San Francisco

Who: Jen Musty What: Professional cookie baker Where: Batter Bakery, San Francisco Today we have the pleasure of sharing holiday cookie baking tips from expert baker Jen Musty. Jen’s the genius behind my favorite chocolate chip cookie (chewy on the inside, crusty on the outside, big discs of quality chocolate and a touch of Maldon sea salt, oh yeah), so this interview and tour was of particular interest to me. (Inner dialogue: What is her secret?

The long-awaited, much anticipated Tartine Book No. 3 is here at last! Are you already a fan of the two previous Tartine books and have been waiting patiently for this latest installment? If so, you will not be disappointed. Or maybe you’ve never heard of Chad Robertson or his San Francisco based Tartine Bakery or his previous cookbooks but are interested in making your own bread using ancient and whole grains? Then dive in: this book is a game-changer.

Alice Waters’ last cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, made the top of many people’s favorite and most-used cookbook lists. Her newest cookbook, The Art of Simple Food II, is sure to follow suit as she continues her crusade to encourage and inspire people to cook at home. This volume take things one step further by highlighting the garden and by natural extension the importance of freshness and the seasonality of ingredients.

Sue Conley and Peggy Smith opened Cowgirl Creamery back in the early 1990s. Both had strong backgrounds in the Bay Area restaurant scene, with Sue at Bette’s Diner and Peggy at Chez Panisse. Inspired by life in bucolic West Marin and ready for something new, they decided to open a food store in Point Reyes Station; and soon after that they developed their first cheese: the delicious, creamy, elegant triple cream named Mt. Tam after nearby Mount Tamalpias.

Daniel Patterson is a self-taught chef and the owner of several Bay Area restaurants, notably the innovative and imaginative Coi in San Francisco which has earned two Michelin stars. But he is also a husband and father, someone who, when he can manage to be home for dinner, enjoys making roast chicken for his children.

“I feel like I’m on a boat.” These are the words I found escaping my mouth while spending time with Becca Piastrelli in her narrow Oakland, CA kitchen. She laughed and agreed her tiny kitchen is reminiscent of a ship’s galley —  cozy, bright, and a bit quirky! Becca and her husband Tim moved into their current apartment after occupying a much larger home in Sonoma County. They welcomed the change and the vastly shorter commute into San Francisco for work.

When I was facing a significant birthday a few years ago (one that ended in a “0”) I began my celebration at SFMOMA, specifically at the Blue Bottle Cafe with a slice of Thiebaud Cake: a chocolate cake covered in strawberry buttercream and filled with Lillet- and vanilla-poached strawberries. Clearly it was going to be a good decade!

Sandwiches are a natural lunch box item. They’re easy to make and eat, they keep well, and people love them. But it’s also easy to get into a sandwich rut, making the same roast turkey/swiss/mayo/mustard day in and day out. Sometimes you need a little inspiration to kickstart your sandwich routine. What’s the easiest place to find new and interesting sandwich combinations? Read on for my free and easy hint!

When I arrived at Samin Nosrat’s house, her front door (which, appropriately, also happens to be her kitchen door) was wide open. I could see her shuffling around inside with a rag underneath each foot as she hastily dried her freshly washed kitchen floor. With sparkling eyes and a wide smile she shuffled forward and welcomed me into her kitchen. Samin is a true treasure of the Bay Area.

Kimberley lives in a rented home with a humble kitchen on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. She doesn’t let an ordinary space keep her from making extraordinary food on her colorful cooking blog, The Year in Food. Join me for a peek into this food blogger’s kitchen so we can collectively marvel at all the props and trimmings she uses to create beautiful images of food.

Home cooks have to be a careful when it comes to a cookbook written by a restaurant chef. There often can be a disconnect between what it takes to get restaurant food onto our home tables when we don’t have exotic ingredients flown to our doors and a dozen employees to prep them, not to mention years of professional training and the extraordinarily high btu’s of a huge, multi-burner professional stove.

It seems like this is a good year for mushrooms, at least in Northern California. In Berkeley, you can find heaps of delicious looking wild mushrooms at fairly reasonable prices, especially chanterelles, which come in many colors (white, yellow, black.) But what caught my eye recently is the oddly named Fried Chicken Mushroom. Is it true? Does it really taste like fried chicken? At $8.99 a pound, I picked up a small handful for around $2, and took them back to my kitchen to find out.

Off the Menu: Staff Meals from America’s Top RestaurantsMs. Guggiana specifically looked for restaurants that had a strong farm to table connection or a special place in their communities, knowing that these establishments would likely extend that caring and respect to their staff. For six weeks she traveled across the USA to visit such places, entering through the back door with her camera and notebook in tow, and sitting down with the staff, and sometimes even the chef/owner, for a meal.

If you’ve ever flown into or out of the San Francisco airport, you have probably looked out the window and wondered about those weird red ponds scattered along the edge of the Bay. Wonder no more: they’re sea salt harvesting ponds!I was recently invited along on Diamond Crystal Salt’s annual sea salt harvest right here in the San Francisco Bay. Let me tell you, it was a fascinating trip from Bay to box. Oh, and why the startling red color in those ponds?

So what’s a grocery store in San Francisco doing with a cookbook and why should you care? Take a peek at that lovely cake pictured above and then read on for my review.“Wendell Berry said that eating is an agricultural act; I say that shopping is a community building act.” — Sam Mogannam, owner, Bi-Rite MarketAt first glance it may seem like Eat Good Food is for Bay Area shoppers only.

While chocolate and cheese are an unusual pairing, they’re not as mutually exclusive as one would think. Consider chocolate cheesecake or the chocolate drizzled on cannoli, for example. This dessert, which pairs a wedge of double creme cheese with squares of dark chocolate and dead ripe figs, takes this concept to a whole new level. So simple, yet at the same time sophisticated and, well, pretty sexy, too.

On a brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon in Seattle, we hit up the Ballard Farmers Market, strolling through the tree-lined street, learning about the region’s seasonal specialties and sampling an impressive variety of artisan foods. There were sweet cherries and strawberries, curlicue garlic scapes, and the most incredible caramels we’ve ever tasted…Open every Sunday year round, rain or shine (and oh, the glorious blue skies we had yesterday!

Reinventing something elemental — your morning cup of coffee, for example — takes creativity, tinkering and imagination. Matt Higgins and Keith Gehrke of Coava Coffee, have spent the past seven years honing their skills in the coffee industry and dreaming up their innovative (and ridiculously good–looking!) brewing equipment. Their Portland, Oregon coffee shop is gorgeous and the baristas intensely knowledgeable. Let’s learn how to brew the perfect cup of joe!

Sasha and Michael renovated their kitchen a few years ago, with groovy aqua countertops acting as the guide for all other style and color decisions. The results of their hard work? A cheerful, vintage-inspired space, where friends, family and doggies want to hang out all day long! Sasha and Michael love to entertain casually, making big dinners for friends on impromptu weekday evenings. They are relaxed in their space and cooking style.

Steven Smith of Steven Smith Teas, has been expertly blending fine teas for the past thirty years. Steven and his wife, Kim, are both from the Portland, Oregon area, and after many different tea ventures and a few years of living in France, they’ve returned home. They’ve also opened a cozy tea shop. Pull up a chair, throw the kettle on, and join Steven and myself in a conversation about tea. Find out what this expert says about how to brew the perfect cup!

Where in the world is it not only polite but a downright requirement to slurp up your coffee with vigor and tenacity? At Stumptown’s Annex, a tasting room in Portland, Oregon, you can drink several of their esteemed coffees and learn about the intense brews from the pros behind the counter. It’s the quintessential gourmand Portland experience, perfect for locals or out–of–town guests.

A light sprinkling of salt on your comforting, mellow, bowl full of ice cream? My grandmother would be aghast. That doesn’t mean I didn’t immediately try it and love it, after my conversation with Mark Bitterman.Mark and his wife, Jennifer, own The Meadow in Portland, Oregon and just opened up a sister shop in the West Village in New York City.

Kim Boyce comes from a long line of female home bakers and cooks. Her mother made Chinese food from scratch in the 70s, her grandmother was constantly pulling something fabulous from the oven. These ladies made honest, ‘not fancy’ food. Lucky for us Kim caught the baking bug in college, and never looked back. With a recent move from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, and Good to the Grain, her first cookbook, out now, Kim has cause for celebration.

Many people see tofu as a blank canvas kind of food, something that has no inherent flavor but can act as a vehicle for whatever you introduce it to. So they squeeze it and marinate it and toss it with all manner of spices and aromatics. But people who grew up in Asia may know a secret about tofu that many Bay Area citizens are just beginning to discover: if it’s well made, fresh tofu can be a delicious food in its own right.

dried apricotsI first sampled these apricots from ApricotKing Orchards a few weeks ago at the house of two of my friends in Boston. These friends are dedicated Northeast locavores, but said they make one of their only exceptions for dried apricots from this particular orchard in California. They buy them by the pound and keep the bags squirreled away for fear of over-consumption.After trying a few, I can see why!

I was recently invited by the California Milk Advisory Board to tour Clauss Dairy Farms in Hilmar, CA. I think it is important to approach food with a farm to table curiosity — to ask where it comes from and how it is produced. At Clauss, I saw how the cows lived and how they were treated, and I even got to pet them!Clauss Dairy Farms raises brown Jersey cows, and the farm raises over 3,500 cows. Clauss is a family-owned business started by Richard Clauss.

Hidden away down a tiny side street in the middle of San Francisco, Bell’occhio is a sweet jewel box of a shop, chock full of odd and eclectic bits this-and-that. There’s plenty of unique things here for the kitchen, as well as large spools of red and white butcher’s twine and whimsical boxes shaped like fruit, flageolet beans, morels or trout.Also stocked are a lovely collection of ribbons, jewelry, custom perfumes and handmade papers.

Last Saturday, November 7th, was the opening day of recreational Dungeness crab season in California. This means that people like you and me can go fishing for our own Dungeness crab as long as we follow the rules! I’ll talk about the where and the how in this post. The commercial Dungeness season is expected to open this Saturday, November 14th. Look for crab prices in the seafood markets around San Francisco, including Sun Fat Seafood, to decrease.

We recently had the opportunity to try out fresh coffee beans from Storyville, a Seattle coffee company that sends their beans direct to your door. But this isn’t just any mail-order coffee service. Storyville is on a serious mission: they are utterly determined to help you make a great cup of coffee, and they go to great lengths to see that happen. Here’s how.At first, we were rather skeptical of Storyville and its efforts to promote its beans. Why?

Lured by the sight of thousands of colorful winter gourds, we made an impromptu stop while driving through the Santa Ynez Valley last weekend. We found ourselves at Summerset Farm, a produce stand located just north of the towns of Solvang, Santa Ynez, and Los Olivos. Although the Valley is best known as wine country (this is where the film Sideways was set), at Summerset Farm the focus is on organic vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

We went to this store on a recent trip to San Francisco, led by a friend who knew we’d get lost in it. True, we could have stayed and browsed for hours in this dimly lit (excuse the grainy photographs), packed-to-the-gills, recycled French housewares shop…Leslie at AT:SF has covered Cookin’ before, and the comments reflect what we’ve read elsewhere: Some think it’s overpriced, and the owner is unpleasant.

This morning, I sent in my $25 membership fee to the Mycological Society of San Francisco. I’ve always wanted to learn how to identify and collect mushrooms, and the Bay Area is a wonderful place for it, due to the rainy winters and close proximity to woodlands.September through May is the mushroom season here, and right now is the perfect time to join the Mycological Society of San Francisco.

If you’re in San Francisco and you have a hankering for Kinder eggs, elderflower syrup, some spaetzle, and a copy of Der Spiegel, have we got the store for you.In Noe Valley at the corner of Church and 28th, just a stone’s throw from the MUNI J-Line is Lehr’s German Specialties, a quaint little shop on a quiet street in San Francisco flanked by Victorian row houses. They have tons of German candies – Kinder eggs, marzipan, and other German chocolates.

We love CSA’s because we believe in supporting our local farmers and we love getting fresh produce delivered to us direct from the farmer. Now, those of us in most Bay Area locations can have local meat delivered to us straight from the ranchers.Meat CSA’s are a recent development in the Bay Area and there are only a few of them at the moment. The prices (ranging from $5 to $15 per pound) are very reasonable for organic and grass-fed meat, and the packaging is minimal.

Want to learn better knife skills? How to cook Thai? Or just have something fun and different to do after work or for a party? Consider a cooking class or cooking party. In this post, we’ll list some cooking schools in San Francisco.If we’ve missed a favorite of yours in this list, please let us know!Kids Culinary Adventures – for kids951-5 Old County RoadBelmont, CA 94002(650) 440-0241 Tante Marie’s Cooking School – focuses on home cooking.

Starting yesterday, Slow Food Nation has begun stripping up the sod in front of San Francisco’s City Hall in preparation of planting a large victory garden. With food prices rising and arable land shrinking, cities worldwide are encouraging urban gardening.The food from the garden will be donated to food banks and other needy people with limited access to fresh, healthy food.

The Ferry Building is a historic building that opened in San Francisco in 1898 and was a major transportation hub in San Francisco before the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge were built. Damaged in the 1989 earthquake, the Ferry Building was restored as a food market hall.Every store in the Ferry Building is related to food; from specialty markets to restaurants, to kitchen supplies and kitchen antiques, garden stores, and a Farmer’s Market twice a week.

We don’t really have a lot of room to garden at our San Francisco Edwardian row house. Our backyard faces north and doesn’t get enough light to grow vegetables, and our south-facing front stoop had very little real estate. We’re limited to whatever containers we can fit on our sunny front stoop.Last year, we had several container herbs, strawberries, and vegetables growing on the stoop and some sunflowers growing in the sidewalk.

We’ve mentioned before how we love buying fresh seafood direct from the source. On Saturday, we decided to check out an abalone farm we’ve seen several times when we’ve driven past on Hwy 1 between San Francisco and Santa Cruz.Abalone is a gastropod with one bowl-shaped shell that has a beautiful mother-of-pearl interior. They resemble a large snail or slug, and have a tender texture similar to a cooked shiitake mushroom. Their flavor is very delicate and extremely delicious.

I’m reluctant to talk about my favorite seafood market in San Francisco, but my mother taught me to play nice and share. And what a gem this place is!Hours: Mon-Sat 9:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m.; Sun 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.Deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, Sun Fat Seafood Company is the kind of family-owned business where they remember the names and faces of their regular customers.

Like a well-stocked bakery entices the passing sweets addict, the doublewide storefront of Kamei Restaurant Supply beckons kitchen junkies inside.With its unparalleled selection, this is one of the best kitchen supply stores in the city. It’s really two stores in one. There are rows of commercial goods like hotel pans, industrial stockpots and plain white, deep soup bowls.

The enchanting Jimtown Store is a place of fantasies. I always feel like I could curl up and go to sleep on the warm, creaky, wooden floor. In my fantasy, I lie there, undiscovered, as the store is cleaned and locked up for the night. Later on, as if in a childhood dream, I wake up and each room comes alive with delicious foods, toys and friends to play with.There are antique toys, like folk art carousels, that add to the fantasy.

You know the fish is fresh when you watch the guy behind the counter stun it with a mallet before he takes it in the back to clean it for you.Manila Oriental Market just opened in the outer Mission a week ago and it’s a destination for fresh fish. They have tanks of live clams, oysters, crab and rockfish. There’s also quite a selection of shrimp, whole fish on ice and items like fresh sardines and fresh (not frozen) squid that rarely show up in supermarkets.

Rancho Gordo grows and sells New World foods – beans, dried spices, chiles and corn. The beans are grown in Northern California from heirloom seeds that company founder Steve Sando scavenges in trips to Latin America. If you don’t eat beans like these then you don’t know what you’re missing. They’re utterly delicious, an easy source of protein.You can buy through their online store, or check out their Northern California market schedule.