#136 | Have It Your Way, Or Not
🌶 You Want the Spice, 🎲 You Roll the Dice
Hello!
BAY LEAVES
I watched Mommy Cook Though I cooked With Grandmother With Grandmother I learned To pluck chickens Peel carrots Turn chittlins inside out Scrub pig feet With Mommy I watched leftovers for stew Or vegetable soup Great northern beans Mixed collards turnips and mustard greens Garlic cloves Bay Leaves Very beautifully green Stiff so fresh With just a pinch of salt Not everything together All the time but all the time Keeping everything I make my own Frontier soup in a crock pot I make my own ice cream with a pinch of salt And everything else With garlic But fresh Bay Leaves Are only for very special Ox Tails
—Nikki Giovanni, Poetry Magazine
Hey there - I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to Eat.Drink.Think., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
👉 ICYMI The most clicked link from our last newsletter was The 25 Best San Francisco Restaurants in SF Right Now from the NYT. Prik Hom, a Thai restaurant on Geary in the Richmond was included in the list. They are now fully booked until the end of the year!
🚙 How America Dines In: Uber Eats reveals the 10 most popular delivery requests in the US. Uber Newsroom
No onions
Dressing on the side
Ranch
Extra soy sauce
Spicy
Sauce on the side
No lettuce
No jalapenos
Extra gravy
No slaw
Support San Francisco’s Cookbook Authors! Order their cookbooks today for yourself 😉 and holiday gift-giving 🎁. We’ll be featuring recipes from their books in our upcoming magazine issue. Subscribe here to get your copy!
Italy by Ingredient: Artisanal Foods / Modern Recipes, by Viola Buitoni, chef instructor and food writer.
Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California, by Sylvan Brackett, chef and owner of Izakaya Rintaro, and Jessica Battilana.
Scandinavian from Scratch: A Love Letter to the Baking of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, by Nichole Accettola, chef and owner of Kantine.
Crisp Edges & Soft Noodles: Wow! Clare de Boer’s (King, NY) zucchini lasagna!
🇺🇦 When Your Hometown is a War Zone: Anna Voloshyna, author of Budmo! Recipes from a Ukrainian Kitchen (and Edible SF contributor), recently returned from a 24-day trip to Ukraine where she researched recipes for her next book (working title is Preserving Ukraine), drove an ambulance full of medical supplies for soldiers and civilians from Amsterdam to Lviv and cooked a meal for Ukrainian soldiers. Stained Page News
Bot Bowls To Go: Kristen Hawley on Chipotle’s burrito bowl-making bot, Sweet Green’s salad bowl assembling robots, and billionaire investor Marc Andreesen’s techno-optimism fantasy that preaches “Trust in tech, above all else. It’ll save the world, and you’re either for it or you’re against it.” Expedite
🎃 Trick or Treat: A savoury pumpkin pie with cheese and herbs from Anna Jones.
🔪 Dull or Wickedly Sharp? How sharp are your knives? A sharpness chart.
The Future of Salmon: Melissa Clark says land-based farming is the future of salmon aquaculture in America. Considering the sad state of salmon populations on the West Coast, she may be right. NYT
The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat: China has launched a vast armada of fishing vessels across the globe. Besides literally plundering the sea, the human cost and labor abuses are an open secret. “You are slaves to work anytime and anywhere.” The Outlaw Ocean
Is That a 🦀 in Your Trunk? Poachers are using ride-share services as getaway cars to escape with their illegally caught (out of season) Dungeness crab from beaches south of San Francisco. Parking a car near the beach in the middle of the night could draw the attention of state wildlife officials, so poachers are dialing up ride-share cars to get in and get out without being caught. Until now. SF Chronicle
Meanwhile: The commercial Dungeness crab season opener has been delayed until December 1 to protect humpback whales migrating up the coast from potentially getting tangled in the crab trap ropes. But, if you’ve got waders and a rod and reel, the recreational fishing season will open on November 4. See you at Ocean Beach!
🍝 Solid advice! But cooks are freaking out in the comments. ATK
An Even Better Way to Cook Mushrooms! Back in April, we posted Cook's Illustrated Editor-in-Chief, Dan Souza's take on the science behind why you should cook mushrooms in water first before sauteing them. Lucas Sin goes one better with his method by boiling the mushrooms and slowly reducing the liquid, before searing them off by adding oil. Food52
The Customer is Always Sometimes Right Wrong: Anthony Strong’s (chef and owner of Pasta Supply Co. on Clement St.) editorial in the New York Times on how he approaches running a restaurant after years of success/failures set the comments section on 🔥 revealing what restaurateurs surely already know; that there’s a whole swath of diners out there that are a nothing but a bunch of entitled whiners demanding to be served. As Strong notes, “Admittedly, not everyone is into how we do things. We’ve had … incidents.” NYT
Have it Your Way: A new series based on a popular and cozy Izakaya in Tokyo that’s open from midnight to 7 a.m., where the chef makes whatever a customer wants and “patrons find simple yet profound connections with one another based on the shared love of a particular dish.” Netflix
Or Not: Bar Martha, also in Tokyo, where the customer isn’t always right. The Guardian
🍷 Broc Cellars in Berkeley and the Drops of God Connect: A cameo in Drops of God Mariage, the sequel to the Japanese manga comic Drops of God, which was also the inspiration for the eight-episode series on Apple TV (mentioned in our last newsletter), is the surprising reason that the majority of the Vine Starr Zinfandel that Broc produces goes to Japan. The storyline in the manga includes a scene where the sommelier at a small izakaya is tasked with selecting a wine to pair with a spicy Sichuan pork dish, and he uncorks a bottle of the Vine Starr Zin. Kanpai! KQED Food
Udon, Sushi, Matcha, and More: Stonestown Mall has become a mini Japantown. SF Standard
🇯🇵 Attention Donabe Afficiandos: Per our friends at Bernal Cutlery, the Chinese government has apparently purchased the world’s largest petalite mine in Zimbabwe and will begin exporting all of the petalite mined there to China to corner the market on electric vehicle production. Petalite also contains lithium, which is necessary to make batteries for electric vehicles, and petalite is also the critical ingredient in donabe construction that gives the unique ceramic cookware its exceptional heat shock resistance and allows it to be exposed to direct flame. Due to the ongoing scarcity of petalite on the open market, prices for Donabe cookware will increase dramatically, so get yours now!
🤮 You Want the Spice, You Roll the Dice: An estimated 46 million Americans are sickened by food-borne illnesses every year. Who better to skewer the FDA for their inability to prevent it than John Oliver? Last Week Tonight
On Repeat This Week: A little Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach in the middle of the forest should bring down your stress level after a hellish week filled with awful news stories.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
—Bruce
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“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
—Gary Snyder