For those who are searching for Old Rasputin on tap in San Francisco, we found it yesterday at Inferno Pizza, 1800 Fillmore St, corner of Sutter. (Tasty pizza there as well. …)

Old Rasputin is also available at the Kezar Bar (900 Cole @ Carl). (Not at the other Kezar Bar on Stanyan, I’ve been told.)

The Page at 298 Divisadero Street (at Page) also has it on nitro-tap, alleges the Web. We’ll check that out soon.

Know of any other places in San Francisco where Old Rasputin is on tap? Comments welcome!

[This has been a public service for those hankering for Old Rasputin on tap in San Francisco]

We turned up Kearny toward North Beach as we walked home on a Saturday night. Dinner decision time:  Original Joe’s? The House? Park Tavern? But wait! Broadway! Kearny! Txoko! at Kearny and Broadway. Perfect. And what a delicious meal I had: crispy pork headcheese, glazed beef cheek with crispy sweetbreads, Shishito peppers with sea salt. Tasty. Perfect. The mains were staged on a medley of tasty peppers and vegetables blended with sauces, more. Bringing the Basque back to North Beach.

The food at Txoko’s is amazing. The wine list has an interesting selection of Spanish wines. The service was low key and on the money. What a perfect evening.

I was talking up Txoko’s to a friend of ours recently and he said, “But it’s on [gasp] Broadway.”

Well, yes. It is. In the former Enrico’s space. Hello? Did people not go to Enrico’s because it was on [gasp] Broadway? Two-star Michelin Coi is across the street and down a block and a half.

*sigh* Oh, what a sorry rep the Broadway strip has, but it was always thus.

Txoko’s has the food and ambiance (see the Jeremy Fish mural on the back wall) to be a magnet for local foodies. I wish I could convince more people (neighbors especially, who just have to walk down the hill) to get down there and see what I mean.

Old friends brought a “spring” box collection as a hostess gift when they came for dinner a few weeks back. The box is beautiful. The chocolates ymmm.

Adieu, JS. Another San Francisco tradition signs off.

After checking the clock several times to make sure we timed it right, we used our Ukraine-specific calling card to call the younger younger guy, who’d requested a Mother’s Day call. Later, I talked with the older younger guy. Happy Mother’s Day to me.

A bit after lunch, we headed down the hill to the Ferry Building for bread at Acme. After scoring our sour bâtard, his nibs took me out for a delish Mother’s Day brunch at Butterfly on the waterfront. I watched the Bay: he watched the family dynamics of the Mother’s Day celebrants in the restaurant.

Our meal started with a small platter of four amuse-bouches for each of us: a Bloody Mary oyster shooter, salmon and strawberry salad roll, tuna poke tartar, and — my favorite — Rob Lam’s outstanding meatball of Kobe beef wrapped around a bit of foie gras and then cooked until the outside is crispy. (We’d had these meatballs at a wine tasting event at Butterfly a while back … memorable. Hot. Crispy. Rich. Ymmmm.)

The amuse-bouches were followed by a choice of first courses. From four or so we chose two different items — a rich, creamy shrimp bisque in puff pastry with white truffle oil, minced chives =and= spicy green papaya and mango salad with Vietnamese carmelized shrimp. We swopped halfway through.

Next, we had a choice of main courses — again, four or so … we both chose the Eggs Benedict three ways: traditional, w/ crab, and w/ wild mushroom. And, finally, a dessert plate from the chef. (We boxed up the non-melting portions for later consumption.)

On our way home (after opting to head straight up the stairs rather than go roundabout with the 39bus up to Coit Tower and walk down), we stopped off at a neighbor-on-the-steps’ everything-must-go sale. She’s headed off to Fiji with the Peace Corps and off-loading as much as possible.

We were so thoroughly full that even the walk down to the Ferry Building for bread (0.9mi), over to Butterfly for brunch (1mi), and back up the hill (0.5mi), didn’t wear off enough calories. We both went to bed later Sunday night without our supper (and without having a single regret that we’d missed a meal).

A lovely day it was. … extended by the package that arrived from our PCV (sent from Berkeley) this morning.

One difference, the newer edition has a foreword by MFK Fisher.

One other crucial difference, for those of us who spent our young adult years in the sixties and seventies, this edition contains the recipe that (for legal reasons) the publisher could not include in the first edition. Yes, the recipe for Haschich Fudge — no, not brownies … fudge, even though the talk was always of Alice B. Toklas brownies.

The Haschich Fudge recipe is not a Toklas original, but rather came to Toklas from painter and film-maker Brion Gysin, according to the notes.

————-
Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)

This is the food of Paradise — of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by ‘un évanouissement reveillé.’

Take 1 teaspoon of black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of coriander. These should be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa [sic] can be pulverised. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognised, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
————-

Now that I’ve saved the recipe (although for what reason I don’t know), I can pass the copy of the later edition on to someone who will give it a good home.

Delightful food closeups.

[found via StumbleUpon]

It's Not What You Eat, It's How Much

Calories count.

A lot.

Baskin Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake
2,600 calories
135 g fat (59 g saturated fat, 2.5 g trans fats)
263 g sugars
1,700 mg sodium

Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It’s soiled with more than a day’s worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.

The Men’s Health article has twenty of the worst foods in America: worst salad, worst breakfast, worst burger, &c. (Hard to navigate, but interesting. …)

[via Sour Grapes' Google Reader]

The recipe — one that I’ve used for years … used so much in fact that the page has fallen out of the cookbook — calls for 1tsp. chopped garlic. 1tsp. chopped ginger. Wha? Wimps. I threw in a certain amount that might’ve been five or ten times what they asked for.

Loads of measuring and stirring — first for the goop the chicken sat in before cooking and then for the cooking sauce added after the chicken was cooked through. Measuring of peanuts. (Well, I didn’t measure, really. I scooped up about twice what the recipe called for.) Counting of red hot dried peppers. Cook this. Set it aside. Then this. Add that. Add that back in. Stir until thickened.

Cooking of rice in rice cooker. Making of veggie to accompany — in this case, a green salad with cherry tomatoes. Not very traditional but something his nibs likes. (He made it.)

Cut, chop, cook, stir.

Well worth the effort.

We’d seen a bottle of “kung pao sauce” at the grocery store over the weekend when we were getting a fresh bottle of hoisin sauce, having used up our bottle dregs when we were eating egg foo yung the other night. Bottled kung pao sauce? Why? And what’s in it anyway?

Still, I’d already been thinking of kung pao chicken and we had peanuts on the shopping list because we were out and I couldn’t make kung pao chicken without peanuts. Seeing the bottled stuff kinda shoved me over the edge.

Today seemed like an appropriate day.

Ymmm.