September 26, 2005

• eeek, make that Saturday the 17th.
• *dies, drowning in own saliva*
• Meal #2, Sunday the 18th at Yuet Lee: My friend from school wanted to have a dinner with some of our fellow students to relax before the upcoming comprehensive exams, and to clebrate the Chinese Moon Festival. Altogether, there were five of us from school, my wife, our son (18mos) and the husband of the student arranging the whole event. I should mention that she is a retired imigration lawyer who spent much of her career helping people from Hong Kong immigrate to the U.S., including many chefs at chinese restaurants in SF's Chinatown. Including the owner of Yuet Lee. Yuet Lee has a reputation as being one of the best Hong Kong style restaurants in Chinatown -- it looks like a dive, but some of the best food is being cooked there. It is the place that other chefs go to eat late at night, and the owner likes to show off. Our friend called him and told mim she was binging a bunch of friends, and asked him to prepare foods not regularly available on his menu. He was happy to oblige. We were seated at a large round table with a lazy-susan in the middle. The meal started with a beautifully simple chicken soup. It was quite a hit with my son who drank two bowls of it throughout the night. Next came a dish unappetizingly called "boiled beef." However, the complexity of its flavor far outwayed the drab name -- many layers of ginger, garlic, nutty greens, and wonderfully textured beef. This was followed by expertly fried calamari in a pepper batter. Then a whole steamed bass. Then an oyster dish. Then an egg and tofu plate. Then a wonton dish. Then sauteed mushrooms with peashoots. Then chinese broccoli with a fermented soybean sauce. Then crab and lobster. And finally, an enormous bowl of rice porridge was brought to the table, two eggs were cracked into it, and thin layers of raw sturgeon placed on top. It was then stirred while all of the raw ingredients cooked. OMFG!! So good! All of this was followed up with house-made moon cake. It was an incredible night of eating, and enjoying being with friends. Very special.
• Zanshin = very lucky boy!
• Hot lead. That shit's tasty.
• Oh, you insensitive clod... it's gonna be one of those 'mouth waters & stomach growls' posts, isn't it? I love japanese food and everytime I feel like blowing some heavy plastic, go to a specific place where my favorite is the full Wateishoku: Sunomono, Sashimi, Filekatsu, Tempura, Gohan/Yakimeshi and calpis. Mmmhh... However, the best meal I've ever had was in some (now long gone) deli sandwich place. Nothing fancy. But the companion is what made it taste like... licking the sweet nipples of angels.
• Two Boots pizza?
• $5 lobster on the docks in Montauk, 1980.
• Rabbit in dijon sauce, Arles, 1982. La Cote Basque lamb, 1987. Cinco de Mayo garlic-stuffed BBQ brisket, Somerville, 1989. Chesapeake Bay crabs steamed with Old Bay spice, corn on the cob, beer, 1992. Half the menu (high-end Moroccan fusion) while on a restaurant-reviewing gig, Aziza, San Francisco, 2004.
• Some wine recommendations for California monkeys: Fenestra syrah and pinot noir, Livermore Valley Domaine Alfred pinot noir and chardonnay, Edna Valley
• Turley zinfandel. Zin Alley zinfandel and zin port, Paso Robles. Holy crap, I can't stop. Damn you, Zanshin.
• D'ya know what? Almost everyone I know will cite the simple but delicious egg and chips as their favorite tea. Not perhaps the best meal of their lives, but the one everybody goes 'ooh yeah, egg and chips!' when you mention it. I like the beans variety, others like peas...
• There are so many, it's hard to decide. I guess one that stands out in my mind is a birthday dinner for 8 from 2000: Appetizers Duck and fig tartlets Smoked salmon and wasabi cavier tartlets Wild boar sausage and red pepper tartlets Herbed goat cheese tartlets Spinach and feta phyllo triangles Sausage and herb phyllo purses Prosciutto cornets with garlic-herb cheese Sun-dried tomato and cheese phyllo triangles Dinner Venison pinwheels stuffed with feta, spinach, and pine nuts Lightly steamed asparagus with sesame mayonnaise Yellow herbed rice and red pepper timbales Dessert Tiramisu parfait 10-year-old Taylor Fladgate ruby port
• Chicken batter fried potatoes from the little stand across the street from Grandma's beauty shop, 1970-something. Pure heaven in a paper-lined basket, accompanied by a vintage cherry limeade from the nearby Sonic.
• If pressed, I'd have to submit two: - Lobster thermadore, eaten at Stocks Hotel on the Channel Island Sark (1988). - Elk steak in a (juniper) game sauce with stewed chanterelle mushrooms and steamed potatoes, which someone once cooked for me in Sweden (1991).
• Crawfish and beer, eaten at the Hole in the Wall above Johnny Walker's in the French Quarter (before things got all fancy).
• Lamb chops in white wine and mushroom sauce, La Coupole, 1991. First visit to Schwartz's, 1995. Pretty unexciting, I know. De gustibus non est disputandum.
• Oh yeah, fried oysters w/ketchup in my Grandmother's kitchen, New Orleans (1978).
• On a road trip, just south of St. George, British Columbia, stopped at a tiny little hole in the wall. It looked, from the outside, well...kind of dirty. We weren't going to stop until we saw a sign that said something to the extent of "NEXT GAS, NEXT FOOD: 180 KM." We hadn't eaten in 12 hours as it was. We were on the best road trip of our lives -- who had time for food? So we went inside, a bit nervously. The menu seemed interesting and varied -- much moreso than one would expect in such a tiny place, but that's not NECESSARILY good...some tiny places would be better off sticking to what they know and can do well. The waitress came up and asked our order. I thought that if the soup was homemade, maybe soup and half a chicken salad sandwich would be just the thing (and that they couldn't screw it up too badly). I asked the waitress what the soup of the day was, expecting...oh, I don't know. Chicken noodle. Beef vegetable. "Mulligatawny," she said, rendering the "is it homemade?" question inoperative, in fact, rendering my speech somewhat inoperative. Mulligatawny when you're less than a day's drive from the arctic circle? I had to see if it was any good. In a word...it was incredible. The soup, combined with the moments of that trip, made for an incomparable experience. i've always wanted to make that road trip again and find that same little place, but some tiny part of me says I shouldn't -- I could never duplicate the meal or the experience, and I might find out that the restaurant was one of those twilight zone apparitions where you can only go once, then never find again.
• The best meals in my life haven't necessarily been the *best* ones because of the quality/taste of the food, rather, because of the company in which I enjoyed them, or the circumstances. For example, after three days of absolutely no food, hot dog buns stolen from the back of a pickup truck in South Dakota. Heck, I *was* starving! But they tasted *damn* good! I wolfed down an entire pack within minutes. Eating with a large group of close friends... Occasions that come to mind are the summer of '97 in Tokyo at JuJuTei, my birthday in Jakarta 2003, and in Poplar Hall dormitory '94 - '99 (Charlotte NC). Family dinners from childhood (which at the time didn't seem very special, but now when I look back and remember... ahhh... If only I could hear my usually-quiet grandfather crack another of his witty jokes at the dinner table...) A series of meals in Bandung Indonesia in December 2002. The Peak was where I proposed to my wife... That night was one of my best meals ever!
• All I can think of is a time - last year, probably - when I made roasted garlic on ordinary store-bought Tuscan-style bread. Not impressive at all. But the experience was memorable to me. I think because it was emblematic to me of my independence, freedom, even: rather than make the boring three-squares meat-and-potato thing my mother would expect and require, I made roasted garlic on bread, for dinner, yes, only that. I could only do this because I was alone, in this particular situation and this particular time. I had shed my significant other and finally left my family, so now I could do this simple hedonistic thing. I could never have done it if I had to answer to other people and their demands. Your cooking isn't good enough. That's not a meal, there's no meat in it. You never make me anything good. When you get home from work, make me this. You're a bad partner because you don't take care of me right. But I was alone now. I wanted to do something and I did it, end of discussion. I sat down at my boring kitchen table, had exactly what I wanted, and savored every second. That's why.
• Bacon on bread toasted on a stick, and campfire coffee. SMT is right. Hunger is the best sauce.
• To continue Wurwilf's theme - I think one of the best meals I ever made myself was in my first apartment. I had gotten a cookbook and found a recipe to try. I went to the farmer's market and got all fresh ingredients and spent about 2 hours chopping and slicing and sauteing and putting all together. It was delicious, and I haven't made it since for fear of ruining the memory. It was a fettucine primavera.
• The best meals I've ever had were the potluck Thanksgiving dinners my best friend and I held at our apartment in San Francisco, for all our friends whose families lived far away. The one that sticks out as my favorite was when this couple from Spain was there (they made this wonderful quiche-type thing, but I can't remember what it was called), and we taught them about the Thanksgiving traditions we were all raised on ... bickering, burning food, watching football, falling asleep in front of the TV, getting too drunk and telling people off, giving thanks, breaking the wishbone, "ruining everything", crying, etc. They loved it. Great times :)
• I've had many amazing meals but most recently was at a Japanese/Korean restaurant on 155th and Aurora here in Seattle (for all you Seattle monkeys who are reading, take note!). Looks like a dumpy place on the outside but has the most incredible food. We ordered a full-on dinner for two with about 15 different dishes, and were in hog heaven. Every single item was amazing, especially the melt-in-your-mouth Korean BBQ. Highly recommended.
• The very first thing I ever dared to cook for someone special, a simple pasta with meat sauce (sister's recipe - oh, sorry, sis...) ended up this short of an absolute disaster, making it clear from then on that: 1)I can't cook worth a damn, and 2)sometimes, even undercooked pasta can taste great.
• Just-caught trout and a tin of beans, beside a Yukon lake.
• There's a place in South Pasadena called Shiro's. It's Japanese/French Fusion. It's kind of a hole-in-the wall place, the first time I was there we drove by twice looking for it. My roommate's father came into town and wanted to take us to a nice place. I had read reviews about Shiro's so we decided to try it. The food was so good, we were all literally euphoric as the meal progressed. I had never known food could taste so good. The chef goes to the market and sees what's fresh and decides what he's going to serve for the evening. For an appetizer, we had oysters that were lightly breaded with fairy dust and sauted in butter and magic juice and then served in a half shell. I'm not typically an oyster kind of gal but when I tasted my first one, I could easily see myself living off of them. For my entree I had filet mignon in a reduction sauce inspired by angels with sauted frois gras on top. I had heard of steak melting in ones mouth before, but I had never experienced it until that night. The sauce was incredible and the meat was so incredibly tender and succulent. We also split an amazing bottle of French merlot. For dessert, wonderful coffee and creme brulee. I'm a dessert gal all the way, but my entree eclipsed it completely. Shiro's isn't cheap, but if you have a special occasion and live in the area, I highly, highly recommend making a reservation and stopping by.
• Hey, that place must be good: there are some photos on flickr's Food Porn community that are brand new of meals at Shiro's. I was just drooling over them earlier today. One of them there serendipity moments, and now I'm starving.
• I guess good cooking kind of runs in my family. I thought about a number of meals that I had out before realizing that none of them topped the homecooked meals I've been lucky to have. My favorite is xmas eve dinner. Fried calimari, marinated seafood salad, shrimp in tomato sauce, octopus in spicy tomato sauce, white clam sauce over fresh linguini, baked scallops, broccoli rabe, lots of wine. I think the best though, was this one time I came home to visit from college. After months of cafeteria food, I had a nice sunday dinner with stuffed rigatoni, breaded veal cutlets, and eggplant parmesan. And we used to catch crabs when I was a kid, with traps or a net. A few times my mom made homemade tomato using the crabs to flavor the sauce, served over fresh pasta. Right, I'm going to get my pb&j sammich, and eat it at my desk now. :(