crazysalad

Bulthaup Chef Series

Last week marked the inaugural dinner of the bulthaup San Diego Chef Series, a monthly dinner party held in the bulthaupSD downtown showroom.  

 

The series is the brainchild of bulthaupSD owner Aleka Kim and local chefs Pete Balistreri and Rian Brandenburg, of Tender Greens.   The small, intimate dinner party setting (only 24 guests) allows guests to mingle while watching Balistreri and Brandenburg cook in the nearby open kitchen. 

The meal is prepared with locally-grown, seasonal ingredients and is served, family-style, at three tables set up in the showroom.  Last week's Oktoberfest dinner included local (Poway) beer maker, Lightning Brewery, pouring samples of their hand-crafted, European style beers and a menu that featured sausages, braised pork belly and duck confit.  

Next month's "Celebrating Harvest" dinner will be held Thursday, November 19, at 7 pm.  The menu will include seared sea scallops with brown butter, hand-made fettuccine with rabbit bolognese, slow-cooked short ribs, roasted vegetables, and apple crumb pie. 

A third of the proceeds from each $60 ticket go toward sponsoring the 2010 Cultivating Food Justice Conference in San Diego.  Seating is limited, so be sure to call and reserve your spot today. 

Cafe Influx

Influx (from medieval Latin, influxus, and Latin, influere) - a flowing in (in-fluence), a continuous coming, esp. of individuals in large numbers. 

Influx Cafe, a local cafe in Golden Hill in San Diego (Broadway at 20th) which has a lot of customers continuously coming in to get delicious homemade pastries and cupcakes. 

I like to sit in the seat by the window and watch the cyclist cruise down the hill, under the freeway overpass, and into downtown San Diego.

When the sun gets to be too bright and blinding, the staff will kindly come and lower the shades. 

 

Tacos &Tastings

 
The evening started off at Hamilton’s Tavern and their second Saturday celebration.  Every month, Hamilton’s showcases a different local brewery and offers tasty (and free!) food-pairings to match that month’s beer selection.  

I was lured there by the promise of tacos from El Camino, the as yet-unopened Mexican tapas restaurant located just a few blocks from my house. El Camino was supposed to open in May of this year next to Rebecca's on Juniper in South Park.  But the butcher paper is still covering the front windows and no “Coming Soon” sign has yet appeared, so the tease of getting a sneak preview of their food was too tempting to pass up. 

I called up Alice and, adventurous foodie that she is, she gamely arrived at my house within the hour and we headed down to Hamilton’s.  Even before we had parked the car, we could see a line down the block.  Apparently I’m the last to know, but these Saturday celebrations are extremely popular and getting more and more crowded every month.  Josh was already inside, having wisely arrived at 3:30, and had managed to secure both a table and a spot in the taco line. 

After a 15-minue wait, we were in, but the crush was even worse inside and it was about 100 degrees in there.  On the pool table in the side room I could see women making tortillas by hand and arranging platters of meat and toppings. 

By the time we had navigated the line at the bar and gotten our drinks, Josh arrived with plates full of tacos.  There were 3 types of tacos: lengua, birria, and carne asada.  The birria was my favorite—juicy and flavorful meat wrapped in tender, fresh tortillas.  

We escaped the heat and headed up to Ritual Tavern.
This month Ritual is celebrating its first anniversary and all through September they are featuring local artisan brewers and winemakers, guest bartenders, and concluding with an Alesmith 5-course dinner on September 30.  (Events aren’t always listed on their website, so if you want to find out what’s happening, it’s best to sign up for their weekly email.) 

But that night we were there to check out the charcuterie plate.  I discovered Rey Knight of Knight Salumi Company at the Thursday North Park Farmers’ Market a couple of months ago and have fallen in love with his salumi. Every week Rey experiments with something different and is more than willing to give samples of the 5-6 things he has for sale every week.  I’ll write more about this in my next post, but I was curious to see which of his products Ritual Tavern was offering.

The plate (left) included three types of salumi (El Fuego, Coppa Molina and Sopressata), feta cheese and olives from “the Greek guy at the farmers’ market,” and Ritual’s house-made mustard. I could have eaten the whole thing by myself, but I was polite and shared with others. 

After we polished that off, our server slipped us some lardo, too.  Apparently it had been served on the previous night’s charcuterie plate and although it wasn’t on that night’s rotation, there was enough of it to give us a small taste.  It was a cut a little thicker than I am used to—more like the thickness of American bacon than the silky, paper-thin slices of Lardo di Colonnata—but it was delicious nonetheless.  I asked Rey about it afterwards and he definitely recommends slicing it thinly.  He uses a truffle slicer and eats it on toasted bread. 

I wasn’t as crazy about the Onion Rings I ordered.  I prefer thicker, old-fashioned breadcrumb-style to these tempura-style onion rings, which were too greasy for my taste.  (I know, it’s crazy to complain about grease after eating a chunk of lardo, but there is a difference!)
 
Luckily, we had something to help us wash it down.  We happened to be there on a night when Brewmaster and consultant Lee Chase was on hand doing a blind tasting. 

I’m no beer expert—I don’t really even like beer that much--but it sounded like fun and a good opportunity for me to educate my palate.  After all, years ago I didn’t like coffee or wine either, but the more I learned about them and the more I learned what it was about them I did (and didn’t) like, the better choices I was able to make when ordering them. 

So Alice and I teamed up and shared one tasting.  For $6 we received a tasting sheet and 4-4 oz. glasses of mystery beers.  The tasting sheet gave us some general guidelines about appearance, smell, taste and mouthfeel and offered some key words (toasty, biscuity, dank, herbal, grassy, spicy, citrusy) that we might use to describe the beer’s qualities.

Despite my limited beer knowledge, I was actually able to make some pretty good guesses, at least as to the types of beers we were drinking.  The first was pretty light and clean-tasting, reminiscent of some German beers I seem to recall from a very hazy period of a junior college year abroad.  The second one I immediately nailed as a wheat beer, not too difficult given its cloudy appearance. I had no idea what the third sample was, but reminded me why I don’t like beer—very hoppy and extremely bitter.  The fourth was pretty carbonated, definitely had the highest alcohol content, with a nice fruity, yeasty flavor I actually liked. 

Lee encouraged us to try to identify the beers by name, but I had absolutely no clue.  We pored over the Ritual beverage menu, knowing that the answer lay somewhere on that list.  However, considering there were over 50 beers to choose from, that wasn’t much help to me.  The only exception was beer #2, the wheat beer.  Since there were only two wheat beers on the menu, at least I had a 50/50 shot with that one. 

And the winners were:
#1 Sam Smith Organic Lager
#2 Ayinger Brau-Weisse Wheat Beer
#3 Oscar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale
#4 Uni Broue La Fin du Monde Belgian-style Strong Ale

So I learned something that night.  I definitely don’t like pale ales—there’s something about the bitterness of the hops that I can’t get past.  And I actually liked two of the beers I tasted—the Brau-Weisse and the La Fin du Monde. 

I don’t think I’ll ever be a huge beer drinker, but at least now that I’m beginning to learn the different types of beers, I won’t feel so overwhelmed when I look up at the board at Hamilton’s or Tornado and wonder what the heck to order.

After Ritual, we headed over to Eclipse Chocolate for dessert and coffee. Not all of Eclipse’s wild combinations of flavors work for me--I’m a real traditionalist when it comes to chocolate—but I always look forward to seeing what owner Will Gustwiller has come up with.  I like the fact that he’s willing to push the boundaries and experiment with bold flavors and ingredients.  Also, he runs his business in ecological and community-minded manner, so I want to do everything I can to support him and encourage more artisan businesses like his.    

That night Josh, Alice and I split the summer seasonal dessert tasting platter.  I went straight for the chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich.  The cookie was fantastic--the saltiness of the dough and crunchy cocoa nibs were a good contrast to the creamy gelato.   But at that point in the evening I was too full to eat anything else, especially the grilled boysenberry-goat cheese panini (a substitution for the grilled white chocolate almond-kumquat cake pictured here).

That’s another lesson I’m trying to learn when it comes to food: I don’t have to eat everything.  Better to enjoy one or two bites of something I really enjoy and savor that taste, rather than trying to do too much and regretting it later. 

Sometimes the best course is knowing when to stop.

Tonkatsu

Hungry in Tokyo but don’t speak Japanese?  Don’t worry, there are plenty of visual aids to help guide you in choosing an entree.  Walk down the street and in the front window of nearly every restaurant you will see entire meals made of plastic.

There’s even an area in Tokyo selling kitchenware, Kappabashi, where you can find entire stores devoted to plastic food. I was looking forward to buying some until I saw the price tags.  You think real food in Tokyo is expensive?  (It is.)  But get this: ¥65,000 (nearly $60) for a plate of plastic spaghetti.  An entire sushi platter: $200.  The window display above probably represents several thousands dollars worth of fake food. 

Why do you want to buy plastic food, my husband wondered.  What would you do with it? 

Hmmm, good point. 

Well, I could set some out on the kitchen counter, avoiding the inevitable “what’s for dinner, Mom?” question that arises every day around 4 or 5 in the afternoon.   

What’s for dinner tonight?  Tonkatsu.

What is tonkatsu, you ask?  Breaded pork cutlet.  Similar to Wienerschnitzel (which is made with veal) or chicken-fried steak in the Southern U.S. (made with beef), tonkatsu is pork dredged in flour, dipped in egg, coated in breadcrumbs and fried.

Some of the best tonkatsu in Tokyo is served at a restaurant called Maisen, located in a former bathhouse in Omotesando.

We arrived and were led in along the front counter, past the kitchen and into the spacious, high-ceilinged main dining room.

Although the restaurant does serve other dishes, everyone comes for the tonkatsu.  The menu is bewildering, with page after page of seemingly identical choices.  Since I have been hearing a lot about black pork lately, I decided to try the kurobuta fillet.
 

Kurobuta, or black pork, is a highly prized meat in Japan that comes from an ancient breed of English pig called the Black Berkshire.  Well, it had better be good, because at ¥3100 ($29), it cost at least $10 more than the regular tonkatsu. 

While I was waiting for my food to arrive, I headed back toward the front entrance where I spotted a window full of plastic food.

Here’s a test.  Can you spot the real tonkatsu?

Celebrating San Diego

Yesterday was a perfect reminder of why I live in San Diego.  We are blessed with a climate that allows us to grow food year round here.  And every year Celebrate the Craft at the Lodge at Torrey Pines brings together the region’s best farmers and chefs to showcase our culinary splendors.  What I really love about this event, however, is the way that restaurants and farms are paired together.  Next to a farmer with a gorgeous display of fruits and vegetables is a chef handing you a plate of that same produce, deliciously prepared.

It was hard to know where to start.  I walked around from table to table admiring the bounty.  The bright sun intensified the already-colorful fruits and vegetables.   The smell of grilled tuna and duck confit wafted across the lawn.  I wanted to eat, but as at the farmers’ market, I got distracted talking to old friends, asking questions, and taking photographs.

For me, Region is the restaurant that best exemplifies what San Diego cuisine is all about. Here Chef Allyson Colwell prepares plates of grilled bread and Crows Pass Farm onions waiting to be topped with grilled tuna.