Catching Up...Again

It feels good to finally be back. To say I have been taking some time off would be an enormous understatement. Last semester's move to San Francisco for fifteen semester-units of Spanish indeed left little time for extracurricular activities. However, I did manage to perfect my pulled pork, get a whole hog roast setup for my crew at the Delta (although I missed it due to car problems), and tried just about every form of tapas, sangria, steamed dumpling, Banh Mi, food truck, and donuts (including jelly-filled donut holes off 9th and Irving) available to me in the City by the Bay. I also took time to continue getting to know the lineup at Thirsty Bear, my still-favorite watering hole in the downtown area, while continuing my search for unique cocktails past the varieties available at Trad'r Sam and Cioppino's. 

But I find myself again working as a personal trainer, and my physical fitness goals trump my taste bud's daily goals so lately the name of the game has been fresh produce. I feel great since making the relatively small change of adding a leaf of kale to my morning protein shake and cleaning up my diet by decreasing starch intake overall and processed starch specifically. I've also again been diligent on taking proper vitamins, including a chelated multivitamin by Apex, nootropics by Alpha Brain and generic fish oils, and I feel as sharp as I've felt in a long time. 

Morning Protein Shake:

2 cups frozen fruit (choice)

15-25g hemp or whey protein

1/2 cup oats

1 leaf of kale

1. Put all ingredients in blender with 1-2 cups of water. Blend, adding water as necessary to achieve desired consistency. 

Note: For more calories, use skim milk or orange juice.

Although don't take cleaning up my diet to mean that I've lost my sense for flavor. On the contrary, my use of  all types of onions, many more varieties of peppers, herbs, and vegetables in general has exploded, leaving me with delicious recipes like Soy-Almond Green Beans, Butternut squash "Risotto", and a number of variations on the meatball using 99% lean ground turkey, 95% lean ground pork, and 93% lean ground beef.

Soy-Almond Green Beans:

2 cups fresh green beans with tips cut

1 teaspoon butter

2-3 tablespoons low sodium soy

2-3 tablespoons finely chopped green onions

2-3 tablespoons finely chopped almonds

1. Blanch green beans in boiling, salted water for approximately 2 minutes, move to ice bath.

2. When ready to serve, melt butter in skillet over medium-high heat. Quickly saute almonds and greens beans in butter.

3. Add soy sauce and reduce until the sauce is thick and coats all the beans and almonds.

4. Plate and garnish with green onion.

All-in-all, I feel great about my recent culinary development and I believe I'm finally able to verbalize my culinary perspective: The New American Cantina. For a definition of this, stay tuned to my coming onslaught of recipes!

Catching Up

Well, suffice to the say the semester got ahead of me and blogging had to take a backseat to academics. But that's not to say that I stopped cooking! On the contrary, I covered a lot of culinary ground as my desire for fall flavors hit full force when the leaves fell. And when I wasn't cooking, I was out enjoying the Journey.

Cheese tasting plate from Thirsty Bear.

So I threw out some of the things I covered between Halloween and the New Year. I'll put up pics and the scoop on my trips to Boston and Orange County, in addition to my new approach to eating for 2012 and the lowdown on where the Journey takes me as I move to San Francisco until July!

Desserts

You know, when I watch cooking shows I realize that I have two major, gaping holes in my cooking game: fresh fish and pastry, or desserts. When it comes to dessert, I just have never previously had a great desire to play in the pastry world. But on the Journey, you can't avoid every obstacle; sometimes you've got to go through your obstacle. So I confronted some desserts:

  

Red velvet cake. It frickin' took me
three times to get this right!

Just a little bacon covered with chocolate on one side
and toasted-walnut caramel on the other, all finished
with Maldon sea salt.

While Trey's girlfriend, Katrina, made a cheesecake I
made a bitchin' cognac-raspberry sauce. Boom.

This apple galette recipe that I got from school
is the best pastry dough I've EVER tasted!

In addition to the above, I also tried my hand (and succeeded) at creme brulee (for which I acquired a torch), a variety of fruit tarts with my beloved pastry dough recipe, chocolate mousse from real chocolate, and berry pie (with seasonal berries).








Classic Sonoma County Produce
With the summer weather running late I had access to some incredible produce until well into the fall months. I got to bake my tail off and cook Italian food like it was going out of style.

Tomatoes from the backyard.

Tomatoes from the Tomato Festival.

Berry picking at Ragle Ranch Park.

 

A killer shot of some provisions from Sonoma.

Savory Scrum-diddly-umptiousness!
Of course I didn't just work on desserts! My love for savory dishes will always win out over any other type of cooking, and I in fact made some excellent dishes over the last several weeks. 

Venezuela's national dish, Pabellon Criollo.

Meat empanadas (ground beef with pork chorizo) next to
vegetarian empanadas (sweet potato, carrot, onion, garlic).

Making a pizza in class!

A nice, light meal to start Thanksgiving Day.

Pesto chicken roulade with
fettucine peppers over rice.

Mine and Kristi's first turkey. I traveled to Boston to see
her for Thanksgiving, and we made the full spread.

Honorable Mention

These are all the dishes that don't fit into their own little descriptive box, so they all get an honorable mention.

Chili cheese omelet from the Apple Tree in Sebastopol, CA.

Grill night with chicken and some late baby summer squash.

 

Sampler of pumpkin beers--2 lagers, an ale,
and a porter.

Croquetas of Serrano Ham from Thirst Bear.

Haha well I've reached the data limit for one post here, so to be continued...

Another rockin' course from SFSU's Professor Sarah Josef

School started in August, and the pace has been steadily accelerating since then. With midterms behind me, it is time to catch up a little bit on my food blog, because while my cooking opportunities have diminished somewhat, I have been fortunate enough to cook at school and pick up three units for my effort! 

Lemon souffle

The class, officially classified as HTM-352,  has a great organizational base, and my only complaint is that I don't get to cook every week, as alternating weeks are spent in the campus' restaurant, the Vista Room, which serves a three-course prix fixe menu from 12-1:30pm every week day.

So far this semester I have had the opportunity to cook a few things--salad and dressing, a souffle of corn and cheese and one of lemon and an apple galette--and sample several dozen other items, like soups, sauces, casseroles, custards, puddings, cookies, scones, muffins, and cream puffs. Often times I've been able to compare low-fat or gluten-free preparations side-by-side, which is truly a useful exercise.

This is about the size of a 10" round dinner plate.

Of the few items I've cooked, I must say the lemon souffle and the apple galette were both excellent and exceeded my expectations. The souffle surprised me because I don't typically enjoy things that are "eggy," but this was delightful.

Corn and cheese souffle

If you'd like the recipe for anything you see, just ask in the comments section, or go to my facebook page, and I'll get it posted ASAP.

The nation's only 100% Native American-owned wine label!

Photo courtesy of PNWG's Facebook page.

 

I recently joined the small but powerful team at Pomo Nation Wine Group (PNWG), the nation's only 100% Native American-owned wine label, as a rep for the San Francisco City area.

I'm really excited, to say the least, because not only is this a fantastic direction for my Incredible Edible Journey, but there could also be some serious professional implications as well! To say the least, the future is exciting.

PNWG has five incredible wines, and instead of trying to tell you myself what they are like, I'll simply refer you to their (well constructed) website: http://www.pomonationwine.com/. I will say, however, that I fell in love with their Cabernet, which is how I got on this whole path in the first place.

15th Annual Tomato Festival Delivers!!!

This year's tomato festival, my first, was a blast. As a foodie with the exacting eye of a former special operations soldier, I can be highly critical and miss few things. Saturday's display was, without a doubt, the finest event of that nature I've been to.

The list of food vendors was as great as was the food itself, the wines were delicious and flowed from multiple locations around the beautiful, grassy venue and the ambiance was one of quiet energy. The Carlos Herrera Band set the tone for the day with upbeat but mellow Spanish-inspired rock-and-roll, and former Top Chef contestants chopped up the competitor's stage with a happy, fun energy that was new to me, as cooking shows always strive to convey the gravity of the moment. All the while thirty-minute seminars on various wine topics educated the truly curious from the flanks of the venue.

The day started with a quick little wait in line as we were greeted by volunteers who ran the event, given wristbands, bamboo plates emblazoned with the Kendall Jackson logo, and the obligatory wineglass. (We also received 6 tickets each for wine tasting.) I particularly enjoyed three of KJ's wines: their Riesling, their Cabernet Sauvignon, and the steel-aged Chardonnay. 

As for the food, I got down on everything! From the tomato tartlet with tomato ice cream to rosemary french fries with heirloom tomato ketchup to gazpacho to sausages to cheeses and on and on and on... My favorite ended being a pulled pork taco, but almost everything was incredibly delicious. And then there was the tomato tasting tent!!! Four tables making a rectangle with a different type of tomato every foot or so!!! For myself, I restricting my tastings to only tomatoes that were yellow or deep red/purple. I wasn't disappointed. Asking which one was best is like asking which one of your guns you like best: its unanswerable, as you love them all!!!


Once I had sampled all I cared to, I grabbed a glass of Riesling and went over to the competitive cooking stage, where former Top Chef contestants Jenn (Jen?) and Kevin were getting down on a thirty-minute competition featuring tomatoes. The winner? The freakin' judges. And me, because I got to see it all, right there in living color. It was sooooooooooooooooo cool seeing two professionals putting together a three-course meal in thirty minutes, featuring tomatoes and pairing it all with one of the wines KJ was serving that day! And telling jokes and talking techniques and ingredients. Truly impressive.

I ended up getting to meet both chefs by the end of the day, and capped it all off with meeting Guy Fieri at Johnny Garlic's booth (where they were serving a smoked tri tip wrap).

It was a great time, and I'll be back next year.

Enjoying a Bier's Identity Crisis

It is the second week of a new semester and I'm all settled in to my class schedule for the fall, so to blow a little steam off, tonight I'm trying out a new beer--just one--that has been eyeballin' me from the shelf every time I walk into Pacific Market (where my brother, Benjamin, works) for several weeks now.

I don't know German, so I looked up the title on Google Translator and, according to them, translates to "Reported Noble and White." Hmm.... Interesting.

I am dubbing this beer "Identity Crisis," because it truly doesn't know what it wants to be, in a wonderfully tasty way!!!

The confusion begins when the bottle fails to define exactly what the bier is, only stating the history itself of the recipe. So, I began tasting with an open mind (and palate) and found that this bier combines two of my favorite bier characteristics: lightness of body and the flavor of a wheat bier=delicious!!! Another thing I really like about it is how mellow the flavors are. It isn't a mild flavor--the flavors themselves are still present and pronounced--it is just mellow.

All in all, loved it. I would pair it with something sweet, like a light salad of butter leaf lettuce with a citrus vinaigrette, or drink it as a session bier (if I can find at less than $4.50/bottle!!!).

Indy Car Races... And a Teriyaki Stick!!!

The pre-race jet show.

And, they're off!!!

I scored three tickets to last week's Indy Car Races at Infineon Raceway, and it was a rippin' good time! I took a fellow veteran, a Navy buddy of mine, and his fiance with me, and thank God I brought my earplugs!

The races were great, but it was clear by lap 25/75 who was going to win, barring some vehicular malfunction. So we headed to the booth's for SWAG, a beer, and of course some fair food!

After perusing the variety of foods: your usual foot-long corn dogs and hamburgers, we stumbled upon a couple cool items: a smoked meat place, where we got pulled pork nachos, and a teriyaki stand, where I of course got a teriyaki stick, because I must try teriyaki anywhere and everywhere I go. This didn't disappoint.