Which Got Me To Thinking

I sat down to polish off the last of the twelve dirt bombs that I made on Friday.   I peeled away the plastic wrap, admiring the perfectly round dome with its crystal coating of sugar and cinnamon.  This batch of dirt bombs is the best I’ve ever made.  I boldly considered that these could quite possibly be better than the dirt bombs at Cottage Street Bakery, which I have credited before as the source of inspiration for these beauties.  I have even travelled there, as on a pilgrimage, more than once to eat their bombs.  They are good, but mine are better. 

 

Dirt Bombs, Ultimosa Style

Which got me to thinking that I could open a café that sells only dirt bombs and coffee.  It’s all the rage, opening restaurants that overspecialize in one item, like toast. Too many choices can weigh you down.  I am still haunted by my own indecision-making skills as a second-grader, when my friend Sally and I would ride our bikes to the drugstore to buy candy on Tuesday afternoons, and I would pace up and down the candy aisle that towered over me, debating whether I should branch out (PayDay?  BabyRuth?), or go with the tried and true (Butterfinger, Marathon Bar).   I like the idea of specialization; it simplifies the decision making process greatly.  If I want tea and toast, I know just where to go.  And it will be The Best.

I could offer dirt bomb variations at my café.  There would be the Comfort Food version, with butter, sugar, and white flour.  The gluten-free version.  The dairy-free.  And of course, the Dust Snow and Coffee Ultimosa Dirt Bomb, with its secret recipe that I will tell you includes almond meal and buttermilk. 

Which got me to thinking about changing ingredients to classic recipes.  Sometimes this is a beautiful thing, a natural evolution, like adding prickly pear juice to a margarita, or garlic to mashed potatoes.  But some recipes should never be touched.  They are sacred, and should exist only as perfected.  This got me to thinking about two friends – husband and wife – with splendid taste who went gaga over fresh basil tossed into Caesar salad.

“What???!!!” you exclaim?  That’s what I said:  Basil in a Caesar salad.  Crazy, right?  A powerful leafy green in Caesar salad changes everything.  It completely overshadows the Romaine and clashes with the dressing, which has taken centuries to perfect.  Would you add Romaine lettuce to pesto?  Of course not!

Panettone, a classic

Then there’s coffee.  What’s with the flavors?  Vanilla, hazelnut.  Yuck.  Coffee is coffee.  If you enjoy the sublime taste of coffee with flavor, get yourself a pastry to eat with the coffee, like a shortbread cookie or biscotti.

Which gets me to thinking that I need to bake something else, now that I have eaten the last dirt bomb.  Which gets me to thinking that Easter is coming, so its time to make hot cross buns.  

Coffee, Donuts, and Cayenne Pepper

Sometimes I observe comments (on other websites) from grumpies who are sick and tired of seeing pictures of other people’s food.  I like seeing good pictures of good food, and so I will continue to post pictures of what I feel fits into that narrow description.

For example, here is a good picture of good food.  Is this picture going to hang on the walls of the Guggenheim?  No!  Will it auction at Christie’s for a bazillion dollars?  Never!  It does, however, capture the mood of the food, and it makes you want to reach in and grab one.  Doesn’t it?  Even a Grumpy would want one of these.

I like sweets, and I like treats.  For Christmas, Santa gave me a Nespresso Citiz.  I LOVE my Citiz.  Here are all the reasons why:

- It’s beautifully Bauhaus, fire-engine red
- It makes a perfect cup of coffee with foam
- It streamlines the coffee-making process
- There are no messy grinds or filters to clean
- A cup of Nespresso made at home costs a lot less than a Peet’s made at Peet’s.

Almost right away, I discovered that morning cups of Nespresso SCREAM for a baked breakfast accompaniment. 

Hello, donuts.

Before Santa even left the North Pole, I ripped this recipe from the Wall Street Journal  (Lo!  A recipe in the Wall Street Journal!), which features two donut recipes from "Glazed, Filled, Sugared & Dipped," by Stephen Collucci with Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn.

I followed the baked version word for word, and it worked perfectly.  My only comments are:

1. Double the recipe, because there is no way you are going to eat just one at a time, and you will definitely want to give some away.
2. Double dip on the glaze, which I highly encourage, and there is plenty of it with the measurements as listed.

I did a double take on the list of spices that go into these donuts.  It’s long, and it includes cayenne pepper.  (Lo!  Cayenne pepper in a donut!)  Cocoa powder, espresso powder, molasses, honey, it’s all in there, plus more.  Still, they are easy to make and quick to bake.

And oh my, they do taste good.  Incredibly moist and full of flavor, they are THE perfect pairing with a fresh and frothy lungo.

Have You Been Wanting to Do This For Years Too?

I'm talking about taking a spontaneous day off of work, all by yourself, and doing something--anything--that you've been wanting to do for years.

I did it.  In Golden Gate Park.  With absolutely no prior planning. In fact, when I left home in the morning, I didn't even know that I was going to do what I did.

But I did it.  And it was appropriately organic.

First, I dropped my kid off at Summer Art Camp at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park.  It was an unusually glorious day because it was already warm and sunny in JUNE in SAN FRANCISCO.  Everyone knows this is rare.  It doesn't bode well for July or August...we all know what's coming.

You probably know that the Japanese Tea Garden is right next door to the deYoung.  In the tea garden is a tea house.  I went there first, and was the first there.  From the modest but ample menu, I ordered gen-matcha and ochazuke.  It was my first ochazuke, and it was perfect.  Rice, with puffed rice for crunch and seaweed for salt, is bathed in steaming hot green tea.

You would have loved the plush green, finely manicured garden.  Japanese in its attention to detail and design, quiet in the middle of a city.  My peace was interrupted by a generous Frenchman who first asked the time and then kindly offered to escort me through the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit next door.  

An older woman cackled her way up the gentle slope to the tea house.  Panting, she reminisced about how much more quickly she made it here as a young lady so many years ago.

A cuddly couple, honeymoon style, came and went.  Americans, oversized camera lenses projecting from their bellies, trundled through.  It was time to go.

After a quick walk up to and through the Conservatory of Flowers, it was back to the car for the drive to wherever, and whatever it was that needed tending.

Lobster Tale

“Now, people ask me, what rituals can we have today? My answer is, what are you doing? What is important in your life? What is important, they say, is having dinner with their friends. That is a ritual.” – Joseph Campbell

It’s a given that at least once every summer Dad will make Lobster Dinner.  This has been going on, with some regularity, for decades.  If he doesn’t make it at home, we go out to get it.

In the early days, when we spent our weekend days in Maine’s coastal towns, we discovered Barnacle Billy’s.  This was, and could still be, the kind of place where you pushed your way forward through the crowd and then hollered your order up to the cook behind the counter.  Meantime, someone in our party would troll the weatherbeaten restaurant for an equally weatherbeaten wooden table.  The lobsters came out of the kitchen hot and red with limp claws draped over paperboard bowls, accompanied by sides of corn, piles of steamed clams, and small pools of melted butter.

Last summer, Lobster Dinner took a new twist.  Dad acquired a recipe from a friend who apparently has created quite a following of his own with it. 

Preparing lobster in this manner is a multi-step process: first, you pour a large martini and drink it to get up the nerve to cook the poor buggers by plunging their writhing bodies into a boiling cauldron of water.  (I never look.  It’s murder.)  After they're cooked, you pin their bodies, belly up, to a cutting surface while you use a strong knife to score each down the length of its body.  (Don’t worry, it’s already dead.)

Once scored, you generously brush melted butter with garlic in and all around the lobsters' nooks and crannies.  If there were a recipe to the buttery sauce, I would give it to you.  But after several requests, it was revealed that there is none.  It's more of a style than a recipe.  

Grill the lobsters.  Not too much. Serve with bowls of melted unsalted butter, grilled corn, carrots and potatoes in broth, steamers, and cole slaw.  Beer, white wine.

Breaking All the Rules + Oysters

Okay, I've broken one of the golden rules of blogging by letting 10 months--10 whole months!!--go by without a single post.  I'm crawling back into your arms, humbled.

I got busy.  Like, busier, because I have a business that got really busy.  I am going to experiment with a new approach to DustSnowCoffee.  Briefly, it's going to get brief.  Not as brief as Twitter (@dustsnowcoffee), but with a lot more pictures and less prose.  That's the plan anyway.


Let's do it!


We've got a lot to catch up on.  In small bites.


Which leads me to a meal, the real subject of this post.  I've been meaning to share it with you for months (six, not ten!).  

Do the cranberries give away that this meal took place on Cape Cod?  I was visiting my parents at their cottage on the beach, and they experimented with two newly discovered recipes, one of which was martinis with cranberry garnish.   We transported this exciting cocktail twist to the Coonamessett Inn in Falmouth, MA. It hasn't made its way to California yet, but I expect to see it in every chic lounge on the West Coast for the next cranberry harvest.

The real gems of the meal were the oysters.  To make the dish: start by whipping up your favorite aioli recipe.  Then shuck.

  
Freshly shucked oysters are key, right before you prepare the dish.  If there is no way you're going to shuck oysters yourself, the fishmonger will do it for you, but you risk losing a lot of juice.  Gently sautée a mix of chopped mushrooms, preferably fresh from the market, in olive oil and garlic with some salt and pepper.  Pile the mixture onto the shucked oysters.

Drop a teaspoon or two of the aioli onto the mushroom mixture, and broil until the aioli is just right--lightly brown but not burnt.

This is not an oyster.  It's a clam shell that is hosting a colony of smaller mollusks.  A micro community on South Cape Beach.

After you eat, you have to walk.  Otherwise, you risk making (and consuming!) another crispy-chilled martini with cranberries and a lemon twist.

Mirror to the Local Soul

I learned at a very young age that to really get to know a culture, you need to shop where the natives shop.  I also learned at a very young age that of all shopping, I prefer the food kind of shopping.

When I was about 10 years old, I lived in the diesel-crusted capitol city of a middle-eastern country, and for some inexplicable reason my parents allowed me to go to the local koutche store and bread shop alone.  There, I would buy warm, fresh barbari or nan-e taftoon and carry it to our marble and parquet home, where my mother would prepare simple sandwiches with crunchy green onions, a creamy cheese or butter, and salt.  This freedom was brought to an abrupt halt by a violent revolution that involved lots of hostages and embassy explosions that gripped the Western world for quite some time. 

But this story is about a western culture in another hemisphere in a new millennium.

My friend Vanessa was in town recently from Boston, on vacation, and so she was a tourist.  When she visits, she always brings a few trinkets from her most recent adventures—prayer beads, bracelets, necklaces—that she no doubt procures from bazaars and independent artisans that sell their crafts along pathways to this or that point of significance.  While Vanessa likes food as much as I do, she tends to survey local cultures through their crafts. 

Through these two perspectives—of food and of crafts—we discovered a view of San Francisco that I, as a local, had not yet seen.  It was the view from Treasure Island, filtered that day through the Treasure Island Flea.

It is oddly fitting to find a flea market on a place called Treasure Island, though if you’re unfamiliar with this particular Treasure Island you wouldn’t know that it dangles like a patina pendant from the Bay Bridge, halfway between Oakland and San Francisco. 

Admittedly, it was a pretty cold and windy Saturday morning, even with the mostly clear, blue sky.  Treasure Island Flea is held on the last Saturday of the month, a kind of appetizer to the Bay Area’s mother-of-all-flea-markets, the Alameda flea market, made popular recently by the Afghani protagonist from the wildly popular book The Kite Runner.  We paid our $3 entrance fees, and I scanned the tent tops for the food stalls—sadly, way at the other end of the market.  We started to troll the booths. 

Sometimes, you get lucky.

I immediately spotted a chunky, silver David Yurman-style necklace that the vendor explained was from the ‘70s.  I plunked down a whopping six bucks, and chirping with delight, showed off my acquisition.  People craned their necks to see, anxious to find the next treasure hidden in these piles of old bracelets and necklaces.  I could feel the silent, competitive energy, and felt triumphant.

We grazed through stalls of vintage American ‘70s and ‘80s clothing, 20^th century jewelry, accessories, and household goods like brass lions, hammered buckets, and lawn chairs. Somebody walked by with a large paper cone filled with miniature donuts covered with icing and colored sprinkles.  We were getting closer to the food.  I felt like one of those hungry lions on the Discovery Channel, stalking its knock-kneed prey.  I distinctly remember craving coffee. 

My friend Sheryl had joined us, and eventually, we three separated, each immersed in our own obsessions.  I made a break for the food stalls, but not without a brief delay to purchase two dashing, pink, deer-resistant plants from a horticulturalist. 

I shamelessly inspected each small kitchen, not hesitating to stare at other people’s food and how they were eating it, here in the wind with no tables and a sea-level view of San Francisco’s east face.  South American, Italian, Greek, the choices were all intriguing.  It was hard to decide, which reminds me of when I was in grade school, and my friend Sally and I would ride our bikes into town on half-day Tuesdays to buy candy, and I would labor for minutes (read: hours to a 2^nd grader) over which candy bar to buy… Marathon, Butterfinger, Almond Joy… so many choices, only one lifetime!  I might have been better off growing up in an Eastern Bloc country, where I hear the options were much more limited. 

I decided on an arepa, because I’d never eaten one.  Oh, it was good!  A crusty, gluten-free bread pocket stuffed with black beans, avocado, shredded cheese, and tomato.  Oh, the joy!  People ogled at my arepa, and I pointed to the stall with my saucy fingers.

It didn’t take long for Vanessa and Sheryl to fall in line.  There was immediate and unanimous consensus that we must have—and share—one of those paper cones stuffed with Harvey’s mini donuts.  We did.  Chocolate glazed, if you’re wondering.  At the bottom, the donut crumbs float in the melted chocolate.  You want to be the one holding the cone at the end.

Freshly juiced, we poked around a jewelry table, where the artist assembles necklaces with chain and found objects like old keys, locks, etched glass hearts, and so on.  We each bought one, a silent bond.

At this flea market, floating on the Bay, you won’t find any Moroccan spices, prayer beads, or dreamweavers. Rather, you'll find food, crafts, and treasures of two water-rimmed cities in 21^st century America.

Special thanks to Vanessa, guest photographer for all the images in this blog post.