Say what you will about Starbucks. Sure, they muscle dozens of perfectly good local coffeehouses and roasters out of business every year and flatten the coffee landscape as they go. They burn the crap out of damn-near every shot of espresso they pull. They’ve changed conventional wisdom about what a simple latte should cost, let alone taste like. *shudder*

However, one of the greatest fallacies to be found in those reassuringly red-lit environs are the spectres they attempt to pass off as PASTRIES.

Limp, lifeless, wooden, weak, alternately too-sweet and flavorless, they scarcely deserve to be called baked goods. Nay, they seem to have been belched out of some nefarious cousin of the Nutri-Matic machine from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, endlessly turning out items that are “..almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pastries”

In these health-concious times, a pastry is almost a revolt- a personal snicker in the face of calorie-counters, for the sake of sacred communion with the butter, the chocolate, and the holy toasted almonds! Certainly nothing to be sneered at. A pastry is a commitment, a pact, the cause of many brisk runs to the gym. A pastry should tantalize the senses, envelop the soul, and send one into swirling rapture.

..or at the very least it should TASTE GOOD, right?!

*pant* *pant*

Excuse me. Anyhow, here in S.F. we’re blessed with not only some wonderful coffee :roasters, but a good amount of local coffeehouses that have yet to give up the ghost, and most of these serve pastries that just wipe the floor with their plasticine Starbucks equivalents (and let’s not talk about, shh, the COFFEE).

My favorite place for a pastry and a cup of drip in my neighborhood is Squat & Gobble, a place which also does quite good crepes and other offerings. It’s 3 or 4 doors down from me, the coffee is servicable and the pastries are local and fresh.

The place showcases art from local folks, and the people working there are friendly in an unforced way. They are an indelible part of the neighborhood in a way that no megachain could ever be.

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Filed under: Recipes, Philosophy
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Sorry for the unexplained break in updates here- I had a bit of a bicycle accident last week. I banged up my knee pretty good, may have cracked or bruised a rib, and crunched the primary computer that I edit photos and update f // f from..

Oh PowerBook, you’ll be mourned evermore.
(excuse the bad cam photo, I’m an injured man!)

*sigh*

Well, that was last week, dear friends- As of yesterday I’ve got a new compu-pal (ThinkPad!) and my bod, too, is on the mend. There will be new content here with the quickness, I promise. Thanks much for your readership.

-gc

Me in hospital,

..wishing to heck
I were blogging

P.S. - WEAR YA HELMETS, YOU LOT! Mine now has a rather large dent in it. My head doesn’t. There’s something to be learned, there.

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Thanks to recent commenter FarmGirl, I’ve learned that I have been mentioned on english expat Sam Breach’s wonderful Becks & Posh blog, as, no freaking way, her Bay Area blogger of the week!

Yay! Thanks very much for the inclusion. I’ll have to write some good stuff, now!

Of course, just after the fanfare about my new camera, I found myself out of batteries, of all things, when a culinary Kodak moment struck. Cam-phone it is..

After a night of watching Miss Kittin and much of the Kompakt crew play wonderful techy-glitchy-teutonic music, I awoke, rushed to practice with my space-rock band The Lag, then returned home famished and nursing the tail end of a rather nasty hangover.

With the sushi place below us closed ’til later and falafel and even vegan sausage (other favorite neighborhood eats) sounding too heavy, I realized it was time to improvise.
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Filed under: Recipes
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Well, the new cam has arrived (as you can probably tell), and while I haven’t come close to figuring out how to get great shots out of it, I couldn’t exactly wait to try shooting a few pixes, could I?

..of course not.

Incidentally, the food is from an utterly nondescript mexican joint near my work that just happens to make decent seafood tacos. It’s pretty much the closest thing to edible food I can get to for lunch. Man, do I need to start packing my own lunches again! The fountain is an artifact of our being situated in a charming concrete corporate park. It’s got so many anti-skateboarding metal fixtures all over it, it may as well be a water-spouting cylindrical porcupine.

..and you know I can’t stand those!

More later,
-GC

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All the way from my time as a simple Thai food freak to my current incarnation as a Thai food chef-wanna-be, Tom Kha has always loomed large. Done well, it is very much like liquid gold. Liquid gold, that is, in a parallel dimension where gold tastes really, really good. Spicy, tart, savory, creamy and a little bit sweet, it satisfies me to the core and inspires slooooww, languid broth sipping, for fear of the bowl running out before the jones is satisfied.

Thus, before I started learning to cook Thai food, I held tom kha as some kind of mysterious manna, doubtlessly fiendishly complex to prepare and better left to the best native chefs. I mean, jeez, 3/4s of the tom kha I had eaten locally was not great, even from otherwise fine restaurants.

So, in the spirit of personal challenge, I took it upon myself as my first dish to try and recreate when I finally got some good info on what made that cuisine taste like it should. I read a bunch of recipes online, I fretted, I shopped, I doubted my mettle, and I fretted some more.

Finally, I did it. ..and it wasn’t half bad.

The recipe contains no chicken stock, but does contain fish sauce, so it is, unfortunately, riotously un-veggie/vegan. In my case, I’m a pretty weak vegetarian, so I bend like a reed in a pond under the briny wind of the influence of fish sauce in Thai cuisine. It just sort of HAS to be there to set the whole picture in place. If fish sauce you abhor, try Thai thin soy sauce in its place (or double up the Bragg’s).
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So, now that I am fully addicted to writing food tutorials and briskly chronicling my tasty adventures for y’all, I’ve realized that a real camera is in order. To whit: I have finagled an insane deal on a new Canon A520!

*drool*

Fancy it isn’t, but it’s got lots of manual control, a good macro mode, 4MP and 4x optical zoom. Not bad for (a lot) less than $200! Anyway, I will now sit on my hands and fret petulantly until it arrives. In any case, what this advancement means is..

Fewer dumb stock photos, less nasty phonecam shots, and a far higher food-pr0n quotient in future posts. I hope to see this gleaming device within a week and a half.

In more minor news, I’ve migrated feeding//fashionistas to a brand-spanking new URL of its very own, www.feedingfashionistas.com. Please update any bookmarks or RSS subs if you like reading f // f!

Later today I hope to post my recipe for Thom Kha Het, or at least my bastardized version of it, which combines vegan sensibilities with… Fish sauce. (Try as I might, I’ve yet to find anything non-ichthyological that can replace it)

In any case, if you can put aside your fish-fancier side for a moment, there’s no yummier soup in creation, IMNSHO.

Cheers,
-GC

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I recently started a new life as a bicycle commuter (as opposed to by car) and have been quite enjoying it. Being a former psycho mountain biker, it feels great to get back on two wheels. Plus, as a single-gear/fixie hipster road bike guy, I get to obsess over and buy new parts and add-ons and such again, which is a plus.

I bike to and from BART (one of the local subways) instead of taking streetcars/buses/whatever to get there, over moderately hilly terrain. This allows me both to work off all that coconut milk I’m always talking about, and to discover new wrinkles in my city.

The last few weeks I’ve noticed, on Wednesdays such as this, a farmer’s market buzzing away right next to Civic Center BART. Today I stopped there because I noticed prik kee noo (Thai bird chilies, thanks much Pim!) being sold ON THE BRANCH. Little bundles of them, bristling with red and green firebombs and rife with pretty leaves. This is something I hadn’t seen before.

As it turns out, about half the stalls were run by Thai or Vietnamese folks. Score! Wide-eyed, I picked up a HUGE bundle of scandalously fresh lemongrass, a gang of thai basil that weighed down my bike, a bag of bird chilies, a pound of chinese eggplant, and 1 lb. of sublimely gorgous organic dry farmed tomatoes, all for $4.75.

(Prithee excuse the awful photograph. Bad
cam-phone and no imaging sw at work= bad image.)

Four-freakin-seventy-five. I couldn’t believe it. There was no galanga or lime leaves to be found, and no tremendous deals on king oyster ’shrooms (I miss Battambang Market), but the produce was in terrific shape, the people were happy to see me buying this stuff, and you can’t argue with the price. I see a weekly ritual taking shape!

Next time, I’ll bring a backpack, and get more tomatoes. They were half gone before I even got to work. *sheepish grin*

I think I’ll pass by Battambang on the way home to get the rest of the essentials. It’s green curry and thom kha het tonight, baby!

I love this city.

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Blessed as I am to share an apartment where the kitchen and living room are basically one and the same, cooking for friends is always a social occasion. I can be deep into a conversation about vintage synthesizers while chopping vegetables, throw a beer to somebody on the couch while deglazing a pan, then jog around the kitchen peninsula and mix into a new record on our little DJ rig before the previous one runs out. It’s a rough, rough life.

(Images: Lydia White - Bad Editing: Yours Truly)

Our place seems made for hosting little soirees, so we try to make use of it whenever we can. On nights when we’re all eating in I usually get to be the lucky guy crashing around in the kitchen with people watching, which is nice for my occasionally attention-grabbing nature! Sometimes, though, even when it’s not time for a meal, the urge will strike me to commit a random act of yumminess.

Sneaking to the kitchen, fiegning dishwashing or straightening-up while still in conversation, I’ll grab a few ingredients and throw a snack together. Usually nobody really notices (except for my girl, she knows my tricks). In the end, I’ll plop a bowl of something or other on the coffeetable with a few little forks stuck in it and say, “Here, eat this”, to much delight (if it’s any good!). I’d better not do it too often, or people will start to expect it, and then it’ll hardly be a random act anymore, will it?
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Filed under: Recipes, Philosophy
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