Visions of Sugar Canes

I found myself yesterday with some egg-nog and bourbon lighting up my insides and a small kitchen mallet poised over a red and white striped holiday tradition. I was told by my fiancee and her sister that you can't be a man until you have smashed candy canes with a mallet. "Ha," I scoffed, "I'm plenty secure with my masculinity. Way too secure to fall for that line."

Moments later, I brought the mallet down with finesse, with artistry, and looked down to see . . . an intact candy cane. Seriously? I tried again, same result. You should make cars out of candy canes, because they would be indestructible. Wham wham wham, and I hammered with greater intensity, causing the cutting board to jump and spreading fragments of visions of sugar canes all across the counter top.

I tend to think it should not have taken me fifteen minutes to smash four candy canes, but oh well. Moving on. The candy canes went into a sugary frosting to be sandwiched between two small chocolate cookies. Totally made it all worth it.

The reason for this candy cane massacre was not because it was just another Saturday night. It was the annual Christmas cookie production for Marina and her sister and mother.

I love the three of them dearly, but I have to say that the motto of these cookie days seems to be "Hurry up and have a festive, relaxing, family cookie-baking, damn it." Yet somehow, it works! Especially when there is plenty of enhanced egg-nog.

Oh, I also got to say the line, "You put the fun in funnel." They pretended not to hear me, but they heard me, all right. Oh yes, they heard me.

(I would have loved to provide photos of the beautiful cookies and rice krispie treats, but I was busy letting Marina's nephew play Pac-Man on my iPhone--Boden, by the way, is the first kamikaze Pac-Man player I've ever met, determinedly running directly into each ghost, saying "Got him!" Distracting a young boy from the fact that he can't have cookies yet is definitely the reason why I have no photos of the finished product to offer; it certainly has nothing to do with me having finished my own tin of cookies already. Not at all.)

Items learned: candy canes are hardy; parchment paper is great for baking; chaos is a little boy who wants sugar; and Marina's mom has cunningly figured out how to let Marina and Valerie take over the kitchen while she stays out of the way. I adopted a similar strategy. I mean, I spent the time bonding with Boden, providing a very important source of male energy, by which I mean I knew how to play Boden-Monster and race around the backyard. Some would say that was the most important ingredient for the cookies we made. That, or the candy canes.

Or, you know, not.

In all sincerity, it was an absolutely fun weekend, and the cookies turned out wonderfully.

What are your favorite types of Christmas cookies or other holiday treats?

Firefish? Try Hire Fish!

On visiting Santa Cruz, you will come across the Municipal Wharf, a long platform sticking WAAAYYYY out into the water on wooden pilings, where sea lions lounge on the beams supporting the structure and you will find all sorts of souvenir shops, kayak tour groups, and a wide assortment of dining options, from seafood to Mexican to a wine bar to seafood.

The setting is sensational. You might be concerned, though, that the restaurants would trade quality of location for quality of food, figuring tourists would be too entranced by the memory of rides at the Boardwalk and views of pelicans and sea lions to notice what they were eating.

Nevertheless, I've always wanted to check out more of the dining options on the wharf. I've gone many times to Gilda's for breakfast, because on our visits, we always stayed at the Dream Inn, right next to the wharf, and Gilda's makes for an irresistible breakfast destination for someone like me who likes coffee cheap and plentiful and a side of pancakes with my pancakes. And of course, the view of the water is a delightful novelty.

Since we moved to Santa Cruz, I've also tried the takeout window at the Dolphin. Marina was out of town, and I wanted to do something other than my usual solitary dinners at home, so I walked to the wharf, and the Dolphin, whose name has always intrigued me, caught my eye. I ordered fish and chips and a beer to go, before I saw the signs on the garbage can that said no beer allowed. I must have misread it, or else no one really cares, because they handed me a can of Corona and a plastic cup. When I got the fish and chips, I had to eat and drink quickly, and not just because I wasn't sure I should be drinking a beer in public. As soon as I sat down at a picnic table, hiding the beer can within the plastic cup--yes, in retrospect, there was probably a better strategy--I felt like a celebrity stalked by paparazzi. That's right, I compared paparazzi to a swarm of raucous, greedy seagulls. Not fair, I know, because seagulls are perfectly innocent creatures. I apologize, seagulls. Still, I would prefer you didn't hassle me for my fish and chips.

So that marked two restaurants I had sampled. A week or so ago, Marina and I were walking towards the lighthouse along West Cliff Drive, and I suggested we walk to the wharf for dinner. I had seen an advertisement in the morning's paper advertising a Local's Special at the Firefish Grill. Lots of tempting menu options, particularly the chicken dishes.

When we arrived, we found a cozily-lit establishment, plenty of space between the tables. We had a good view of the water even from our table in the middle of the room. The server brought some menus that didn't seem to include the specials; when I mentioned the item in the paper, she said, "Oh, yes, the locals' specials," and brought the appropriate list, which means that I had successfully verified my Santa Cruz residential creds. Huzzah!

In the end, though, none of the locals' specials could tempt me after I saw the fish and chips, battered in Anchor Steam. I ordered the fish and chips to follow the sweet and mellow mojito, and to accompany the Anchor Steam-battered entree, I ordered . . . an Anchor Steam. And as an appetizer, we sampled some of the best garlic bread I've ever had, light and buttery, with just the right amount of crispiness.



The garlic bread whetted my appetite for the fish and chips, which were the best I can remember having in some time, not too greasy and flavorful, accompanied by a small portion of coleslaw and excellent fries.



So far, the Wharf is off to a great start. Gilda's is a favorite and I loved Firefish. The Dolphin I could maybe take or leave, and would probably try a new place first before going back. It's all about the fish and chips on the wharf for me. Well, that and breakfast.

Have you had amazing fish and chips experiences? If so, where? I need to know these things.

Pumpkins And Egg Nog And Bourbon, Oh My

The holidays are coming up, which means it is time to figure out all the wonderful things you can do with egg nog and alcohol. Last year, I cultivated the mixture of egg nog and brandy or bourbon, occasionally cutting the egg nog with a little non-fat milk, which served both to make the egg nog last longer, and also to make it a little healthier. I would also sprinkle some ground nutmeg on the top, and I would sometimes make a version of a Brandy Alexander--1 oz Brandy, 1 oz Brown Creme de Cacao or Kahlua, 1 oz Half and Half, and 1/4 tsp of nutmeg--substituting egg nog for the Half and Half.

This year, I've ramped it up a little with some pumpkin liqueur, a wonderful concoction that I did not know existed. Trust Marina's unerring eye for strange and wonderful new sideboard candidates.

The liqueur can be enjoyed alone, over ice or neat. When mixed with egg nog, brandy, and maybe a dash of organic cream, it adds a tasty spice to a gentle, sweet and full-bodied drink which is perfect for a nightcap on an chilly evening by the ocean.

What are your favorite liquid treats for this time of year, alcoholic or non?

To Bean Or Not To Bean, That Is The Question

Last night's dinner marked several firsts: the first dinner I've cooked in Santa Cruz that merits a blog; the first time I've cooked green beans; and the first time I've set off a smoke alarm. I would say they are all important milestones.

You would think that green beans would be easy to cook. And you would probably be right. But all the recipes I looked up on Epicurious were very complicated, seating the green beans in the midst of a bunch of other ingredients, and last night, I was too tired for ingredients. I just wanted to cook something healthy that was not pasta, so I made a run to the local New Leaf grocery store, which is essentially a Whole Foods, or, for those of you in Montana, a Good Food Store. At New Leaf, I bought a boneless, skinless chicken breast, and asked them to cut it in half (note to self: next time, be sure to ask the butcher to cut it in half horizontally; cutting in half the other way doesn't give any advantages in terms of making the breast thinner for faster cooking time). I also picked up half a pound of fresh green beans--okay, I don't know that it was half a pound, but who's going to check?

In other New Leaf notes, egg nog is now available, which is the first sign of the holidays. I'm currently on my second egg nog and bourbon of the evening. Okay, okay, so it's my third.

Google mentioned sauteeing green beans, so I decided to wing it. However, it did mention trimming the strings from the beans, so I set to doing so. That took a while. And then it took a while more. It took me so long, in fact, that I realized that cutting green beans belongs in a French movie, perhaps featuring Marion Cotillard and Gerard Depardieu, chopping green beans and drinking melancholy glasses of red wine and brooding philosophically. After I finished trimming the beans, the couscous and chicken breasts were starting to cook rapidly, so I chose a haphazard strategy of piling up all the beans and slicing at them at random, which worked surprisingly well, probably better than I deserved.

It was one of my more chaotic cooking experiments, and that says a lot. Here's the evidence of chaos:





Pretty chaotic, considering all I had the energy to do was throw instant couscous in a pan and cook chicken in olive oil with salt and pepper, and cook green beans in olive oil. So chaotic that the smoke from the chicken set off the smoke alarm, which was a first. I think that means I've earned my stripes as a cook now, right?

I reckon this hasn't happened before because our old stove at the SF apartment had built-in fans for ventilation, while the new stove does not. Next time, I will open windows first.

Somehow, some way, order appeared from chaos.





All in all, not my best effort. I put too much water in the couscous, which caused absorption problems, and I had to drain and fluff and do some remedial heating to bring it up to the right consistency. The chicken was tasty and tender on the inside, but was perhaps excessively crispy. Still, it wasn't bad for being exhausted.

But short of baking green beans into a casserole, does anyone have good, simple ideas for spicing up their preparation?

A Relocation Of My Hunger For Knowledge (Pun Intended)

So we have moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, which changes the venue for the blog, but not the overall purpose. There are eateries to try, meals to cook, and beers to drink (and the local market stocks Moose Drool, my Montana friends! This makes me very happy).

The big news is that our bungalow, two blocks from the ocean, comes with a yard and vegetable beds! In the months ahead, we will be plotting--so to speak--a strategy for what to plant and when. In the meantime, we inherited a few small, delicious, sweet tomatoes, and some vaguely yellow things which I am calling squash, for want of a more precise knowledge. Here are photos; could someone please confirm for me if these are squash, and if so, what kind?




And how does one cook a squash? I have vague notions that one slices and roasts or sautees it. Or one blends it up and magically converts it to soup or a stew. Anyone have any good recipes to try?

INTERLUDE IN THE NORMALLY SCHEDULED BLOG WHILE I COOK MAC AND CHEESE AND CHICKEN SAUSAGE FOR LUNCH: I just learned that I have tendency, when slicing chicken sausage, to pull the knife to the left. This means that when I am cutting four sausages at a time, if I want the sections to come out roughly even, I need to have the sausages furthest away from me lined up indented to the right compared to the others, which I argue is a great image to use when writing about food. I cook in paragraphs. Maybe that should be the new blog motto.

As far as our Santa Cruz dining goes, we've had some good experiences. Lots to talk about, but I'll start with the two places we've tried since we've been here that we had never tried before.

The Parish Publick House

You might not expect much from a pub located in a shopping center that includes, among other merchants, Panda Express, Chase, ACE Hardware, and Safeway. But let me just say that this is no ordinary shopping center. The Safeway is the most advanced and glamorous Safeway I can remember, with a huge wine selection and an olive bar. Let's just say it makes the Safeway on Mission Street in SF seem even more sketchy than it is, which is saying a lot.

The Parish is a Sharks bar, with lots of TVs for watching sports, particularly hockey. The decor is quite good, full of the dark lighting and dark wood paneling one would expect from an authentic pub, and featuring a pool table with red felt at the back. They also have an extremely strong beer selection, including Moose Drool, and they recommend pairings with their menu items. They are apparently famous for their shepherd's pie, and I have it on good authority that this dish is quite tasty. The salmon fish and chips are also thoroughly satisfying; if the onion rings are a bit too greasy, that can be forgiven. All in all, a good pub to have as the local pub.

Burger.

Sunday night, when The Parish was too crowded, we headed instead for the nearby and grammatically-interesting Burger.. See, already the extra period has thrown me off. It also leads to the grammatically-dubious quote on the website, "At Burger. ingredients matter."

You would think that a place so hip as to recklessly use extraneous punctuation would appeal only to the college students from UCSC, but there was a good cross-section of humanity on hand. Burger. also uses random celebrity mugshots instead of numbers; when we placed our orders, we got pictures of Mischa Barton and an unrecognizable dreadlocked guy whom we later learned was Tommy Lee. Clever, but like so many hip things, problematic when you think about it, because how are the servers supposed to see who you have from a distance?

It is definitely a popular establishment. We had to stake a claim to a single table and chair and send forays to the counter to order, until a couple nearby left and we were able to swoop like vultures on the additional seats. The place was lively, with big screens showing sports and a hefty beer selection that looked quite promising. They even offer beer-shakes, which seems good in theory but which I did not find appealing on the night.

As for beer, Marina tried a can of Fat Cat beer, but didn't like it much and passed it on to me. Clever name aside, I will probably not try this again, because it seems to be a hip version of Bud, Coors, Miller, etc. In other words, it tasted like mildly flavored water. We also shared a pint of Retribution beer, which was better, but a little too sweet for my taste. However, the Pink Burger that I ordered--a salmon burger with aioli and dill, was light and flavorful and satisfying, although the serving size of the burger and fries seemed slightly San Franciscan, which is to say, small for $9. Still, it was good enough that I would certainly go again.

Keeping Currant On The Philosophy Of Salad

I think what I like best about salad is the laissez-faire nature of its preparation. If you can eat it, you can put it in a salad. That pretty much sums up my perspective on salad.

That may be a bit simplistic. There are some things that don't belong in a salad, such as sawdust, or even worse, sauerkraut. Still, there is a lot of flexibility, and a salad is difficult to butcher, so to speak.

Nevertheless, my latest idea for a salad innovation was not attractive to Marina. In fact, it was so definitively NOT attractive to her that she left the country for a month in the hope that I would forget all about it.

I do not forget, however.

So last night, taking advantage of Marina's absence and resultant lack of veto power, I decided to combine crispy lettuce from a romaine heart, sliced radishes--which have become my favorite staple for salads due to their peppery kick--dried currants, and crumbled goat cheese.



I made just a small portion, a one serving size to go with the pasta and chicken sausage entree and a glass of Carmenere. As with most of my salads, I skipped any sort of dressing. A lot of people find this tendency of mine to be weird, but I would argue that salad nudists are people too, with a valid point of view.

The goat cheese had a heavy taste, slightly sour, but not excessively so, and it matched well with the sweetness of the currants and the bite of the radishes. I would call it a success.

What are the oddest combinations you have tried in a salad, and what were the results?

The Continuing Adventures of The Dining Out Amateur: Another Mission In The Mission

You might be surprised, but sometimes life gets a bit busy, too busy to check out new restaurants. Thus, the relative dearth of entries on this blog, particularly regarding new restaurants and my reaction to them. I even considered writing about eating pizza at Chuck E. Cheese in Sacramento for my future nephew-by-marriage's birthday, animatronic rodents and all. (Nephew-by-marriage seems awkward. Nephew-in-law? Bonus nephew? Mascot?)

This is not to say we haven't eaten. That's just not plausible. For one thing, even Chuck E. Cheese pizza can technically be considered food. But we have tended to rely on the standard choices recently, good as they are.

So yes, we've cooked, but we haven't dined out as much. But there are some days when enough is enough and you just have to get out and go to Rosamunde for gourmet sausage and delicious beer. And then when you find that Rosamunde is packed to the gills, you have to find a new place to eat.

La Traviata

We were on Mission Street, between the Bart Station at 24th Street and 25th Street, trying to decide where to eat. We talked about walking around to Valencia to Pi Bar, but we knew that might be crowded too. We settled on choosing between Italian and Mexican, and that seemed to present an obvious choice.

I've walked past La Traviata on Mission Street almost every day on my way home from work. Being a fan of Italian food--pasta and wine and garlic bread? Who, other than my crazy friend Jeff, wouldn't love it?--I've always been tempted by it. It has a small, modest entryway, a recessed alcove with a door oriented perpendicularly to the street, and a friendly, well-used wooden sign. It seemed a welcome prospect.

Or not. Yelp's review, which seemed favorable, assured us it was open at 5:30. The glowing red open sign was another good indication.

The locked door, however, was not so favorable. No signs in the window indicating closed for a private party. No sign of life when I tugged on the door. There was a small doorbell next to it. Maybe they wanted us to ring the doorbell, which seems paranoid. In any case, we decided to move on. If they didn't want our money, we didn't want their food.

I'm sure there was a reasonable explanation. But deny me Italian food and you've earned my enmity; there is so much good Italian food in this city, I feel like I have no reason to try La Traviata again.

So instead, we strolled down to 23rd and around the corner to the Velvet Cantina at Bartlett.

I had a couple doubts at first. The layout of the place, two separate, darkish rooms connected by a narrow hall, threatened to feel oppressive.

But two words: watermelon margaritas. Yeah. Words can't do justice.

The fish tacos were also quite satisfying, and I actually liked the rice and beans even more. It also seemed to avoid being too crowded; maybe because it was slightly off the beaten path. I guess writing about it could be risky, because now other people might be there when I want to go.

Yes, on that thought, I should tell you that I totally made up the Velvet Cantina. It doesn't actually exist. Forget I mentioned it.