in praise of sardines

My Great Wall of Cookbooks

Pastry Queen extraordinaire Anita of Dessert First tagged me for the "Recipe Collection Meme," which was started by the Web Sorceress Cooks. Admittedly, my first reaction to Anita's email was a roll of the eyes and a sigh. "Oh good, another meme." But then I read her insightful post and realized that this was quite an interesting topic. In a nutshell, the topic is about how we choose (and store) our collection of recipes. But, delving even deeper, I am inspired to write about how we decide to cook what we cook.

The Web Sorceress provides a definition from a dictionary website that calls a recipe "a set of instructions for making something from various ingredients." True, but then again that's like saying a novel is "a set of sentences strung together to tell a story about various events and people." To me, recipes are far more than a mere set of instructions.

For one, recipes are a source of inspiration. I rarely follow a recipe as it is written, but I often look to cookbook authors - especially favorites like Paula Wolfert, Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney, and Alice Waters - for guidance, advice, and ideas.

When well-written, a recipe and the prose attached to it can convey the author's personality, preferences, and his or her personal history. If you've ever seen Judy Rodgers' The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, then you know what I'm talking about. Her book is probably the quirkiest, most opinionated collection of recipes to be published in the last decade.

Where do you obtain the recipes you prepare?

I have too many cookbooks to count (well beyond 101). Or more accurately, I'm too lazy to count them. So I measured my collection to see how tall they would be if they were piled one on top of the other. The answer: just a shade under 20 feet. Those 20 feet are spread out over 11 shelves. One shelf, the one dedicated to storing the over-sized sumptuously illustrated coffee table books, just collapsed last week.

That is only part of my collection. The 20 feet don't include years of back issues of Saveur, Fine Cooking, Gourmet and Food & Wine. Nor does it include the recipes I've clipped from the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and all the recipes I've gathered from the restaurants where I've worked over the past 10 years.

What about the Internet, you ask? With the exception of food blogs, I don't really get any recipes from the Internet. For one, I'm old-school. I like the tactile sensation of the book in my hands and the feel of the paper against my fingers. Reading, like cooking, is a dying pastime. They belong together. Besides, if I bring my laptop into the kitchen and spill tomato sauce on it, I'm out a thousand bucks.

The main reason I don't look to the Internet for inspiration, though, is a question of trust. Why would I cook a random recipe written by someone I know nothing about when I could cook something by Marcella Hazan or Suzanne Goin? If I don't know who wrote a recipe, I know I will never cook it. That's why the only online recipes I use come from food bloggers. Food bloggers tend to be incredibly open and generous with their thoughts and opinions, willing to share both their (our) successes and failures.

How often do you cook a new recipe?

The last month I have been cooking a lot less frequently than I usually do. I am putting all my creative energy into my restaurant search, so I have little left over for new recipes. When I have cooked, it's been mostly comfortable old favorites.

I have another perspective on this topic, though. With the exception of pastries, I do not really follow "recipes" in the traditional sense of that word.

I cook intuitively. The products I use tend to come from small farms and artisans, so they vary incredibly. I rely on all my senses and experience to determine how to bring out the best in a particular ingredient. I've probably already said this before, but I view my products, especially seasonal fruits and vegetables, as my Muse.

Take that quintessential spring ingredient the fava bean, for example. When they're as tiny as the tip of my pinkie, they taste good raw, skin and all. When slightly bigger, I prefer to peel and quickly cook them to bring out their sweetness and bright green color. When they get larger and starchier, they taste best stewed and then mashed.

I try to maintain that sense of wonder and respect for the products that I buy so that, in a sense, every time I cook I am cooking a "new" recipe.

Having a ball (or two) at Incanto's Head to Tail Dinner

I've mentioned before on this blog that I used to be a vegetarian.

So how did I go from eating a diet of rutabegas and wheat berries to finding myself staring down a strip of bacon flanked by two nuggets from that part of the bull that, to put it politely, makes him a bull rather than a cow (third picture in post).

In my mind, there is a straight line that I can draw between my veggie days and my seat at the table of Incanto's Third Annual "Head to Tail Dinner" 3 weeks ago (where the only vegetables were a few capers and a sprinkling of herbs). I'll attempt to describe the connection between the two eras of my life here in this post and you can decide whether I am in fact full of another product of the bull (which thankfully was not part of this particular feast).

Like many who are vegetarian by choice (as opposed to by their upbringing), my decision to stop eating meat was made consciously and was based on personal ethics. I was and still am sickened by the treatment of animals in the industrial system that currently exists for raising the majority of the animals that we eat. (If you haven't yet, view The Meatrix now). Well, er, maybe that's only part of the story. The other reason was that, as a good little rebellious twenty-something, I enjoyed causing my mother grief during holiday feasts.

Once I chose to return to my omnivorous ways (it turns out vegetarianism has a way of curtailing the options of aspiring chefs), I sought some system of ethics that would support my decision.

I enthusiastically latched onto the ethical standards of Alice Water's "Delicious Revolution" and, later, those of the Slow Food Movement. I intentionally sought out local ranchers and farmers who raised animals more humanely, like Bill Niman (cattle, sheep, and pigs), Bud and Ruth Hoffman (chickens and quails), Jim Reichardt (ducks), the Straus family (dairy cows) and others.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that ethics costs a premium. On the pennies that I earned as a novice cook and the nickles N earned as a teacher, we really couldn't afford these pricier meats. But we were both committed to the cause, so we shelled out a shocking portion of our incomes to shop at farmers markets and support the efforts of these pioneers.

One way I learned we could save money was to buy less expensive cuts of meat. I happily mastered the art of slow cooking and braising tougher cuts like lamb shanks, beef short ribs and cheeks, pork shoulder and belly, and duck legs. In fact, these are some of my favorite cuts of meat to this day.

Unfortunately, every other penny-conscious chef and home cook in the area came to the same realization at the same time as I did. As demand rose, so did the price of these once less desirable cuts. Slow-cooked meats became a hot trend and "comfort food" became a buzz word.

The next logical step was naturally to find out which of the even less desirable cuts were the tastiest. I had eaten many interesting parts - like pig's ears and bull's "whip" (another euphemism) - during my year teaching English in Sichuan, China, but I honestly had little idea how to cook them.

Mr. Sardine's Wild Ride

First things first. It's been a long time since I pressed the "create new post" button. I have to say, I've missed y'all. Sniff.

Every day during the past week and a half, I've woken up with the best of intentions, telling myself "I want to write something today!" Perhaps I'll describe last week's Head to Tail Dinner at Incanto! Or maybe I'll write about how I made the most wonderful steak by cooking it backwards!

And then the phone rings. It's the broker. Or the landlord. Or the architect. Or the accountant. Or one of the dozen other brokers I talk to weekly.

The last 2 weeks I've been riding the roller coaster known as restaurant buying. No. Scratch that metaphor. The plunges and twists and turns have been too tame to require an E-ticket (reserved for the scariest rides). The trip has reminded me more of a particular kiddie ride that enchanted me on birthday visits to Disneyland (remember, I grew up in LA). The C-ticket ride still exists to this day, 50 years after its premier. Its name is "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride."

The ride is based on Disney's 1949 animated adaptation of "The Wind in the Willows." You climb aboard an old convertible buggy and ride through madcap scenes set in the countryside of England at the turn of the 20th century. As the story of the ride unfolds, J. Thaddeus Toad is accused of stealing a car, sent to prison, escapes, is chased by the police and nearly loses his ancestral home, Toad Hall, to a group of nefarious weasels.

Here's how one fan describes the ride:

You are passenger in a runaway car which careens through hilarious scenes reminiscent of the Keystone Kops. On your fast ride which is in the dark, you have a lot of near misses. You blast through haystacks, nearly run characters down, crash through a fireplace, end up on a railroad track with a locomotive bearing down on you. You end up deposited unceremoniously in Hell, and you laugh all the way.

That's about as accurate a description of the last 2 weeks of my life as any I could come up with.

So climb in your buggy and lower the safety bar while I share my tale.

After months of insufferable hemming and indecisive hawing that I mercifully spared you all from reading (tea house? tapas bar? culinary book store? food writer? private chef? restaurant chef? back to school? insane asylum?), I finally decided that I wanted to go ahead and commit myself (hmmm... maybe I should stop the sentence there, press publish and never post again? nah, too easy) to opening a little restaurant.

Since the new year, I've ratcheted up my search process. I've been looking and looking and looking. I've felt like Goldilocks. This one's too big. This one's too expensive. This one's next to the projects.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I found a pretty decent place quite close to my house in a good but not great location (you blast through haystacks,...). I contacted the agent and walked through the property. It has just a few seats, but plenty of room to expand. Surprisingly, it even has a walk-in refrigerator, which is a much-coveted rarity in the size of restaurants I have been considering. Sure, the equipment is kind of old, but what can I expect from a 20-year-old restaurant? I assured myself it has lots of potential.

When is a trout not a trout?

When it's an omelet, of course! (Don't worry, this Dadaist answer will soon make sense).

A month ago, I promised an unusual Catalan recipe that features green garlic "later in the week." I made the dish, took pictures, ate it, and then plumb forgot about it.

My promise remained buried in my gray matter until an alert reader, Jesse, emailed me a few days ago. Jesse subscribes to the weekly CSA box (go Jesse!) from one of my favorite local farms, Full Belly, and was scheduled to receive a bunch of fresh green garlic on Tuesday. Jesse, hopefully you still have some of your stash remaining to use in this recipe!

During my trip to the Priorat wine region of Catalonia last summer, I sampled what was to me an unusual riff on the classic Spanish tortilla. In place of the traditional potatoes (and onions in some renditions), the cook had substituted local white beans, called mongetes, and green garlic. Tasted alongside the potato version, I actually preferred this tender, mildly garlicky tortilla.

Once I returned home, I flipped through old and new Spanish cookbooks and learned that the Spanish tortilla is just as versatile a platform for experimentation as the more familiar (to American cooks) frittata of Italy. The potato-based tortilla is the most famous and widely adored version, but there are countless others. What they all have in common is a relatively low proportion of eggs to filling.

Catalan cooks appear to be especially fond of tinkering with the classic potato version. In his book Catalan Cuisine, Colman Andrews wrote that he encountered a wide variety of fillings while in Catalonia, including "white beans, green beans, samfaina [similar to French ratatouille], artichokes, asparagus, garlic shoots [another word for green garlic], wild mushrooms, tuna, botifarra sausage, apples or pears, even fried zucchini flowers." The version I tasted, then, was not as shockingly original as I had assumed!

It's time I explain the seemingly absurd riddle of the title. It's quite simple, actually. In the Catalan language, the word for tortilla is truita, which means "trout." Although theories abound as to why a round omelet made of eggs and vegetables would be called a trout, nobody seems to know the true reason. To differentiate between a real trout and an omelet, Catalans call the fish a "trout of the river" (truita de riu). A few months back, when I made a delicious tortilla with potatoes, leeks, and smoked trout, I had unwittingly made perhaps the world's first truita de truita.

The following version is called a truita de mongetes i all tendre, meaning white bean and green garlic omelet. In its homeland, it would most likely be a served as a tapa, cut into small wedges or squares and served on toasted slices of baguette, perhaps with a smear of romesco sauce or a paper thin slice of jamón serrano. N and I enjoyed this truita one weekend for brunch. It would also makes a nice luncheon or early supper with a simple salad and a glass of sparkling Catalan Cava.

My bad. Reflections of a food snob

The Sunday before last, a local newspaper critic reviewed Dosa, a new South Indian restaurant in San Francisco, and dismissed bloggers, including myself, who were critical of their initial dining experiences there as “snobs.”

I can't speak for the others, but me? A food snob? Well, um, yeah. Is that bad? Which of the following words describes me?

    a. chowhound
    b. connoisseur
    c. foodie
    d. food geek
    e. food lover
    f. food snob
    g. all of the above

Clearly I have to circle “g.” And, you know what? I’m quite OK with that. In fact, I’m rather flattered.

Honestly, though, I was critical of my first meal at Dosa and I bluntly expressed my dissatisfaction in a comment on another blogger’s review. In hindsight, perhaps too bluntly. While my wife, a second grade teacher, will remind me that there are no are "mistakes" (only "learning experiences"), I do have some regrets about the comment I left. So much so that, prior to the newspaper review, I asked the owner of the blog to delete it, and she kindly obliged. My regrets stem not from being called a snob, however, but from my own self-imposed ethical standards.

So, if you don’t mind, allow me to get horizontal on the couch here and share with you some of my innermost thoughts and feelings about my role in the Dosa debacle.

First, let’s look at what happened. Shortly after Dosa opened, my wife and I invited our friend, who’s of South Indian descent, to dine with us there. We were all quite excited that a South Indian restaurant had opened in San Francisco, as we love and crave dosai (plural of dosa. Oops. Does that come across as snobbish? Ah well, I am what I am).

With its winning combination of an imaginative wine and cocktail list, a contemporary take on a previously underrepresented “ethnic” cuisine, and affordable prices, all presented in a colorfully painted loft-like space, Dosa brings to mind the original Slanted Door and the new Limón. Unfortunately, our first dinner at Dosa was marred by myriad service mishaps and disappointing food. We especially disliked the chutneys. We were crestfallen that the restaurant initially didn’t meet our perhaps too high expectations.

Although I intentionally did not write a review of Dosa on my own blog (more on that later), I left that blunt comment on the other blogger’s review. That review, which was also somewhat critical of the restaurant (although more balanced than my comment), inspired an earnest reply from the restaurant’s co-owner, Anjan Mitra. Mr. Mitra acknowledged that our  criticisms of the food were at least in part warranted. During the first weeks, Mr. Mitra explained, there were some "mistakes" made by the kitchen staff that led to our disappointing dinners and, in particular, the problematic chutneys. He invited those of us who initially disliked Dosa to return.

A couple of weeks ago (prior to the newspaper review), my wife N and I accepted Mr. Mitra’s invitation and returned anonymously to Dosa. I am happy to report that the food and service are much improved. To use an analogy from the Winter Olympics, our recent meal was like Bode Miller’s performance prior to the Olympics, while our first experience at Dosa was like Bode during the Olympics. As the pictures on this post help illustrate, the food is now quite tasty.