Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

Here are a few of the things I fell in ♥ with on our San Francisco holiday!

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Dandelion Chocolate

As you all know, I’m pretty fussy about chocolate, preferring to temper my own whenever possible. We wandered into Dandelion Chocolate on Valencia Street purely by chance, having strolled down from the extraordinary Paxton Gate (more on that in a future post).

I was completely blown away by their chocolate! The bars are made from scratch using cacao beans grown on a single estate, then carefully tempered to a rich, dark 70%. The flavour profile of each variety is distinct and elegant. Without doubt some of the best chocolate I’ve ever tried and so beautifully packaged that I purchased three bars on the spot, and then went back to pick up five more to bring home. So far, the Hacienda Azul from Costa Rica has been my favourite…

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Zenni Optical

To be fair, I’ve been crushing on these guys for quite a while now.

I had new Zenni glasses delivered to where we were staying in SF and they were absolutely perfect for our holiday adventures. The frame is stainless steel and the lenses are transition and progressive – that’s photochromatic and multi-focal, in old person speak. They cost just US$94 plus US$5 delivery (although shipping to Sydney would only have been US$5 more). They’re very comfortable, they’re ludicrously affordable, and they remind me of my dad. I’m completely smitten with them…

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Blackcurrant Aguas Frescas

I discovered two local SF drinks that I adored – the Arnold Palmer (a mix of unsweetened ice tea and American-style lemonade) and aguas frescas (Mexican fruit drinks). Dan and I ate three times at Cholita Linda in Temescal, just so that we could indulge in their blackberry aguas frescas…

Admittedly, their fish plate was pretty awesome as well…

When we came home to Sydney, I discovered that a reasonable copy of the the Cholita Linda drink could be made by mixing together equal parts of pure lime juice with Ribena cordial and topping it with ice cold water. Dilute to taste – it’s the proportion of lime to blackcurrant cordial that’s important…

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Vintage Thrift 

I thought we had decent secondhand shops here in Sydney, but the vintage and thrift stores in San Francisco are out of this world. We had huge fun visiting as many as we could find, including the beautiful Rocket Reuse in Alameda…

…and some amazing shops in Haight-Ashbury, where we found (but didn’t buy) World War II fighter pilot hats…

…and heavyweight bike jackets…

Our very favourite store was the completely insane Mission Thrift, which sold everything from Bavarian loden jackets to wedding gowns to vintage military uniforms…

Pete and Dan had to stop me…used cowboy boots at $20 a pair were almost too hard to resist…

I bought a dozen (ok, more) square scarves to use as furoshiki and then gave the girls at the counter a lesson on tying them…

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Suiseki

Treasure Island is an  artificial island and former military base in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can only enter and exit from the Bay Bridge, which runs over the land mass. Once a month, they hold an amazing flea market, which offers a huge selection of vintage memorabilia, hippie clothing, secondhand goods, and artisan arts and crafts.

I had a conversation about Suiseki, the Japanese art of viewing stones, with Daiza artist Jerry Braswell.  The stones are carefully selected to suggest mountains, lakes, animals or other scenes from nature, and then a daiza (stand) is carefully carved to support and complement it. Jerry’s pieces were stunning, and I particularly loved the one on the top left, but we didn’t have enough baggage allowance to bring it back to Sydney…

After a lovely chat, we were walking off to explore other parts of the market when Jerry came after us. He gave me a small stone with stand, and said “I’m sure you can find room in your luggage for this”. I was very touched by his kindness, and promised that I’d find a spot for his gift on my rock shelf (and I have)…

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Kate Spade Wallet

I’m madly in love with my Kate Spade wallet! It’s full hide leather and I picked it up for 65% off at Nordstrom Rack. My old purse was falling apart at the seams (literally) and all my cards had started dropping out of it. The Kate Spade has a zip the whole way around…

…and when it’s open, everything stays inside. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to buy a new one…

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Piccolo Keep Cup

Finally…my Australian-made 4oz Keep Cup has traveled all over San Francisco with me. It’s been a little trooper – it never leaked, it was small enough to fit into my handbag, and baristas all over the city went mad for it. If you’re an espresso, macchiato, piccolo or gibraltar drinker, then I can’t recommend this highly enough. Order directly from the company website and you can choose your own colour scheme!

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Remember my earlier eel adventures? Don’t panic, I’m not putting the twitching video back up.

When my friend and Italian chef Carla Tomasi heard I was frying fresh eel, she sent me her recipe for anguilla in carpione – a pickled eel dish traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve. It’s delicious and very easy to make, once you get past the squeamishness of handling pulsing slabs of flesh.

Cut the eel fillets into pieces, then dust them in seasoned flour. Keep them as cold as possible and work quickly to avoid the twitching! Fry the pieces gently in a combination of butter and oil until cooked through…

In the meantime, bring to boil ¾ cup oil and ¼ cup red wine vinegar, with a bashed clove of garlic, a pinch of fennel seeds, half a sliced onion, two bay leaves and a piece of chilli (dried or fresh). Drain the eel pieces and place them in a bowl, then pour the mixture over…

It will keep well in the fridge for at least a week – make sure the eel is submerged in the liquid, topping up with more oil/vinegar if needed…

The skin becomes quite rubbery when cold, so I trim it off before eating (it’s fine when first cooked). The tender pickled eel is tangy and delicious, and particularly good on buttered sourdough toast…

Thank you, lovely Carla, for sharing such an interesting dish with me! ♥

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My darling husband is very annoyed at me for calling his creation “Baked Bean Pasta”.

He thinks it’s misleading, but I disagree – I think it’s a dish that has to start with baked beans, because regular tinned ones wouldn’t be soft enough. Anyway, the point is, it’s a genius recipe. It doesn’t taste like baked beans and it’s a luscious and frugal alternative to a meat sauce.

Many of Pete’s creations are one-offs that disappear into the ether – this one was too good to lose, so I typed it on to my phone as we ate. Here’s the annotated version of what I wrote:

1. Fry two grated carrots and one chopped onion in oil (Pete used lard). Put a pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta.

2. Add a few slices of finely chopped pancetta (we had that in the fridge, but bacon would work as well) and fry everything well for about ten minutes. Season to taste.

3. Rinse the contents of a 420g can of baked beans well to remove all the sauce, then add it to the pan with a tin of Italian tomatoes. Add a splash of white wine and half a tin of water.

4. Cook for a further 10 – 15 minutes, mashing the beans into a paste as you go. Add a little garlic oil and chilli oil (we have these on the bench, but you could add a little garlic with the pancetta and a pinch of chilli flakes instead).

5. Just before adding the pasta to the boiling water, add green vegetables to the sauce – we used topped and tailed beans and sliced zucchinis. Add a little water to the sauce to loosen if necessary. Continue to simmer gently.

6. Once the pasta is cooked and drained, combine everything together and serve with a drizzle of garlic oil and a little grated pecorino cheese. Enjoy!

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Baking sourdough bread has become so easy that it feels effortless.

It doesn’t matter if I’m sick or tired or grumpy or overwhelmed (don’t worry, I’m not), there is always bread. It’s literally just minutes of hands-on work. But effortless doesn’t, shouldn’t and mustn’t mean joyless. To this day, thousands of loaves in, I still get a thrill when I lift the lid off an enamel roaster and see the risen loaf.

Unlike other household “chores”, baking bread has never become mundane or boring. I’m not quite sure why that is, but I suspect a large part of it lies in the enthusiasm with which the loaves are consumed.

These days I hardly ever do a small bake anymore – it feels wasteful to run Bobby II for a single loaf. My standard batch produces six slow-proved high hydration loaves for a total flour cost of $2.35 and $1 in electricity. This gives us two loaves to eat and four to share with our lovely neighbours. How cool is it that so much food can be produced for less than the cost of a takeaway coffee?

Last week I picked up a torn 12.5kg bag of bakers flour off the clearance pallet at Southern Cross supplies for $5, so the six loaves below cost me just 81c (technically $0.8072) in flour and flossy salt. I was pretty excited about that…

Five of those loaves went out to neighbours, fabric wrapped of course…

You see, whilst baking sourdough makes me happy, it’s the sharing of it that brings me joy. Which is why I cheerfully bake twice a week, rather than simply stocking up the freezer once a month.

Of course, it’s also hard to beat a chicken and mayo sandwich with backyard lettuce on freshly baked bread…

Last week, Big Boy’s old school friend Gabby moved into an apartment around the corner. We’ve known him since he was nine years old and it was with great excitement that we dropped around a furoshiki-wrapped loaf as a housewarming gift. He didn’t have a knife or a plate at that stage, so I suspect he just ate it like a caveman…

The following evening, the indigo cloth came back wrapped around a six-shot Negroni cocktail in a jar (I love that The Screaming Mongoose unpacked his cocktail shaker before his cutlery)…

I suspect it’s contraindicated, but I’m sure it helped with the shocking head cold I had at the time…

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If you’d like to bake and share, you might be interested in our basic yeasted bread tutorial or, if you have access to some starter, the basic sourdough tutorial and the overnight sourdough tutorial. Or try our step by step focaccia for 23 year olds – it’s the perfect treat to take to a party!

Sorry folks, I don’t have any dried Priscilla starter at the moment. I’ll let you know when I have more to share!

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