Project Food Blog Entry #2: Just call me Miss Saigon Crepe......

Was it the weather?

It could, I suppose, have been the weather.

It's been unfairly hot and punishingly humid around the Valley all through September. Mosquitoes have been feasting on us, hair has been limp, eyeliner has been running.......but it all seems so very much more romantic if you close your eyes and imagine that instead of sweaty Phoenix you might be in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (once Saigon), clinging to the back of a motor scooter weaving its way through the humidity and the crowded streets, on your way to some fresh, streetside fare like phở.....or perhaps bánh xèo and chao tom?

It might also have been because of the discovery Mike and I made this month of our new favorite Vietnamese soup house, a place so nice we visited it twice......in a single week. 'You--back again??" roared the cheerful female Vietnamese proprietor when I strolled back in just two days after having eaten a lovely meal there and chatting with her and her husband over steaming bowls of beef tendon and tripe in broth. I threw up my hands in an 'I give up' gesture, laughing at the absurdity and admitting to her the cravings that both my husband and I had been suffering for her soup ever since we'd first been. Vietnamese cuisine, as it turns out, can be a highly addictive substance.

Still, when the second challenge for Project Food Blog came along and challenged me to choose 'an ethnic classic that is outside your comfort zone,' Vietnamese didn't immediately spring to mind. After all, there are so many places I've never traveled, not even at the end of a fork, so many cultures I've never visited. I've never had taro in Tahiti or hákarl in Iceland, never known what it's like to sample ajiaco or arepas in Colombia, or sega wat with injera in Ethiopia. I think of myself as a fearless cook, ready to tackle even the most unknown-to-me dishes, but truthfully there are a lot of things that could be said to be 'outside of my comfort zone.' Finally, I remembered that first, ecstatic bowl of phở and my head cleared. I have a lot of enthusiasm for eating Vietnamese food, clearly, but not much experience actually preparing it myself. At home. From scratch. With authentic ingredients. Envisioning a trip to our local pan-Asian megamarket (the venerable LeeLee Market, originator of such previous posts as this one), I excitedly began researching recipes.

Phở was too simple, too obvious. Phở is arguably a food whose time has come, one which has gone mainstream in a major and well-deserved way. Even my non-foodie friends are starting to talk about it, a sure sign of the times. And soup, even divine, sublime soup just didn't seem.......challenging enough for a Project Food Blog challenge. Where's the flash, the drama, the sweat? Where's the oh-my-God-this-might-fail-at-the-last-crucial-moment cooking method? Soup just..........simmers. And then my brain rested on something else, something I've never cooked or eaten, from a country I've never visited. A dish I've never even seen except through others' descriptions and photographs. A street food sizzling-crepe classic known as bánh xèo.

As with any local specialty in the world, there are as many different ways to make bánh xèo as there are local regions where it is made. There may even be as many different ways as there are people in all of Vietnam. Most seem to agree, however, that pork, shrimp and bean sprouts are the preferred filling. I settled on a version that includes turmeric, rice flour and coconut milk in the banh batter. Also, interestingly enough, this particular recipe calls for........beer. Some recipes called only for water, but I reasoned that beer as an ingredient would result in the light, bubbly batter I needed to make the wafer-thin, crispy and ever so slightly chewy pancakes I was after. So, beer* it was.

( *Full disclosure: No Vietnamese beer of any kind being available, even at our beloved LeeLee Market, I reached for a popular Chinese brew instead. Still delicious.)

The name bánh xèo is adorably onomatopoetic, a fancy term meaning that to say the word aloud suggests a sound, in this case the sound of a thin crepe merrily sizzling in hot, splattering oil over a searingly hot skillet. Banh ssssssssssssaaaayyyoww. It's even fun to say!


To accompany our bánh xèo, I chose another popular dish known as chao tom, a juicy little shrimpcake made of finely minced shrimp, sugar, scallion and a little beaten egg, molded kebab-style around a skewer of sugar cane which also imparts its sweetness to the dish. These are then grilled over coals until lightly charred to perfection, then dipped in salty fish sauce and enjoyed. I've had chao tom before, including a fantastic version at a little Vietnamese place on a side street of Hong Kong, and they're amazing as an accompaniment to just about everything. Plus, if you're going to stand at your kitchen counter and peel and devein a pound of shrimp for an hour, you might as well get an extra shrimp dish out of the whole affair, am I right? Right.

Some slight trouble arose when Mike and I realized that the simple-enough-sounding little shrimpcakes, in order to achieve maximum deliciousness and authenticity, would need to be grilled outside over charcoal. We hadn't grilled all summer. We looked at each other and froze in horror, having both just remembered the day we threw out our rusted old Weber grill, several months prior to this moment, in a fit of extreme spring cleaning. True, the thing was on its last aluminum legs, rusted almost completely through the bottom, and had originally been purchased in rough shape by me at a Goodwill, five years earlier. But at that moment I would have given anything to have the old girl back. How on earth were we going to cook the savory-sweet, smokey, juicy morsels of fragrant shrimp paste of my dreams?


In what I like to think of as the true street food vendor spirit, we devised an improvised plan that worked suprisingly well, involving hot coals, an old saucer-shaped metal firepit that was also hanging around the yard (no photos of our yard will be shown, for obvious reasons....the theme song from 'Sanford & Son' is already running through my head), and long, oiled strips of twisted aluminum foil. Mission Grill? Accomplished!

With the chao tom out of the way, I set myself to the task of putting together the bánh xèo, which comes together at very, very high temperature in a short matter of minutes. The batter was whisked together and set aside while I chopped scallions and sliced pork shoulder. The bean sprouts and small brown beech mushrooms were lightly stir-fried in a small amount of vegetable oil and a pinch of salt, then also set aside. Finally, it was time to put everything in the pan, super-heated and shimmering with vegetable oil. First in went the slices of pork, which were swirled briefly until almost cooked, and then the shrimp. The batter I poured directly on top of this and swirled again until it was as thin a crepe as I could possibly make it. The characteristic sizzle was happening here, the desired crispy edges appearing. The bánh xèo cooked from the edges inward, and when the cooking had all but reached the center I spread the rest of the filling of bean sprouts and mushrooms on one side, then lifted the other side of the crepe and gently folded it over--bánh xèo at this point should be hot, oily and crackling but still soft enough to manipulate.

I slid one masterpiece onto a plate and held my breath, feeling like someone on the verge of a new discovery. It smelled amazing. It even sounded amazing. It was sizzling. Sssssssssssssaaaayyyoww!

And then Mike whisked it, and the plate that followed, away for photo-taking and our once-sizzling Saigon crepes eventually became cold bánh xèo that needed to be reheated--gasp!--in the oven. Such is the lot in life of a food blogger, I suppose. We suffer a little so that you may enjoy photographs taken right at the moment our lovely newborn food enters the world, steaming hot and already dying a little every second. And anyway, even rewarmed from the oven they tasted amazing--each bite is wrapped in cooling lettuce leaf and mint leaves, then dipped in your condiment of choice, pickled chili-garlic paste, lime juice, nuoc mam. The fresh, herbal zing of the greens containing the rich sliced meats and crackling pancake, bound together by a splash of salty sauce was true heaven.


So, bánh xèo: the ingredients, the method, the taste, even the pronunciation......it's no longer outside my comfort zone but has become a true comfort food in my mind.

Say it with me again..........baaaanh sssssssssssssssssssaaaayyyoww! It's a good, good thing. A classic, even.

Bánh Xèo - 'Sizzling Saigon Crepe' (serves 2 hungry people comfortably)

1/3 lb. shrimp (I bought 1 lb., the remainder was used in the chao tom)
2 T. beer
splash of fish sauce
sugar
1/2 lb. pork shoulder
1/2 C. bean sprouts
1/4 C. brown beech mushrooms

2/3 C. rice flour
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/3 C. beer (use something light in color and taste, a pilsner, lager or similar)
1/3 C. coconut milk, unsweetened
2 scallions
6 T. vegetable or canola oil

For serving:

lettuce leaves
mint leaves
dipping condiment of choice (pickled chili-garlic paste, lime juice, nuoc mam, etc)

Peel and devein shrimp (chef's tip: a cold beer helps accomplish this task much more enjoyably), place in bowl and splash lightly with beer, fish sauce and sugar, mix briefly and set aside. Thinly slice pork shoulder, set aside.

Heat skillet to high, add 2 T. oil and quickly stir fry bean sprouts and mushrooms with a pinch of salt until just soft. Remove from pan, set aside, and wipe out pan.

In a large or medium sized mixing bowl, whisk together coconut milk, turmeric and rice flour. Chop scallions and add to batter. Add beer, whisk lightly just to combine, and set aside.

Add 2 T. oil (you will use the last 2 T. to cook the second crepe) to skillet and heat on high until oil is shimmering. Throw pork slices (enough for one serving, serving size is up to you) in pan and swirl in oil for about 20 seconds, add shrimp (again, enough for one serving) and continue to swirl pan until meat is just cooked. Pour half of batter into pan and quickly swirl until batter forms as large and thin a crepe as possible. When crepe has almost fully cooked (the edges should appear slightly drier and more cooked, while only the very center still looks a little raw and batter-y), spread half of the bean sprout and mushroom filling on one side of crepe, then gently fold other side of crepe over this as though making an omelet. Slide onto plate and listen for the sizzle! Make second crepe just the same as the first, using everything you have left.

To assemble, I recommend picking up each bite wrapped in a leaf of lettuce and a few mint, then dipping in sauce of your choice (fish sauce, nuoc mam, is great here).

Chao Tom - Sugar Cane Shrimpcakes (makes about 12 skewers)

2/3 lb. shrimp
1 tsp. cornstarch or rice flour
1 beaten egg
1/4 tsp. five spice powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 scallion, finely chopped

one fresh sugar cane stalk, cut into 12 equal, skewer-sized pieces

Heat charcoal in a grill (or improvised grilling device of your choice!). Peel and devein shrimp, place in bowl of food processor*, pulse until coarsely chopped. Add all other ingredients, process until mixture has become a sticky paste which is not completely smooth (it should hold together as a paste, but there should still be small chunks visible in the mixture, for texture). Form in equal amounts around each sugar cane skewer, refrigerate until coals have reached their optimum temperature.

( *Instead of using a food processor, you can also use a chef's knife to finely mince ingredients, or a traditional mortar and pestle to grind them together into a paste.)

Grill on a well-oiled grate over coals (this is important, or they will stick badly), turning once, until cooked to your desired level of doneness. Enjoy straight off the skewer, or wrapped in mint leaves and dipped in fish sauce. Chewing the cane and squeezing a little sweet juice out with your teeth after each salty bite is a wonderful idea. Enjoy!

Vote now!

Voting is OPEN right now in Project Food Blog, and will remain open until Thursday, September 23rd! Please vote for me if you get the chance--you have to sign up with Foodbuzz, but it's free and it takes about thirty seconds. This first round of eliminations is potentially the scariest, because they are whittling down the number of contestants from nealy 2,000 to 400! The odds scare me.

Here's the link you can follow to vote for me. Please, please, please if you can spare thirty seconds or so, help a poor nervous food blogger out, won't you, ha ha? I'll remember all of you when I win this contest. We'll have a party! :)

Project Food Blog Entry #1: 'Born Hungry'

One of my favorite food writers of all time once wrote that hunger, like love, is a basic human urge, and thus writing about it is intertwined with our very humanity.

Hunger.

It was hunger, unsurprisingly, that drove me to write about food in the first place. An urgent hunger to taste--really taste--more of the world around me, one bite at a time. To share with all those who are reading that sudden and intense pleasure, the rushing flow of blood to the head that accompanies one first transcendent bite of absolutely fresh sashimi, tenderly grilled liver, or a single perfect peach. The pure hunger for more travel, more experiences, more sunsets over more unfamiliar horizons, more new friends and bonds yet to be formed. Hunger. You could say I have it.


I wasn't a picky child, that I can remember. My mother tells me the only thing I wouldn't eat was, for the longest time, fast food hamburgers. Which I think only means it's safe to say I got a good start in life, far from the influence of grinning clowns or rascally hamburger thieves. Raised by globetrotting parents who had traveled half the world before I was even born, there wasn't much that I wasn't exposed to from an early age. Will the baby eat couscous? Will she eat lamb biryani? Water chestnuts? Garlic confit? Steamed mussels? Yes, yes, yes, yes and oh yes. Turns out, I was born hungry.

I have had a passport since I was a baby, thanks to those globetrotting parents. As soon as I was reasonably old enough to be unleashed alone upon the world, I started traveling in earnest. I'm not sure if it was my love of travel that fed my love of eating or the reverse, but to me it's one and the same. After all, what is either but a willingness to open your mind, and on occasion your heart and mouth, to a new way of life? Barbecue in Texas? Yeah. Street noodles and stuffed duck's foot in Hong Kong? I'm there. When you travel, you eat what those around you eat, what is most delicious and freshest and most locally beloved. To really know a new person, I have to share a meal with that person. We can talk about whatever it is you are passionate about, politics or art or racehorses, and we may disagree, but we'll still be breaking the same bread.

I want to make something clear, though: it's not all plane tickets and international food markets around here. Because my husband and I are neither millionaires nor travel show hosts, because we are regular people with a regular budget and regular jobs, we cannot travel nearly as much as our vagabond hearts might desire. Luckily, I have always believed in the concept of cooking as exploration--so I can't afford to visit Vietnam this year? I can learn to make bun mang vit, a Vietnamese duck and noodle soup right in my own kitchen.

So I don't have an Italian grandmother to teach me the right way to roll pasta, or the means to fly to Italy and find one myself? I'll teach myself over and over again until I find the right way. So I can't afford a $500 meal at a certain highbrow, eat-here-before-you-die restaurant run by a certain famous chef? I can purchase the famous chef's cookbook based on the restaurant and enjoy the hilarity of trying to reproduce his famously artful meals in my home kitchen. And so on. And so on. It's all part of my culinary education.

Earlier this year I started this blog, Orange & Salt, as a way of recording past eating adventures and misadventures. In every blog entry, I am telling a story to myself about each special meal that comes out of my kitchen. I am trying to describe to the reader the feeling and texture of every success (and oh yes, the occasional failure) and what went into the pot--both figuratively in terms of feelings or history, and also quite literally in terms of ingredients. To share the experience with my fellow travelers, I almost always include a recipe at the end, because after all, what's travel without a few intrepid partners?

I started a food blog because I love cooking and eating, but I continue it because I love my readers. Do I want to become the next Food Blog Star? Yes, absolutely, because I plan to stick with this food writing thing for a long time, after all. Win or lose, I'll still be here, eating and writing. We're all on some kind of journey together, whether it's to a street market in Southeast Asia or no further away than your own home kitchen.

Eating, cooking, writing, sharing recipes and photos, these all bring us closer together and I'm thankful for the chance to have a blog that allows me to do all those things at once.

Enough talking now.

I'm hungry.

Project Food Blog: What is This?

Readers, I have entered a contest! You can read more about it here, but to sum it up briefly, I'll be competing against 2,000 other food bloggers in an effort to become 'the next Food Blog Star!'



I'll be posting my first official entry in the contest shortly, and I hope you'll all enjoy these themed entries and vote for me when the time comes! The contest consists of ten elimination challenges and lasts, at least provided that I advance in every round, until early December. There will be other, non-contest-related entries on the blog in between, but I'm really looking forward to participating in this and the extra challenge and structure it will bring to Orange & Salt. Oh yes, and the prize! Did I mention there's a fabulous prize? :)

The Queen of Pop

Oh sweet, sweet, summer romance. Readers, I have been seduced........and it was by a frozen dessert.

When hot weather set in for the summer a few months ago (and in Phoenix, it clamps down over the city with a vengeance, not relenting until long after sweaters are on the department store shelves and the rest of the country seems to have swapped ice cold lemonade for steaming hot apple cider), this young girl's fancy naturally turned to popsicles*. It was fate. It was a natural collision of my well-documented love for food on sticks and anything that stands a chance at cooling me down from the boiling point in the middle of a 112-degree July afternoon. It's also something of a wave of nostalgia for the summers of my youth, when my mom always made sure we were well-supplied with homemade juice pops (made in these funky 1980s yellow plastic molds with juice-catchers at the bottom, and little sippy straws for draining every last drop! Remember those? Even back then, I thought they were the greatest invention). Freshly armed with my own brand-new set of popsicle molds, an updated version of our 1980s classics, I was ready to become the Queen of Pop.

( *oh, I know. A popsicle post in August? What's next, a roast turkey recipe in November? Well, just bear with me, sarcasmatrons, because it's worth it. I swear to you. And after all, who doesn't love a popsicle?)


Technically, here is where I should tell you that what I have been making and obsessing over all summer are in fact not 'popsicles,' that term having been trademarked in 1924 by Frank Epperson, the inventor of the Popsicle (which had previously gone by the much-less-snappy appellation 'Epsicles'). In their original form (invented, according to Popsicle legend, in 1905 when an eleven year old Epperson left a beverage and wooden stir stick on the back porch all night to freeze solid), Frank's frozen treats consisted of powdered soda mixture in various 'fruit' flavors and water, frozen to a stick. Sounds tasty, right? Um. Maybe not so much.

In fact what I've actually been making in my own kitchen is less like Epperson's iconic Popsicle and much closer in definition to the classic Mexican treat known as paletas, an ice pop based either on fresh fruit like strawberries, watermelon, guava, mango or tamarind, or creamy, milk-based flavors such as vanilla, chocolate, coconut, and even the rice pudding-like arroz con leche. The pops of my dreams are like this, thick with concentrated fruit and even green glimmers here and there of fresh herbs, or else creamy, smooth, and full of rich flavor. Almost like magic, flavors began to suggest themselves to me. Coconut and lime, with a hint of sweet basil! Tart strawberry and balsamic vinegar with honey and fresh mint! Creamy mango yogurt puree! Inspired, I think, by all the press surrounding the recent success of artisanal ice cream (particularly those in 'inventive' flavors) and wanting to bring a little of that glamour to the world of frozen pops, I began making plans to quit my day job (such as it was) and open a mobile popsicle stand. I kid you not, there was one night I even did have an actual ice pop-based dream. It's safe to say it had become an obsession at that point. A delicious, frozen obsession.

I experimented with many flavors, including the aforementioned coconut-lime-basil, strawberry-balsamic-mint, and mango-yogurt, but also blackberry-lime, creamy lemon curd, and (boldly, I thought) a slightly sweet coconut-milk based spicy peanut curry version. The last, according to my husband, is something of an aquired taste. To each his own. We found that the more watery an ingredient (say, certain kinds of fresh fruit), the harder and 'icier' the pop would freeze. Conversely, denser fruit with less water content like the sweet orange flesh of a ripe mango makes for a slightly softer, chewier pop. Yogurt is a great matrix for holding just about any fruit in frozen pop form, whether pureed or whole. And coconut milk--oh my! Coconut milk was the great discovery. It's tasty, of course, but something about the texture when frozen just makes it perfect. We're still experimenting over here at the Orange & Salt test kitchens. Summer, after all, is likely to be with us until Halloween this year. But in the meantime, I'm including recipes here for our top picks (and if you're feeling spicy, contact me for the sweet peanut curry pop recipe--I think it's an unappreciated winner and would love to share the recipe!), and I'm urging you to try them yourselves. Go on, be a pop star!

Recipe note: I have been using this particular set of popsicle molds, which results in 6 4 oz. pops. These recipes will yield enough for my set of molds, but your mileage may vary. I've been known to drink leftover popsicle mix straight from the bowl, so really, it's not a problem either way, now, is it?

Strawberry Balsamic Mint Pops

16 oz. fresh strawberries

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons honey or sugar (this particular measurement is a very basic guide, your mileage may vary here depending on the ripeness of your strawberries and just how tart you like your sweets, so taste before freezing and feel free to adjust)

2 tablespoons fresh mint

Place strawberries, vinegar and honey into food processor or blender, puree until smooth. Strain through fine mesh strainer into bowl to remove strawberry seeds (this step optional but recommended for any very seedy fruit like berries). Place puree back in food processor with mint, blend until mint is finely disributed throughout, pour into molds. Freeze at least 6 hours.

Coconut Basil Lime Pops

1 can of coconut milk (14 oz.)

1 cup fresh lime juice

sugar to taste (again, this is intensely personal)

2 tablespoons fresh basil leaves

Blend all ingredients in a food processor or blender until desired consistency achieved. Pour into molds and freeze at least 6 hours.

Mango Yogurt Pops

1.5 cups plain yogurt

1.5 cups fresh mango pieces (if you're using a larger variety of mango like a Kent, this may be one whole fruit. However, if you're using something like the smaller, sweeter Ataulfo or Champagne mangoes I frequently see at my local markets, it may be more like two)

sugar to taste (you know the drill here)

Blend all ingredients in a food processor or blender until desired consistency achieved. Pour into molds and freeze at least 6 hours.

48 Hours in San Diego

It's Phoenix. It's summer. It's hot here, I might have mentioned that once or twice? A few weeks ago, Mike and I decided we couldn't stand it any longer. No amount of air conditioning or popsicles was going to cut it--this was a problem whose solution required travel. So, we packed up the hatchback on no more than twelve hours' notice, found a room downtown, and hit Interstate 8 for 48 glorious hours of relaxation and fine eating in San Diego.

Day 1, Wednesday: Arrived in downtown San Diego around 1 pm, somewhat bedraggled from the road and positively starving, immediately checked into what must be the world's cutest Motel 6. Seriously. Apparently the entire chain was recently redesigned, and rather than the beige carpet-and-80s-vomit-bedspreads that I remember from my youth, every room now looks like this:

.......Adorable. Still decidedly no-frills, Motel 6 at least now has style. It's got a sort of 'Readymade Magazine goes to IKEA' vibe, very fresh, no more funky carpeting--and best of all, only $60 a night, just steps from the downtown Gaslamp District. But we soon left our orange mod palace in the sky (okay, the second floor) in search of our first San Diego meal. Regrettably, hunger and desperation drove us to a mediocre sort of Italian restaurant/bar, where I ordered a vegetarian calzone that turned out to be the size of my head. I ate a third of it and then, feeling woozy, asked for a box. I gave the remains of mine and Mike's to a homeless man outside who asked me for change, and felt a little better then, though still stuffed with cheese.

4 pm: Mike and I are idling at a red light when the car begins to heave a little. We glance at each other in mild what's-wrong-with-the-car-now alarm, and I happen to notice that across the street, the shop windows are wavering, shimmering like the surface of a pond on a breezy day. It's pretty. It's an earthquake. It's a first for both of us. Welcome to California!



7 pm: Revived from the rigors of the road, tectonic shifts and our enormous lunch by a shower and change of clothes in the orange mod palace in the sky, Mike and I ventured out to La Jolla to what might be our favorite restaurant ever. The mantra over the front entrance of Whisknladle reads, 'You get out of the pot what you put into the pot,' which is an example of extreme modesty on their part, even if technically true. They put a lot of delicious things into the pot at Whisknladle, nearly all of it local, farm-grown, or made in-house.



We first discovered this restaurant on our last trip to San Diego two summers ago, and have been talking about it and making plans to return for another memorable meal almost literally ever since. The bacon cocktail that changed Mike's life is, sadly, no longer on the seasonal & ever-changing menu, but he managed to find one that sounded equally delicious if somewhat daunting: the 'Freebird,' a peach-spiked bourbon and barbeque sauce concoction that burned like fire but went down sweet as honey. I had one called the 'Titania,' a limoncello-based drink blended with grilled watermelon that was sweet and ethereal as cotton candy--until you bit into the garnish, a fiery, sour pickled piece of watermelon rind that balanced the sweetness of the cocktail while miraculously having no pickling effect on the drink as a whole. It took me to fairyland, okay?





I usually skip cocktails and reach straight for the wine list, and I certainly don't usually swoon over bartenders' attempts at being 'clever,' but in this case I think a little swooning is well-deserved and appropriate. These were easily as carefully composed as any dish on the menu.



For our dinner, we shared an order of the rosemary lemon gnocchi with calamari in heavenly, savory romesco (a rich tomato and almond-based Spanish sauce) and crispy capers, as well as an order of local (Carlsbad-farmed) mussels with frites. I'm a desert dweller with a great love of fresh seafood, and a healthy horror of ordering it in a land-locked place like Phoenix, so being anywhere close to the open ocean is always an invitation to indulge in some rare mussels--I can't resist.



These were perfect: plump, ruffly, golden little nuggets of the sea, traditionally poached in white wine with garlic and shallots. I may even have sipped some of the broth straight from the bowl when no one was looking. I wished I'd had a straw. The frites, another traditional choice with mussels, were a little less fulfilling. Maybe I just prefer a fatter slice of potato, but these were not my favorite variety of french fry: string-thin, somehow dry but not overly crispy. They were good dipped in the broth from the mussels, but come on, what wouldn't be? We ended up mostly abandoning them in favor of dipping the slices of freshly baked bread also provided.



Finally, for dessert we shared a scoop of pistachio gelato between the two of us. Why is it that most supposedly 'pistachio' flavored things (including the Jell-o brand pistachio pudding mix of my youth) actually taste more like almonds? If this had been called 'marzipan gelato' I wouldn't even have blinked, and it was tasty, after all. Just didn't taste like pistachios. Oh Whisknladle, you know I still love you, baby, because your mussels, your light and savory gnocchi, your tender calamari and your superb cocktails were all dead-on. All is forgiven, really.



Day 2, Thursday: Grabbed two croissants and a latte from a streetside coffee vendor for breakfast before heading to the nearest Fed-Ex Kinko's to use the public computers (one of several trips we made, because the exciting world of freelancing just never stops). Everyone else seems to have a laptop or an iPhone. Me? I have to use the pay-by-the-minute machines at Fed-Ex whenever I need to do business on the road. Dramatic sigh. I want an iPhone.



12 pm: We head to another favorite spot from our last trip, The Naked Cafe in Solana Beach. A kind of 'global-fusion' breakfast/lunch spot, this bamboo-walled little cafe looks right out on Solana Beach and is the perfect place to grab a casual bowl of quinoa, organic green salad, or local brew. I had a plate of sesame-ginger marinated chicken tacos on whole wheat tortillas with baby greens and Thai peanut sauce, served with coconut-infused brown rice and black beans. It was mind-blowing, but proved impossible to finish because of size (not for lack of trying!). I'm still working on reverse-engineering the Thai peanut sauce for home use, I should have saved some on a napkin.





Mike had a very respectable plate of scrambled eggs and potatoes, and we each had a local Coronado Island beer (Orange Ave Wit and Islander Pale Ale).



Followed by a long walk down on the beach and a brief (knee-high) dip in the freezing waters of the Pacific ocean, this was the perfect lunch.



9 pm: After a long afternoon and early evening of beach walking, slope soaring (Mike's hobby) at Torrey Pines, and boardwalk strolling at Mission Beach (where we caught a few minutes of an artificial-wave surfing competition), we made our way back to the ol' deluxe apartment (motel room) in the sky, then on foot out to the Gaslamp District a few blocks away for dinner. Each of us craving the raw protein buzz that only a good plate of delicious sushi can provide, we ended up at the decidedly unfancy but very friendly Katsu. Okay, the menu might feature such gems of wordplay as 'Jessica Alba-Core Tuna Roll' and 'Eelectric Tempura,' and one of our orders might just have come buried beneath a snowfall of eerily (although not eelectric) bright red tempura flakes, but it's actually a pretty decent place. The sake was chilled, the staff was friendly and helpful, and most importantly the fish was delicious. We shared a plate of spicy tuna rolls, salmon nigiri, and one of those every-living-creature-in-the-sea-crazy-roll concoctions (covered in the aforementioned disturbingly red tempura flurry). Maybe it was the chilled sake, but everything tasted wonderful, and it certainly disappeared, right down to the last tempura flake and shred of daikon garnish. Stuffed like baby walruses, arm in arm with one another and full of sake, we made our way through the darkened streets of downtown. Mike began humming something that sounded vaguely familiar.

'What is that?' I asked. 'It sounds....'

'.....just wanna tell you how I'm feeling...gotta make you understand.......' he sang in a near-whisper.

'Is that....? Wait, I know what that is!'

'NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP! NEVER GONNA LET YOU DOWN!'

'Did you just Rick-Roll me??' I asked, turning and trying to simultaneously shake my beloved husband by the shoulders and wipe desperate tears of laughter from my eyes. 'Did you just Rick-Roll me.....in person??'

Rick-Rolled indeed. Raw fish and fermented rice wine will make one do funny things.

Day 3, Friday: On our last day in town, we spent the morning strolling around beautiful Balboa Park, taking pictures of the luxuriously ornamented Spanish-style architecture, bizarrely Tolkienesque tree roots, and the world's friendliest squirrel. At the gift shop of the Air & Space Museum I squealed upon spotting (& subsequently purchasing) what would be our breakfast: a block of the chalky, weird striped substance known & recognized immediately by eight year olds everywhere as 'astronaut ice cream.' Man. This stuff is strange. I don't think I've tasted it in about 20 years, and I don't think it's changed a bit since then. Chalky, crumbly-changing-immediately-to-gummy when making contact with your tongue, and always, always Neopolitan. I remember I was very disappointed when I learned that actual astronauts never ate the stuff (I've read that they are, in fact, able to take real ice cream into space); it seems to have instead been designed only to be sold to impressionable kids in the gift shops of science museums across the country. Doesn't really matter, though. It was a taste of nostalgia.

11 am: Back to Solana Beach, back to The Naked Cafe. Why, you may ask, why so many trips to Solana Beach? Well, besides being very pretty and offering many opportunities for expensive-real-estate fantasies (one of my own hobbies, I might have mentioned I'm an architecture nerd?), and besides the very excellent Naked Cafe, it also offers something irresistible to Mike: close proximity to the Torrey Pines Gliderport, where some of the finest remote control glider slope soaring in the country can be found. This may mean nothing to you, but it's Mecca to my husband, so the prospect of another chance at a tasty organic lunch followed by an hour of slope soaring was not to be missed.

We arrived just a touch early for lunch, so while waiting for hunger to set in we strolled around the nearby Cedros Design District, ending up at yet another place I love, Solo. Located in a highly restored old warehouse (and housing a high-end architectural firm in the back 2/3 of the building), Solo sells charming things like old nautical glass buoys, furniture, handmade jewelry, and an impressive array of full-color-photo artbooks and cookbooks. It was here that we finally gave in and purchased the cookbook we've both been coveting for months: the 350-page, gorgeously photographed Ad Hoc at Home by the esteemed chef Thomas Keller. You might remember that I own one of his other volumes, The French Laundry Cookbook? Okay, so I'm nothing less than a Thomas Keller disciple (more on that to come soon, since we've already had the opportunity to road-test some of these ingredients). We were happy, drunk with the culinary possibilities of homemade pastas, chutneys and confits of pork belly to come. We went to lunch.

After lunch (The Naked Cafe delivered a home run once again, this time an egg white scramble with pesto and zucchini, and an excellent house-made roasted tomato salsa), it sadly was time to leave behind the grey, mercifully cool and cloudy skies of San Diego and turn eastward towards heat-stricken Phoenix. I almost cried. I considered even asking Mike to lash me to the passenger seat with good strong nautical rope (like Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship) to keep me from throwing myself out the window. A little dramatic? Sure. But leaving southern California is always like that for me.

6 pm: We pass the usual sign for Dateland (a date plantation in middle-of-nowhere Arizona, a fixture on the drive along Interstate 8), make the usual jokes about 'going there for a date,' etc.

' 'World Famous Date Shakes'? Do those even sound like they'd be good?'

'They sound like they'd be........um, gritty.'

'But they're 'World Famous'!'

Forced to make our last dinner on the road out of sunflower seeds, potato chips, and bottled iced tea from the last gas station we passed, it was maybe the lowest culinary point of the trip (lower than astronaut ice cream? It's hard to say), a far cry from tender gnocchi in romesco sace at Whisknladle, or even the tasty spicy tuna rolls at Katsu. But I had Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home spread open across my lap, and I had big plans, plans for buttermilk fried chicken, leek bread pudding, and saffron rice salad. I feasted on the artistic, full-page photos. And the sunflower seeds, somehow, tasted wonderful. :)

The Slackers.

They hang around our kitchen like a gang of delinquents and old fashioned drug-store hooligans (arousing the kind of fist shaking and rage from me that inspires such phrases as drug-store hooligans). They lean against my counters and shelves casually cracking gum and occasionally raising an eyebrow in my direction, as if to say, 'Whadda you want? Wanna make a cappuccino? Oh yeah. We both know that ain't happening, lady' (my cappuccino maker is, mystifyingly, from Brooklyn) 'I been sittin' here for two years now, you ain't foamed or steamed a thing.' They are The Slackers. Allow me to introduce this colorful cast of characters.



The Crème Brûlée Kit. The ramekins that came in this box assimilated immediately, like work-eager immigrants, into the general population of the kitchen. After all, they are helpful little ceramic vessels when it comes to holding condiments or a pinch of chopped herbs, or in which to whisk a quick vinaigrette before tossing it on a salad. But this was a Crème Brûlée Kit, after all--we had high hopes of making our own classically French, creamy vanilla-infused custards with the perfectly caramelized crunchy tops. Which brings us to the crème brûlée torch. This would be used, except for one crucial thing.

We need to buy butane.

'We need to buy butane!', we remind each other every time the 'hey, wouldn't homemade crème brûlée be nice' urge strikes, and much earnest hand-wringing commences. This is, of course, because butane can obviously only be purchased at the far-away place known as The (Just) Butane Store, or better yet hand-harvested by moonlight by squeezing it drop by drop from the delicate petals of endangered Alpine flowers. It's certainly not readily available at every grocery store, everywhere, if only you could remember ahead of time to put it on the grocery list and actually buy some. That can't be it.

Another word on those torches. Almost everyone I know that owns a kitchen torch (listening to that, it sounds like I know a whole horde of torch-wielding fellow chefs, doesn't it? Actually, off the top of my head, I can't actually think of one, except for us......surely they must be out there, ignoring their crème brûlée torches just like we do?) owns it for the sole purpose of putting the traditional burnished sugar crust on the tops of crème brûlées--and absolutely nothing else. What else do you do with it? Brand your name into a steak? Some extreme kitchen ant removal? A spot of light weeding in the backyard? Suggestions, both funny and serious, will be entertained. After all, we're going to buy butane. Someday.

The Potato Ricer. This is one of those funny things that I don't think I actually believed existed, growing up (we were strictly a potato masher family). Then somewhere along the line, I was made dimly aware of its existence but I had the idea that it was some torture device for somehow combining both potatoes and rice into some uber-starchy American side dish nightmare. Finally I learned the truth, probably via Alton Brown and some believable scientific evidence on glutens, that it was the only way to make fluffy, sublime mashed potatoes that would sit on your fork like heavenly clouds and not line your stomach like rocks.




The word on potato ricers is this: because they force warm, cooked whole potatoes through tiny holes, also incorporating air along the way, 'mashed' potatoes produced this way are finer, more even, and lighter in consistency than those glutinous lumps made more traditionally with a masher. This supposedly makes wonderful mashed potatoes, the Platonic ideal of all mashed potatoes according to some ricer enthusiasts. I must say 'supposedly' because, despite having had one taking up valuable real estate in my kitchen for the better part of a year, we have yet to make a single batch of mashed/riced potatoes. But I hear they're delicious.

The Pasta Roller. This one is a relative newcomer to the gang, having spent only a few weeks so far on my kitchen counter, but he's already starting to make me uneasy. He actually belongs to my parents, and I've been angling to borrow him for months now with ideas towards making fresh golden sheets of pasta in which to tuck tiny lumps of savory ravioli filling, or else tall, twisted piles of tender linguine. But I'm nervous. The pasta roller bears suspicious signs of under-use, and I had to retrieve it, in its box and under a thin layer of dust, from the back of a kitchen cupboard at my parents' in order to borrow it in the first place. He may turn out to be a Slacker yet. But in the meantime, I'm leaving him out in plain sight on the kitchen counter as a subtle reminder to put him to work soon. Does anyone out there have a good ravioli recipe?

The Cappuccino Maker. I'm not sure whether this should make me feel more or less guilty, but we acquired this secondhand from some well-meaning friends. Less guilty because after all, it was free, but perhaps more guilty because they were passing it along after having discovered that, much to their surprise, they never used the thing. When they offered it to us, I swore up and down that I'd be different. After all, I love coffee. My husband, a tea drinker, does not, but I drink plenty of it daily to justify owning a--free!--cappuccino maker. And so we took it. And it turns out that while I do love coffee, what I actually love is my morning French press routine (Boil. Dump. Plunge. Drink.), and not fiddling around with handles and pitchers and steamer wands before my eyes have even opened properly. And so it sits.

I'm considering passing it along to someone else who will no doubt leave it sitting on their own countertop for another two years, until giving it to someone else and so on and so on until one day, two thousand years from now, alien archaelogists will uncover it from the rubble and wonder how such a thing could be simultaneously so old and yet appear so completely untouched. And then, most likely, they'll take it home and put it on their own countertops and proceed to not use it themselves for two years.



The Ebelskiver Pan. Look, I don't know how many of you are married, but there is this crazy thing that sometimes happens around the pre-marital time, and it is known as 'the wedding registry.' And it makes even the most level-headed folks a little overly ambitious, to say the least. Worse yet, there is an evil presence out there in the world that preys on these folks just as wedding planning is making them soft and weak-minded......and his name is 'WILLIAMS-SONOMA.' Beware of Williams-Sonoma. Williams-Sonoma will show you things like The Ebelskiver Pan and make you believe that not only would you perhaps like to own one (once you figure out what it is in the first place), but that you will actually need one for the weekly brunches you will be whipping up every Sunday morning for friends & family, just like the ones shown in the two-page catalog photo spread. This is because Williams-Sonoma is, in fact, an evil and dangerous demon from hell. Be ye warned, hapless newlyweds! Don't go into the woods.

Look, okay, I actually like the idea of the Ebelskiver pan quite a bit. According to the photos, it makes adorable little round pancake nuggets, filled with anything from jam to goat cheese to Nutella, and it has an adorable name on top of everything else. And the lady who bought us our particular Ebelskiver pan is awesome, and...and......and we're going to use it. Really! Before our first wedding anniversary, I swear that there will be adorable pancake nuggets, or my new nickname isn't Ebelskiver Jones. Which, by the way, I really think it should be.

So this, apparently, is my challenge. Round up The Slackers and put them to work, or kick them to the curb once and for all! Will there be cappuccinos? Freshly extruded ravioli or riced potatoes? Plump, steaming ebelskiver? Or will there only be failure, degradation, and red-faced gadget-induced shame? Stay tuned, dear readers. Stay tuned.