ESF: The Last Supper

Wednesday night was our final class meeting for Eating San Francisco, and it was bittersweet. Sweet because approximately 3 hours after class got out, I would be done with almost all of my work for the year, and would feel about 15 pounds lighter. Bitter because the bonds we forged and the things we learned over the course of this short class were a little tough to say goodbye to (not in the sense that the bonds and the knowledge are going to disappear, but in the sense that we won't have the chance to further them for 3 hours every Wednesday night any longer).

My memorial Flickr Set

For our last class, my fellow students and I embarked on a local, seasonal, delicious meal cooking extravaganza, resulting in a gourmet potluck meal that proved there is definitely no such thing as too many cooks in the kitchen (as long as we have our own kitchens...) when it comes to this class. My contribution? One of my favorite fallback recipes: a summer pasta salad, salty, sweet, fresh and tasty. A more complicated and hearty recipe could have been tackled, had I had more than one hour between work and class, but I was happy - a fresh pasta salad is more reflective of my cooking personality. I have been covering Rainbow Grocery for my Journalism class for the past month and a half, and know more about it than any ordinary person should. But gladly, because I knew it would be my one stop shop for my local, seasonal grocery list. Not everything on their shelves is local or seasonal, but the selection is pretty unbeatable. I set on my way with the following list: Bulk pasta, bulk olive oil, balsamic vinegar, tomatoes, basil, pine nuts, mozzarella cheese, and the elusive "whatever else sounds good". I came out with a pound of bulk rotini pasta, a little tub of local, lemon-infused olive oil, some 18 year aged balsamic vinegar from Napa, organic basil from Hollister, organic tomatoes from Chico, pine nuts from China (*SMACK* - That's you, David Silver, slapping me on the wrist. I know, but apparently our good old American evergreens don't produce adequate enough pine nuts even for the most locally focused grocery store), mozzarella from a Berkeley cheese company, and "whatever else" in the form an Oakland produced parsley/arugula pesto and two bottle of "Cheap Red/White Wine" from Morgan Hill. Here's how it all came together (a careful science):

Ingredients:
1 lb Rotini Pasta
Two handfuls lightly chopped Basil
Lots of olive oil (part lemon-infused, part regular)
Not so much balsamic vinegar
One handful pine nuts
4 chopped tomatoes (large chunks)
Mozzarella balls, chopped in half
A dash (aka spoonful) of the parsley/arugula pesto (in retrospect, a traditional basil pesto would have been better)
Salt, salt, salt, and pepper to taste

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, and dump in all the pasta (the pasta I bought from Rainbow cooked quicker than your regular supermarket box). Chop up a good amount of the basil leaves, but not finely, just enough to release the flavor. Chop the four tomatoes into large chunk. Chop the mozzarella balls in half, or quarters depending on the size. When the pasta is soft (al dente, preferably), strain it and rinse the noodles with cold water. Put the noodles in a large bowl, and add the chopped ingredients and pine nuts. Begin adding lemon olive oil, regular olive oil, and a little balsamic vinegar to taste. Finish with some salt and pepper, seasoning to taste. It's a DIY kind of recipe - you can make it however you like it.


REMINDER!
I created an ESF Cookbook blog on Wordpress, so log in and post your recipes please!
Login: ESFRecipes
Password: eatingsanfrancisco

When I arrived at the feast, a table of deliciousness lay before me, awaiting my addition. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that everyone had made something completely, and equally as enticing. There were open face steak sandwiches, chocolate covered strawberries, pita chips and salsa, salmon pasta, fruit salad, bite-size vegetable napoleons, couscous, fava bean dip, gnocchi, a fresh salad picked from USF's vegetable garden...I'll stop there. I'm getting hungry. We each grabbed a cafeteria boat and dug in, filling them to the brims. I don't know if it was the proximity, the seasonality, the freshness, or all three qualities of the ingredients we used, but it was, as Professor Silver said, the best meal we had all semester. Each dish made with different hands, different personalities, and it showed. I never doubted us and our new, or not so new interests in food, but this was beyond all expectations. Bravo, ESF, we done good. I couldn't have imagined a better way to close out the year.
Inspired by our meal's focus, I created a map using "MapMe" where we can pinpoint where all of our ingredients came from. I've already entered mine in, and uploaded some pictures to go with it. I've embedded the map here, but I want all of you to edit it and add your dish's ingredients so we can create a geographic picture of what we ate! The site takes a minute to get used to, but once you do it's pretty simple, so please contribute if you have a minute! I'll post it on our new ESF Cookbook blog as well.

You have to log in to edit it, so here is the info:
Go to: http://www.mapme.com/ and click Sign In
Username: ESFPotluck
Password: eatingsanfrancisco
Click "1 Map" under the My Maps heading, and get to gettin'.


Download: KML RSS | Create your own travel map on MapMe.com

Would you like to Supersize?

"Oh, good sir, would I ever" may have been response in the good old days, at least if those golden, crispy, salty Micky D's fries were involved. Seemingly, things have changed. By no means was I ever a fast food junkie at any point in my lifetime, including the 7 or 8 years of that were spent in the dirty south (by this I mean Florida, which really isn't what one would call the dirty south, but it gives me a little more character to say so, doesn't it? - plus, regardless, people do eat insane amounts of fast food down there). However, when I was a kid I waited patiently, and sometimes not so patiently, for those mornings my mom ran out of time for cooking breakfast, and I would get my beloved, steaming sausage mcmuffin en route to school. According to vague memories, and my mother, that was all I wanted. Ever. Dependent on the toy of the month, I would usually forgo the venerable happy meal for that mcmuffin (the picture is inaccurate - I don't think they make my precious anymore). Just me, my muffin, and my strangely geometrical patty-o'-smooshed-beef-parts, come hell or high water. As I grew older, my tastes "matured", if you will. Upon moving to quaint little Laguna Beach, Calif. at 13, I lost immediate access to most fast food restaurants, and began developing an appreciation for the mom and pop restaurants (in retrospect, I realize there were two small, organic restaurants within 5 blocks of my home there, before which I had never experienced anything of the sort). Yet, still, there were the late-night, special excursions "over-the-hill" (our term for the dreaded in-land - a whole 15 minutes off the coast) with friends to In 'n' Out Burger. One Cheeseburger (or grilled cheese during my vegetarian bout), an order of well-done fries, and a vanilla shake to dip them in, and I was set for a month or two more sans greasy indulgence. The once or twice a year that I ever went to McDonald's (usually a sneaky trip inspired by my mother's southern junk food cravings, behind my stepdad's back), there was only one thing I ordered: Filet o' Fish Sandwich. I detect your cringing, but I assure you - if ever there was a time not to knock it 'til you try it, this is it. Now that I have provided you with the anthology of my rare moments of fast-foodian epicureanism (triple word score), I can get to the point. Throughout my life, I have considered myself healthy for the simple reason that I've avoided fast food to the extent that I ate it, at the very most, once a month. Living in San Francisco, that frequency has decreased even moreso. Sure, I have my frozen dinner, greasy Mexican food, I need a god-foresaken pint of ice cream moments, but overall, I really just like healthy food better. Or so I thought....

Enter Michael Pollan and his extensively researched "The Omnivore's Dilemma", the source of my dietary despair for the past two weeks. He, representing all of mankind and its conflicting blissful ignorance and passionate self-concern, is part of my story of a deliciously twisted love triangle. The other two parties are Zazie and McDonalds, both residing in the Haight-Ashbury/Cole Valley areas of San Francisco. These two represent two alimentary choices or directions, not the same, but not completely different either. Let me first explain the relevance of this triangle with the first paragraph: In the past two or three weeks, a time I'll remember being nose deep in Pollan's book, I have been struggling more than ever in my life with the phrase "you are what you eat". Specifically, on a recent outing to In 'n' Out, I could not bring myself to order anything made with beef without knowing where it came from. On recent trips to grocery stores, I have walked out empty-handed, dazed, bewildered, wondering what the hell I had even been looking at while wandering the aisles. Why Michael, why? A large hand reaches from the heavens, turns another page in my book, and I see why. From "The Omnivore's Dilemma" I have learned, well, a lot about corn - which before, I thought was just...corn. After reading Pollan's descriptive analysis of the contents composing the contents composing the contents of the grocery store, i was intrigued. Reading further, I learned that corn's roots go deeper than unnaturally fertilized soil. Life. Is. Corn. This is something I had never once thought about before I was told to. Now, all I can think about is the perverse and incestuous relationship corn has with the life cycle of everything I see. This may sound dramatic, and I certaintly will say that I am fresh off the Michael Pollan boat and haven't quite gotten my land legs, however I think this reaction is appropriate when confronted with reasonable arguments against the way I have been nurishing my body for the past 21 years. What have I been eating, and what kind of walking corn hybrid have I become? I know these frantic and dramatic questions will subside, but I'm not sure my concern will.

On our final ESF outing, we visited the Haigh and Cole Valley neighborhoods, starting with dinner at Zazie, and finishing with some matching desserts at the ever-fascinating McDonald's on Haight Street. While there is better and worse food than Zazie and McDonald's, respectively, over the span of one entire meal, we probably traveled as far as one can imagine from one end of the spectrum to the other. Zazie is a small, quaint restaurant, with a simple, gourmet menu and wine list. We were there around 6, so natural lighting was provided by large skylights. The menu boasted that it sold beef from cows that lived locally on the coast and had a pleasant life "with an ocean view", and the menu items are changed to account for seasonal fruits and vegetables in the area. The food was amazing, and the service equally so. I couldn't help noticing that Kelli's pasta de printemps actually had flower petals scattered across the dish. Can't feel more natural than while you're eating that. Fresh was the most prominent word to describe our meal there, and even after reading most of Pollan's book, I don't think any of us were too worried about our orders. Then, we made the trek to the golden arches of Haight Street. Outside, young wanderers and old homeless men loitered in the parking lot and at the bus stop, and we all stepped into the sterile lights of McDonald's, our fin de la nuit.