I don’t want to turn this (or my other) blog into a press release portal, but I have a new dance music release that just hit Beatport, and it is some truly hott business. If you like tech house/electro and have a taste for dirty, twisted tracks, you simply MUST check this out.

Listen and grab it here.

OK, so I’ll add a LITTLE food related content. I went to 99 Ranch market in Daly City last night for some weekend shopping, and really scoured the place for crazy new stuff. I saw two things I’ve never seen before:

Vegetarian Intestines:

…no comment.

Caltrops:

Apparently Caltrops are an evil-looking perversion of the humble, innocent chestnut. Raw, they often contain a very harmful parasite (and are you surprised? LOOK AT THEM!), so they must be boiled into submission, and then opened with an icepick, bowie knife, or the jaws of life. The flesh is described as “creamy”. Mmm hmm.

I bought a bunch of food, including a nice little slab of “sashimi grade” tuna. When I got it home, most of the veggies were far sadder than they looked in their (styrofoam and shrink wrap) packages, and the tuna was several shades past fresh enough to pop in one’s gob uncooked. Miffed but undeterred, I still got a decent meal out of the haul. I even cubed up the tuna, rolled it in sesame seeds and panko, and fried it ’til crispy. Served with a japanese mayo, lime and mustard sauce, it was pleasant, but not quite pleasant enough to keep my mind off the fact that I wasn’t eating it raw.

Such is life. I guess this is why I try to buy stuff at places where the scale of the store allows for better quality control. I don’t shop at Safeway for a myriad of reasons, but that’s one of them.

Filed under: Random, Meal Reports
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…that was today’s question. In my quest to shore up my lacking Mexican cooking skills, I’ve been wanting to make a really good batch of Salsa Roja, but the texture’s been eluding me. A cooked salsa with a silky smooth texture and a burnished but still bright flavor, Salsa Roja seems simple enough on the surface…

I mean, come on, it’s just canned tomatoes, cumin, cilantro, lime juice, salt, pepper, garlic, and dried chilies, all cooked for an hour or so until well-integrated and then liquefied somehow. I’d tried a stick blender, a regular blender, a food processor and even a food mill, and all left me with too much fibrous, texture-wrecking junk behind, no matter how zealous I was. VRRN VRRN VRRNNNN…. :/

Well, I’ve finally cracked it. After reading about them in a hundred fancy blogs and marveling at their $50+ price tags, I’d lusted but never lunged for a tamis (pronounced “tah-mee”). When visiting Kamei restaurant supply last week, I found one for all of $6. A tamis would be mine, at last.

A tamis is nothing more than a fine mesh screen, steel or nylon, stretched tight in a circular metal frame with three-inch-ish-high sides. You place it on top of a pot or bowl, fill it with the food you’d like to liberate from the bonds of solidity, and then scrape back and forth across the screen with something flat (like the business end of a spatula). This mashes, purees and separates out the larger solids from your dish with blinding efficiency.

They’re used to great effect in Indian food, reducing lentils to subtle creaminess in Dhal. They’re MVPs in the creation of satiny soups. Surprise surprise, it did a perfect job of separating the essence of this salsa from the seeds, husks and skins that no blender could ever mitigate. I was left with the above, an absolutely luscious sauce that satisfied my blurry-eyed morning cravings handily. Topping a plate of eggs, refried beans and tortillas, it was a breakfast to be remembered.

Next to receive the tamis treatment will be some enchilada sauce. Definitely will post when that plan’s in motion.

Filed under: Tools
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This is gonna have to be a quick one- all I’m going to say is, go to your local well-stocked liquorium, and pick up a bottle of Falernum. I picked up a bottle of the easiest to find stuff, Velvet Falernum, on a lark due to acres of mixology blog being dedicated to its ilk. I had no idea what it’d taste like, apart from knowing it had something to do with cloves and rum.

I mixed a quarter-shot of it into a shot of Buffalo Trace bourbon, plus a quarter shot of dry Noilly Prat vermouth. Stirred briskly with ice and decanted into the nearest glass, it was the perfect drink for ringing in the end of summer. Sweet, complex and refreshing, but not so detached from the base liquors to become a trifle, it was eminently enjoyable.

It’s probably been done before, but if not, I’d like to stake my claim to this combo. I’ll call it the “Aurora Borealis”.

All I’m saying is, grab a bottle of this stuff, and get experimenting. It’s wonderful. Even better, make your own damn falernum.

Filed under: Ingredients, Cocktail Hour
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For some time, I’ve been a person who is always buying giant armloads of organic/local veggies, sticking to less processed foods, ferreting out fun new things to cook with, having frequent dinner parties, etc. My shopping cart at Rainbow Grocery generally looks like a mobile hill of vibrant greens, reds, yellows and browns when I’m done. I LOVE FRESH FOOD! It’s the centerpiece of my life.

While raw foodism is seen by some as almost ascetic by many, and obviously no fun at all, I normally eat raw food constantly (along with plenty of cooked stuff). My work lunches often used to consist of a box of vegetables, raw as the day they were picked, some miso, and maybe some hummus and some other kind of protein. My contented munching on undressed spinach used to elicit smug titters from my co-workers.

There are also a few competent taquerias and a halfway-decent noodle house about a 10-minute walk away from work, so there was always something decent to eat.

Lately, the pace of my life and work has picked up. The giant shopping trips, the weekend research kibbutzes with co-obsessives, the nice breakfasts and packed lunches on weekdays, and even the safety valve of decent restaurants a short jaunt away have been compromised. Thus springs the trap of immediately available food around the corporate workplace, which generally means: CRAP. Subway sandwiches and Round Table Pizza salads just seem like pale, cruel jokes.

Worse than all of that chain-store garbage, though, is the robot-like entity that recently descended, to much fanfare, in my company’s cafeteria.

Cold Food, indeed. Embalmed sandwiches, interred pizzas, lonely-looking yogurt, bags of tuna salad, toxic muffins. Each week, we’re told “The Machine’s been restocked! This week we’ve got…” as though the makeup of the Costco by-the-pallet astronaut food would change in some compelling way over time.

For god and Grant Achatz’s sake! We’ve invited a robot into our midst that will happily serve us dorm food, forever. Its name is “COLD FOOD”, and it’s here to save us from the drudgery of that one-minute walk. I can hear its wheels and gears clicking together in calm, collected malice, dreaming of fattening us all up for the eventual harvest by its alien creators. “Yes, my pretties. Enjoy your lunch of corn syrup fried in trans fats. The Overlings will be pleased with your girth in short order.”

I’ll never be able to bring myself to support the death-bot, but I’m still being lazy. Every time I find myself biting into another cardboard Subway sandwich when I could have walked a little further and had a really nice torta at Lisa’s, or a bowl of spicy chow fun at TK Noodle, a tiny black cloud forms in my heart, and gray raindrops stream out of it, a cartoon frown forming on its translucent face. A frown that says, “Look how the mighty have fallen.”

Consider this my official resolution, my online point of accountability (hold me to it!) that I will no longer eat crap. That I will take the wheel of my own epicurian 18-wheeler and steer it away from the oncoming ravine. Today I’m taking a couple of co-workers to Lisa’s, so we can all marvel at the rare sidewalk flower that is a great mexican joint in the wilds of Daly City. Next week, the boxes of living, breathing vegetables will be my lunchtime companions again. It’s GO TIME.

Now it’s time to create a map of good local restaurants and stick it on the robot, perhaps with a subtle warning, like this:

Filed under: Random, Philosophy
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