Tag: travel

Victory at the salad bar

August 21st, 2025

21 August 2025 Thursday

There is an appointed time for everything after all, my friends. A time to be born and a time to die, a time for planting and etc. you know. This summer has been a truly eventful one for me. I’ve had great times in the Redwoods and in Ohio, and San Francisco never disappoints in her offerings. I’ve had personal challenges with friends, a 30th high school reunion, my closest teacher and mentor died, and I sustained a minor injury at work, requiring me to walk with a cane for a few weeks. I’ve seen a lot of family, and friends from other times of my life. It’s been a good time for reflection and assessment, a time to think about the changes we can make, and the changes that visit us.

Throughout all this, I have made it from the farmer’s market to the kitchen many times, enjoyed lots of good food. A few notables:

Sorrel soup. I haven’t seen sorrel before, though I’ve heard of it. Here is the thin potato soup loaded with sorrel straight from the farmer’s market. It is very pleasant and citrusy flavored, bright but not sour.

My best batch of bagels yet. I managed to knead them long enough, boil them long enough, and bake them NOT too long enough, which made them super chewy and satisfying.

I’m getting better with leftovers. Yesterday’s roast chicken is today’s chicken pot pie. Yesterday’s boiled rice is today’s stir fry.

Tuna salad sandwiches with fresh tomatoes. Dark Chocolate cobbler. Eggplant Parmesan. Good food makes us happy.

Good food makes us happy yes, but is there any dish better than being right about something? I don’t mean everyone else said turn left and you said turn right and they did and there was our destination. I mean, the longer simmering right. A theory you’ve had for years, and say even written about on a blog called Bingo-Fest all about food and stuff.

My latest trip to Northeast Ohio coincided with my dad’s birthday. His birthday treat of choice is not cake but pie. Elderberry pie to be exact. Now, if don’t really know what elderberries are, and I didn’t, they are smooth, shiny berries that grow in clusters, they look like fresh currants, and they have a particular taste that is sweeter and more pronounced than blueberries, but not as tangy or seedy or raspberries or blackberries. Very yummy. For some reason known only to the cosmos (see photo above), members of our family have varying degrees of affinity for this fruit. My dad likes it on his birthday, and a cousin, whom I refer to as “Elderberry Bernie”, cultivates the trees in his yard and can’t go three minutes of any conversation with bringing up the damn things. I have never seen them in a grocery store, and I bet you haven’t either. You’ve heard of them sure, but we’ve also heard of Sasquatch, and where is he?

Anyway, in order to get the beloved confections, you have to pre-order them and drive a ways to get them. In our case, we drove into the very heart of Ohio’s Amish country. In deference to local custom, I did not take any photographs while there, so you’ll have to use the “cinema of the imagination” for the next several sentences.

We drove down long, wide streets through a small town that had lots of little bakeries and Amish quilt shops and knick knack bricabracks while horse drawn carriages with bearded lads and bonneted ladies went gliding by all the fat people in gas guzzling SUVS idling in the middle lanes. This little town is a huge tourist destination in the region, primarily for the wonderful, farm fresh food and baked goods made by hands that have never held smartphones. The long procession of cars had a destination in the parking lot of Mary Yoder’s Amish Kitchen. This magnificent cortege pulled in and parked. We got out of the cars, went into the restaurant, and waited in line. The same people, almost the same order, this time out of the car.

We were seated in the large dining room and at the far end of the room were three enormous buffets. The first was a cold salad bar, the second was side dishes, and the third, meat and main dishes. I should mention at this point that our party included my parents, my 10 yr old niece, my 8 yr old nephew, and myself. The children were immediately interested in at least looking at the buffet, so I took them up and they looked at it. Chicken tenders? Check. Mashed Potatoes? Check. Orange jello? Check. A child’s food paradise.

Now some time in the past, maybe a year ago, I wrote a blog post about introducing children to vegetables and my own formative experience at the Brown Derby salad bar, and the joy of putting together my own weird combinations and eating the results. I wondered to you, patient readers, if this were something that I could witness someday with other children.

Well, it happened. I was so so very happy that I got to be the first person to take my niece to a salad bar and watch her put her own salad together. A time sow seeds, and a time to harvest what we have sowed. And so it was, we walked up and looked at all the colorful offerings, and she asked, pointing to the baby spinach, “Uncle Ben, can I have that as my lettuce?” And I said, my heart beaming from ear to ear, “Why of course, my dear, you may have whatever you want.” For a brief moment, I was the Willy Wonka of crudites. My nephew too, not wanting to be left out of the make-it-yourself lunch, got his own plate, chock full of fried chicken tenders smothered in orange jello. Everyone is a god at the salad bar.

And so I am grateful, so grateful. For the first time in quite a while, I had something I wanted to write about. “As soon as I get back to San Francisco, I’m gonna write about this”, I said. I returned renewed and invigorated, and in an appointed season of looking back, I began to look forward.

Now, I settle in for a season. There will be, I hope, many good, sound, new theories to put forward, and many new recipes and techniques to discover. The days are getting shorter, we can see them, as summer begins to dress for fall, and that’s OK, didn’t we savor every moment? And wasn’t it glorious?
Foreign food

April 5th, 2025

5 April 2025 Saturday

I’m laying bed, it’s a warm spring day out, and I am sipping a hot cup of coffee. Strictly speaking, coffee is a foreign food. It is not created domestically, therefore it is foreign. It’s so difficult to tell in this world what is foreign and what is not, some of the most familiar every day items we eat are foreign. So, this word, foreign, has lost a great deal of its meaning. Foreign means for many of us, anything that is unfamiliar.

I think many people would consider the Paw Paw a foreign food, even though it is the native fruit of Ohio. We’d much sooner eat a banana, even though bananas cannot be grown anywhere in the continental United States. With shipping methods, new routes, methods of preserving foods, there is no foreign. Everything is domestic in a sense in this global world. It has in fact always been global, it’s just that we didn’t know it. Many still don’t know it.

One of the best things about being an American, is that everything we eat is part of American cuisine. How many times a week do you eat Italian, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Thai, German, Korean, or Japanese food? I bet at least three of these make it to the table every week, maybe more than once. I eat Chinese food three or four times a week. When I say, “let’s get Chinese”, I am saying “from our endless variations on world food, I want to taste the one that aligns with the flavor profile of China.” Most of our grocery stores have an Asian and/or Latino aisles with all the ingredients in that nation’s flavor profile. It’s a very American thing. I eat American every day.

Now, I am not saying that all the foods from other countries need to be “Americanized” in terms of flavor or cooking methods, we’ve really come around to eating more spicy and what do you call it, non-Yankee cooking. We eat Chinese food in an American fashion, with napkins on our laps, drinking clean water, with fork and knife, (or chopsticks, made right here in California) and in the context of our own culture. For instance, we are more likely to eat kimchi at dinner when our palates are ready for something spicy. In Korea, kimchi is eaten at all times of day, including a wonderful kimchi soup often eaten for breakfast. Most Americans who love kimchi would probably not eat it for breakfast on a regular basis. We make it an American food by interacting with it on our terms. Kimchi for dinner, not for breakfast.

Another use of the word foreign is with regard to things that shouldn’t be where they are. Foreign actors you may hear them called. Traces of a foreign substance were found in a sample of cereal, for instance. There are food cops out there all the time blowing the whistle on things found in food that shouldn’t be there. The Girl Scout cookie thing recently, where they were found to contain heavy metals, and all sorts of other not-Girl Scout cookie things. Everyone went nuts for a few hours, until the next paper concluded that you’d need to eat 73,000 cookies a day for those metals to harm you, so you’re in the clear.

No, this picture was not taken on another planet, this is Earth. You can’t see the pollinators, the foreign invaders that are the bees, but they are there in full force, making life continue.

Anyway, don’t forget to savor and enjoy all of those everyday, normal foods that are a “foreign” part of your daily domestic diet. The climate may not be able to sustain them, and you and I may no longer be able to afford them. And if you’re in Ohio, maybe start eating Paw Paws.
Hungry for surprise

March 17th, 2025

17 March 2025 Monday

Perhaps because everything went smoothly, perhaps because I’d done something like this before, I forgot to write to you, dear reader. But don’t worry, I probably spared you a boring story. It would be more exciting if I were writing this from a hospital bed, recovering from third degree burns after a cauldron full of hot oil exploded in every direction after I put a rare cut of exotic meat, covered in searing hot, eye-watering chiles and spices took me to the floor, fully engulfed in flames. But I’m not. I’m just a man with an empty wok, walking the indifferent streets cold and windy. I realized recently that everything is completely meaningless, and I haven’t quite felt the same since.

Interestingly, this horrific picture was something quite lovely. I know it looks like someone dropped their doggy bag in a oil slicked drain, but it is actually pork belly simmering a marvelous stew of garlic, ginger, soy, and a new to me ingredient: Mushroom Soy Sauce. Have I not written of this elixir already? It is wonderous. Thicker and more umami than regular soy sauce, it’s also quite smoky, which makes the Chinese pork belly taste like, you know, bacon.

I braised that pork for four hours, worth every second. I have another whole pork belly in my freezer, am gonna make this again for guests.

Last week’s full moon, shortly before it eclipsed, seen over Mission Street. That’s the name of a song, appearing shortly: Moon over Mission Street. OH, the skies are playing tricks with us these days, so many changes, nothing to stop them.

Ginger, apple, upside down cake. Good, yes, good. Not enough ginger. maybe not enough spice in general. Lots of Molasses, maybe a little too molassesy. Still, good. I’m restless. I need a bigger project, maybe something with a little failure or at least risk involved. Spring is almost here, I’m ready.