Babbling Blueberry

Wakes up bright in a cake made of strawberry?
Livin right in a cake made of strawberry?
Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t ya know.

And me too!

I love Strawberry Shortcake!  The original Strawberry Shortcake, not the current tarted up version.  I think that I like thinking of people (and myself) as fruits and fruity desserts! 

I went with a fruity and fun crew to pick our own strawberries last weekend at Swanton Berry Farms near Santa Cruz.

We had a lot of fun picking strawberries.  Exhibit A:

And we also snuck in a few bites to keep ourselves full of energy.  And to do some quality control to make sure we were picking the best strawberries.  Exhibit B:

And the picking fun was enhanced by a little competition.  Exhibit C:

In addition to the informal competition, we had three official contests (photos from top -> bottom) biggest strawberry, ugliest strawberry, and best strawberry.  The winner of each category got to keep (and pay for!) all the entries in that category.

Which ones would you have voted for?

It’s time for me to brag a little… I won the best strawberry category!  Can you tell which one it is?  Although, I did pick at least twice as many strawberries as other people.  But I also was pretty stringent with only picking the very best ones.  So my “best strawberry” was really the best of the best, with a lot of bests.

We also rewarded ourselves after all of our hard work!  “White velvet” cupcakes with white chocolate chips and whipped cream with a little bit of strawberry jam to stabilize it.

And the yumminess didn’t stop there.  Here’s a run-down of the strawberry feasting that I’ve been doing:

• oatmeal (stone cut) with brown sugar, Straus milk, and strawberries
• strawberry shortcake!  Christina aka Plum Puddin’ shared some shortcake that she made.  Yummy!)
• sesame bagel with cream cheese and… strawberries.  A better bagel would have improved this greatly, but what can you do when you haven’t moved back to NY yet?  The bagel matters less when you’ve got yummy strawberries.
• strawberry lime ice cream!  This is my new favorite flavor of ice cream.  I made a double batch because I knew that it would be yummy and one batch wouldn’t be enough.  To get the lime flavor, I steeped the lime zest in the milk/cream and macerated the strawberries in lime juice.
• strawberry sorbet
• just plain strawberries.  Ha, “just” strawberries.  “Just” the most delicious and lovingly picked strawberries ever!
• brownies with whipped cream and strawberries

The strawberries would have also made great smoothies and milk shakes.  And Mark aka Huckleberry Pie and I love getting donuts and slicing them in half and putting sliced strawberries inside and eating it like a sweet sandwich.  Tim aka Philbert Wormly III (sorry, the Strawberry shortcake world is like the inverse of the Smurfs world with very few male characters and mostly female characters, so I had to resort to using the worm) says that he’s going to make strawberry milk (milk blended with strawberries and maybe a little sugar).  That sounds really yummy too!

My fruity friends, it sounds like we’re going to have to go pick more strawberries!

Games and chores in a cake made of strawberry?
Strawberry Shortcake, wouldn’t ya know.

Not Tuan and An’s cat.  Penne pasta.  The sauce was actually the yummiest part.  Butter, garlic, morels, milk, flour for thickening, cherries, and a little manchego cheese.  We mopped it all up!  I love how the sauce turned purple.  Mmmmm, so delicious.  Morels are magic.

I also wound up making strawberry jam out of those frozen strawberries.  And ate a lot of PBJ sandwiches.  As I’m getting older, it’s good to have opportunities to make you feel young again!

I love Mark and Joshua and Katee on SYTYCD.  They make me smile.  And laugh.  And I love their dancing.

Afghan bread - bolani - and spreads from the Alemany farmers’ market (and you can see the pomelos in the background).  We froze one bread for him to take back to Boston.  I hope it went through okay.

Oatmeal (steel cut) with peaches and Straus (yummy!) milk.  Whole milk!

Gary is now a Burma Superstar!

And finally, he finished off a few scoops of Bi-Rite ice cream. Gary’s showing how sad he is that the ice cream is gone.

Those were all the yummy things.  We also had an adventure with strawberries.  Gary doesn’t like berries, but I thought that maybe eating a strawberry fresh from California instead of nasty East Coast berries could change his mind.  But he’s more stubborn with berries than he is with oatmeal and mangos and peaches and flossing.  I sliced a bunch of strawberries and picked the most delicious one for him to try.  These weren’t the best strawberries I’ve ever had, but they were up there.  This is how much he enjoyed it:

You should appreciate my honesty.  I could have posted a photo like this one and then reported how Gary now loves strawberries:

But he’s pretty sharp and he probably would have found out about my scam, if I had attempted it.

Thanks for visiting and keeping me on my toes!

I went to Pagolac (Yelp, Menupages) in the Tenderloin last night with a fun crew of dinner eaters.  We were in San Francisco, but throughout the whole dining experience, I kept having all these flashbacks to being in Vietnam.  It was an unusually warm night for San Francisco, so that helped.  The rest of the effect is probably from the comfortable, unpretentious atmosphere inside and from the great food.  One result of all this good Vietnam food and the Vietnamness was that I had this flash of worry when one dessert came with ice: “Oh no, we forgot to ask for no ice!  We can’t eat this.” While this is a common thought when traveling in places like SE Asia, I don’t usually have that instinctive reaction in the U.S.  (I should note that this reaction wasn’t because the place looked unsanitary… I think it was because I felt like I was away from home.)  Also, when passing through the tiny, cramped kitchen in the back, because it was extra hot back there, I felt like I was a kitchen in Taiwan or Vietnam or another hot Asian country.

More about the food:  pretty much everything was great.  I especially liked the imperial rolls (with taro inside!).  There was also a really interesting noodle (fat rice noodles) dish with dried shredded pork, coconut milk, and other toppings.  Anything wrapped up in rice paper with noodles, herbs and greens, and fish sauce (assembled ourselves) was great.  The imperial rolls were really yummy eaten this way as was a shrimp ball wrapped around sugar cane.  Such a symbiotic relationship with the sugar cane and the shrimp - both components come out way tastier when cooked together.  (You’re supposed to chew the sugar cane to get the juice out rather than chew to swallow.  But if you’d like a little bit more fiber in your life, it can be eaten, as we all witnessed last night.  Mark, thanks for the demo!)  The best dessert we had was this rice pudding and taro dessert - it also had coconut milk.  It was so warm and pleasant and comforting and yummy!

I’d recommend staying away from the ice cream because while it was flavorful, the texture wasn’t great.  There are way more yummy things to eat at Pagolac so there’s no need to order the ice cream, in my opinion.

I haven’t reviewed the dishes and pottery of a restaurant in a while, probably because I haven’t seen anything memorable.  But Pagolac had some great pieces.  They had this one black bowl with pale yellow flowers carved to look like they were scattered on the inside of the bowl - really pretty.  And they had this four-sided teapot with an amazing glaze job - a tenmoku-like (black/copper/red) top, a narrow yellow band, and most of the base was blue.  The different glazes all flowed together and it was very fiery and organic at the same time.

Happy travels!

Chinese-style pancakes with squash

These aren’t like scallion pancakes that require you to make a flour-water dough and then roll the dough out and then roll it up to roll it out again. Lots of rolling. That’s how you get the layers. If I make that sometime, I’ll write a post about it w/ photos.

But we’re not talking about those kinds of pancakes. These are just eggs, flour, water, salt, white pepper. I don’t really measure anything - I just play with the ratios until I get a consistency that I like, that is a little runnier than a typical American pancake batter.  I threw in some grated white zucchini (I first salted it, let it sit, and then squeezed excess water out - it helps me control the moisture in the final batter). You can also use scallions, carrots, and other things that grate easily and that cook pretty fast. Then you just cook them up like American pancakes.

They come out really soft and tender, with crispy edges.

I also made a dipping sauce - soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, red pepper flakes, sugar.

Our fridge is too cold (maybe that’s related to the ant story). So we had some strawberries that got frozen. Any suggestions for what I can do with them? Jam? Sauce? Something else?

Don’t worry, Simona. I’ll eventually get to six. It just takes a long time for me to think of them.

This one is about the stones in my hands. Let’s assume that you believe me. Then you might be wondering, “How did I discover these?”

My sister did this program at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa when she was in high school. There, she learned this little trick to check the doneness of meat. If you touch the tip of your thumb to the tip of your index finger gently, and then use your other hand to press against the fleshy part at the base of your thumb. That’s what a rare piece of meat feels like when you press against it. Medium rare = thumb to middle finger. Medium well = thumb to ring finger. Well done = thumb to pinky.

It’s a good thing that I don’t cook very much meat! It turns out this doesn’t work with me. If I tried this trick to check my steak, I’d have really overdone steak! My pad of flesh at the base of my thumb feels like there’s a rock in there rather than feeling like a piece of meat, even with the thumb to the index finger. When my sister shared this trick with me, I compared her hands to mine - hers feel like meat. I’ve actually felt the hands of quite a few people and everyone (Except for Vince, my rock hand brother!) seems to have normal steak hands.

Vince and I tried to figure out why we were different and we’re not really sure. We both hold pencils the same way and it seems to be different from most other people. But we have the rocks in both of our hands even though we just write with one. Maybe it’s from playing piano and/or cello and/or doing ceramics and/or kneading lots of bread dough and/or doing foot reflexology for my mother. But I’m sure Vince didn’t do ALL those things.

Hey, LaMancha! They’re talking about LaMancha goats on So you think you can dance! Great show, by the way.

I love getting inspired by ingredients that I already have sitting around. It’s always fun to use up random bits and pieces of ingredients these dishes usually turn into my most yummy creations. But I usually do it with savory food. Tonight, I played with sweet ingredients and made an impromptu dessert.

I whisked together a couple of eggs, poured in some soy milk, added some sugar, vanilla, and freshly grated nutmeg. And then soaked some leftover sourdough bread that I had in this mixture. I diced some peaches and threw those in as well. I baked this up in some ramekins and wound up with a lovely peach bread pudding. I didn’t measure anything - it was all instinct and using up bits of what I had on hand, so there is no recipe to share. All I have to share is a photo and a little bit of bragging - the sweetness and flavors and textures came out just right!

Okay, so bread pudding isn’t that complicated to make. Plus, most of the ingredients were things that I have around all the time. So it’s not that special of a story. But it was still quick to make and really delicious to eat.

LaMancha the Localvore, Ben, and I visited Redwood Hill Farm and Creamery for a tour (free) of their goat farm and yogurt and cheese operation. LaMancha and Ben have been visiting a lot of farms around the Bay Area and in Northern California so they’re experts on this whole agriculture business. But for me, it was new and interesting. I figured I could share some of what I learned and provide some reviews of Redwood Hill Farm’s various products. I’ll put some photos in this blog entry, but if you want to see more photos, you can see the full album.

First, let’s talk about the yogurt to get it out of the way. The tour wasn’t very interesting and the yogurt wasn’t so good. Because it’s a liquid product, California requires that their whole process be automated in this huge system of pipes and vats and tanks. So it isn’t that interesting to see. Plus, I’ve already learned a bit about how to make yogurt from various people who make their own yogurt (Jen at SEP, Da - she makes DaDannon yogurt!, and Karin) and the larger scale process is pretty much the same. Plus, this tour leader, while knowledgeable, didn’t answer my questions as fully as I would have liked, and I didn’t want to be a pain for the rest of the tour group, so I let things go. For example, he said that goat milk comes out of the goat homogenized while cow’s milk is not and will separate if left standing. When I asked him why that was the case, he basically just defined what homogenization meant rather than really explain why. We decided amongst ourselves that it must be because the goats are more active than cows, jiggling and jumping all over the place to homogenize the milk in their udders. If it were any other reason, this tour guy would have said so, right?

Other than learning that goats homogenize their milk, the only other interesting thing that I learned on the yogurt tour was that they package the milk and cultures into the little cups, and then let the bacteria grow within each individual cup! It’s not going to change my life, but it’s interesting, to me, at least.

We had to wear hairnets and booties over our shoes to help them keep things sanitized, but I suspect that it was all a sham or an excuse to point out the long shelf-life of their yogurts. They weren’t making any yogurt that day and all the yogurt was enclosed within steel pipes and tanks. So what were the booties and hairnets protecting? They weren’t really making cheese that day either, but that portion of the tour was much better because of their head cheese maker doing a good job talking about cheese and answering questions. That’s head (cheese maker) not (head cheese) maker.

Before I get to the cheese, a quick review of the yogurt. They add tapioca and pectin to thicken the yogurt. Boo. The flavor is pretty good, but I didn’t enjoy the texture and I wish they wouldn’t put tapioca and pectin in it.

The cheese maker was the exact opposite of the yogurt guy in how much information she provided and it was great. It would have been slightly improved if she had described the different types of cheese and how the final product looks and tastes before she described how each kind is made, but I think I put together the pieces eventually. It looks like a really fun job. She tweaks various parameters relating to proteins (casein in the milk and rennet - from baby cow stomaches! - that’s added), fat, squeezing the whey, shaping, different aging conditions. And she takes plays with various microorganisms - bacteria that produce lactic acid, yeast, mold. She says that she has a number of small experiments running to tweak and optimize the cheeses that they produce, and to develop new ones. Seems like a really fun job. In case anyone is wondering what it takes to get a fun job like this, she did her undergraduate work at Davis in animal science and dairy something or other, and then she did a masters degree in microbiology. And then she studied with some cheese makers in Europe, maybe France. Plus, I’m sure she has a ton of other qualities that help, but those are the basics.

So on to what I think of their cheeses! I won’t really cover the information that’s already on their website, so go there if you want more information. I’ll just share what I think is the most interesting and/or relevant.

Gravenstein Gold - This would have been LaMancha’s nickname had I not decided to use the breed of goat with the funny ears. Based on what I’ve seen online, this is a type of cheese that was developed at Redwood HIlls Creamery and there’s way more information at this other blog. To summarize, they wash the cheese with cider from Gravenstein apples and that’s what makes it yellow. This cheese is aged so it’s firm and got a good stink. But only mildly stinky. And, it really is a good stink. I don’t have a good vocabulary to describe the stink of cheese, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s enjoyable and try some yourself.

Camellia - This one is a soft one, very much like Camembert in texture and flavor and visually. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably made with the same process as camembert but with goat milk instead of cow milk. CAMEmbert? CAMEllia? They say this cheese is named after one of their favorite does, but it sounds like it’s also named after camembert.

Bucheret - This cheese has a texture is halfway between Camembert and feta, but flavor is more like Camembert.

Crottin - This one was quite similar to Bucheret and I can’t really do a good job describing the difference in their textures and flavors without both in front of me. I recall the difference in how they were made being that in one, the salt is mixed into the curd mixture before it’s added to the mold (to shape it, not mold like what grows on the cheese) and with the other, the salt is sprinkled on to the ends of the mold and it’s allowed to dissolve into the cheese. I think the former is Crottin and the latter is Bucheret.

They also have feta and chevre. These are pretty good, but there’s nothing interesting to say about them.

We wound up buying some chevre, Bucheret, and some of the Gravenstein Gold. I had a good dinner with some sour dough bread, these three cheeses, and some Rainier cherries! I would have liked to buy goat milk directly, probably to make ice cream, but maybe another time and another creamery.

Here’s one last bit of interesting information that I learned from the whole goat tour: Goats are seasonal and produce milk with highest fat and protein content in spring, and fall’s a close second. So goat cheese is best during those times.

We also stopped by Screamin’ Mimi’s in Sebastopol for ice cream. I was a little concerned when we walked in and it looked and smelled very much like a Ben and Jerry’s store. And I was a little disappointed in their flavors (I’ve been spoiled by Bi-Rite Creamery), but they still had a good selection and things were very tasty. LaMancha and Ben got lemon poppy and ginger, and I got black walnut and cassis sorbet. The lemon poppy was nice and bright, maybe a little too sweet and not tangy enough. The ginger good, but I would have preferred it to be more sharp and spicy Black walnut was good but not spectacular. The cassis sorbet was really nice with a full and bright flavor. The texture for everything was pretty good but I would have preferred it to be a little bit more custardy and chewy (which would be a direct result of custardiness). The best part of this place is that they sell you the ice cream by weight so you can get what you want to eat and what you want to pay for. My guess is that the bump up the price a little in exchange for the customization, but that’s okay, I think. It was a fun place to stop if you’re in Sebastopol, but there’s no need to go out of your way to come here. Bi-Rite kicks Screamin’ Mimi’s butt! And it’s much closer to where I live.

We had a few other stops up north, but this post is long enough and I’ve already covered the parts that are most worth writing about. See, I’m using these awkward phrases. That means it’s time to end now.

Last night, I went to a Pakistani/Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin that blew me away in how delicious it was - I haven’t been blown away by Indian/Pakistani food in a long time - there are many good places in San Francisco, but no one stood out from the rest of the pack.  It’s my new and clear favorite Indian/Pakistani restaurant!

The best dish was an eggplant curry dish. Eggplant by itself is magic, but in this dish, it was elevated beyond magical - to godliness and divinity. There’s also this hard to find (according to our C Facilitator, which, in this case, stands for curry facilitator) fish dish that looks like it’s cooked in the tandoor oven. (Is saying “tandoor oven” like saying “The El Camino”?) Others in the group thought this was the best dish, and it is quite good, but it was not even at the same level as the eggplant dish. Some of my companions think that Shalimar, a neighbor to this place, has better naan, but I respectfully disagree. The flavor of the dough was much better, almost sweeter. And the texture was better - chewy but very light at the same time. And there was a good balance of thin crusty parts and thicker, but not too thick parts. And they were very generous with the butter/ghee.

I haven’t revealed the name yet because that’s the best part. No, the eggplant was the best part. This is maybe second place. Lahore, pronounced “La whore.” Full name is actually Lahore Karahi. This extends the fun beyond dinner, both before an after… “I have a craving for Lahore.” After sitting in the fragrant atmosphere of the restaurant during your leisurely meal… “I smell like Lahore.” And so on.

They gave us some kulfi to end our meal. I’m not sure if they do this for everyone or if it was because of our C Facilitator, but it was a nice touch.

If I’ve ever recommended an Indian and/or Pakistani place to you in the past, scratch that. Just go to Lahore.

I’d like to buy a cherry.

If you’re trying to plan for meals that use local and in season produce, it helps to have an idea of what’s in season in your area. But I know I’ve lost touch with my farming roots (what farming roots, you ask? I’m sure I have some ancestors at some point who were involved in farming) and I don’t have a complete picture of how things grow and when they’re ready. But I’m getting better with the help of the SF Bay Area’s local foods wheel. It’s a literal wheel made from cardstock and you can spin the wheel to figure out what’s in season at any point in the year. I love mine and it’s worth the investment of $12 or so, I think. It also makes a great gift. I’m actually planning to give mine to someone when I leave the Bay Area (don’t worry, I’m keeping mine nice and pristine). I haven’t decided who I’ll give it to just yet, but if you’re interested, let me know! Someone should enjoy it when I’m living far from California’s bountiful and fruitful and vegetableful harvests.

The website also has all the information listed as text, but the wheel is a lot more fun with nice hand-drawn pictures of the different foods. And with the text version, it’s not easy to see which foods are in season at a given time during the year. The wheel is good for inspiration when I’m planning a menu or before I go shopping or to the farmers market.

For those of you outside of the Bay Area, there’s also Epicurious’ map. But it’s not as complete as the local foods wheel - California only has 9 things listed as being in season during May! But it’ll do until there are wheels are invented for everyone!