and then a wine bar and we all woke up struggling to move most of our body parts–but I knew what the cure was. As soon as we were all capable of dressing ourselves (it did take a few hours) we headed out to dim sum. This whole trip came about because of the idea of going to dim sum. However, I did make the mistake of listening to the wrong person for the dim sum choice and while the dim sum was passable, it was not the dim sum I came to SF for. We hit up Ton Kiang, a favorite of my travel partner. As we sat, they put out the hot sauce. A tiny dish, with two parts, one filled with hot mustard and the other with an odd salsa like green sauce. I tried flagging for the kind I wanted and got a sriracha type sauce. No others. Dim sum without appropriate hot sauce. Hangover nightmare! The food was…well, it was anyways. They had some interesting looking stuff, but nothing really ever panned out well. Softshell crab? Yes please! But it was over breaded and underseasoned and just tasted like friedness with a lack of hot sauce. Other items were better, but the dumplings were clearly made without care in the pleats–nor in any aspect of creation. Soup dumplings lacked soup and in general it just fell flat. As we left, the purpose of our trip half failed and my travel companion feeling bad for making the recommendation, I told her, “Don’t worry, we had fun, we ate well, and now I have a wonderful excuse to come back soon!”

My Tamales: Tiny and Pork Cheek Filled

My tamales have always had a bit of an inferiority complex, small in stature and slightly misshapen. What they lack in size they make up for with their tiny hourglass shape, stained glass jalapenos and beauty of flavor. When I first learned to make tamales I tried to make the big, traditional ones, I tried to make the creamy banana leaf wrapped ones, and yet the tamales that made me most enjoy both the process of making them (and trust me, if you’re going to make them, you want to love it) were these little squirts. A mix between the Southern U.S. style shape and the Mexican style flavors and dough, it comes together as a wonderful balance of light, fluffy dough, thick rich filling and the tiny crunch of an embedded jalapeno slice, loaning both its flavor and its bright color to enhance the tamales.

I make tamales by the hundred–and by I, I mean myself and anyone (generally my boyfriend) I can convince to help me–because it is a lot of work, it is messy and most of all it is busy work so it is nice to have someone to chit chat with. I started with the filling, using my Holy Shit Pork Cheeks with extra meat added, letting it stew all day while I was at work, scenting the house with a wafting, spicy aroma. While that hung in the air, spread on a sheet to cool, I prepared the dough. I use the recipe on the back of the tamale flour (masa) bag combined with freshly rendered lard from the Mexican market by my house. Here in lies the key, though, to light, fluffy tamales: Start your dough with the lard, put it in the stand mixer with the paddle on and whip the lard for a good couple minutes. When its warmed up and has taken on some air, add the masa in, slowly, then the salt and the stock. Keep whipping it with the mixer.

When your filling is cooled, stop the whipping and bring your the filling, the dough, and your corn husks (soaked in water for 30 minutes) to the assembly station. With a husk in one hand, place a jalapeno slice (I use the mandoline for thin slinces) in the center, then smear a small (palm sized or smaller, very thin) dab of dough. In the center of the dough put a tiny bit of the filling–seriously, a half teaspoon or so. Pull the two long edges of the husk together and then roll it over. Take the bottom of the husk and fold it up. Then using a strip of husk (you can often pull it from the broken pieces of husk), tie a bow around the bottom, holding the folded piece against the tamal. They end up about the thickness of two fingers. The top stays open ended, so when you steam it, the grow a little taller. I steam them for about 45 minutes to an hour, with their open ends sticking up from my bamboo steamer in a large stock pot.

In no way are the authentic, in no way are my tamales something traditional. They aren’t modeled after anything or based on anything. They are simply what happened when I took to the kitchen, and when they turned out to make me happy, I kept making them the same way. Sometimes I change my mind and try to make more typical tamales, and each time I grow frustrated and angry with the results. The only thing that calms me is a return to my own tiny, pork cheek filled, beautifully misshapen tamales.

San Francisco Picnic

Now that my situation has been rectified, I must admit that I was committing a grave mistake by failing to visit San Francisco in the last 14 years. In the coming days, I do promise to attempt a deeper delve into the food I consumed while actually on my visit, but right now I’m already floating down memory lane by eating the fabulous foods that I brought back with me. Thanks to the luxury of traveling with a small insulated tote, I was able to return from my short trip laden with the fabulous products which I did not have time to eat while there.

The pimentos de padron, you’ll see, the bright green at the top of the picture, I picked up on Saturday morning, during our stroll through the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market. It was early, it was the first stand. Upon spotting them, I remembered a passage from either Calvin Trillin or Jeffrey Steingarten (I can’t remember at the moment) about the wonders of these. I immediately bought them. I worried, then, that I was going to pick up hundreds of other products in the course of my walk, but in fact I managed to hold out until we made it to the permanent stores inside the building. Frying them up in olive oil and sprinkling salt atop, I prepared them in the traditional fashion and immediately understand the love these created. In any bite, a game of mystery is involved–will it be violently spicy or a gentle burn–the flavor wavering between faint (allowing the olive oil to come to the front) and strong, almost resembling a slightly spicy green bell pepper. These epitomize the Spanish style to me, allowing for simple preparation of a fabulous ingrediant.

Moving to Italy and to meat, at Boccalone we sampled $3.50 Meat Cones. As much as I love prosciutto, I found myself enthralled by the slightly different texture and flavor of the prosciutto cotto (meat product in upper right hand corner of white plate) and needed to buy that. The Coppa di Testa is in the lower left–also known as head cheese, and when properly prepared (as this was) a delightful melange of textures and flavors. The final product I picked up there was one which is much enamored by bloggers and I’d heard rave reviews about. In the upper left hand corner you can see the Nduja, a wonderfully spiced salami that is actually spreadable. The texture is so unexpected with the flavor that it makes for a strange experience to eat, yet is delicious at the same time as arousing curiousities of the tongue.

The next stop was the Cowgirl Creamery. It was a good thing there were not more shelves in this store I could simply pull stuff off of, because I could not help myself here. I wanted it all. I started with a taste of Burrata, an extra creamy cheese, like soft mozzarella. This is my favorite new cheese–the white lump in the lower right hand corner. Moving counter-clockwise the next cheese is the Cowgirl Creamery’s own Red Hawk. My own cheese preferences tend to run soft and stinky, and this was a perfect cheese for me, the epitome of both of those! Next is the Inverness, also by Cowgirl, and this, while soft and stinky, was also a much more refined cheese, which was nice–you can only take so much stink at once. Wait, did I really say that? Because I’ll need to back track that for the next two cheeses, the Sottocenere and the Truffle Tremor. I had tried the Truffle Tremor at an event about a year ago and hadn’t seen it around much, so when I saw it, I decided to get some. “You like truffle cheese?” my friend and host for the weekend asked. I nodded. “That’s kid stuff, try this” and she requested the Sottocenere to taste. It is a totally different cheese, a totally different flavor. I must admit the harder cheese, more earthy truffle of the Sottocenere was appealing, while the soft stink of the Truffle Tremor tugged at my cheese loving heart strings. I had to have them both.

Just in case our little hedonistic San Francisco picnic was not yet complete, in the center of the plate is a bowl of Ryan Farr’s 4505 Chicharrones. I had heard of these and wanted to try them, but hadn’t by Sunday night and we were returning Monday morning. Luckily he happened to be cooking at the Cochon 555 event we were at on Sunday night. He was serving up tacos with chicharrones in place of tortillas, and man, were they delicious (as were his corndogs, ‘rolled face’ and really everything else hand the other 5 chefs made). But again, my host doth protest “These aren’t the real chicharrones” she said, “we have to get the normal spicing, this is different,” and working her magical ways on the gorgeous and friendly (and exceedingly nice) Ryan Farr, she charmed him right out of a hidden stash of those chicharrones.

“You know what my favorite part of the meal was?” B asked me as we finished. He had not been in San Francisco with me, and yes, I was curious. “The crackers that you made to go with everything” Ah, yes, folks, he’s a charmer. But really he should thank Alton Brown for the recipe–I took out the seeds and tilted it a little more heavily toward whole wheat flour, since I was using the amazing Bluebird Farms stuff. See, we’ve got good stuff here too!

Celebratory Salad

Farro Salad with Sea Beans

“Something’s wrong with the tomatoes” B told me, standing over my epic bounty from the farmer’s market that morning. What? They had been beautiful that morning, luscious and ripe, like they were just waiting to explode juicy, summer tomato-ey goodness everywhere. “They’re like greenish,” he explained. I drew in a deep sigh of relief and explained to the Indiana boy that not every tomato is perfectly shaped and perfectly red, that in fact, these were my perfect tomatoes.

The next day, after a long day of oystering, I prepared to make an amazing salad out of the killing I’d come away from the market with. There was a little problem. After a long day of oystering, I couldn’t stop eating oysters. I’d had a good third of my daily limit while still standing with shucking knife in one hand and shell in the other. I had already pan-fried another third. I had to cut myself off, distract from the endless oyster eating. I had to make a salad that I could use to celebrate both bounty of the farmer’s market and my oysterific excitement.

As the salad came together, each layer of color I added to it made for another layer of excitement. The beginnings, the cheese, the farro, the tomatoes, the sea beans came from the farmers market. Once I had the basic ingredients, I hunted for herbs from my garden to top it–purple shiso loaning more vibrant color, parsley and basil, in tiny amounts adding their say in bright flavors. Finally it needed a dressing. I started with a little Korean red pepper flake (good for this sort of use, as it has no seeds, just stunningly red flakes), but quickly realized it wasn’t the right ingredient–it left its mark of tiny crimson freckles, but not nearly enough of it natural flavor. I turned to my secret weapon, a wonderful pepperoncini olive oil my boss had brought me from Italy. The deep, slightly acidic tasting spice provided the perfect counterpoint to the sweet tomatoes, the salty sea beans and the creamy mozzarella.

So while I might not have been celebrating much–some tasty oysters and beautiful vegetables, the colors and flavors in the salad made it worth celebrating in and of itself, thus, a celebratory salad.

Beat the Heat: Where to Eat

Can’t think. Must type blog deliriously in heat. Must babble top 5 things to eat (and how to eat them) in Seattle during ridiculous heat invasion!

1) Sichuan Boiled Fish from Sichuanese Cuisine (or anywhere else that serves this awesome dish: 7 Stars, Chiang’s, many more). Hot, spicy peppers, soft flaky fish, this dish is delicious anytime of the year, but in the hot weather it feels especially good to sweat out the heat–it is your body’s natural cooling system anyways.

2) Ezell’s Fried Chicken because nothing says a picnic on the beach like fried chicken. Yup, that was hot days in high school for us, pick up chicken, drive down to Leschi beach, enjoy.

3) Happy Hour on the deck at Maximilien’s. Yes, there are millions of decks in town, including others with better food, better drinks, better just about anything–except views. The food is pretty good, lots of classic French options like cheese plates that are great for snacking in the sun, and your own personal bucket of Stella Artois so you don’t have to flag the waiter for your next cold one ($15 for 6, kept cool on ice at the table).

4) Jack’s Mainly Chinese Tapas. Okay, I know, Chinese food 2 times. But this is a whole different brand and they have a cold cuts platter and a great cold noodle dish and an even more amazing dish that I tried for the first time this weekend which includes sour napa cabbage, jalapenos, cilantro, ginger and bean thread noodles.

5) Cactus in Madison Park for mojitos–with a caveat. The key here is that you rent a canoe from the Waterfront activities center at UW and canoe across the cut and over to the beach, hide said canoe in bushes, run up to Cactus, drink tasty mojitos and eat a few chips and salsa, then enjoy a slightly tipsy canoe home. But remember–safety first! not too many mojitos! You’re a small canoe! They’re big ships. They are much larger and more powerful and in all likelihood drunker and paying less attention.

Where else? What am I missing? Remember, we’ve got a lot of these days in our near future, let’s not forget the best ways to enjoy them!

Pomegranate Sorbet

Pomegranate Sorbet. That’s what it is, plain and simple. Both infused with and garnished with grapefruit mint from my garden. Not grapefruit and mint, but rather a mint that has a wonderful citrus-y tang to it.

I chose to make pomegranate sorbet because the temperatures were climbing (and staying high) and I had yet to get all the ice cream making supplies in house yet, so there wasn’t much to choose from. A few POM Wonderful pomegranate juice bottles had been languishing away in the back of our fridge since they sent me them to sample a few months back. B drank a few, but I’m not a juice person of any kind (if I’m drinking its almost certainly water or alcohol) so they had gone unused, save the undistinguished pomegranate-chipotle wing BBQ sauce I’d made. Tasty, but not especially interesting.

So where was I? Temperatures climbing, lots of free pomegranate juice. New garden, filled with odd flavored mint. Combine, stir, shake, enjoy!

The sorbet is a little tart, as I’m not much of a sweets person, but just add more sugar if you are, or use this as a fabulous palate cleanser between courses.

Pomegranate Sorbet

3 Cups Pomegranate Juice
1 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Water
a few leaves of grapefruit mint, plus more to garnish

Bring the juice, sugar and water to a boil, add the leaves and let them steep for 15 minutes. Strain, then cool down in the fridge. Churn and eat! Or freeze and eat later, but if you do, be sure to pull it out of the fridge 10 minutes before you want to eat it, it freezes hard.

Whipped Lardo: How to Make my Holy Grail

Whipped lardo is simply heavenly. A heavenly spread that was my holy grail of recipes. I’d eaten it at an underground restaurant type of meal and it stuck in my mind. Stuck so hard as one of the best bites I’d ever eaten that I scoured the internet, up, down and every which-way, without gaining even the first inkling of any idea how to make the dish. So it was taste and test time. For the last year I’ve made more attempts than I want to count, all equally failed, to recreate this dish.

It had been called ‘Whipped Lardo’ when I ate it, so yes, I began by making my own lardo. Good, yes, but was it making whipped lardo? No. So I kept going, rendering lard and whipping it, curing back fat right and left. Finally I had to give up. There was just no way I could figure it out without just a little hint from its creator.

Fate must have intervened, because a few weeks ago I took up a friend on an offer to attend that same underground restaurant type of meal. The cook was different, but luck would have it that the chef who made the whipped lardo, the wonderful and pretty darn cute Joel Cox, would be joining us in eating the dinner. So, fast forward to the car ride home, I’ve had a few glasses of wine and I finally feel courageous enough to ask “Joel, please tell me how you made that whipped lardo!”

And like a little child trying desperately to watch the beauty of the bubbles while also catching them in their hands, I listened as he told me the secret I had been missing. You grind the fat directly in the meat grinder. No actual lardo used, nor is there actual whipping. He told me the rest of the recipe, though I have to admit to having been so stuck on this part of the recipe that I only vaguely heard ingredients, so I improvised when I made it. He also explained that he had learned this recipe from the great Dario Cecchini, who you may have heard about in the book ‘Heat’ or seen on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations.

So what is the whipped lardo like? Like butter on overdrive, like meat in cream form, like flavor that is at once so simple and so complex that you must have another bite to figure out which one it is.

Whipped Lardo

1/3 lb of pork back fat or leaf lard (Joel said back fat, I used leaf)
1 small clove of garlic, mashed into a paste
1 teaspoon of Sherry Vinegar (or red wine vinegar)
Salt, pepper, rosemary to taste

Grind the fat through the smallest setting on your meat grinder. Add the garlic and vinegar and begin massaging air into it. As you work with the meat, folding in air using a motion like a back rub or milking a cow, it will get softer and softer. Add in salt and pepper and rosemary and begin to taste. It will need a decent amount of salt to bring out the full flavors, though go more sparsely on the pepper and rosemary for that big pig flavor. When you’re done, spread it on a cracker or piece of bread and enjoy.

Walla Walla Wining and Whining

Oh, I’m not going to whine too much, I’m exaggerating. A little bit. But it did seem like most everything that could have gone wrong on our wine tasting trip did. On the other hand, I got to drive across the state in a pretty sweet car.

Maybe a little too sweet for my blood, actually. This Mustang that Ford loaned me for the weekend got me all kinds of attention. Driving in front of Harvest Vine (fancy and delicious food) a group of men in suits stood gawking. I pulled up at my soccer game and watched my teammates look on in awe as I stepped out. I picked up rentals and the guy loading my car, when I told him to have a great day, actually said “my day was better for having been near that car.” So maybe I let it go to my head a little. Maybe the fact that it was so fast–and so easy to start going fast loaned a little. Maybe the attention wasn’t all good. Needless to say having the fast car contributed to issue number one on the trip: What cop would not be dying to pull over a firetruck red, Michigan plated Mustang?

Moving right along, it was a beautiful, 70 degree, sunny day and the sun shined down through the glass roof all the drive long (B thought this was much less cool the next morning on the drive home, when he felt the sunlight was unwelcome in his life). And the wine. Wine tasting in Walla Walla was absolutely amazing. We hired a local student to drive us around as we loaded up the car with fabulous roses for grilling, rieslings for sipping on summer afternoons and a few heavier wines for later in the season.

I declared my favorite to be the Trust/Rollat tasting room and I bought the wines to prove it. Another great one was Spring Valley, in town. Aside from the most pleasant hostess, terrific wines and a good story, they gave us industry discount, which was amazing. Next door to that we found Salumerie Cesare, which has an awesome selection of cheeses and salumis and a very friendly policy on tasting (you could find me in the refrigerated cheese room for quite some time). Fortified with braseola, daphinoise and any number of other delicacies, we soldiered on, hitting up a few more wineries before they started to close.

6pm and the wineries are shut. We load our share of wine into the ’stang for safe keeping. But we’re not done yet, we’re just getting to the good parts. My friend makes a call to a man she knows and next thing I know I’m hopping a barbed wire fence and scrambling across highway 12 to meet a man in the back of a truck. He sits with two bottles of wine, a red and a white and we proceed to taste through them. And by taste through, I mean the 5 of us demolish the two bottles and he brings out a third, a local Carmenere, one of my favorite types of wine. It’s delicious, I want more, but as we get to the bottom of it, he breaks to us the news that there are only 6 bottles of this left, they’re all in his basement and he’s not selling. We’re heartbroken, but leave with three bottles of the red and the white under our arms. He gives us a ride in the truck to our dinner reservation down the hill at Whitehouse Crawford.

So we arrive at Whitehouse Crawford. I can’t say enough good stuff about this place. it’s a beautiful, airy room that feels vibrant and alive. It smells like great food without overbearingly smelling like cooking. Unfortunate incidents that I won’t go into here (and were not fault of the restaurants, they dealt with them beautifully) interrupted parts of our dinner, so I’m afraid I can’t entirely claim to have had a perfect dinner, but I will say that we started with four terrific appetizers and a wonderful wine by local wintery Abeja. We only got two entrees between the four of us, and the lamb we ate many hours later–if you told me it got any less delicious in that time, I am not sure I’d believe you, as it is hard to imagine a more perfectly cooked and flavored piece of lamb.

Then there was our pasta dish. This is with out a doubt the best pasta dish I’ve ever had in a restaurant–overtaking a certain sea urchin tagliarini I recently ate. Local shrimp and squid playful twisted and tangled with squid ink black tagliatelle and paper thin slices of bell pepper, cooked till the texture perfectly matched that of the noodle. The sauce was barely detectable in texture, just a thin coating over everything, but in flavor it gave everything, a bright and rather spicy everything. The balance of textures and flavors matched up amazingly. It was fabulous.

It was a long day, and slightly stressful (the whining part of the title here) and rather expensive, especially thanks to the lovely cops in Ellensburg (still whining) and in part due to my own buying (oh, there is the wining!). But the fact is, even as a 1 day trip, wine tasting in Walla Walla was awesome. And definitely, if you are ever anywhere nearby, don’t miss a meal at Whitehouse Crawford.

A Free Dinner at the Herbfarm

How do you get all this free stuff? I’m always asked, and for once I had an answer that didn’t exclude the general public. I answered a Twitter Tweet. Yup, a tweet out in the public domain, nothing having anything to do with me being a blogger. Simply it had to do with me being the first one to call in and say “hey, I’d love the free dinner that you just offered on Twitter!” You might say it would be hard to consider a free dinner in a review, but since my only dinner at another restaurant of this caliber in Seattle (Rovers) was also free, I feel prepared to make the comparison. And this? It blew Rover’s right outta the ever-lovin’  lake water that separates the two!

And so on a beautiful Friday afternoon, we slogged through traffic to get to the other side of that water, then up to Woodinville for our dinner. I actually thought the kitchen garden tour was one of my favorite parts, sampling various edible herbs straight from the plant, learning how to eat tulips and basking in the sun. Did I mention it was like 70 degrees and sunny? Perfect.

After a glass of punch and a wander through the wine cellar we were sat in the rather cluttered dining room, the table packed with various shapes and sizes of wine glasses.

We start with the scallop tartare in the lower left hand corner, topped with caviar and carrot-lovage foam (they called it a sauce. I appreciated the attempt to be less pretentious). It was good, it introduced me to new flavors, which I like and always makes me think more highly of a place. The second part of this array of apps was the spot prawn chawan mushi. I adore chawan mushi, and this was a good version of it, but my favorite part of it was the garnish on top, the sake cured salmon roe. The least good part of the appetizer tray (but by no means a bad bite) was the dungeness crab and mangalitsa pig sausage spring roll. It just muddled the flavors a little too much. With this we were served champagne cocktails–our choice of tamarack or spruce. Following the first course, the chef and sommelier said their pieces, describing the various food and wine we’d be eating in our “Spring Forager’s Dinner.” This might have been my favorite part, as it was like live action food porn hearing the descriptions. I was especially impressed with the sommelier’s enthusiasm about each wine–it helped that she chose some of my favorite kinds though.

A little close up of the sake cured salmon roe, for all of you food porn voyeurs out there. I don’t normally take pictures at restaurants, but with the loads of light in the room and the beautiful food, I knew I could do it unobtrusively and have them turn out beautifully. Besides, I was way classier than the group taking flash photos of themselves or the man sticking his giant SLR in everyone’s faces and meals.

Next up was a pizzeta, topped with two different preparations of tuna with caviar. This was very tasty, though B’s was slightly less well executed than mine. The soft boiled egg in the center and the wasabi sauce underneath did serve to remind us of the little touches that a fancy dinner like this employs to make things special, but over all, we still felt a little like we were eating pizza. Pretty pizza, but still pizza. I normally love albarinos, which was the white wine we were served with this, but I had to admit it was not my favorite.

This was a rabbit pave with rabbit saddle on top and a potato smear thing and some kind of sauce? Sorry, I’m trying to do this by memory because I stupidly cleaned over the weekend, by which I mean stacked all the loose pieces of papers flying around my room, assorted menus included and haven’t dug through them yet, because that would make it no longer clean. This was B’s favorite dish, I believe, and it was good. The texture of the pave was fabulous and the hint of sweetness to the sauce went well with the slight gaminess of the rabbit. I was dismayed to find some bone pieces in my pave, which was otherwise a smooth paste texture, but upon notifying the sommelier (who was serving us) things were handled with the utmost professionalism. Really, lets be honest, everyone makes execution errors, but when things are dealt with so well, it’s hard to hold it against them especially when they apologize with a tasting of muscats (the three muscat tiers, har har har) at your cheese course and by saying “this is because of the bunny bones”. Those little bits of slight lightheartedness was what kept the ambiance from being stuffy with formality (a problem, I felt, at Rover’s).

That squab, right there in the middle? Easily my favorite bite of the night. So rare, so savory, perfect texture, amazing flavor. Going clockwise, you get to the ‘faux gras’ which was basically a squab liver mousse. I loved it. I might have loved it more if it hadn’t been called something so close to foie gras. Then I wanted foie gras (but Gastrognome, you say, you always want foie gras! And you are right). At the top are that amazing spring combo of morel mushrooms and asparagus (tips only, ooh lala!), though I didn’t think the honey smear added much.

Um, lamb detritus? Yeah, forgot to take the picture before I started eating this one. In the bowl was a lamb and mushroom gratin, which, while quite delicious seemed a little out of season for the day. That said, had this been one of the much rainier days this week, I think it would have been perfect. As was the fabulous lamb in the front, with the herb pesto on it.

While the squab may have been my favorite bite of the meal, I believe this was my favorite course. The simplicity of it, combined with the matching of the flavors meant that it was more than just the sum of its parts. The River’s Edge Full Moon goat cheese there may well also be my new favorite cheese, stinky and rich, soft but with just enough structure. The ’samosa’ on the other side was nice, lightly spice and full of potatos and vegetables. This was followed by a buttermilk panna cotta that was a tasty little intermezzo, then we moved on to dessert.

The thing on the right was a hazelnut and chocolate thing that, as I recall, was described as being like a kit kat bar.Next to it was this lovely little cake that just melted in your mouth. It was unbelievably good, not too sweet, perfectly soft, almost a custard, but with enough bite to slice. It went amazingly with the crunch of the apples underneath. Then there was another dessert plate of little bites. They also handed us chocolate as we walked out the door. I was overloaded. But while I was full, I wasn’t so full that I was in pain, as I sometimes am after a dinner this long, which was nice. The dinner had been well portioned and well paced, so I felt good.

In the end, I felt like not only would I return on my own volition, paying with my own dollars, that I would want to look for an occasion to do so, which is saying a lot, when you’re looking at spending $220/person to do so.

Karama: An Exersice in Ethnic Eating

Being whiter than Weird Al, I often find satisfying my cravings for eats from random ethnicities to be a bit of an exercise in patience and rolling with the punches, though often with delicious rewards. Karama, a new self-described “East-African, Somali, Italian, Mediterranean and American” food restaurant was no different. Usually I will avoid any restaurant that claims to do that many different cuisines, but upon reading the menu and seeing what they offered, I instead rang up my friend M, who lived in Tanzania, and informed her of my findings.

We made a date and headed down with our boyfriends in tow. We had another event to go to, so had planned on having a fairly light dinner, picking three dishes off the menu for the four of us to split. The menu has many different categories, including appetizers (liver, foul madammas) and entrees as well as more entrees, including gyros and schwarma (I’m assuming that’s the Mediterranean) and we saw a guy getting an enormous platter of pasta, covered in some sort of orange-y sauce and dried herbs (Italian?).

As we were deciding, we were served a delicious, if greasy soup. The main flavoring, as far as I could tell was niter kibe, the Ethiopian spiced butter, but I’m sure it was just similar ingredients. A good way to start the meal.

We all immediately gravitated to the goat, simply described as ‘Somali-style’ with peppers and onions, then M. directed us toward the Kata Kata (chicken with chapatis, as a kind of stew) and Ugali (a corn based starch). We decided to order one of each of those three. Here’s where the mix up started.

“Have you been here before?” the waitress asked. We shook our heads no, and M. proceeded to order our food. On hearing her pronunciation or her choice of dishes, the waitress started “Oh, you have been here?” “Well, no,” M. explained her experience.

Unfortunately with all that explaining, what got lost in translation was our order. Four orders of goat appeared on our table. Four orders which each came with, I’d point out, a plate of salad, of vegetables and of chapati. That’s four plates of each of four dishes, so our table looked ridiculous. Sensing the problem slowly (dishes were delivered one or two at a time) we flagged someone down and explained that we had wanted to share. They removed two of the veggie dishes and two of the salads. We weren’t sure our message was across. We flagged again. I wasn’t around for this full discussion (I was grabbing water) but the woman seemed upset. And never brought us the other two dishes. Oy. However, considering the amount of food brought out for $40 and that we were heading to what turned out to be a hedonist bacchanal filled with free flowing beverages and platters of bone marrow and foie gras floating by, we just rolled with the punches.

But the food? Well the goat was spectacular! That’s where the reward part comes in for all the confusion. The veggies were awful, the salad was shredded iceberg lettuce with a drizzle of some dressing (didn’t try that) and the chapatis tasted like they’d been made longer ago than they should have been. But the goat, that was amazing. We all devoured ours, eating with our chapatis (”In my country, we use the chapati to eat the vegetables,” our waitress scoffed condescendingly when she saw us doing this. Ah, well), and liberally dousing everything with the excellent hot sauce (which I think may have just involved oil and raw garlic). While most of the side dishes were, well, nearly inedible, the goat was good enough that I left rather disappointed that we didn’t get to try the other dishes, and also good enough that we will be returning for sure!

So yes, if you want to know what you’re getting and want to be sure of it, perhaps eating at Karama or any other hole-in-the-wall not used to catering to the most American of customers is not the best idea. However, if you’re willing to pack a sense of adventure and to see what you can find you may just be rewarded with some super-tasty goat!