Eat Really A Lot

Eat Real is Oakland's annual food festival, held in Jack London Square, a bipolar part of the town that seems half bourgeoisie wharf area with expensive restaurants and new condos, and half sketchy warehouses and dive bars. Not somewhere I frequent, but one weekend a year I pass the looming local jail, walk under the freeway, and through the blocks of overpriced, empty condo buildings to get to the tightly packed foodie frenzy known as Eat Real.

The Bay Area gets its summers late; June, July, and August are mostly marked by the dense layers of fog that roll in off the Pacific, pulled inland by the heat of the Central Valley. As the rest of the state cools down, the fog withdraws, making September often our warmest month. So wandering around in public with a jar full of beer feels particularly glorious in the lovely, sunny, perfectly temperate climate. 

It was so enjoyable in fact, that I didn't pick up my camera again until the jar was nearly empty and the Green Guys had opened their new Eritrean-Irish food truck, serving out a huge portion of doro wot, injera, and salad.

And even though I split it (with Ben, on a work trip from Philadelphia, who shares an appreciation and capacity for good food) some serious recovery time was needed before the next food truck foray. So we watched Chef John Fink of The Whole Beast carve up a roasted lamb.

An aside: a good, but rarely utilized marketing strategy is to decorate your bad-ass sign with drippings.

The jars were empty, so we headed over to the "Jam Bar," a misleading name designed to trick people into drinking cocktails. Ben got a really excellent grilled watermelon and basil-infused vodka thing from Wood Tavern, and Robyn and I shared something with rye in it, which was also pretty good.

The huge paella booth from last year was gone, but Venga Paella brought it with a rich, wet, seafood paella that was so good it didn't even matter that it was a bit on the salty side. It probably made it taste even more like the sea.

Friday, the first day of the three-day festival, is the day for ice cream vendors. I'm actually very familiar with the ice cream people in the Bay Area, and so I didn't brave the lines for Scream Sorbet or Nieves Cinco de Mayo. There was a brief moment, however, when Ici Ice Cream – an Alice Waters influenced ice cream venture – had just a few people in front of their booth. The line for their College Avenue storefront is usually down the block, so I jumped at the change to buy one of their ginger cookie and meyer lemon ice cream sandwiches in under twenty minutes. It was so phenomenal that i saved the ingredients list, just so I can try to recreate it at home. But I'm not optimistic; Ici goes above and beyond rational expectations for their product.

The only thing that could have possibly surpassed the taste of that ice cream would have to be an astounding, utterly life-changing, and deeply moving event. Like these shoes. And that was Friday.

Saturday evening I went back to the festival for dinner, starting off with a lovely rice and chicken dish from Soliel's and some absolutely amazing beignet de banana, which is French-African for "delicious fried sugary things with bananas in them that you just ruined your appetite for dinner with."

I've eaten beignets, and I've had a lot of fried bananas in my time, but these were so fresh and so good that I'd consider going to Soleil's restaurant just to eat them by the plate. For real. I even ate the one that fell on the nasty-ass ground, because it hurt too much to waste. 

 Then I got a bacon-studded hot dog on a stick from 4505 Meats, just for the novelty of meat-on-a-stick. It was pretty tasty.

And then, as the sun went down, we hung out with the hippies by the bread oven, who were super awesome and helped us figure out how to build one in my boyfriend's backyard.

And then we tried some plum-jalapeño gelato from Gelateria Naia, which was almost as good as my vanilla-habañero ice cream, and I bought a Rickey Henderson t-shirt from 57-33, and we went home.

But not before we saw a piglet humping a cabbage.

Why do melons always have big weddings?

We've been buying quite a lot of melon for our small, three-person household because they're so perfectly in season, so wonderfully refreshing, and they just smell so damn good that it's worth the extra weight on the mile walk home from the farmers' market. And, to make room for the new melons, we have to eat up the old ones, resulting in this cantaloupe sorbet from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. Some advice:

1. If your melon happens to be less-than-perfectly ripe and flavorful, add another lime. Or, if you like lime, add another lime. For instance, when Lebovitz wrote "1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lime, plus more to taste." I read it as "one lime, plus another one." It might make the sorbet's texture a little coarser, but it will completely overwhelm the cantaloupe's inadequacies.

2. If you need to test the white wine in the back of the fridge to make sure it hasn't turned into vinegar, don't use the mini plastic teddybear cup you found in the back of the drawer because a) the four-year-old watching Toy Story with your dad will want some and b) it's probably covered in 20-year-old lead paint from China.

3. When your mum mentions that her second-hand mixer might run a little different because your uncle tinkered with the motor a bit before giving it to her, that means that he made it go twice as fast and it doesn't have a low setting and it may not be ideal for churning sorbet and you should just put it away on top of the fridge and replace it with the one you got from your grandma, which doesn't know about warp speed yet.

4. Don't leave your lens cap out on the counter.

5. Don't worry too much about the four-year-old angling for that plastic cup of white wine; she's much more interested in raspberries.

Cantaloupe Sorbet [with a lot of lime]

Adapted from David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop"

Chop up the meat of 

One 2-pound ripe cantaloupe

Purée in a blender with

1/2 cup sugar

pinch of salt

the juice of one or two small limes, or if you have a really good melon, maybe just a teaspoon.

Add

2 tablespoons white wine or Champagne

Chill thoroughly, then freeze in an ice cream maker that your uncle hasn't tampered with.  

(Because they can't elope.)

Nonsense Cake

California is a pretty dry place, and though we've come out of our latest drought rather spectacularly, with heavy rainstorms and fog and wet well into the summer, the weather is still rather mild compared to, for instance, Philadelphia. Which is where I was this year as Californians complained about their dreary storm clouds, sopping rain puddles, and thick, lovely snowcaps. Happy as I was to miss the excitement and return to a much better watered state then when I left, I haven't completely avoided the unpleasant side-effects of our return to more sustainable waterways. Because, you see, our delicate agriculture that California so lovingly cultivates was affected by the unusual bounty of rain. Our more sensitive fruits – tomatoes, peaches, strawberries, cherries – have not only been late this year, but less intensely flavorful, less ripe, and far less plentiful. Except the plums.

The plums have been pretty fantastic.

And my mum, who 99% of the time would prefer a fresh piece of fruit over any confection that even the very best local, organic, unionized, free-range bakers might produce, has a deep, uncharacteristic love of zwetsche kuchen, a sort of German breakfast cake where a soft, sweet, spongy dough is generously covered in plums and baked until each plum piece is surrounded by a puffy golden pastry. And my mother is a damn good cook, so when plum season comes around, my mother stocks up on the little purple-green prune plums in the hopes that she'll end up with too many and be forced to bake them.

The recipe is from my great aunt Eva who, despite our family's legacy in the kitchen, was a fantastic cook in her day. My mother, as a child, tried to request Eva's zwetsche kuchen in her informal, phonetic German, and instead asked for schwatzen kuchen – nonsense cake – sending her aunt into hysterics, and providing one of the few family anecdotes about food that actually results in something delicious.

Eva calls for three to four pounds of fresh prune plums, which is about as many as you can possibly fit into your pie pan, plus a few more.

Unlike many German desserts, this cake is primarily about the fruit, not dark spices or rich pastry. It's a summer cake, and the plums should be nearly stacked on top of each other so that even when they shrink in the oven there will be hardly any room for the pastry to puff up around them.

But it is still a German cake, so the plums are lightly sprinkled with sugar and breadcrumbs – or, in our case, leftover ground hazelnuts – before they go in the oven.

In the oven the cake expands, turning golden and crispy around the edges, and the plums become soft and dark. Served hot, the crumbly warm cake sets off each bite of wet, thick plum. Left to itself for awhile, the flavors deepen and the plums imbue the cake with their juices.

My personal preference is to eat it hot right out of the oven it for dessert, and then, after it has sat overnight, again for breakfast the next morning.

Zwetsche Kuchen

adapted from a recipe by Eva Wertheimer

In a bowl, combine 

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/3 cup sugar

1 egg

With hands, work in

4 tablespoons butter

Chill dough for 30 minutes. 

Roll or pat dough into a 9" pie plate (or any approximate alternative). 

Pit and halve

3-4 pounds fresh prune plums (or one 9" pie plate full, plus a few)

Place plum halves overlapping on top of the dough. Sprinkle with

3 tablespoons breadcrumbs or ground nuts

1-3 tablespoons white or brown sugar

Bake at 375° for 45 minutes. Cool slightly before serving. 

An unexpected love affair with Filbert.

The recipe sounded, felt, smelled, looked, tasted like poetry.

Warm, roasted hazelnuts rolling free of their skins in a clean kitchen towel, milk chocolate flakes melted by hot cream, sweet, nutty milk stirred into a custard, every step was a beautiful, satisfying aroma of things to come.

Engaging in some light reading with The Perfect Scoop, my dad bookmarked the recipe for gianduja gelato.

I might have passed over it, favoring fruit flavors in this late summer season, and preferring bitter dark chocolates to the creamy milks.

It may be the best ice cream I've ever eaten.

But please, disregard the instruction to "discard the hazelnuts" after infusing the milk with the roasted, ground nuts. They can be put back in the oven, covered with the milky, sugary residue, and roasted until they become the perfect crispy topping to sprinkle over the thick, rich, smooth gianduja gelato.