November 2008 Archives

This post is a cautionary example of the effects of procrastination. I have been planning a review of Sunday brunch places in San Francisco and environs, with weekly posts. I visited a few places and took some notes but didn't actually post anything. And when I finally had the time and incentive to launch the series, I find my initial target restaurant has shut down their brunch service! Well, no matter. I have these notes and it was such a good brunch. I'm going to write about it anyway.... but I'll be short.

South is the North American outpost of Sydney chef, Luke Mangan. It features the foods and wines of Australia and New Zealand. Located across the street from the King Street Cal Train station, it is in a warehouse-like building and the decor is modern and SoMA loft-like.

I tried the south crab omelette, enoki mushrooms, miso broth—a clever Pacific Rim take on breakfast food. It was a delicious omelette generously stuffed with crab meat and enoki mushrooms, garnished with crunchy fried garlic and shallots, and served in a savory pool of miso broth. This was so good, I had it every time I went for brunch.

If crab or miso aren't your thing you could have had "eggs and soldiers," "crumpets with butter + marmalade," or "coconut bread with new zealand manuka honey." And if that didn't sound good, how about "sweet corn fritters, bacon spinach + maple syrup," or "truffled egg, citrus cured salmon, hollandaise"? Or a "venison burger with spiced beetroot chutney"?

I really liked the South[ern] Brunch, but alas, 'tis no more. Too bad. A little variety has leached out of the world to be replaced by yet another waffle or poached egg. You can still have lunch and dinner here. Give it a try. Maybe if you promise to come for brunch, they'll bring it back.

Next week I'll write about a place that will actually serve you food on Sunday morning.

South
330 Townsend St # 101
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415) 974-5599

The official cultivar for this miniature pumpkin is "Jack be Little" but Lou from Iacopi Farms alliteringly calls it a "Munchkin Pumpkin."

Though the most popular use for these is for centerpieces and fall decorations, they have a sweet winter-squash flesh with a thin skin—meaning that you can eat the whole thing (minus the bottom, the stem, and the seeds).

The first time I saw one of these at dinner was when I had Daniel Humm's tasting menu at Campton Place. The pumpkin had the seeds scooped out and was filled with the most delicious pumpkin soup imaginable. (Just thinking about this meal makes me jealous of all the New Yorkers who can now go to Eleven Madison Park where Daniel moved in January 2006). If you want to do something special with these Lilliputian pumpkins, The New York Times recently published a recipe for Baby Pumpkins With Seafood which filled the hollowed-out and roasted pumpkin with a rich scallop-cheese sauce. I think that's what I am going to do with mine. It will give me an excuse to open one of my bottles of Aubert chardonnay. (Not that I normally need an excuse.)

P.S. The real Farmer's Market Product(s) of the Week were strawberries (Catalán Family Farm), Italian basil (Chue's Farm), and tomatoes (Balakian Farms). Normally, these things aren't unusual in the least, but to find them fresh and from the field on November 29th strikes me as highly unusual. Alas, though I had my camera with me, the battery was dead and you are going to have to take my word that California is truly an agricultural paradise.

Just as there is an unexpected aviation tie-in to the current economic crises and efforts to deal with it, there also is a wine tie-in.

The aviation tie-in was the badgering of the auto executives by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D, NY) for flying to Washington on their corporate jets while pleading poverty and asking for a government loan. Indeed, the resulting media echo-chamber cacophony was enough to get General Motors to announce that they were selling their corporate jets. I really do think that executives of large corporations should have their own aircraft, as it saves a lot of time which is important for guys who work 80-hour weeks. But, if you are weeks away from bankruptcy and you are begging for a loan, I guess you have to wear the sackcloth.

However, CNN is also beating the demagogic populist drum over the fact that the White House served world leaders 2003 Shafer Hillside Select at a state dinner: (a wine "worth $500 per bottle!") World leaders dine in style as they discuss financial crisis. This really seems like grasping at grape-stems. Besides the fact that the current Wine-Bid average price for this wine is $205, not $500, would it have been better to serve Two-Buck Chuck?

This is just silly.

Observant readers will have noticed that Sweet and Sour Spectator has been upgraded from Movable Type version 3.2 to version 4.2. The upgrade includes a complete face lift, support for tags, and much better navigation and search capabilities. I think it is a big improvement, but there are two changes that readers might want to take note of.

1. The Category archives now contain only the fifteen most "recent" entries. They used to contain all posts in the category. I may change this later, but for now, you can work around this limitation by using tag search. I've tagged all posts with their category, so a tag search will return all posts for that tag/category.
2. This version of the blog software no longer supports rdf syndication, only atom syndication. I've linked index.rdf to atom.xml & hopefully that will provide a seamless transistion for those using the rdf method. If that doesn't work, you may need to switch to atom syndication.

If anyone finds anything that is broken or has any questions, please contact me using the email link under the "Author!" block in the right margin.

Photography has always had a tenuous relationship with the real word, but as we get further into the digital age, the links between photographs and reality are disappearing.

We entered the age of photography with an industrial attack on the landscape and portrait artist. Before the daguerreotype only artists could document the world for posterity. After, anyone could do so, and thus we have an extensive record of the world from about 1850 forward.  For scores of years, photography provided indisputable evidence of reality. However, today the digital manipulation of photographs can lie and cheat, or create an alternate reality.

And if that wasn't enough, now we have a post-modern take on photography where the intent is to fool us into thinking that a picture of something real is a picture of something fake. This started when Olivo Barbieri started taking photographs using a special tilt-shift lens that manipulated depth of field to fool us into thinking we were looking at a model. (Follow the Barieri link for some examples of his work). Ironically, this illusion relies on a limitation of photography--close-up lenses have poor depth of field--plus assuming that everyone is familiar with this artifact.  And, just as the digital domain makes it easier to fake reality, it also makes it easier to fake fakery.

Here is a recent on-line magazine article that is a must see: 50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography.  For do-it-yourself buffs here is a Tilt-Shift Photoshop Tutorial, there is a tilt-shift Flickr tag and it brings up these examples, and for the obsessive, a comprehensive Tilt-Shift Link Collection.  If you want to do this in the analog domain, here is a nice $2k Nikkor special lens to get the effect. Finally, there is my attempt above, taken along Cienega Road in Hollister, California, which will pop up a larger version if you click on it.

The Alinea Cookbook has landed! And I can barely pick it up again because it's a damn big and heavy book! This is the perfect coffee table book, as it is full of gorgeous photographs of amazing objects, which also have the wonderful characteristic of being edible. For many owners of this book, it is likely to remain an object of display rather than becoming stained with grease, as the recipes are seriously intimidating.

Of course, this is exactly my kind of cookbook! Almost all of the recipes require a new ingredient or a new cooking device. Despite what you might think, this is no bad thing. As is well-known, the healthy American male looks upon every project as an excuse to buy a new tool, and if the end result of the project is food then it is even better. All of those barbeque grills in American back yards are only tangentially related to feeding the family.

If you don't work at Alinea or WD-50 you can't just open to a random page of this book and start cooking. Most of us need to answer three questions: 1) Do I have the ingredients? 2) Do I have the time? -- and 3) Do I have the equipment? Since my answer was "no" to at least one of these questions for almost every recipe in the book, I had to fall back to a more abstract method for deciding where to start. I looked for a recipe that produced something extremely neat, and which seemed at least theoretically possible to pull off. After closely examining every picture in the book and imaging what it might taste like, I decided to make what is prosaically described in the book as bacon powder, wrapped in pineapple glass.