Bread By Sadie

My friend Sadie also started making gluten-free bread.

http://breadsrsly.blogspot.com/

I got a loaf of the teff sourdough. I brought it to a party, actually, and it was a hit!

Tasty Italian Food

Yesterday Smark and I went to this restaurant in Albany, CA, which is just a bit north of Berkeley.

http://www.miamangiamangia.net/

It was amaaazing. I had the veal and Smark had the homemade pasta with duck.

doctors learning to cook

thank goodness

Kaiser Permanente, which is a provider and an insurer, is the largest nonprofit health care system in the country, with about 8 million members, 15,000 doctors and 170,000 employees, predominantly in western states. The sheer scale of Kaiser, which holds farmers’ markets at 30 sites, makes changing the way food is bought a challenge, but also an opportunity.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,” Dr. Maring said. Kaiser Permanente Oakland, for example, serves 6,000 inpatient meals a day, 80 percent of which have no special restrictions.

“It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain,” he said. “We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.” Toward that end, he helped start a regional growers’ cooperative and joined the board of the nonprofit entity that administers it, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers.

Dr. Maring also envisions Kaiser’s role expanding into areas like environmental stewardship, and he has carved out a kind of subspecialty in institutional real estate, with the goal of eventually putting some of Kaiser’s undeveloped land into agriculture.

Grow Mushrooms

NYT article on growing mushrooms! Sounds awesome.

Fancy Fish Recipe

At Oishii, there is this black cod dish that is really amazing. I found a recipe online, though, and now I'm trying to make it. The miso I used is not that white, though. It is more orange.

Into Cooking

I'm feeling a wave of desire to cook. I found some good recipes online. I want to be a little adventurous since part of the reason why I started cooking a little less was that I felt uninspired to cook the same dishes. Then again, even when I was "cooking less" I was still spending a lot of time cooking.

Cumin lamb!

Pork dish!!

Last night I bought some liverwurst so I've been looking up ways to eat it. Liverwurst sandwich

I made some potatoes with rosemary last night. That turned out really well.

I want to make a soup with anchovies to flavor the broth.

Changes In Cambridge

Last Friday, Smark and I went out to dinner, and we decided at the last minute to go to the Thailand Cafe for some bad Thai food. Usually this place is pretty empty, but this time it was totally full of Chinese people. Apparently, six months ago or so they got a new chef from Szechuan, and now they mainly serve Szechuan food, and it's really really good! I always suspected the owner and the server woman were Chinese, but they never spoke much so I couldn't tell. Well, now they're always speaking with the customers in Chinese, and they had hired a few more Chinese servers, too. However, it's still called Thailand Cafe, and they haven't changed the decor at all.

This review on Yelp pretty much sums it up.

No, I don't understand what this place has to do with Thailand, but the Sichuan food they serve is fantastic.

So - shopping at the Korean market - question arises - where to have lunch. Honey says: "Let's go to Thailand Cafe across the street." I say: Thailand and Sichuan cuisine? You must be out of your mind. If they cannot make up their mind, how can the food be any good? Uhhh was I wrong.

Ignore the Thailand signage and decor if you like really good Sichuan food. Chengdu spicy chicken, beef jerky (added 3 orders for take out - not kidding), dan dan mien and a cold cucumber dish were all fantastic. Two weeks earlier I was in Chengdu and I must attest, the food at Thailand Cafe could not have been more authentic Sichuan. It rivals the classics in the suburbs (Sichuan Gourmet and Sichuan Garden).

Tasty Science

Petri Dish Cookies

Turkey and stuffing

I tried this recipe for stuffing and turkey, and it turned out really well! I actually didn't use a whole bird, though, just the thighs.

Mint Chutney

I made mint chutney yesterday, and it was awesome! Even my mom liked it, although she preferred to eat it with potato chips.

LA food

I'm going to LA for a winter vacation, and Alicia says I should check out Tamara's Tamales.

Delicious

This weekend, Smark and I went to Sandrine's for dinner, which is a French bistro in Harvard Square. It was amaazing. My favorite was the pan-seared foie gras. I love foie gras. I get a mouth orgasm when I eat it. Smark got filet mignon, and we got salads, and also onion soup. For dessert, we split a creme brulee. Our waiter was awesome, too. He looked authentic for a French restaurant for some reason, like a butcher/sailor.

Made Bread and Butter

it was yum

Alicia came over and we made butter first and then bread. We used fancy heavy cream instead of heavy whipping cream. We were worried that heavy cream wouldn't get whipped, but it did. Heavy whipping cream includes a thickener. It was magical. We used an electric egg beater and the trick was to turn it on high. After it becomes chunky whipped cream, it slowly starts separating into butter and buttermilk. Alicia had a strainer and a funnel so we would pour the buttermilk back into a bottle and put the whey back in to be beaten more. We started using a wooden spoon to mash it and get all the water out. I had watched that video online about making butter, and I followed its steps. I rinsed the butter with ice water and then after I poured that out, I just added some salt and the butter was done. It was really tasty. I think Rendezvous must make their own butter.

Then we used the buttermilk to make honey buttermilk bread in my bread machine.

It was really fun and delicious.

Butter

I made chocolate chip cookies, and I also bought Burt's Bees buttermilk lotion, which smells really good and feels good, too. I really like the texture of butter and how it looks. I realized I have no idea what buttermilk is and what butter is made of.

Whipping cream is just cream from milk that is skimmed off the top of fresh milk before homogenizing it. Apparently, you can just keep whipping whipping cream, and after it turned to whipped cream it turns to butter and buttermilk. Whaaat?

How to make butter.

Kinda looks like fun, and actually I think I've made it before when I got a little carried away making whipped cream. I thought it went bad or something.

Mac and Cheese

My friend Chuva made this amazing mac and cheese with four cheeses. I think it was something like this recipe. I didn't really follow it, but I was inspired by it today.

Maynard James Keenan - a Wino

he's going to be at Whole Foods next Monday selling his wine and signing them. Weird!

Tis the Season For...Heirloom Tomatoes!

They are delicious.

It also seems to be the season for strawberries and peaches. WHOOOO. I like summer.

New Favorite Vegetable : Watercress

watercress is the best! It's good just stirfried by itself. The juices are really good in rice. Plus, it's really good in wontons! You can even eat it raw in a salad or sandwich. Wow.

Seriously, I am impressed.

Rediscovering the Joy of Grocery Shopping

Thank you Whole Foods, for making me excited about grocery shopping again, even though I always end up overspending. (Turns out, I spend about $600/mo on food). Of course, I'll always really like shopping at Asian grocery stores like Kamman, but Whole Foods is definitely the best for white people food.

I definitely have a style of shopping, which is to browse and get whatever looks good and can fullfill my food needs. By food needs, I'm talking about planning out my meals for upcoming days while I'm shopping. Like, oo, weird mushrooms, maybe I can use it for dinner today and tomorrow if I also get some beef. I need something for lunch, ooo deli meat. I should get some bread, then. Shopping with a list totally gets me down. I sort of wonder if this is a genetic thing because I am pretty sure this is how my mom shops. In fact, I think my dad does it, too. They are better at it than me, though. The problem for me is that I tend to forget what my ten day forcast was by the time I get home. The planning while shopping part is such a thrill, but then I often end up throwing a lot of stuff away since I forget about them and they go bad. On the other hand, this happens less if I have plans for the things that are exciting, not like, oh I will probably need a veggie later in the week, I should get broccoli.

Plus, at Whole Foods, everything looks so delicious with their fancy yuppie packaging. But also, I think their produce and meats do look and taste better, but maybe I'm just fooling myself. I also like the variety, especially the availability of higher-end stuff like Applegate deli meats.

Place I Lost

Found online!!!

Bonobo's Restaurant in Madison Square Garden in NYC. I stumbled upon it once early in college, and I keep trying to find it and failing. Finally, today it occured to me that I could look it up online and actually get the address...

Ooo, I should go with Alicia sometime.