Today I made like Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey: my 5 gallon bucket of Guss’ Pickles arrived from New York. These are the real thing – fermented in brine with NO VINEGAR. Decent pickles here cost an arm and a leg, are hard to come by and, since I didn’t make any myself this summer, I had to have them express mailed to me. Why 5 gallons, you ask? The shipping is so pricey that it is not cost effective to purchase individual gallon containers – plus, they keep for months and we were only interested in the full sours anyway. That’s why. I’m writing this entry three days later and I think we are down a couple quarts, at least, so this will not be a problem. I divided up the large pail into smaller containers, so we should be set for quite some time. Guss’ Pickles is a New York City institution, having operated on the Lower East Side for years. If you want to order them, here’s the site: www.gusspickle.com. Note that Guss’ pickles is a bit like Ray’s pizza in that you will find many operations using the name in one form or another or making this or that claim, but the guys in New Jersey who’ll mail you pickles can be traced back to the founder, Izzy Guss. If you want the whole spiel, just Google “Guss’ pickles” or check out the Wiki entry.
Yearly Archives: 2007
Dimsum at Asian Pearl in Richmond
Matt and I treated ourselves to dim sum today. Asian Pearl at Pacific East Mall in Richmond, where else? We seriously over ordered, having circled nine items on the menu and then grabbing two on impulse as they made their way around the dining room. Here you go: green tea dumplings; Northern China dumplings; Shanghai dumplings; steamed beef balls; tofu with hoisin sauce; steamed tripe with ginger and scallions; steamed BBQ pork buns; shrimp rice noodles; salt and pepper squid; har gow; shrimp and scallop dumplings. Matt loves dumplings, so I let him go hog-wild and figured I’d resign myself to eating them, too, though I’m not as fond of them. Next to us were two big guys unable to defend five small plates while we were stacking steamers just to fit everything we ordered on the table. They enjoyed Matthew relishing dumpling after dumpling, not missing a beat with the various sauces, and then punctuating his dumpling orgy with a few tripe shards and squid tentacles, happily chatting away. I defended all three beef balls and quite a bit of the large plate of fried silken tofu. If you come to this place, give the tofu a try — it is not at all greasy and has a nice crust. They also serve good XO sauce rice noodles, which are your basic sheet rice noodles with scallions, rolled and then charred in a wok with the XO sauce and, I would guess, a bit of soy sauce, and served dry-style. After packing up leftovers we broke into the green tea dumplings, with their odd, blackish-green and grainy semi-liquid filling. Funny what you wind up liking when you try things.
Boulud’s Braise
I made two recipes from Daniel Boulud’s Braise (2006) today, the tripe with spicy yellow peppers and watercress (pg. 100) and Southern-style black-eyed peas with bacon (pg. 181). Let’s talk tripe. I love it, and this dish sounded so damned good I thought I’d go through all the prep and the zillion ingredients to prepare it. I used what he said and did what he said and it turned out good. It was complex – a bit spicy with a sweetish backdrop – but I think I’d like a little more peanut butter and a higher PTT (potato-to-tripe) ratio. The extra PB would make it a bit more comforting and provide more body to the sauce, and the potatoes make the dish a meal while serving as a foil for the flavor parade that is the sauce, so more of them would be a plus. I’d also reduce the stock slightly. I can’t see myself making this dish all that often, not so much because it is quite a bit of work, but for the same reason I only order Singapore chow fun one time for every thirty orders of “regular” chow fun: it has a very distinctive flavor and, as a matter of personal taste, it’s not something I want more than a few times a year.
I took a couple of liberties with the black-eyed peas and bacon dish: I used canned black-eyed peas and substituted 2/3 of the slab bacon with pork belly, which is basically slab bacon that has not had anything done to it. If you like a pronounced smokey flavor, then you should use all slab bacon, but I like it in small doses. I also used slightly over a pound of meat, which is way more than the recipe calls for, but I had a piece of pork belly in a “use it or lose it” situation. Finally, I substituted plain old yellow onion for the red. This was excellent – so savory and rib-sticking. Next time I make this pork and beans super deluxe I’ll serve it with some crusty rolls and a green salad. I cooked it so long it was like a confit – and a little goes a long way.
Castro Street Festival
Matt went to the Castro Street Festival today with friends Ross and Ken. He’s been hopping over to SF every weekend for this or that event and then having a bite over there and reporting back on quality. Today they stopped in at Slider’s Diner (449 Castro Street, SF) for burgers and thought they were pretty good. Matt told me that Welcome Home had closed, which is too bad since we went there often when we first moved here in 1995. They met up with Gino Ramos later in the day and went over to the Dignity service in the Sunset to connect with Gino’s partner, Paul Riofski. Paul schlepped them south to have dinner at Harry’s Hofbrau (1297 Chess Drive, Foster City). Harry’s = big hunks of meat. You can get a serious turkey or roast beast groove on at Harry’s while feeling like you stepped back in time. This must be the only place you can get a side of carrot and raisin salad with your Swiss steak, and where your mashed potatoes happily swim under a lake of gravy.
Flowers in my garden
I’ve been meaning to put up a couple photos of my flower garden. My mom is more interested in growing flowers than I am, but I do admit that flowers are very nice and I like looking at them when I’m in the yard working on the laptop. They also provide excellent material to photograph. The orange flower is from the plant Matthew gave me on Mother’s Day in 2004 – which has been growing and blooming like crazy. The purple and pink one was grown from bulbs our friends Marcia and Marc brought by over the summer. It’s amazing how so many plants do well here in the Bay Area – even in containers, which I have many of due to having a cemented side yard that needed to be cheered up. This reminds me of a line from Homo Faber, by Max Frisch, which goes something like, “….even if you spit on the ground, something will grow,” which is pretty much the situation here, though this was not a positive thought for Herr Faber. Nothing much on the food front today since Matthew is off at the Folsom Street festival in SF with friends and Steve and I are doing some minor home repairs – namely caulking and sealing in anticipation of the rainy season.