You won't find much to eat here, but you can learn a lot about west coast seafood, investigate climate change and dissect a squid! Make plans to tour the visitor center next time you're at the Presidio of San Francisco's Crissy Field or schedule a field trip for your kids' class at school.
Back in 2013, Liza Shaw joined me at Food Lit to discuss Charlotte Druckman's Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen. Since then Liza has taken on more heat by opening Merigan Sub Shop and was recently featured in the Chronicle's food section. My family loves beans and greens are often in our CSA box, so I had to try her recipe.
Shrimp cook fast. Shrimp are high in protein. Shrimp taste good. I usually only need two good reasons to do something, so that's enough for me! This recipe has the added bonus of using spinach, which is a frequent part of our weekly CSA box. And it makes whole wheat pasta tolerable. That's five reasons to make it for dinner. Five!
This may be the quickest dinner in his entire book. I whipped it up in about 15 minutes late tonight after my husband and I arrived home from separate parental duties, one PTA meeting and one trip to the local wine bar to solicit a donation for the PTA fundraiser.
This is basically pad thai, but it is much more delicious than any version of that sticky, stinky, gooey dish served in American restaurants. Can you tell I don't like that one but love this one we made at home? There is no comparison.
Yes, it's true. I often leave my children at home with nothing more to eat than a bowl of pasta. This time we just happened to have a few mini-sausages and a gift of ripe strawberries from another CSA member, which inched their meal's nutritional content above moderately sub-par. Plus, our babysitter was thoughtful enough to bring cake pops to celebrate my son's birthday!
There is a recipe for shaved fennel and radish salad in this week's Eatwell Farm newsletter and both ingredients in the box, along with green garlic. Chicken broth, arborio rice and green garlic seem like natural companions to me, so I'll add some shrimp and we'll have risotto with a little sauteed kale and this salad on the side.
"Too much sausage!" you say? Perhaps. Two days in a row is a bit indulgent. But it is really a pretty small portion. I keep shrimp in the freezer and dry chorizo in the fridge, so that I can make paella whenever red peppers arrive in the produce box. This also makes good use of crock-pot stock made from last week's chicken.
Deborah Madison's new book is really quite good, I love all her writing on the actual veggie plants themselves: it's a kitchen and garden go-between.
Today was a really good day. It started with a successful drop off of my daughter at her first day of Kindergarten, followed by a chicken fried steak with hash browns and a bloody mary. My 3 year old son had a cheeseburger topped with grape jelly. Then a little bit of back to school shopping, an episode of Sesame Street, an iced coffee at Blue Bottle's sunny Kiosk location, Kindergarten pickup and then a madcap dash through the Castro to Bi-Rite for ice cream, where the salted caramel is absolutely fantastic.
My daughter has a dirty mouth. Today at preschool she said "poo-poo head." She ran around and around the table. She hid under the table. She ignored the parent-teacher. She was so naughty that the story she wrote was confiscated, and when she and a co-conspirator told a different teacher they didn't care about their bad behavior, they lost their show-and-tell privileges.