My weekend started on Sunday at 6AM for a party I was throwing on my roof for Bay to Breakers. B2B is a 12k race through San Francisco that is actually just an excuse for San Franciscans to get dressed up, drink and party in the streets. I happen to live right along the route so on Saturday morning I picked up a keg and invited about 30 people to show up at 7am on Sunday and watch the race go by. It was a pretty big success and no one fell off the roof.
Yesterday I spent my day biking around San Francisco, eating tacos, and listening to 6 really great talks that covered all sorts of topics such as surviving the zombie apocalypse, how we can use technology to build and archive community, a plea for programmers to stop being such jerks about new coding languages and duh, tacos all through this really cool thing called TacoConf. That link doesn’t actually give you too much information about what TacoConf really is so good thing I just explained it, right? Anyway, I had so much fun but somehow felt I didn’t get a chance to eat enough tacos (I had only one taco al pastor! How did this happen?!) So by the time I was riding home my mind was already thinking, “steak!!!” But somehow steak wasn’t enough and although Jesse was hoping for some roasted cauliflower I decided that mac and cheese would be a much better idea.
There are things in my life that just make me want to swear. Usually immensely joyful and beautiful things where I’m not sure I could properly express my enthusiasm and delight without a dirty word. These days I find myself swearing a lot and what I made for lunch yesterday was no exception. Once I put this plate together I said to myself, “Spring has sprung, mother f*cker.” So what have we got here?
On Saturday I finally stopped being number 1 lazy girl and actually biked down to the Ferry Building Farmers Market which for those of you who are not familiar with San Francisco is like, the holy grail of Farmers Markets. I had been to the market once before with Jesse when I first moved but between him having no tolerance for aimless wandering in crowds and me immediately having to pee a million times when I’m overstimulated, it was a fairly unsuccessful outing. Luckily, this time I had my friend Isis with me who runs the booth for our work every Saturday so she was able to take me on a well curated tour of growers and producers that ended with me having a backpack full of cookies, yogurt, avocados, fava beans, blood oranges, pea shoots, basil, pea blossoms, and strawberries. Yummmmmm!!!
Hello! It has been a while! The last two weeks I have been preparing for Coachella, attending Coachella, and then recovering from Coachella. It was totally exhausting but worth every sleepless, dehydrated, and hungry day! The only thing that I missed was getting to eat good food, something that Coachella definitely lacks.
Anyway, I’m back now and I’m back to cooking and I’m still not over tacos so naturally, I made tacos last weekend. The decision to use pork cheeks in the tacos came from two different places. The first is that as I’ve been learning more and more about different kinds of meats, I was finding that I was wanting to get a little more familiar with our less expensive and less popular cuts and be able to help people figure out how to prepare them. Second, my amazing, wonderful, sweetest woman in the world mom just sent me Thomas Keller’s first three cookbooks, French Laundry, Ad Hoc at Home, and Bouchon and Keller is way into braising so I was feeling way into braising too and pork cheeks are the perfect thing for that.
Thursday has turned into “feed your friends Thursday” which is great for me because I love cooking and having people over. Also I pick up my farm box on Wednesday night and always have enough vegetables to feed a small army. Last night Jesse’s friend and former coworker came over and I was feeling a little lazy so I picked up a pancetta wrapped tenderloin from work.
fulfillingplanb asked: What exactly do you add to the bones when you make stock? Just boil it down with water?
Hi! Yes! If you only have bones you probably need about three chickens worth of bones (I had one carcass and one with some meat on it since I had broken it down and took only the breasts and legs). Try to chop them up into about 2 inch pieces if you have a cleaver so that you can get more flavor out of them. Then throw them into a large pot with onions, celery, carrots, salt and pepper and a little parsley if you have it and then just fill the pot with water until everything is covered. Bring it to a boil and then turn down the heat and simmer uncovered for about 4 hours. Once the stock is done you can strain out all the veggies and bones, voila!
Maybe you don’t know this about me but I am an obsessive bone saver. Anytime we cook something with a bone you better believe that those bones get picked out and put into the freezer. Why do I save bones you may ask? To make stock some day out in the future, obviously! Unfortunately, when you have a teeny tiny freezer like mine sometimes saving bones isn’t the most space effective thing you can possibly do. And after a solid week of Jesse complaining about the lack of space in the freezer and the excess of bones I realized that something probably needed to be done. So I dragged out my frozen chicken carcasses, hacked them up with a cleaver, and I made some stock. About 10 cups of it….some of which are just going to go back into the freezer. Oops.
Last week I did something a little daring and signed up for a CSA box through Mariquita farms. I say it’s daring because CSA farm boxes are known for being extremely bountiful and there are only two of us to feed. It feels particularly challenging to figure out what I’m going to make with veggies that are not so familiar to me at all, such as calcot onions, soup celery, and green garlic. Green garlic has been particularly captivating to me because it was something I had never heard of until I moved to San Francisco but once spring hit it seemed to be the talk of the town. I had been dying to buy some but since I didn’t know how to actually cook with it I had been holding off. Lucky for me, some came in my CSA box this week.
