SATURDAY NIGHT

THE MENU

Seared Sea Bass
Fava Beans & Pancetta
Roasted Beets with Pomegranate Vinaigrette & Point Reyes Blue Cheese

Chocolate wafers

The Sea Bass was seasoned with salt, pepper and smoked paprika and seared in about teaspoon of olive oil and butter in a really hot pan for roughly 60 seconds each side with a little shaved Buddha’s Hand to add a little zest.

Preparing Fava Beans is a labor of love; first you shell, then you add the shelled beans into a boiling hot pot of water to shell the skill and afterwards you have the most delicate bean to do with what you like. I had a little pancetta in the fridge that I didn’t want to go to waste so I sautéed the pancetta then tossed in the fava beans, yum.

Elton Brown on Food Network must be credited for my basic roasted beets. No matter what the final preparation is for beets it always starts with roasted beets. Roasting beets intensifies the sweetness in the beets. I roasted the beets covering them in a little olive oil and coating them with sea salt in a 425 degree oven for roughly 25 minutes. After the beets cooled I peeled them, sliced them and added the pomegranate vinaigrette. Roasted beets are a staple in our house and they take on many forms. Tonight the beets were served in pomegranate vinaigrette with crumbled Point Reyes Blue Cheese on top. The beets were delicious and could have easily been a dessert course or with the after meal chasse course.

Dinner was finished with a chocolate wafer from Miette. I’m a happy girl; Good Night!

SATURDAY MORNING

Since I will be on the road again tomorrow I wanted to have a nice dinner at home tonight so off we went to the Farmer’s Market in the Ferry Building in search of dinner. We didn’t get as early a start as usual but I was pretty sure that my fish monger would still have something good and I was sure I could find really vegetables as well.

We arrived at the Ferry Building around 11:00 am so we immediately went to the fish monger and pick up a really lovely piece of sea bass. Then to the vegetable stands where we picked up beets and fava beans, my menu was formulating in my mind. The plan was to do something with the fava beans and we would have a meal.

After making a few other stops to by bread, snacks, fruit for the plane, bread from Acme and dessert from Miette it was time for lunch. We decided to try our luck at the Slanted Door and much to our surprise we got a table! The Slanted Door always pleases; we had oysters, Vietnamese crepe with shrimp and pork, five spice chicken and cellophane noodles with crab. The five-spice chicken wasn’t as spicy as I thought it would be but it was fresh and good, everything else was perfect and oh so delicious!

I love the Farmers Market in the Ferry Building, absolutely!

Home I go to nap, relax & pack by bags.

FRIDAY

This Friday was special, the end of the work week and the end of work for me for awhile. I am on my way to Chicago again for family matters and I am not quite sure when I will return. There were a few things I wanted and needed to do before taking off. I want to celebrate a birthday that I will miss and the holidays so I made a lunch reservation for Friday and invited two special people. So yesterday, a cold rainy day in San Francisco we had a celebratory lunch at one of our favorite restaurants Salt House.

We drove to the restaurant planning to park in a nearby parking lot but the parking gods were with us because we found a parking space in front of the door! Ok, it was a one hour metered space but who cares it was in front of the restaurant door so we had a nice leisurely lunch feeding the meter as needed. That’s the way City Slickers do it!

The food was sublime; between us we had the Crispy Shrimp Salad with Spicy Green Beans and Serrano Ham, Cassoulet (a perfect dish on a cool rainy day), Foie Gras Torchon and a Clam Stew with Beans, Kale and Linguica Sausage. Everything was perfectly seasoned and tasty; the Spicy Green Beans were so good and spiced with Harrisa. Needless to say we had a lovely glass of wine with our meal! We finished the meal with the Yuzu Panna Cotta, it was light and creamy and very flavorful with the candied Buddha’s Hand on top.

It was really wonderful to share this beautiful meal with two special people, a nice way to end the week!

Dinner by Iron Chef Laurine Wickett

The Mission neighborhood is one of the best dinning neighborhoods in the City, this food Ghetto is home to many of my favorite restaurants, bakeries and wine bars. Relatively new to the scene is the Coffee Bar http://www.coffeebar-usa.com/CB_HOME.html. The Coffee Bar is now hosting guest chef for dinners, this past Saturday we signed up for dinner with guest Iron Chef Laurine Wickett http://www.leftcoastcatering.com/chef.html. The food was awesome; I had the beet salad and the pork shoulder. The combination of the red and gold beets with the arugula and goat cheese was perfect, and the pork was tender and juicy. The dessert was OK; not bad but not great a nice ending to a great meal. A different dessert would have knocked this meal out of the park! Looking forward to the next time - I love the concept of the visiting chef!

Furlough Friday

Twice a month I have to take two unpaid days off from work and I love it! Working four days a week and having two long weekends a month is quite appealing to me. It is such a luxury to have a day to relax or catch up on chores.

This past work week although only 4 days was long with work activities from sun up to way pass sun down. Thursday afternoon I had to drive to Rohnert Park for an evening event, thankfully I did not have to make the drive alone. Traffic is what you would expect around 3:00 pm driving up to wine country. Across the road from my destination is a meat market/smoke house that I have seen many times but never went in. This trip with a little encouragement from my traveling companion we checked out BUD’s Custom Meats http://www.budscustommeats.com/. Inside we found all types of poultry, meat and wild game. I purchased lemon garlic chicken thighs, Texas baby back spare ribs and marinated tri-tip. Not much to say about the event and the ride home, it was work after all and the next day was furlough Friday!

Friday I had a lunch date with one of my favorite people at Serpentine, sister restaurant to Slow Club. Like Slow Club, Serpentine has a very nice limited seasonal menu. My friend had the cod dish and I have the albacore tuna with a warm German potato salad. The tuna was perfectly seared, cooked on the outside and rare on the inside. The tuna salad was not quite a salad nicoise but really delicious with the mustardy flavor of the sauce, the tartness of the capers and the mellow taste of the potatoes. I enjoyed catching up with a dear friend over a really good meal on a Friday afternoon!

Rejuvenated after lunch I decided to bake an Apple Cake using a recipe inspired by James Beard; Don Farmer’s Fresh Apple Cake. This recipe can be found in The New James Beard book, copyright 1981. I have make this cake for many years following the recipe to the letter until about 8 years ago or so when I decided to deviate adding ¼ cup of Calvados (see Savoree on Foodbuzz for the recipe). The Calvados adds a little more flavor and moister to an already moist and delicious cake.

While working on the cake the husband readied the grill for the Texas spare ribs. On the menu for the evening; grilled Texas spare ribs and sautéed collard greens. The ribs were perfectly seasoned and didn’t need a thing. These were among some of the best ribs I have ever had and I have had a lot of really good ribs! The meal was accompanied by a bottle of Navarro Lopez Gran Reserva '01, a perfect match to the spiciness of the ribs and the greens.

Friday, November 6th was a perfect Furlough Friday!

3 Autumn Days in Chicago

Thursday October 29, I traveled to Chicago for my mother’s 92nd birthday! From Ohare I hopped the train to the City where my sister picked me up and we headed to the parents place. At my parents place I was greeted with love and affection; I’m so very fortunate! Later that evening my sister, an old friend, my nephew, his wife and I went to dinner at my sister’s favorite restaurant, Garcia’s. Garcia’s is a very nice neighborhood Mexican restaurant with two locations one in Lincoln Square and the other on Lawrence Avenue; the Lincoln Square location is much nicer but it was closed for remodeling. The food was good, the margaritas were just what the doctor ordered and an evening with family and a good friend was priceless!

Friday morning, the actual birthday started at Molly’s Cupcakes http://www.mollyscupcakes.com/ where I picked up two dozen mini cupcakes ordered before leaving San Francisco. My two dozen cupcakes included the red velvet, vanilla, chocolate and the carrot cakes. I had a little treppredation about ordering the mini’s for fear they may not be moist but my fear was quickly dismissed with the first bite; so good! My parent’s birthdays are a little quieter these days but there was a steady flow of family members and friends paying homage all day and it was a joy to see everyone!

Halloween night was very special, my sister arranged a theater date at the Lookingglass Theater http://lookingglasstheatre.org/content/ , we invited a friend and had dinner before the theater at Restaurant 676 on Michigan Avenue. We had a very good meal, although I am craving spectacular, I had an arugula salad with apples and parmesan cheese and a bowl of Lake Superior White Fish Chowder. My friend had a white fish dish with clams and risotto. My sister had smoked chicken soup, I taste it and it was really smokey and good; followed by shrimp flatbread. The food was enjoyable not too filling for a pre theater dinner.

The play was Fedra Queen of Haiti; the Lookingglass Theatre is housed in the historic Water Tower Water Works Building. The historic landmark was one of the few structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The Theatre Company was founded in 1988 by eight Northwestern University graduates, Lookingglass ensemble notables include David Schwimmer of "Friends," Joey Slotnick of "Boston Public" and Tony Award-winner Mary Zimmerman. My husband is an alum of Northwestern Graduate School which did not factor into our decision at all to see the play.

The play is a must see; “an explosive retelling of Phaedra that would make Euripides, Seneca and Jean Racine blush.” This story of power and lust is set in a re-imagined Haiti evoked a range of emotions in a very satirical way. I have a love affair with the theatre and this production rates at the top of my many years of theater experiences here and abroad.

Chicago is such a great cultural city with world Class Theater, because it is home I don’t always have the opportunity to take advantage of all the City has to offer. But when I do it makes for a very special experience!

Early Sunday morning I flew back to San Francisco with great memories of a wonderful fall weekend in Chicago.