Get in my belly

We went to Zeitgeist (great bar with patio and bike parking and a grill out back — and some filthy bathrooms) last night for my friend’s birthday.  It turns out that June 24 is also the Tamale Lady’s birthday!  The Tamale Lady is patron saint to San Francisco hipsters — she travels from bar to bar with coolers full of tamales and a bottle of hot sauce, and saves you from yourself when you’re too drunk and hungry to feed yourself. Here she is, dressed in hot pink, serving some birthday-special chicken mole out of some really big pots.

It was a damn good chicken mole. It also came with some really odd pasta salad. This plate of food and all-you-could-drink Speakeasy beer was $10. Not a bad birthday party.

Tamales covered in mole are pretty amazing too. Her prices seem to have gone up — it was $3.50 each, where I remember paying $2.. but that was years ago, so perhaps it’s just inflation and rising food prices.

I am convinced that alfajores are the new hot cookie. (Macarons are so 2004.) The alfajor de nieve at Citizen Cake is a particularly wonderful specimen: tender, delicate, buttery discs cemented together by dulce de leche. Yes, that’s right: delicious, delicious dulce de leche. Also known as “substance I wouldn’t mind mainlining.”

When I got home on Wednesday, our usual farm box pickup day, A. complained about how light it was, implying that we hadn’t gotten very much this week. When we opened it up, we realized that the majority of the farm box value was represented by a basket of succulent red jewels. Technically strawberry season began last week, but I was out of the country and thus opted out of last week’s box.

Also, my CSA has a blog now.

Did you know that Chris Ware looks just like a character out of his books? Not only that, but he acts like one too. I saw him with Art Spiegelman at a talk at the JCCSF, which has a fabulous lecture series. Definitely see Art Spiegelman sometime — he is hilarious.

Just queued up at on the SFPL request list: Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes (both Ware and Spiegelman are huge fans of him), Black Hole by Charles Burns, and Blankets by Craig Thompson. Also Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Disc 2. Have I told you how much I love the library?

I think I forgot to post my photos from the big wheels race. Please proceed through my flickr set for a brief tour of the 2008 edition of “Bring Your Own Big Wheels”.

I have a new everyday taqueria — Dos Amigos next to the REI on Brannan. FYI, my calculation for an everyday taqueria goes something like this:

rating α taste ÷ (distance + price)

The meats and juicy and delicious, particularly the chile verde ones. It’s a tiny storefront tucked along a street next to REI (I replaced my mini-nalgene so now I can be hydrated again), and there is a little table inside and then a line of tables outside, along a busy street that leads to the highway. Also I had to take a photo of this:

Exhibit A.

Salt-roasted pork loin I made for Carl and Karl. It’s The Week’s reprint of Russ Parsons’s recipe in the LA Times (whose site isn’t pulling up the recipe). I don’t know why I’ve never used this method before; it is easy. The hardest part is making sure you have about a pound of salt lying around to make the paste you’ll need to cover the loin. All you have to do is thoroughly brown the pork on all sides, mix the salt with some rosemary and enough water to make a paste (which isn’t all that much water, it turns out; better less than too much, I discovered, since it won’t stick if too wet). Roast for 20 minutes at 400F. (Wednesday Chef actually has the recipe. I did my potatoes separately, which was fine.)

Exhibit B.

Another reason to live in the Bay Area. As if you didn’t already have the Berkeley Bowl, June Taylor Jams, Rancho Gordo, and Cowgirl Creamery.

Cosentino is a man after my own heart.

i forgot to take a photo. and i’m not sure of the name. but the burritos were tasty although they had different flavors — maybe the meat was flavored differently? it was $11 for two burritos and a horchata. and the chips were cold, in fact, the whole restaurant was cold. the burrito was way better cold the next day — it was really juicy, not in the salsa kind of way, but in the meat juices kind of way, which really melded with the ingredients better after a night in the fridge.

it’s at 22nd and bryant, i think. lots of space to sit. it’s close by, will enter the neighborhood standard rotation. in fact, it’s already in my labmates’ standard rotation, so i’m sure i’ll be back.

Dos Pinas is run by the catering company that runs our cafeteria at work. That has always disturbed me. They also run a hamburger joint five minutes away. But, I can walk there for lunch on Fridays and get $2 Coronas.

I had a carne asada burrito. It was okay. The carne asada was mediocre. That’s pretty much all I have to report. I’ll go back, not for the food, but for the convenience and the Friday beer lunch.

My sister and I always go to this one Mountain View taqueria (by always, I mean 3 times) called La Bamba on Old Middlefield near Rengstorff. This time, we tried the other taqueria a few doors down which claims “Best Burrito in Bay Area for 8 years!” and “Guinness World Record for Largest Burrito!” It’s a little spot in the back of a convenience store and there’s a long line, which seemed like a good sign. Two burritos for $12.55. I got a carne asada burrito, my sister got a carnitas burrito.

The hot salsa was actually quite spicy, which was nice — I asked for extra, which is apparently always the way to go, according to A. But other than that, it was not nearly as good as La Bamba, which I have yet to review. A ate the remaining half for a midnight snack when today’s torrential hurricane rains and winds woke him up at 5am and deemed it too homogenous and uninteresting.

So we won’t be going back, since we know about a better one next door.