Food Archive

More pics in the Ozumo set on Flickr.

Today we headed across the Richmond - San Rafael Bridge over to Marin to have some oysters up in Marshall along the Tomales Bay.

We left around 11. It was a gorgeous day. Sunny. Blue skies. No clouds. About 70 degrees. Our first stop was for coffee in San Anselmo. I've spent a lot of time in Marin, but mostly on my bike, so it was nice to have a look on foot. I've ridden up and down this corridor that includes Sausalito, Ross, San Anselmo and Fairfax so many times, but I've never had a chance to just wander around San Anselmo. After coffee, we had a nice stroll around town.

There's no real direct route up to the Marshall Riviera, so back in the back in car, we headed west on Sir Francis Drake through Fairfax, Lagunitas, and the redwoods of Samuel P. Taylor Park, before hitting Olema at Highway One. From there, we headed north and after a brief stop in Point Reyes Station, another cyclist mecca, we continued up through Marshall and finally landed at the Hog Island Oyster Company.

Again, I've passed by here many times on my bike headed for the Marshall Wall or points further north on the MS Waves to Wine ride, but I had never stopped. We picked a good day. The place was booked out and all the picnic tables were reserved, but we were able to find parking right across the street and managed to find a family from Atlanta willing to share their table with us.

My new favorite cooking show is Eric Ripert's Avec Eric. Ripert is the chef at Le Bernadin in NYC. His show is a combination travel log and cooking show. Typically, in the first half of the show, he travels to the culinary centers of the world, Tuscany, Provence and Northern California, for example. Then he returns to his kitchen filled with inspiration from his journey to create exquisitely simple dishes.

There are samples on You Tube, of course, but if you want to watch whole episodes they are available on the Avec Eric website.

Here he yukking it up with Jimmy Fallon:

We ordered sushi from a place in Berkeley that delivers and it was pretty good—better than expected at least. The delivery was quick, the selection was impressive and the sushi surprisingly tasty. Mak definitely approved.

We tried to go to Langer's for Pastrami on Saturday, but it was closed for Thanksgiving weekend. Instead, we ended up at Cantor's on Fairfax. When I ordered it, I asked for Corned Beef on white bread with mayo and the waitress nearly had a heart attack until I said I was just joking.

It was good, but I don't if it was $11.25 good, if you know what I mean. The sour pickles and Dr. Brown's cream soda were awesome though.

One of the great discoveries on this past trip to Brazil was Açai (pronounced AH-SAW-EEE). I'd been hearing about it for a long time now. It has arrived with a vengeance in the US (via email spam mostly) as a supplement touting all sorts of positive health affects: energy, weight-loss, blah, blah, blah. Who knows if the claims are true. What is true is that açai is delicious. Served cold and mixed with guarana syrup, it tastes something like a mixed berry sorbet. Add in banana and granola and have a superbly tasty treat. I'm going to have to find a place in Oakland, or more likely Berkeley, that sells good açai. If I can't I'm going to start importing the pulp and open up a shop in the Bay Area to sell it to the masses.

I was insipired this morning by two things:

1) My new espresso maker (and foam maker).
2) The prospect of eating at Riva Fish House in Santa Cruz, CA where I worked as a busboy and host in 1996 and learned to make wicked lattes.

This is the first one I've made since I skipped Santa Cruz to take an (unpaid) internship at CNN. It was as delicious as it looks.

I couldn't find the restauarant so I went into a cyber cafe to see if I could find the address on the internet. I couldn't. So I asked the woman downstairs running the place. I could ask the question in Spanish but couldn't understand the answer. I asked if she could write directions, but instead she called down her husband who spoke English and he walked me to the restaurant.

On the way he was telling me that he lived in Melbourne so we had an instant connection. He was lucky, he said. He was there in 1973 so he was out of the country for the Pinnochet coup. He brought right to Las Vacas Gordas which is on aside street of a side street. No wonder I missed it.

I'm seated upstairs in the non-smoking salon. The place is very warm. Wooded ceiling. Wooden chairs. Tile floors. Every table is packed people are having a great time. It's someones birthday. The waiter lights the candles and leads the restaurant in a rousing chorus of feliz cumpleanos. Everyone is singing and clapping. It's about 10:40pm.

The menu is all in Spanish and while I know many words, I'm lost when it comes to cuts and preparation of beef. I text my brother whose girlfriend is from Ecuador to get some help but before he can answer, the waiter comes back and I wing it. I go for the Biffe o lo pobre. Medium rare. Good choice.

While I'm waiting, the musicians arrive. Sort of like mariachis, only less annoying. There are five of them playing guitar, mandolin and tamboruine. The crowd loves and sings along.

Turns out biffe o lo pobre is a massive perfectly cooked grass fed steak served with a pile of papas fritas and two huevos fritos. It comes with a complimentary visiit to the cardiologista de la casa and an after dinner aperitif. It's delicioso!

While I'm getting ready to leave, the table next to me is being served dessert. The kid closest to me has ordered some kind of flambe dish. The waiter fills one gravy boat with the alcohol lacd topping and sets it aflame. He then pours that into a second gravy boat creating a stream of fire. He repeats half a dozen then pours over a plate of ice cream, all without setting the house on fire.

I'm sipping my very green mintuy aperitif while waiting for the check to show up. My cheeks are aglow with the alcohol. I am extremely satisfied. Even if the waiter added a 20% tip for himself.

Alright, it's exactly midnight now. Time for a stroll home and to sack out (and maybe there's even room for an ice cream on the way).

So I've been walking around Santiago for the past few hours and my feet were really starting to kill me. And, annyway, it was time for lunch so I stopped at the first interesting place I came across, a little alfresco cafe called La Boa Toria.

La Boa Toria sits in a small square on Emserelda street in a quiet section of central Santiago. There's a miniature fountain in the square and a nice gusty breeze and it's just extemely pleasant. It's probably about 75 degrees under a perfect blu sky. There are five tables outside and a few more inside. Very small place. My cute waitress has a stud beneath her lip and another in her eyebrow. The cafe has sort of a scientific theme. The olive oil is in a beaker and there's a test tube rack of spices on the table. The food is pizza and crepes. Not particularly memorable, but not terrible either.

A couple interesting things have happened (or are happening) since I sat down here about an hour ago. One was that a big gust of wind came up and blew the coke bottle vase off my table and it shattered on the group which scared the hell out of me. The gusty wind has knocked over the test tubes and their sign and all sorts of other stuff.

The other thing is that about 20 minutes ago some guys started unloading what looked like commercial camera gear from a truck out front. No cameras, but lot of tripods and light shades, sandbags, dollies and scaffolding. There's a model being made up at one of the tables. Then the camera came in a small car and it's now set up on a tripod and pointed right at me. How long before they ask me politely to move I wonder.

Like I said, my feet are killing me after several hours of wandering around Santiago and I really don't feel like moving. Now I'm so curious to see what this is all about that ill probably stick around at least until they start shooting.

Just for the record my spanish is just fucking awful. Not that this should be any surprise since I never studied spanish. But like most people from California, I have a sizeable spanish vocabulary. I just know nothing of grammar and syntax. Consequently, I feel like a blithering moron when I try to ask for the simplest things, like the bathroom. Will. Some please tell me why I spent all those years studying Latin. Oh right, it's because I'm a complete idiot.

The Corn Refiners Association must be shaking in their collective boots that the dangers of High Fructose Corn Syrup are finally getting some attention. They put together some laughable propaganda videos to convince the hoi polloi that their product is safe and "natural", when it is anything but.

Their propaganda sites are here and here.

"Made from corn, has the same calories as sugar and is fine in moderation." Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the people who make it. I was stunned when I first saw these ads on TV. The truth, of course, is a little different. I avoid this stuff like the plague.

The Corn growers like to claim that "it's natural", but looking at the production process, you can see that it's anything but. There's a hilarious scene in King Corn where the film makers try to make HFCS in their kitchen after not being allowed to film the process at the manufacturing plant. It's simply disgusting how it's made.

Americans are already fat enough because of over-comsumption, but HFCS isn't helping at all. Since it's ubiquitous, it's very difficult to avoid. It's not only in soft drinks and other beverages, it's in ketchup, used in bread to assist in browning, used a preservative in hundreds if not thousands of other products. It's dangers. It should be avoided at all costs.

The interesting fact about fructose is that it is metabolized in a totally different way than other carbohydrates. It does not stimulate or require insulin for transportation to the cells. Since there is no need for insulin release, there is also no secretion of leptin. Therefore the feeling of satiety is altered—you continue to eat and possible overeat.

--Becky Hand, Diet Danger: High Fructose Corn Syrup

There are plenty of places online to read about the dangers of diet with high amounts of HFCS. And if you want to learn more about the dangers of corn in general in our diet (corn grown to feed cows, chicken, fish, etc.) check the documentary King Corn. Here are some more articles:

• The Dangers of High Fructose Corn Syrup
• The Double Danger of High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Diet Danger: High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Stop HFCS
• Corn is Making Us Fat
• The Google

There's a great spoof video (from where I draw the title of this post) on YouTube.

Making a mango smoothie is incredibly, provided you have a blender, some ice and right ingredients. Here's how you do it (roughly)

Start with Mango nectar. You should be able to get it at your local supermarket. If not, sucks to be you. Looza makes a nice one, but it doesn't really matter. Splash about 12 ounces of nectar. Then add about a quarter cup of milk for creaminess. Add enough ice to the blender so it sticks up above the the level of the liquid and blend it all together. If it's too thick and won't blend, add more nectar until it will. If it's too thin, add more ice. Blend until smooth, about 2 minutes. That's it.

If you want to kick it up a notch hit it with some fresh mango, or (almost even better), if you live near a Trader Joe's, pick up a bottle of Mango Quarters in Mango Juice. Add in a few quarters and a bit of the juice and you'll end up with something truly amazing.

in 2004, I worked at Vail Lionshead Sharpshooters for about 4 months. Since then, Lionshead has gotten a massive facelift. It really needed to updated. The village was built in the 60s and looked it. I was just worried that my favorite restaurants in Vail, DJ's and Les Delices de France (aka The French Deli) wouldn't survive the facelift. DJ's sadly seems to be MIA, but the French Deli is alive and kicking.

It was good to see Daniel Bouvier, the curmudgeonly yet pleasantly gregarious proprietor, working behind the counter. He used to give all Sharpshooters a generous discount, so I was a regular. I told him how glad I was see that the Deli was still around and that I had been fantasizing about his pate sandwiches.

He said that business couldn't be better. The construction at Lionshead was way behind schedule and he's been feeding all the workers. He hoped that it would take another two years the finish the work. I wished him good luck, then devoured my scrumptious pate sandwich.

I first ate satay at this street side vendor when I was in Bali in 2002. I stayed for 3 weeks just down the street in the Tebesaya section of Ubud and would pass this guy every afternoon, always stopping to pick up some satay and rice. It's the most delicious thing in the world. When I heard I was coming back to Bali, I started salivating at the prospect of returning to visit the orang satay (satay man).

He has an amazing set up. Everything he need is within arm's reach. He sits cross legged on the sidewalk with a massive tub of marinating satay skewers on his left. Directly in front of him, the grill. There is a small bag of charcoal to replenish the brazier. On his right, a bag filled with rice cooked in bamboo baskets and a bag of chili salt. There's a small rubbish bin and a box of small waters. Somewhere he was a wallet to make change. That's it. It's as basic as street, or any food for that matter, gets.

A wicker plate covered in paper with 8 sticks of satay (pork) and a mound of sticky rice will set you back less than 40 cents. Hard to beat. More pictures are posted on Flickr.

Instead of the same old, same old, give this whipped sweet potato/yam dish a try to spice your holiday dinner table. It's easy. It's delicious. And, well, it's orange.

- 2 medium sized sweet potatoes or yams or one of each (best bet), peeled and cubed, boil for 10 minutes or until fork tender
- 1 shallot, diced, fry in extra virgin olive over medium heat until crispy
- Put sweet potatoes/yams and shallots into food processor (or mash if you are not lucky enough to have one)
- season with salt and pepper to taste
- Add 2 teaspoons of butter (or more if you like your potatoes creamier)
- After you turn the food processor on, pour chicken stock in slowly from the top until you get the consistency you like. (If you don't have a processor, alternate between adding chicken stock and mashing until you get the right consistency.

that's it. it's pretty basic, but very delicious.

In case you don't remember, because I can never seem to, yams are the ones with the orange flesh and the purplish skins. There are two general types, the California and the Beauregard. Sweet potatoes have white flesh and beige skin, very much like a standard potato, but different in shape and taste.

...the great state of Arizona gives us this.

I don't know what it is about bagels in California (oh, wait, it's that they are all made by Koreans), but they just suck. Nothing. Nothing will put into sharper focus the difference between our locally Korean made bagels and actual bagels than a trip to a New York bagelry. Doesn't matter which one. Pick any of them. Upper West Side. East Village. Doesn't matter. I don't know if it's the water, the recipe, the dough, or what, but something about New York bagels is just damn right and for a jew whose tenuous connection to his culture consists merely of regular consumption of round pieces of half-boiled, half-baked dough sliced in half, toasted, topped with cream cheese and some kind of smoked fish, maybe a tomato slice, or a red onion or even capers, when available, it's crucial to have the real deal.

Why do I mention this? I brought half a dozen bagels back with me and I finished the last one this morning. So it's back to the fucking Korean-made bastard bagels for this jewboy.

Austin is a great town and one the best things about it is the food. So many great restaurants into packed into this tiny town. How can you go wrong with a city that has a Waffle House on the road into town from the airport? I barely scratched the surface of the restaurant scene, but here's where I ate in my five days in Austin:

Guera's Taco Bar
I'm a bit of a snob about Mexican food, since we have it so good here in California. But I would love to have a Guera's on every corner in every city. The place is just great. I sat at the taco bar while a woman hand made tortillas on a flat top grill and I stuffed my face with tamales, tacos, a chicken mole burrito, guacamole, beans and washed it down with several top shelf margaritas. Incredible. This place is a must stop for anyone traveling through Austin.

Habana Calle 6
This place was so good, I came back twice for lunch. I love Cuban sandwiches and Habana Calle 6 had the best I ever tasted. Roasted pork, mustard and pickles. What could be better? Ok, so it's hardly Kosher, but who gives a shit when lunch tastes this good? As good as the Cubano was, it paled next to the flan, the best I have ever tasted (including, as hard as it to believe, my own). They also have a little bar tucked away downstairs that I'm going to check out the next time I'm in town, which I hope is soon.

Kyoto
Sushi in Austin? Well, yes. This wasn't my first choice. I tried to get into Kenici, which you should visit just to see the hostess (en fuego). But the wait was 45 minutes for the sushi bar so I needed a second option. Kyoto was closest place. It was pretty damn good albeit a little expensive, but I guess that's expected when you're eating raw fresh fish in the middle of Texas. Miso was good. Unagi was top notch. Caterpillar roll was beyond belief. The only real drawback was that they didn't have large Sapporo's

County Line
Creme de la creme of southern barbeque. Come with a strong appetite because the portions are, well, obese-sized. Gotta love the "how to speak like a cowboy" lessons being piped into the restromoms and the turtles swimming in the pond out back.

Las Manitas Avenue Cafe
Very simple place right on Congress Avenue just a few blocks from the bridge. Great, teasty Mexican breakasts.

Iron Cactus
Ok, so the food at Iron Cactus is not all that fantastic. It's ok, but I'm sure there are a dozen Tex-Mex places around town that have better fare. But what Iron Cactus has is a great location on 6th street, a beautiful deck on the second floor which is the place to be when it's 75 degrees and sunny outside and absolutely killer margaritas.

I have a new love and it's the Banh Mi Dac Biet, a French inspired Vietnamese sandwich of ham or turkey, pate, cucumbers, thinly sliced carrots, onions and radish maybe, daikon, I'm not sure, cilantro some very strong chilis all on a flaky French roll that will leave you covered in crumbs if you're not careful. I can't get enough of them. There are a few little Vietnamese cafes in Oakland's Chinatown (just across the water from Alameda and about 5 minutes from my new place) that churn them out for $2.50 a pop and they are unbelievably delicious. I love them so much, I even bought a loaf of their pate so I could make something similar at home. The combination of the tangy pate, the simmering chilis, the crunchy vegetables, fresh cilantro and the fresh bread is just so perfect. Ok, so it's not kosher, and I don't care if I'm going to hell (mostly since I don't believe in it), but I'm going to be eating dac biet for the rest of my days.

A good way to start off the new year. Homemade pizza with blue, fontina, parmesan, romano, mozzarella and provalone. Add a some sun-dried tomatoes and rosemary. God damn that's fucking good pizza.

If you want the recipe for the crust (incredibly delicious and easy to make) go here

Last night I wanted to make something more like real chocolate ice cream, so I used a recipe that called for baking chocolate and eggs. Melting the chocolate is a piece of cake. Just drop 6 squares with 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan over medium heat. The eggs. Not so easy. I've seen enough Food Network TV to know that can't beat eggs and add them to hot liquid, like molten chocolate. You'll end up with scrambled eggs. You have to temper the eggs by scrambling them, then adding a little of the liquid or the sauce to the eggs slowly to bring the temperature up gradually. I did that. No problem. Added 2 cups of chocolate sauce to the eggs. Combined them together. Everything was working beautifully. But then when I added the new choco-egg mixture back into the saucepan, I clearly screwed up, the sauce was too hot or the eggs not tempered enough because I quickly ended up with tons of little lumps in my previously silky smooth chocolate sauce. I went ahead and make the ice cream anyway. What the hell, I had already sunk money into the mixture. Might as well see it through and see what happens. The concoction solidified nicely into something resembling chocolate ice cream. And when I took out the blade, it was covered in chocolate egg pieces that were easy to spatula off into the garbage disposal. I capped off the creamer and stuck it in the freezer to harden. How much egg is left in the ice cream? I have no idea. Haven't tried it yet. Who knows? It might even be good.

How are Mexican chocolate ice cream and the ghetto market connected? Let me tell you.

Last night I decided I was going to give the ice cream maker another shot after making a mess of the first batch. Now there are a few markets around my place. There's Trader Joe's, but that's really a specialty market. There's a Whole Foods, expensive and hard to park. Berkeley Bowl which has an incredible selection and is reasonable, but the parking is even worse. Then there is the Pak 'n Save.

Now the Pak 'n Save is a creature that I haven't encountered until moving into Oakland. The deal is, ostensibly, you pack your own groceries, you save money. However, the real deal is we're going to charge the same prices as Safeway because we really are a Safeway in disguise, but we're are not going to hire union grocery clerks so you have to bag your own groceries and we're only going to have 2 cashiers on staff during the busiest hours, so you're going to have stand on line like your were voting in Ohio to buy your whipping cream and other assorted bourgeoisie treats.

So after standing in line for a few minutes and seeing it go nowhere, I ditched the stuff IBut on the way back to the cottage, I passed a Long's Drugs and decided to go in a see if they might have whipping cream. I doubted it, but I was wrong. There was one lonely pint left in the fridge. I grabbed it.

On the way out I was looking at the instant coffee because I was thinking of making coffee ice cream when I spotted a hexagonal box of Mexican chocolate, and instantly I thought, fuck, I'm making Mexican chocolate ice cream.

So I was going to put my theory to the test that last time the ice cream came out too soft because I didn't use either enough ice or salt. I went to the liquor store and bought a bag of ice and was far more liberal with the rock salt this time. I ground the chocolate into a fine powder in my new Cuisinart. Blended the ingredients, placed them in the creamer, and voila, in about 30 minutes, I had perfect ice cream.

Now, some who, well, don't appreciate cinnamon might not enjoy the subtleties of something like Mexican chocolate ice cream, but those of who are more open minded to our finer spices, I think, you'd really love this stuff. It's damn tasty.

This morning I made Francophile toast for breakfast. What's the big deal? Nothing except that I made it with bread I made myself with my new (well, new to me) breadmaker. The thing is great. Put in the ingredients (flour, salt, sugar, butter, yeast, and water), set the timer and in the morning you have perfectly baked fresh bread. I added about 1/4 cup of dried rosemary and it was really, really good.

I sliced it nice and thick, mixed up 2 eggs, about a 1/4 cup of half and half, freshly ground cinnamon and a splash of vanilla, soaked the bread until almost all the egg batter was absorbed in two slices, fried it up and scarfed it down with a little maple syrup from Vermont.

Fantastiqué!

On Saturday night, I had to try out the This thing I bought is a little more high tech, but the idea is the same. You mix the ingredients together in the "creamer", surround it with alternating layers of ice and salt and turn it on. Pretty basic stuff. The devil, however, is in the details, specifically here in 1) the recipe for the ice cream, 2) the ratio of salt to ice in the machine and 3) having enough ice on hand to keep the cream cold enough to freeze. I'll get back to all three of these.

I decided for the first time out I would go rather simple, to make the "easy chocolate ice cream" recipe that came in the instruction manual (with the minor addition of Trader Joe's Peanut Butter cups). The recipe calls for 2 cups of half and half, a half cup of cocoa powder (Ghirardelli), a cup and a half of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla extract and two cups of whipping cream. Simple enough. I gathered the ingredients, mixed them together in the blender, poured it into the creamer, put the creamer in the machine, placed the blade inside the creamer, capped on the top, layered the ice and salt and ice around the outside and flipped the switch. According to the instructions, in 18-25 minutes I would have ice cream. 90 minutes later the blade was swirling around in a soupy chocolate like mixture.

Was it cold? Yes. Did it taste alright? More or less. Was it ice cream? Not so much.

I added some more ice around the outside. Added more salt and let it go a for little while longer, up to the point that I ran out of ice, which didn't take very long. I gave up, stopped the machine and put the creamer in the freezer hoping it would harden to the right consistency overnight. It did not. What I had was soft freeze peanut butter cup chocolate ice cream. Good, but not what I was looking for.

I have an idea of what went wrong, but I'm not sure. I go back to the 3 details that I mentioned earlier. I think the recipe was ok, although I won't add as much sugar next time because the mixture was slightly too sweet for my taste and I might cut back on the vanilla, just a smidgen. The ratio of salt to ice is still something of a mystery me. I was lit major, but I do understand something about heat (or in this case cold) exchange from my Introduction to Phsycial Science class in 8th grade (thank you Dr. Cook). I know that the salt is there essentially as a catalyst for this reaction. Unless I'm completely off-base (and I'm not discounting the possibility) the salt melts the ice and forces a heat exchange between the ice and the creamer. The ice melts (gets warmer) while the creamer freezes (gets colder). The more salt, the faster the reaction and the exchange of heat. It's possible that I didn't have enough salt. Probably really. Then there's the last point, not having enough ice on hand. The recipe said you'd need 6 trays of ice and they weren't kidding. I had about 4. If my theory is right and I had used enough salt, the ice would have melted faster, the mixture in the creamer would have frozen, but only if I had replaced the melting ice with fresh layers of ice and salt. Any scientists out there want to comment on this theory?

I'm probably going to try to perfect the chocolate ice cream before I branch out to other flavors (cookie dough). It's easy enough to find recipes on the internet, but if anyone has any experience with this and wants to share, I'm all ears.

I met a few old friends from Samoa in the city last night for dinner at some Senegalese place in the Mission called Bissap Baobab. I was pretty skeptical about the food, having had only one previous experience with Sub-Saharan cuisine, Ethiopian, that left me pretty unsatisfied. But I shouldn't have worried at all. The food, which was larger some kind of protein (I had the lamb) marinated in a delicious sauce and served with couscous, was fantastic. The best was saved for last with the French influenced desserts. The four of us shared a banana flambé and a warm chocolate soufflé a la mode. They were outstanding and made me wish I had done my Peace Corps service in a country colonized by France instead of New Zealand and Germany.

I was trapped in the house all weekend not being sick. With little else to do other than watch TV, read, play with the cats and feel sorry for myself, I decided to dust off an old recipe and make some banana bread with those bananas that were close to (but not quite) rotting on the top of the fridge.

BANANA NUT CHOCOLATE CHIP BREAD

   Amount  Measure       Ingredient -- Preparation Method

 --------  ------------  --------------------------------

      1/3   c            Butter or margarine,

                         -softened

      3/4   c            Sugar

    1       ea           Egg

    1       c            Mashed banana

    2       c            All purpose flour

    2 1/2   ts           Baking powder

      1/4   ts           Baking soda

      1/2   ts           Salt

    1       c            Chopped pecans (or walnuts)

      1/2   c            Chocolate chips (or more if

                         -desired

      1/2   c            Buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350F. Cream butter and sugar. Mix in egg and banana. Stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nuts and chocolate chips. Add this mixture to creamed mixture alternately with buttermilk. Stir until just blended. Pour batter into a greased and floured loaf pan (9x5x3 inches). Bake for 65 minutes, or until bread tests done. Cool in pan for about 5 minutes, then turn out on a wire rack. Makes 1 loaf.

The recipe is awesome. If you don't have or like buttermilk, you can always substitute vanilla yogurt. It makes the bread more moist, but it needs to cool down before you slice it.

I first came across Greek yogurt when I was traveling around the Mediterranean about 5 years ago. It was towards the end of the trip. I was in Istanbul staying in the Oriental, a little youth hostel in the Sultanahmet section of town. The hostel had a restaurant on the third floor that had a commanding view of the Bosporus. I would sit up just after sunrise, watch the ships go by and enjoy a leisurely breakfast that almost every day had a good portion of lovely Greek yogurt.

The yogurt is rich, thick and creamy, probably really fatty too, but what the fuck did I care? I was walking more than 10 miles a day. It's incredibly sour and I can't imagine eating it straight, but with the magic touch of a little, it turns into something incredibly sublime. Breakfast quickly became my favorite part of the week or so I spent hanging around Istanbul.

When I returned home, I thought I add my new discovery into my own culinary routine. I went to the market, grabbed and tub of vanilla yogurt and jar of honey, but when I got home and mixed, there was no magic, there was just a sticky mess of yogurt encrusted honey crystals. I tried a few more times, but eventually gave up.

One of the best things about returning to California after the spending the winter in Vail was access to Trader Joe's. Around the time I started shopping at TJ's again, they started carrying Greek yogurt. At first they had a brand called FAGE which is actually made in Greece. They had two kinds, one with a little pocket of honey that could be easily added and one without.

At first I bought the one with the honey because, well, it was easier, but it was also more expensive. So then I started buying the larger one without the honey. But TJ's didn't sell jars of Greek honey. The first honey I tried, which I think was clover, didn't work. It totally crystallized. The next one I tired, the mesquite, blended perfectly. It was delicious and I was so happy. Then they stopped carrying the yogurt.

I was couldn't believe it. The yogurt was so popular. There was always a chance you could in the store and it would be out of stock. I called TJ's customer service to find out what was going on. They said their distributor in Greece was having some problems and they were trying to work an alternate source. They eventually did. Themselves.

They started producing their own "Mediterranean Style" yogurt. It was just as good if not better than the FAGE stuff. And now FAGE has sorted out its problems and TJ's carries both. It's pure bliss for a yogurt lover.

On Saturday night in Tahoe a handful of us went out to dinner to celebrate Dino's 30th birthday. Ben, who used to live in South Lake, chose the restaurant, Freshies. I was skeptical because the only other major house outing was to a bar in Meyers, chosen by Ben. The place smelled like ass and many of us left and went to the casinos which smelled only marginally better.

Frshies is a small place in little strip mall. It only has about 8 tables and they don't take reservations, so we had to wait. I hate waiting for anything, especially to be seated at a restaurant, but I subjugated my needs to the will of the group and dealt with it.

We waited about 45 minutes for a table that would seat the 7 of us. But when we finally got in the place, I was not disappointed. Freshies has an ecclectic menu. It's sort of Polynesian themed, but with a broad ethnic flair with an assortment of vegetarian and vegan dishes. Everything was organic. Everything was super fresh. There was so much good stuff on the menu, I had a hard time deciding what to get. We started with fried calamari and this shrimp, avo and ahi nori roll that was lightly tempura'ed. Delicous. I had the chicken tortilla soup (I can never pass up a good soup), but I had a tough time deciding what to get for the main course. Everything sounded so good. Cumin rubbed seared ahi tuna steak, tempura anything you can imagine, eggplant parmesan, chemical free shrimp and scallops, grilled alaskan rock cod, hawaiian style baby back ribs, and on and on. There wasn't anything on the menu that I would have been unhappy with. I finally settled on the jamabalya salad which was massive and smothered with diced chicken, andouille sausage and bay shrimp. It was amazing. I couldn't finish it. Not even close. It was like the endless bowl of salad. I picked at it for half an hour and hardly made a dent, but I was stuffed, seriously stuffed, like unbutton the top button stuffed.

Then the waitess came over with the dessert menu. I was, like, forget it, there isn't a chance I'm going to have room for dessert, but that was before she started describing the Big Kahuna, which was something like a mud pie on steroids. Before she even finished the description, I blurted out that I'd take one. It was a amazing. Just a stack of coffee ice cream on a chocolate cookie crust drizzled with chocolate suace and topped with whipped cream. OH MY GOD.

They had to roll me out of there, but I'll be going back. You can count on that. I'm salivating just thinking about it.

Feeling hungry? Then you have to check out this commercial for the latest in McDonald's offering in Israel, the McSwarma. The commercial plays on the famous MCD conversation between Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction (who can forget Royale with Cheese?).

Okay, so it's a spoof, but the characters look good enough that the first impression is that it's actually Travolta and Jackson. The kidnapping humor at the end is a little questionable, but funny.

Go Get Yourself a McSwarma!

I don't have a lot of needs when it comes to restaurant dining, but I do have a few. I don't really care about the atmosphere. As long the place is clean, I'm good. I'm there for the food, not the ambiance. I also want the food to be fresh and prepared like it says on the menu. No surprises. No health hazards. And finally, I want my water glass filled regularly by an attentive waiter. That's what we're paying for, right?

Anyway, we went out for dinner over the weekend and I was completely disappointed in this local Vietnamese place in Walnut Creek called Dalat. It sucked.

When we arrived, the restaurant was full and there was a short wait, which was a good sign. The place was simple, with horrible floor to ceiling murals of the Vietnam countryside, formica tables and old style cafeteria seats. But who cares? We're here for the grub.

We ordered 3 things. Crab and corn soup. Flaming beef and prawns. Chicken and vegetable in curry sauce.

The crab and corn soup was a serious disappointment for the mere reason that the menu didn't say "Imitation Crab and corn soup". Imitation crab pales in comparison to real thing. It has no flavor and the texture, well, it's sort of like a rubber hose. Other than that it was fine.

The flaming beef and prawns was plopped down on our table unceremoniously by an angst ridden 20 something son of the owner who obviously felt he had better things to do than explain the dish which included, not surprisingly, a plate with beef and prawns, but also one with cold veggies and sauce and a third with thin, translucent pancakes. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure it out, but since the menu clearly stated, "prepared at your table", we had assumed this meant by the staff and not by us. It turned out that the pancakes were so sticky that they couldn't be pried apart and so we ate the beef and prawns straight up. It was tasty, but not what we expected.

The chicken and vegetables with curry sauce was a complete disaster in that it didn't show up. Instead we got beef with chicken and curry sauce. It's the sort of thing that happens when the waiter, as in this case, doesn't bother to write down the order, but relies on a faulty memory. No apologies from the owner when we mentioned it. Just a look of consternation that meant either "I'm going to flog the waiter at the end of the night" or "Don't be surprised when I spit in your curry, you foreign devil". Although, I could have misread her expression.

As a former waiter, I'm very attuned to what's going on in a restaurant. I respect the hard work of most waiters and reward them when they merit it with large tips. Often there are problems that are out of the wait staff's control and I understand that. But when the service and everything else falls way short of the reasonable standards that I have, what else can you do but protest by leaving no tip?

It's a horrible thing to do. I feel bad doing it, not just because I don't want to ruin someone's night but because it means my night was, if not ruined, at least brought down a few notches. The good news is that there so many more restaurants than there are lousy waiters.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, there's a frightening editorial in the NYT today about food, it's origins, and the ramifications that modern farming has on the quality of the food we eat.

A serving of broccoli is naturally rich in vitamins A and B, and has more vitamin C than citrus fruit. But raised in an industrial farm monoculture, shipped over a long distance and stored before and after being delivered to your supermarket, it loses up to 80 percent of its vitamin C and 95 percent of its calcium, iron and potassium. Fruits and vegetables grown organically, however, have higher levels of antioxidants. That's largely because a plant's natural defense system produces phenolic compounds, chemicals that act as a plant's defense against pests and bugs. These compounds are beneficial to our health, too. When plants are grown with herbicides and pesticides, they slow down their production of these compounds. (Even more important, from a cook's point of view, organically grown fruits and vegetables taste better - their flavors practically burst from the ground and demand to be expressed, and we chefs merely comply.)

I've always hesitated buying organic food because it's so damn expensive, even though I know it's healthier for you and will probably taste a whole lot better. There's a farmer's market that sets up on Sunday at the Library just down the street. I've been there a few times to poke around. I might have to make it a regular part of my shopping rotation.

It's one of the big mysteries of my life. I did it. I don't know how, but I did it.

If you're not lucky enough to live near a Trader Joe's or have never heard of TJ's, well, I pity you.

(I had spicy salmon rolls for lunch. yum!)

If you ever find yourself in San Deigo and you need to grab a bite to eat, head down to Hodad's on Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach. They claim they have the best burgers in the world and they might just be right, if you can manage to take a bite out of it. I made the mistake of ordering a double. You need to be able to unhinge your jaw to get your mouth around the massive thing. Delicious. American food at its finest.

Dudu xay, mamao com leche, susu esi.

In any language, it's the perfect beverage, for me anyway. I've had a papaya milkshake fetish for years. It doesn't matter where I am, in Cambodia, in Samoa, in Brazil, or even here, I'm always on the lookout for some combination of papaya, milk and ice.

In Samoa I had access to supercheap, unbelievably good papayas (I even had a tree growing from underneath my my house). When I picked up an excellent blender and started making them myself, I was in heaven.

If you lucky enough to live in a place where you have access to decent papayas and you have got yourself a blender, you can use my recipe, if you are so inclined. Here goes.

Get yourself a papaya a little larger than your fist. You want a papaya that smells a little sweet when you put your nose up to it. Some of the best are from Hawaii and have an orange flesh. If the flesh tone is more pinkish, like most of the ones from Mexico, don't bother with it. Your milkshake will be bland and you'll never appreciate the sublime nature of this particular beverage.

Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds and carve out the flesh of the fruit and stick aside in a little bowl or something. You want to use about half as much ice as papaya. Throw the ice into the blender. Then pour milk, and you can choose whatever type of milk you like, my favorite being vanilla soy, so that it fills up to about 3/4 the level of the ice. You can always add more later. Toss in the papaya and start 'er up. The blender should struggle because you want this thing to be as thick as possible. Only add more milk if the blender is stuck and needs some lubrication.

That should be it. It's as simple as it is satisfying. Good luck and let me know how it goes.

A Core of Soft Caramel Encircled by Chocolate & Caramel Ice Creams & Fudge Chips.

We created this Core Concoction to help you find your way to the ultimate ice cream experience. Whether your primal urges lead you to scoop into the sweet core of caramel, soothe your passions through the serene ice cream streams, or play scoop-&-tickle with the fudge chips, you'll be in total control of your own ice cream destiny. Thanks, from all of us at Ben & Jerry's

All I have to say is, damn this shit is delicious. (Not available in Samoa)

One of the great pleasures of being home in the USA is the incredible variety of foodstuffs available here. From produce to bread to beer. Most amazing for me is the cheese.

Sure, we had a fine selection of cheese from New Zealand available in Samoa. There was fresh mozerella, parmesan, all types of cheddar, even the occasional import from the States like Precious Romano. But it was nothing like what's available even in the smallest corner store here.

Havarti, Edam, Gouda, Cheddar, Jack, Goat (even something called "drunken goat, which I've seen around in many places in NYC, but never before in my life), Sheep, Manchego, and list goes on and on. Smoked this, Rosemary enrusted that. It's all so fucking delicious.

My favorite of all-time is Jarlsberg. It's simply delicious. From the time my dad introduced it to me when I was kid, I've always had a yen for it.

Say what you want about the Norwegians, but they make a damn fine cheese.

In case you were wondering:
Jarlsberg cheese is a Norwegian Emmentaler type cows milk cheese with large holes, a rich buttery texture and mild, sweet nutty flavor. It has a slightly lower fat content than Swiss cheese, and melts easily.

Sushi Rikyu has 5 rules for it's 19.95 all-you-can-stuff-down-your-fat-American-face deal:

Rule #1: You must eat everything including rice.
Rule #2: You cannot share sushi special with anyone.
Rule #3: You will be charged extra for any special rolls.
Rule #4: You will be charged regular price for leftover sushi or rolls.
Rule #5: There is a two-hour limit when the restaurant is busy.

When we tried to order the special, the waitress attempted to talk us out of it. She said that the sushi in the deal comes with a tremendous amount of rice and we might be better off orderng one of the other dinner specials, but I would not be denied. I had suffered a sushi-less existence for far too long and I was going to overindulge in a way that would make my countrymen proud. So much for rule one.

There are 7-11s all over the developing world, but none in Samoa, which is a tragedy. A slurpee on one of Samoa's insane heat-index days would be a god-send. Instead, I had to settle for a the occasional ice-cold niu (young coconut). Not a bad trade off.

Even though it was a chilly today, I couldn't resist stopping in the first 7-11 I came across. First I made a combo coke/cherry slurpee, but I threw it away when I saw that 7-11 now has vanilla syrup to add to Big Gulps and made a vanilla coke slurpee instead. It was great. I highly recommend it if there's a 7-11 in your area. If not, talofei.

California Pizza Kitchen`s Thai Chicken Pizza

Submitted By : Bette
Archived at : http://www.cdkitchen.com
Categories : Copy Cat Recipes

1 T. honey
1 C. warm water
2 tsp. active dry yeast
3 C. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt

Topping
3 1/2 T. peanut butter
3 T. brewed tea
3 T. rice vinegar
2 T. soy sauce
2 tsp. chili oil
1 T. ginger, minced
2 tsp. honey
1/2 tsp. sesame oil
2 T. sesame seeds, toasted
1 1/2 T. green onions
1/2 lb. chicken breast, cut in 1/4-inch strips
1/2 C. mozzarella cheese, shredded
1 carrot, shredded
1/4 C. cilantro, chopped

For the dough: In a small bowl, dissolve the honey in the warm
water. Sprinkle the yeast over the water and stir until it
dissolves. Let the yeast mixture stand for 5 minutes, until a
layer of foam forms on the surface.

In a large bowl, combine the flour and the salt. Make a well in
the center of the flour mixture and pour the olive oil and the
yeast mixture. Stir the flour into the wet ingredients, until all
the flour is incorporated. If its too dry, add more water. On a
lightly floured surface, knead the dough for 15 minutes, until it
is smooth and elastic.

Shape the dough into a ball and put in a well-oiled bowl. Cover
with a moist towel and let rise in a warm place until double in
bulk (about 1-1/2 hours).

For the topping: Combine peanut butter and next 7 ingredients
(to sesame oil) in a blender. Process until smooth. Set aside.
In the meantime, season chicken strips with red pepper and salt.
Sauté in 2 tablespoons olive oil, until done (about 7 minutes).

Coat chicken with 2 tablespoons peanut sauce. Set aside in the
refrigerator. Punch the dough down, and divide into 2 equal
portions. Roll out each portion into an 9-inch flat circle.
Spread 1/4 cup peanut sauce over the surface of each of the
doughs. Distribute 1/2 of the cheese over the sauce. Repeat
with other pizza. Distribute 1/2 of the chicken over the cheese.
Repeat with other pizza. Place the pizzas in the oven (on top
of pizza stones). Bake until crust is crispy and cheese is
bubbling (8-10 minutes). Remove pizzas from the oven and sprinkle
each with carrot and cilantro.

I've been wanting to cook up some kind of banana bread for a long time now. We have such fantastic bananas here in Samoa. It's such an obvious thing to bake.

The catalyst was Jen's cache of semi-sweet chocolate chips and walnuts from Trader Joe's. Paleni also provided the secret to making super sweet banana mash which is to freeze the bananas and then let them soften up into a fermented mush.

The bread tastes as good as it looks. Here's the recipe for anyone who wants to make it at home.

BANANA NUT CHOCOLATE CHIP BREAD


Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
1/3 c Butter or margarine,
-softened
3/4 c Sugar
1 ea Egg
1 c Mashed banana
2 c All purpose flour
2 1/2 ts Baking powder
1/4 ts Baking soda
1/2 ts Salt
1 c Chopped pecans (or walnuts)
1/2 c Chocolate chips (or more if
-desired
1/2 c Buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350F. Cream butter and sugar. Mix in
egg and banana. Stir together flour, baking powder,
baking soda, salt, nuts and chocolate chips. Add this
mixture to creamed mixture alternately with
buttermilk. Stir until just blended. Pour batter into
a greased and floured loaf pan (9x5x3 inches). Bake
for 65 minutes, or until bread tests done. Cool in pan
for about 5 minutes, then turn out on a wire rack.
Makes 1 loaf. Source: "Muffins, Nut Breads and More"

(from the original Moosewood Cookbook via Peter Haarsgaard)

Ingredients:
1 cup room temperature water
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbs honey or sugar (go with the honey - my addition)
2 1/2 to 3 cups flour
olive oil

1) Place water in medium sized bowl. Sprinkle in the yeast and stir in the honey until everything dissolves. (Let sit 5 minutes for the yeast to do its work)

2) Use a whisk to stir in salt and flour. When it gets too thick to whisk, mix with one floured hand. Knead in the bowl for anout 5 minutes (10-20 minutes is more like it if you want the best results. Also 3 cups of flour ain't going to cut it unless you want the stickiest dough on the planet. Just keep adding flour until the dough feels like more like dough and less like paste)

3) Brush a little olive oil on the dough. Cover the bowl and let rise in warm place until double in bulk. About 1 hour.

4) Punch it down and flatten by hand or roller into a nice pizza crust (I like to put a little olive oil around the edge and let it ooze around the perimeter of the pizza. This ensures two things. One, that the pizza will have a nice crispy crust. Two, you can remove the pizza from the pan without a hammer and chisel)

5) Bake at 450 F for 15-20 minutes (Presumably, you'd put the toppings on before you slapped the thing in the oven, but the people at Moosewood don't specify, so it's up to you. I'm the sort of guy who likes my cheese melted, so I prefer toppings on before cooking. The time is really a guideline. I look for a browning/bubbling of the chesse, then yank the pizza out of the oven, let it cool for a few minutes and slice away.)

The plan was to get home by 6 o'clock, make a pizza for dinner and veg in front of the TV for the 3-4 hours of the Miss Samoa contest. Unfortunately, TV Samoa (now called SBC One) didn't show it. Instead they showed some movie about a Mormon missionary in Tonga.

The contest was on the radio, so Jen and I listened in true 1950s style. But the pagent has so many visual aspects which the radio can hardly do justice, so when the pizza was ready, we slipped a movie in the VCR and turned down the volume on the radio.

As of right now, 6:19am (I can't sleep), I still don't know who won. The Miss Samoa 2003 website has not been updated so far this morning and probably won't be all day because it's Sunday. I'm waiting for the news to come on the radio at 7.

The pizza was 4 cheese (mozzarella, cheddar, edam & blue) with tons of rosemary, both in the crust and on top. Since I ran out of the pizza sauce from Trader Joe's that my brother sent me, I went with Prego that I bought on sale at MD's Big Fresh. It was a decent pizza, but it's going to be so much better when my spice garden is producing fresh rosemary, oregano and basil (see below).

The arrival of my friend Jen brought many changes in my life, not the least of which is a knockoff George Forman grill that was gift from my dad (Thanks, Dad!). I put it to work right away.

We went to Lucky Foodtown and picked up a few sirloin steaks. The beef in Samoa is really good and not at all expensive. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing it's heavily subsidized. I marinated the steaks in soy sauce, honey, salt, pepper, ginger and garlic and then "grilled" them up on my new electric grill. The results: damn tasty.

Pumpernickel Bagels Nutrition Facts Serving Size 1 Bagel 85g (Approx. 3 oz.) Servings Per Container 4 Amount Per Serving Calories 230 Calories from Fat 10 % Daily Value* Total Fat 1g 2% _Saturated Fat 0g 0% Cholesterol 0mg 0% Sodium 400mg 17% Total Carbohydrate 47g 16% _Dietary Fiber 3g 12% _Sugars 5g Protein 9g Vitamin A 0% • Vitamin C 0% Calcium 0% • Iron 25% Folic Acid 20% *  Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000-calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs. INGREDIENTS: Enriched high-gluten flour (flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, pumpernickel flour, rye flour, caramel, malt, salt, sugar, fructose, onions, cornmeal,yeast, ascorbic acid

I made pumerperbickel bagels over the weekend. They were a little on the tangy side, but far better in texture than the first batch. They even sank for a few brief secs, rising gracefully back to the surface, when I dunked them in the water for a boil.

The outside was rougher than I would have liked because I couldn't knead the dough enough. It's too much work. Especially with this batch because the pumpernickel flour is so light that the dough needed 3-4 cups of regular flour just to keep it from being a sticky, impossible to work with, mess.

The flour was a gift from Lyn Netzler, the owner of one of the most popular stores in town. In exchange, all she wants is my recipe, which I would gladly give to her for nothing. If her bakery starts pumping out bagels, there are going to be some increibly happy palagis on this island. There might even be a few Samoans who could fall for the spell that bagels seem to cast on the most of the western world.

I don't think I'm going to stop making mine even if Lyn's starts producing them. It's just too much fun and so satisfying.

There is something of a Chinese influence in modern Samoan cuisine that came about when immigrants from China came to the island to work. There's stir fry (falai) and chow mein and chop suey (sopisui).

My personal favorite of all of the sino-samoan foods is keke pua'a. If you're a dim sum fan and you know what bao is, then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from keke pua'a. It's doughy pastry filled with pork. At least they used to be pork-filled. Nowadays most keke pua'a are filled with mamoe, or lamb, which wouldn't be so bad except that most of the lamb in Samoa is 90% fatty "flaps". Absolutely disgusting.

There is one place that I know of, Nettie's Market, where you can buy traditional keke pua'a made from pork. They are delicious and they cost 1 tala. What a deal.

Beef with Soy Sauce and Ginger

2 (8 ounce/ 225 gram) sirloin steaks
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 pak choy or bok choy (even spinach or any other greens will do)
8 tablespoons soy sauce
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled
1 chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
1/2 a garlic clove, finely grated
1 lime, juiced
Olive oil

On a very hot griddle pan, cook your seasoned piece of sirloin steak until medium or to your liking. Place in a plate and allow to rest for 2 minutes.

Now cook your greens in salted boiling water until tender.
While hot, douse with a good couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, and sprinkle
with the garlic, ginger, chilli, lime juice and olive oil.

When the greens are cooked, simply divide onto two plates, thinly slice up the sirloin steaks, place on top of the greens and drizzle with any of the infused sauce left on the resting plate.

A good friend of mine just sent the entire contents (all 112 glorious pages) of Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef 2 cookbook in MS Word. The book has tons of recipes that I can make with ingredients I can pick up locally here in Samoa. I can't get "purple basil" or proscuitto, or a few other things, but I can live with that.

Remember, it's not the chef that's naked, it's the food! Sorry to disappoint.

I was searching online for information about Jamie Oliver and I found a few articles about the release of a fake book and has the publishers over at Penguin UK all in uproar. Apparently, these recipes from various publications of the Naked Chef have been compiled into a fake book and emailed to millions of people worldwide. Of course, the publishers are in a stew because this fake book is going to hurt sales, or so they think. It might have the opposite effect as thousands of people who might have never heard of Jamie Oliver are getting to know him.

I don't know how or where my buddy got this book. I actually don't care.
All I know is that I'm making beef with soy sauce and ginger some time this week.

Want to come over for dinner?

Anyone who has been following my exploits on American Idle knows that been doing a lot of baking lately. Mostly I've been cooking up pizzas, experimenting with different formulas for dough and toppings. I've had some very impressive successes and some monumental failures, but it's most been a lot of fun to play around in the kitchen.

I haven't really delved into anything more serious for lack of equipment. But in the last week or so, I have picked up a few things here and there from departing volunteers and have added some more essentials to my growing collection of kitchenware including a massive stockpot, baking dishes and measuring spoons. Now I have just about everything I need to make bagels. BAGELS!!!!!!

If there's one thing that I've been craving that I can't get in Samoa, it's bagels. There's a great bakery in town called Mari's that has bagels on the menu, but I've never actually seen them for sale. For the longest time, I had been expecting another PCV in my group to make them, but after repeated claims, he never came through. A fellow volunteer did bring me a bag of sesame bagels from Hawaii on her return from the States, but they disappeared in a hurry, and that was a long time ago. Since I now have all the tools at hand, I couldn't wait any longer. It was time to get my hands dirty and cook up some Jewish soul food. (What are you supposed to do when the closest bagelry is 4,000 miles away across a large body of water?)

I went down to Lucky Foodtown and picked up 3 kinds of flour, all-purpose, whole wheat and cornmeal. I bought a jar of molasses from Chan Mow (I was going to try to make the pumpernickel variation even thought I couldn't find rye anywhere in Samoa, but, to be honest, I didn't look that hard). Everything else in the recipe I had on hand (water, sugar, salt, egg, yeast).

This morning, after feeding the kittens, I started getting down to business. I mixed the dough in my new, very large enamel mixing bowl. It was a major pain. The recipe calls for an electric mixer to whip up the 5? cups of flour and water into a dough. I don't have an electric mixer. All I've got is a wooden spatula, my hands and my Greek God like forearms. I worked over the dough for something like half an hour to get it to smooth out. It wasn't totally smooth, but I was worn out, so fuck it, time to move to next step.

The dough sat covered for 40 minutes to rise. In the meantime, I played FreeCell (I'm addicted, I admit it) and lost an auction on eBay for an IBM 1 GIG micro drive that I was desperate to win. I need it for my new camera. Oh well. I'll find another one somewhere else.

Back in the kitchen, I removed the towel and looked at the dough. It had risen to twice its original size, but the color was more of a light, whole wheat brown, than the dark pumpernickel I was expecting. Maybe I didn't put in enough molasses. Or was it the missing rye? (look of confusion)

It was time to start forming the bagels.

There seem to be two schools of thought on this. One method of bagel formation involves rolling the dough into a rough sphere, then poking a hole through the middle with your thumbs and then pulling at the dough around the hole to make the bagel. This is the "hole-centric" method.

The second method involves making a long cylindrical worm of dough and wrapping it around your hand into a loop and mashing the ends together. This is the "dough-centric" method. The latter seemed overly complex so I went with the "hole-centric" method.

It doesn't really matter how you make them, as long as they aren't made with something like a cookie cutter. Otherwise you risk pushing your bagels out of the Jewish realm and making them distinctly Gentile. Bagels are not meant to be symmetrical and perfect. Like snowflakes, no two genuine bagels should be exactly alike.

I separated the dough into 12 little, roughly even balls. This is harder than it seems. How do you judge 1/12th of a big a chunk of dough? It turns out I couldn't. But I nailed 1/11th right on the head. I didn't want to make 11 bagels. It just didn't seem right. 13, okay. 12, right on. But 11? Uh-unh. I just pulled a little bit from each of the 11 to make the 12th and I was ready to move on to the formation.

I flattened each sphere down and poked holes in the center with my thumbs, smoothing the dough and trying to maintain a roughly round shape. It's amazing. It's actually starting to look like I'm going to have a dozen bagels on my hands in no time at all. Now we're starting to get somewhere.

I placed the bagels on my floured cutting board to rise again while I boiled the sugar water mixture in the stock pot. I didn't have any granulated sugar so I used brown sugar. What did it matter?

After 20 minutes, the bagels had risen about ? again, the water was simmering gently and it was time for bagels to take a hot bath. The bagels should sink first, then gracefully float to the top of the simmering water. If they float, it's not a big deal, but it does mean that you'll have a somewhat more bready (and less bagely) texture.

There was nothing even remotely graceful about my bagels. They just popped right up to the surface. After soaking for 4-5 minutes, the dough was as wrinkled as an old Yenta after a long bath.

I could only boil 4 bagels at a time. After 3 shifts of soaking, I laid them all out on baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal. I was supposed to brush the tops lightly with a wash of egg yolk, but when I took my one remaining egg out of the fridge, it was frozen solid.

I'm having some climate control issues with my refrigerator at the moment. It turned out not to be such a big deal. I let the egg thaw just enough so that I could easily pull off the semi-frozen egg whites, then defrosted the yolk by gently whipping it with a fork.

I threw the bagels in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius (400F). In 30 minutes, I had 12 steaming golden brown bagels. I was supposed to let them cool, but I couldn't wait. I cracked one open and slapped on cream cheese. Delicious! Give me some smoked whitefish and I'd be in absolute heaven.

(What's really impressive is that I managed to make these bagels despite the smell of a recently deceased and decaying rat that was festering above the ceiling in my kitchen. The odor would have overcome a lesser man.)

The best part came when I brought a few bagels over to my neighbors two doors down, Masima and Fetu. I doubt they've ever had bagels before so they wouldn't have anything to compare them against. And, being Samoan, they would never tell me if they didn't like them. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that for once I was able to share a little part of my culture with Samoans who've given me so much of theirs.

THE BASIC BAGEL

Amount	Measure	Ingredient -- Preparation Method
----------	-----------	------------------------------------------
2	c	Warm water (100 to 115 -deg.F)
2	pk	Active dry yeast
3	tb	Sugar
3	ts	Salt
About 5 3/4	cups	All-purpose flour (unsifted)
3	qt	Water with 1 Tbl sugar
		Cornmeal
1		Egg yolk beaten with 1 Tbl -water

Combine water and yeast in the large bowl of an electric mixer.

Let stand 5 minutes. Stir in sugar and salt.

Gradually mix in 4 cups of the flour. Beat at medium speed for 5 minutes. With a spoon, mix in about 1 1/4 cups more flour to make a stiff dough. Turn out on a floured board and knead until smooth, elastic, and no longer sticky, about 15 minutes.

Add more flour as needed (dough should be firmer than for most other yeast breads). Place in a greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until almost doubled, about 40 minutes. Knead dough lightly, then divide into 12 equal pieces. To shape, knead each piece, forming it into a smooth ball. Holding ball with both hands, poke your thumbs through the center. With one thumb in the hole, work around perimeter, shaping bagel like a doughnut, 3 to 3 1/2 across. Place shaped bagels on a lightly floured board, cover lightly, and let stand in a warm place for 20 minutes. Bring the water-sugar mixture to boiling in a 4 or 5 quart pan.

Adjust heat to keep it boiling gently. Lightly grease baking a baking sheet and sprinkle with cornmeal. Gently lift one bagel at a time and drop into water.

Boil about 4 at a time, turning often, for 5 minutes. Lift out with a slotted spatula, drain briefly on a towel, and place on the baking sheet. Brush bagels with the egg yolk glaze and bake in a 400 deg.F oven for about 35 to 40 minutes, or until well browned and crusty. Cool on a rack. Makes 12.

WHOLE WHEAT BAGELS -----+-----+------ Follow basic
recipe, omitting sugar; use 3 Tbl honey instead. In
place of the flour, use 2 cups whole wheat, 1/2 cup
wheat germ, and about 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour.
Mix in all the whole wheat flour and wheat germ and 1
1/4 cups all-purpose flour before beating dough. Then
mix in about 1 1/2 cups more all-purpose flour, knead,
and finish as directed.

PUMPERNICKEL BAGELS *+* Follow basic recipe, omitting
sugar; instead use 3 Tbl dark molasses. In place of
the flour use 2 cups each rye and whole wheat and
about 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour. Add all the rye
and 1 cup each of the whole wheat and all-purpose
before beating dough. Then add remaining 1 cup of
whole wheat and about 3/4 cup more all-purpose flour,
knead, and finish as directed.

MORE BAGEL VARIETY ----+-----+------- Try adding 1/2
cup instant toasted onion to the whole wheat or basic
bagels; add it to the yeast mixture along with the
sugar and salt. Or sprinkle 1/2 tsp poppy or sesame
seed or 1/4 tsp coarse salt on each glazed bagel
before baking. Or add 1 Tbl caraway seed to
pumpernickel bagels, then sprinkle each glazed bagel
with 1/2 tsp more caraway seed before baking.

I had a great food day yesterday.

It started off basic enough with cinammon and brown sugar porridge for breakfast.

For lunch I made seared tandoori yellow fin tuna. Very easy, very tasty, cooks in seconds. It's so nice to be able to get such good fresh fish, so cheaply.

For a snack in the afternoon I made rosemary macaroni & cheese with some blue cheese added. It was incredibly decadent and delicous. I'm definately going to have to have that again. You can pick up Kraft Mac & Cheese in town at MD's Big Fresh for 4 tala 30.

For dinner there was pizza. What else? The combination of rosemary, garlic and sausage (also from MD's) was sublime. The crust was amazing. Soft and sweet, but crispy on the bottom. It was one of the best I've made.

I'm running out of that incredible pizza sauce my brother sent me from Trader Joe's. It's looks like it back to Hunt's soon.

This morning I bought a barracuda from the fish market. I've never cooked (or eaten) barracuda before so I have no idea what I'm going to with it. It was just too cool and too cheap (10 tala, about $3.25) to pass up.

I had it cut into steaks. I'll probably fry it up with some onions maybe in Satay or Tandoori sauce. If it tastes like crap, I can always feed it to the kittens.

I also picked up four pounds of Yellow Fin tuna fillets. Yellow Fin is the tuna used in sushi bars around the world to make sashimi. It's one of the best fish on the planet. This huge chunk that I bought today would probably cost about 500 bucks in any run of the mill sushi bar. It cost me less than 6 It's only 5 tala a pound).

Ah, the benefits of living in the developing world. Adios, it's sashimi time.

You can usually get fresh mushrooms imported from New Zealand at MD's Big Fresh. They are a little pricey, about 10 tala a pound, but the alternative is buying cans of what are ambitiously labeled "champignons" or doing without.

Occasionally I splurge and pick up half a pound or so. I bought some the other day and made a mushroom pizza last night.

Sadly, this one looks much better than it tasted. It wasn't the mushrooms, they were great. It was the crust.

I decided to experiment and try to make a thin crust pizza. My pizzas tend to be on the fluffy side, which is fine, but I like a little variety. I've been slowly reducing the amount of yeast that I use which has had little effect on the "fluffiness" of the crust so I tried making dough without yeast. What a huge mistake.

It all looked fine when it came out of the oven: golden brown crust, bubbling cheese and great looking shrooms. But the yeast-less no rise crust didn't cook all the way through and it was dense as brick, so tough, in fact that I had a tough time cutting through it with my serrated knife. The crust was thin and damn crispy, though. I'm going to have work on that recipe.

This weekend I made Blue Cheese Pizza.

Twice.

One of the local Italian restaurants, Giordana's, makes a blue cheese pizza which is fantastic, which is how I got the idea. It's not something I ever would have thought of myself. But the blue cheese is so tangy. It really is an incredble taste on the pallette.

When I found a small wedge of blue cheese at Lucky Foodtown for 4 tala 80 on Friday, I had to snap it up.

The sauce was fat free pizza sauce from Trader Joe's that my brother sent to me. I used mozzerella, blue and another cheese from New Zealand called "Tasty". The toppings were fresh basil, cilantro and scallions.

The pizza went down really good with McWilliams Cabernet Shiraz from South Australia. (The Finlandia cranberry is just a candle holder).

I'm definately going to have to make this one again.

I probably shouldn't be able to make Thai Chicken Pizza while I'm in the Peace Corps, but I can, so what the fuck. I found the recipe online. All the ingredients are available here in Samoa. Some things, like chili oil, were quite expensive. Rice vinegar costs 20 tala for a little bottle, so I went without it.

The dough in the recipe came out really soft and after letting it sit for an hour or so, it had almost tripled in size. Maybe I overdid it with the yeast. I don't have small measuring spoons, so I have to eyeball it for tea and tablespoons.

Then when I put it in the oven, the dough kept expanding and expanding until it went from a thin crust to a deep dish, but no matter. It was really the toppings that made this pizza.

Here's the recipe. It's a bit of a chore, but when you little or nothing else to do and very few obligations, it's easy to find the time. You won't believe how good this pizza is.

I'm starting to become addicted to making my own pizza. It's so fun and so damn good.

Tonight I made two little "cheeseburger" pizzas. The toppings were hamburger sauteed in garlic and a little balsamic vinegar with some white cheddar cheese sprinkled on top.

The crust was a little thicker than I wanted because I greased the pan with olive oil and I couldn't pound down the pizza without it sliding right back to place and into form because of the oil. I just lowered the oven temp a little and increased the cooking time and it worked out fine.

Last night it was pizza time again (I'm guess I'm becoming obsessed). But this time, there were a few minor differences.

One, I lost the recipe, so I had to fudge it a little. Then I moved venues and baked the pizze in the awesome industrial oven at the hostel where a few of the volunteer live. I didn't have mozzarella, so I used aged cheddar. Last, I changed toppings to onions, garlic, green peppers and sausage.

I also had a round "pizza" tin so I could make the dough round. Damn, it really was looked and tasted fucking delicious.

I hope this one meets with approval of a few of the skeptics out there.

Last night, I did something I've been wanting to do for ages: cook a pizza from sratch.

I did it courtesy of my old roommate Peter from Atlanta. Peter was a great cook, always messing around the kitchen and producing incredible stuff. A few months back, he sent me his pizza recipe, which incidentally is from the Moosewood Cookbook, and I finally got off my lazy ass and did some cooking last night. (Now that I have all the implements of war: cheese grater, can opener, measuring cups, it was really easy).

I picked up some yeast and a block of mozzarella from Chan Mow Supermarket downtown. The rest of the ingredients, I already had. For sauce, I used a can of Hunt's which was a little runny. I need to augment it with some tomato paste next time.

Making the dough was a mess. There was flour all over the place. But all fun things are messy. I went to watch Minority Report while I let the dough rise for an hour.

Spreading the crust out was something of pain without a rolling pin. I tried to toss it a few times, but I was afraid of it landing on my less than clean floor. What a disaster that would have been.

I couldn't make the crust round, which is no big deal. I just spread it aorund the square surface of the cooking sheet. I laid down the sauce, the cheese, the corn and the onions, popped into the oven at 450 for 20 minutes and volia!

The pizza turned out delicious. The recipe calls for honey, which I didn't have, but I substituted brown sugar. With my topping of corn and carmelized onions, it was sweet, but oh, so good.

This endeavor was relatively cheap. I used 3/5's of a block of mozzarella (6 tala), half a can of corn (1.50), half a can of sauce (2.75). The yeast ran 8 bucks, but I should be able to use that for another few months. I already had flour, onions, salt, and sugar. The whole shebang ran about 10-15 tala, which isn't too bad considering what they charge in the local pizzerias. Now, if I can just find some goat cheese, I'll be in serious business.

(from the original Moosewood Cookbook via Peter Haarsgaard)

Ingredients:
1 cup room temperature water
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbs honey or sugar (go with the honey - my addition)
2 1/2 to 3 cups flour
olive oil

1) Place water in medium sized bowl. Sprinkle in the yeast and stir in the honey until everything dissolves. (Let sit 5 minutes for the yeast to do its work)

2) Use a whisk to stir in salt and flour. When it gets too thick to whisk, mix with one floured hand. Knead in the bowl for anout 5 minutes (10-20 minutes is more like it if you want the best results. Also 3 cups of flour ain't going to cut it unless you want the stickiest dough on the planet. Just keep adding flour until the dough feels like more like dough and less like paste)

3) Brush a little olive oil on the dough. Cover the bowl and let rise in warm place until double in bulk. About 1 hour.

4) Punch it down and flatten by hand or roller into a nice pizza crust (I like to put a little olive oil around the edge and let it ooze around the perimeter of the pizza. This ensures two things. One, that the pizza will have a nice crispy crust. Two, you can remove the pizza from the pan without a hammer and chisel)

5) Bake at 450 F for 15-20 minutes (Presumably, you'd put the toppings on before you slapped the thing in the oven, but the people at Moosewood don't specify, so it's up to you. I'm the sort of guy who likes my cheese melted, so I prefer toppings on before cooking. The time is really a guideline. I look for a browning/bubbling of the chesse, then yank the pizza out of the oven, let it cool for a few minutes and slice away.)

Hey, it's Cinco de Mayo, even here in Samoa. So in honor of the Mexican defeat of the French at Puebla, I ate lunch at the Mexican Restaurant in town, Ricordo's (chilli con carne).

Tonight I'm going to make "California" hamburgers with a little guacamole. I should have cooked the meal I made last night tonight. I had pepper-lime steak fajitas with tortillas that I made myself. It was messy, but then again, all things fun are messy.

Kris and I were just walking through the market, the one called the Maketi Fou, or "New Market". We saw this guy selling a gigantic fiddler crab. He wanted 15 tala for it. We hesitated. He dropped the price to 12 (about 4 USD), and we snapped it up.

We brought our catch back to the Peace Corps office and devoured it Neanderthal style. It was delicious, especially the massive right claw. Yum!

I finally picked up the blender that I bought at George's garage sale. It's a super-poweful Hamilon Beach 2-speed bar blender. It's awesome, chrome perfection and it's going to make my life here a whole hell of lot more tolerable.

George, who formerly managed the surf camp at Salani on the south side of Upolu, was selling most of his worldly goods before his round-the-world-trip and I was lucky enough to pick up his blender and his a cheese grater.

The first thing I blended: Strawberry Egg Cream

Last night was a great night. I went to a friend's house and made sushi and sashimi. We then devoured our creations as we got pleasantly inebriated, first with gin & cranberry and then on wine, and watched 3 or 4 episodes of the Iron Chef, possibly the best television show ever conceived by mankind. Chaiman Kaga is, indeed, a mad genius.

For those of who are familiar with this program, you know what I am talking about. For those of you who are not, all I can say is, get the Food Network and get watching. You surely won't regret it.

The premise behind Iron Chef is that a insanely wealthy and eccentric gourmet (portrayed by Chaiman Kaga Takeshi) lives in his castle with a army of fine chefs. He delights in staging food battles between his honored Iron Chefs and premiere chefs of the culinary world.

I ate at the Steakhouse twice today. They definitely have the best burger in Samoa. And they are conveniently located near the Peace Corps office. I don't know where they get their bread, maybe they make it themselves, but it's great stuff. A little mustard instead of mayo and it's almost like being at home. Sadly the salad that comes with the hamburger is probably the only green veggies I get during a given week.

Today I was at the ice cream place in the food court. They were advertising that their Sara Lee ice cream was a 1.50 for a single instead of 2.50. I guess they were trying to get rid of the stuff. Since they were out of chocolate, I decided I would try the mint chip, one of the Sara Lee flavors.

The woman behind counter tried to scoop the ice cream, but it was too hard and she gave up. There wasn't any other flavor I really wanted so I asked her if I could sccop it myself. I was shocked when she said no problem since I was joking around. She lifted the carton out of the freezer and onto the counter. I let it thaw for a few seconds and then scooped myself a massive single. And then, since they wanted to get rid of it, I scooped one for my buddy Sio and they didn't charge us.

Had dinner tonight at Giordana's in Moto'otua. They probably have the best pizza in the country. My favorite: Blue Cheese pizza.

I can't believe what I found today at MD's. Pop Rocks. Yes, that's right. Pop Rocks (watermelon flavor), right there in the cash wrap at MD's. I haven't seen Pop Rocks in ages. I can still remember back to elementary school when the urban myth of kids dying with the combination of Coke and Pop Rocks making the rounds. I guess it's time for some "Real Popping Action."

Tonight I had a big score. It was Friday night. I had dinner with my friend Kris at the Steakhouse-fish burgers. They were good, but not nearly filling enough. We both decided not to go drinking, but instead to go shopping at Lyn Netzler's.

I was looking in the aisle of canned goods. Down at the bottom were stacked a dozen or so enormous cans. I looked through them out of curiosity and right in the middle I found a can of "Ranch Style" black beans from Texas. I couldn't believe my luck.

I have been looking for black beans everywhere. They were some salted, dried things from China, but they looked inedible, so when I found the can, I was thrilled. I did feel a little guilty that there was only one can and Kris couldn't have one as well, but only a little.

I also hesitated from a second over the 22 tala price tag (over 7 bucks), but I decided I had to have them--I would have probably paid twice that price-and bought them along with some tortillas from Santa Clara and some milk from New Zealand.