Santa Cruz Food Crawl

Let's assume that the safest method of defining a place you have visited is your own experience. That way you don't have to factor in what other people like, because that's just a waste of time, unless they like the same things you do.

When it comes to food, I know what I like, so writing about the dining experiences we had in Santa Cruz seems like a good method for recording of our recent trip. I already wrote about seeing otters and a dolphin, so now it is time for the gastronomic highlights, which were plenty.

Our first night, we went to Seabright Avenue, which is clearly a haven of local dining: pizza, Italian, a breakfast-and-lunch diner, a taqueria, a bar, a coffee shop and a brewery all within a block of quiet residential neighborhoods. We went to Engfer Pizza Works, which was quite popular. Wood-fired pizzas baked in a tall brick oven, the embers and coals flaring a brilliant red that made your mouth water. The tables are snagged quickly, so you need to be quick. We bought two pints and waited at the bar until someone vacated a table, and I swooped like a vulture to stake it out.

The two personal-sized pizzas were excellent, and the atmosphere was convivial. There was a ping-pong table, a refrigerator of ice cream treats that you selected yourself and paid for on the way out, and the inimitable sense that this was a place for locals, not tourists.

The local vibe continued the next morning, when we went to Linda's Seabreeze Cafe for breakfast, right across the street from Engfer. The diners were of all ages, genders, locals versus vacationers, etc. There was a short wait, but a coffee cart was provided around the side of the building, where you could pour your own coffee in a mug to drink while you waited.

The cinnamon rolls were indescribably good. Therefore, I won't try to describe them. But I really, really liked them. And the orange walnut pancakes had a moist, zesty test that made me happy. Orange juice, coffee, and a side of scrambled eggs made for the perfect vacation breakfast. You really have to stretch to ruin that sort of breakfast. Linda's Seabreeze Cafe did not stretch to do so. They were friendly, courteous, and warm, the perfect breakfast spot.

That evening, we found ourselves on the main drag of Santa Cruz' downtown, looking for dinner. We wandered upstairs to Rosie McCann's Irish Pub, because fish and chips and beer were calling me with their irresistible siren's call. The dining room was airy with a high roof, the evening sunlight dappling the walls and reflecting off the red paint. The wooden floor and tables felt very publike, which is, of course, as it should be, and if you don't know what I'm trying to evoke when I describe it as publike, then you haven't been to enough pubs. There were sepia-photographs on the walls that seemed to give the impression that the place had been around for decades, but it had actually been opened in 1995, which made me wonder if it could be actually genuine. The Irish Pub culture just seems so un-1995.

Our last day in Santa Cruz, Sunday morning, we drove south to Capitola to take brunch at Zelda's. We were lucky to avoid a long Father's Day Brunch wait, and got a table on the deck, overlooking a long, sandy beach leading down to Monterey Bay, the sun sparkling on the blue, calm water, seaweed a golden brown. I had a waffle with fresh strawberries, maple syrup and whipped cream, along with orange juice and coffee. To cap it off, we bought a paper and sat on a bench overlooking the water. It was very soothing.

All in all, the beauty of the weekend could be found on the plate as much as anywhere. Santa Cruz is full of these delights. If you have been there, at what other places do you like to eat?

Feeling European On 18th Street

Sunday afternoon, I concede that Marina has a point and that I shouldn't stay inside all day to watch the World Cup in one uninterrupted string. I should go out for a bit to get some fresh air, and then retreat to the cave to continue the soccerfest. We take the 14 bus down Mission Street, disembark at 18th Street, and wander towards Dolores Park, intent on sitting on the grass, absorbing some vitamin D, and reading.

Appropriately enough, we take a detour to a European afternoon. Or at least to my assumption of what a European afternoon would be like if it were spent at a sidewalk cafe.

It is a bit of a wait for a table at Pizzeria Delfina, but it is a wait well worth undergoing.

The row of tables in front of the restaurant are crowded together, and the sidewalk is always bustling with people going to and from the park, weaving past the people standing by the curb, waiting for their own chance at a table. The people watching is good enough that you don't even mind the friendly explorations of the neighboring puppy.

I'm wearing my summer fedora with a feather on it, and I'm sipping a glass of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, which is light, with a hint of watermelon. (How's that for wine criticism?) If that doesn't qualify me for European citizenship, I don't want to know what would.

We are served breadsticks that are thin enough to be breadtwigs, but which are well-seasoned and tasty. For a starter course, we share the Insalata Tricolore, a pleasant combination of three types of lettuce (radicchio, arugula, and something white whose name I can't recall) with shaved parmesan and a lemon and olive oil dressing. For the main course, we enjoy the margherita pizza that is a staple of all decent Italian places in this city, and this one is quite good. For dessert, I indulge in a Baba Rum cake in cherry sauce that is blissful.

Why is it that I have tended to eat at nice places only for dinner? Lunches are a highly underrated opportunity for eating out, I think. What are your favorite places for eating lunch?

Playing Chicken With A Drunken Goat

I bought Marina flowers tonight, mostly because I'm a nice guy. Mostly. That was the primary reason, a good 87% of the reason, in fact. The secondary, hidden, ultrasecret corollary reason was because I was about to cook again and I wanted her to be predisposed to a favorable review.

So. The first step was to choose the appetizer, cheese and crackers. I went with two cheeses I've tried before with success, a dill Havarti and Drunken Goat, discussed before in these pages (pixels? Screens?). As for the crackers, I saw a brand touted as the 'preferred cracker of wine enthusiasts.' As the premise of this blog makes clear, I can't claim the distinction of being a 'wine enthusiast,' but I am enthusiastic about wine, so I figured I would try these crackers to see if I too preferred them.



Preferred might be too strong a word. They were light and fluffy, with enough substance to support a hefty chunk of cheese, and I had no objection to them, but I think it would be stretching it to say I preferred them. Crackers aren't something in which I feel capable of developing a preference for one kind over another. They're crackers.

To go along with a dish of chicken and couscous, I decided to use my fancy rice cooker/vegetable steamer to steam some broccoli and asparagus. This cooker/steamer has been a marvelous help over the years. I bought it from my friends Peter and Roni when they emigrated to New Zealand--before they boomeranged back to Seattle--yes, wrong country, I know--and I have been using it regularly ever since, but only for cooking rice. Steaming the vegetables turned out well enough; they were tender, but they lacked a certain flavor, and Marina suggested that next time, I move the vegetables into the couscous before serving up to allow them to absorb that flavor.

The chicken I cooked much as I've cooked before, in olive oil in which I cook garlic and lemon. This time, I let the lemon stay in the olive oil for much longer, to allow the chicken to absorb more of the taste.



I can't say that the taste was different this time, but the chicken did seem juicier, for whatever reason. I placed the chicken on a bed of couscous again, with the steamed vegetables on the side.



And again, from closer up, because who doesn't like looking at cooked chicken from close range?



A light dinner, tasty, easy, healthy. What to do for dessert? Originally, I planned on fruit in light cream, but because I could not find any cream at the store, I chose, instead, plain non-fat fage, into which went whole blueberries and sliced strawberries. Fage is thicker than the yogurt I am used to, but overall, it was quite satisfying.



All in all, I was pleased with another meal prepared without relying on peanut butter or a microwave.

The Simple Things

I failed the other day. I went into a bookstore and did not buy a book, let alone the three or four I was impulsively planning on acquiring in the afterglow of a promotion and decent raise. Modern Times is a bright, friendly Valencia Street bookstore with a hip alternative vibe; you would think I could find something. But I realized I could not commit to wanting any of the books I looked at in the store, not without stretching my excitement level into the fictional realm. Yes, this does have something to do with food.

What I was feeling was this burgeoning desire to simplify things. This has also influenced my cooking choices in small ways. For instance, the recent salad of strawberries, red peppers, and spinach, when I found myself holding back from thinking of more items to throw in the mix.

Tonight, I wanted something for dessert, but I didn't want anything too sweet. It just didn't appeal to me. So I went with strawberries and cheese, and a glass of red wine. I thought of taking a picture, but because I was cooking just for me, I didn't think of it until afterwards. Oh well.

It was a good combination to cap off a light dinner consisting of a burrito from Taqueria Cancun and a salad.

But much as I went out a few days after Modern Times and bought four books at Books, Inc. at the Opera Plaza, I'm going to break open the pint of ice cream in the freezer now.

An Amateur's Adventures In Dining Out, Part II: Mission/Valencia

The problem with living in this city is the overabundance of restaurants that I could sample and write about. It's a burden.

Okay, so that statement sounds fatuous in light of the economy and issues with violence and homelessness, etc., but into each life, a little light-hearted writing must fall, because who wants to think about that negative stuff on a foggy Sunday morning, so let's just go with the premise that the big problem in this city is one of too many entrees, not enough time.

So, in that light, here are a few more of the restaurants I have enjoyed, a small slice of the whole picture of possible meals. This time, I am localizing the reviews to Mission and Valencia Streets, and even so, this can hardly be said to be a comprehensive review.

1) Speaking of slices, Valencia Street features the relatively new and brilliantly named Pi Bar. As one would expect, it opens every day at 3:14 p.m, featuring great pizzas with delicious ingredients. It features an array of interesting beers, which as we all know, is the key to a happy life. If you drink interesting beer, you must be an interesting person.

We have been to Pi Bar on a couple of occasions. Friday night was the first time it was too crowded for us to get a table right away, so we started at the broad wooden bar. There was a well-dressed man next to us who seemed to be a regular and who clearly recognized us as beer tourists, and in the grand tradition of San Franciscans, offered to let us taste his beer, that he particularly liked. (For all the complaints that San Franciscans can be rude to tourists, one of my early memories of a family trip to the city involved a bicyclist at Ghirardelli Square welcoming us to the city).

Pi Bar is convenient, just a few blocks down Valencia Street from our apartment, moderately well lit, with wooden floors and walls that hold and warm the light, giving it a cozy, neighborhood feel. You can sit at individual tables, along the bar, or at a communal table near the front window. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable about the beer available, and they make you feel welcome.

I recommend that you try it. Go later in the evening, because I like to eat earlier, and that would mean more space for me.

2) Puerto Alegre is a Mexican restaurant further down Valencia, and it has been consistently enjoyable, if consistently crowded. For me, the highlights have been the roasted prawns, the spicy hot chocolate, and the wandering Mexican musicians with their accordions.

I saw a review on Yelp that asked why locals didn't eat here if it was so good, being in the Mission and all. Well, I don't know, but I don't care. Maybe they know it gets crowded--the key, as with most SF restaurant outings, being to go early, as for many hip SF diners, it appears to be anathema to eat before 7:30 or 8. Maybe they are food vampires, I don't know, but the concept seems to be that the later you eat, the hipper you are, even if that means that you have to wait longer for a table.

3) Emmy's Spaghetti Shack is almost literally right around the corner for us, which gives us the sneaky advantage of being able to get there right when it opens at 5:30, which is crucial, because it fills up quickly, due to a combination of limited seating and insanely good cocktails, a cozy atmosphere, good wine, and a reliably strong menu, even if they have resisted our pleas to bring back the spicy prawn linguine dish that has haunted our dreams for nigh on two years.

The booths are my preference for seating as the tabletops are sparkly like Dorothy's ruby red slippers in the Wizard of Oz. Plus, booths are just fun and more relaxing than chairs in general.

It can get mildly loud when they have a DJ playing music, but it has never impeded conversation, and the desserts are as alluring as the apple was to Eve, even if eating a peanut butter cookie ice cream sandwich doesn't constitute the same symbolic rebellion against an offensively paternalistic power structure.

4) Further north on Mission Street is Specchio, an Italian place opened by the owner, Gino, after he closed another place in North Beach. Extensive wine selection, great pasta dishes, excellent desserts. The atmosphere is nice, with lamps above the tables conducive to creating pockets of solitude for conversation. We feel like regulars here, because we started going shortly after it opened.

The odd thing, though, is a feature that I've also seen at the restaurant Foreign Cinema and the bar Dalva's. Along the back wall, foreign movies are projected, but silently, just flashing images that can be distracting, because you have no idea what they are saying. Is this some avant-garde San Francisco tendency that I'm not familiar with?

In other news, I think I've talked Marina into posting on this blog occasionally, so stay tuned for her possible debut.

Friday Night Pasta Rules

If there is a good food around which to assemble rules for ritual cooking, it would have to be pasta. First of all, I love pasta. Second of all, it's easy, so it makes an easy centerpiece to cooking-as-ritual. Pasta, salad, a bottle of cheap but reliable red wine--that's a recipe, so to speak, for a relaxed evening's bout of cookery.

Rules for cooking pasta:

1) Assemble key ingredients. If you have good ingredients, you can generally guess that you will do okay, especially when it comes to salad. Salad is hard to screw up, unless you set it on fire, which I do NOT recommend.

It is, I suppose, possible to over-salad a salad. In Trader Joe's this evening, I saw a box of strawberries near the produce, and I got inspired to include them in the meal. When it came to considering what to pair the strawberries with, though, I wasn't sure how much to throw in. Finally, I decided to err on the minimalist side, and bought a bag of baby spinach and a single red bell pepper. I was delighted with how this turned out. The pepper added a certain counterpoint to the sweetness of the strawberry, and when I took a bite of pepper and strawberry and spinach right before a sip of Yellow Tail Merlot, it was a surprise to find out how the salad affected the taste of the wine. It seemed to enhance the undertones of the wine in a way I can't really describe and do it full justice.



2) Wear fitting attire. In my case, this involves slacks, a t-shirt and my cooking fedora--which is my regular fedora, just worn while cooking--and pouring a glass of wine while looking out the window at Sutro Tower. This makes me feel delightfully bohemian without having to bother with the whole starving-artist reality.

3) Distract the audience. I cleverly made sure Marina would be hungry by suggesting a walk before dinner. In this way, it was almost eight o'clock before we ate, at which point we were both really hungry, which lent my cooking a little je ne sais quoi. Actually, that's not true. Je totally sais quoi. By eight o'clock, anything would taste good. Except sauerkraut. But that's why one doesn't cook sauerkraut in polite society.

4) Add protein. Trader Joe's chicken garlic sausage is perfect; easy to cook, flavorful, and productive of a rich, mouth-watering scent. I chopped it up in roughly evenly sized ovals and fried them in a pan with olive oil, and when the sausage was almost done, I added the spaghetti sauce. I'm a fan of mixing sauces and sausage and pasta in the frying pan these days, because the pasta seems to absorb the taste.



All in all, pasta is always a satisfying way to cook a healthy meal at the end of the week. Fruits and vegetables, protein, carbohydrates in the pasta--but not too much of them. The garlic basil linguine packets from Trader Joe's are the perfect size for two people, and allow you to focus as much on the sauce and the sausage as you do on the noodles.

This isn't the most complex pasta dish we've cooked. We've done the smoked salmon pasta dishes that I loved as a kid, throwing in some blanched asparagus for a hint of sophistication, the lemon zest for the weirdness factor. But the great thing about this meal is that it took about fifteen minutes to prepare from the time I started the salad to when I served up. And I think it was worth it.



What rituals do you enjoy with cooking? What's your favorite pasta dish, and why should I try it? And if it is so good, why haven't you invited me over to try it yet?

You Can't Make An Omelette Without Breaking A Few Eggs? Well, Duh.

In a city as gustatorially-inclined as San Francisco, you can find all sorts of complex options for breakfast, glazes of sugars and syrups and pastries, fresh fruits, complicated brunch buffets of cheeses and mimosas and sausages. I love all these options, though when I dine out, I gravitate towards any thing based on french toast or pancakes. Comfort food is perfect for breakfast, especially when one reads the paper or listens to NPR and hears all the bad news in the world, which is important, yes, but which isn't as much fun as eating something drenched in maple syrup. Sometimes the world just needs maple syrup.

But with all the options for tasty-yet pricy-breakfasts, it is sometimes easy to forget about simply scrambling some eggs at home. Eggs, bagels, coffee, orange juice, and the paper? Hard to beat that.

It occurs to me this morning that the expression "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" is essentially ridiculous, a bad metaphor. Eggs are intended to be broken. That's the whole reason for gathering eggs, at least until our economy collapses entirely and we revert to an egg-based currency. Therefore, breaking eggs is not a good metaphor for the value of sacrifice.

I had no idea that eggs were such a complicated topic, though, with all sorts of breeds producing different colored eggs of different sizes. We bought two dozen such eggs from a forester from Sonoma County last week, good organic eggs at a third of the price we have seen for eggs of similar quality on Cortland.



Other chicken-related facts and trivia we learned:

1) Roosters are intended to lead the hens to food, and to hurl themselves in the path of bobcats, for instance, like Leonidas and the 300 Spartans from the historical battle of Thermopylae--not the movie. Now there is a good egg-related example of sacrifice.

2) A friend of the forester's has a retirement home for chickens down by Santa Cruz. Brilliant.

Scrambling eggs is a fascinating process. I never really paid attention to it before, but it is kind of neat how the mixture of yolk and milk quickly coalesces into the fluffy piles of scrambled eggs we know and love once you pour it into a frying pan with melted butter. It is also fascinating how you can affect the color by the amount of milk you use and the type of egg.

Do you have any favorite tricks or additions to scrambled eggs? Do you prefer omelettes? Do you find it acceptable to cry over spilt milk?