Living it up, San Francisco-style

When I told my friends I was coming to San Francisco, Erin suggested that we cook a big dinner together and invite the rest of my San Francisco friends. She and her roommate, who I will continue to call "Zizou" out of politeness to her and fantasy for me, share a beautiful apartment with the kind of kitchen only rich New Yorkers can dream of. It's filled with light, equipped with an island and even a prep sink, and the stove has some gaseous power that I can't even grasp, something about BTUs. All I know is that it boils up water like you wouldn't believe.

We started our shopping at Alemany Market, my favorite farmers' market in San Francisco. Unlike the famed and rather bourgeois Ferry Building, Alemany doesn't truck in artisanal chocolate sprinkled with grey sea salt. So there are few tourists, and instead plenty of resident yuppies, Chinese bargain-hunters, and those who really want a live chicken, which probably overlaps more with the Chinese bargain-hunters than the yuppies. While Erin and I bought meyer lemons, strawberries, asparagus, and lilacs, Zizou took it upon herself to buy a few dozen Kumamoto oysters. She doesn't cook, but she sure knows how to eat.



The rest of the meal we picked up here and there, from the prosciutto I bought at the Cafe Rouge meat counter (not so exciting) to the walnut bread Lika picked up from Tartine (unbelievable, made me feel slightly less annoyed at Tartine).

And Diane brought the wine from Sonoma. She had called me the night before, telling me she was packing and wanting to know what I was serving for dinner. I momentarily forgot she makes wine for a living and asked, "Does the food you're going to eat affect what you're going to wear?



But what really amazed me is how relaxed I was planning and cooking the dinner. Partly it was that Erin was there. I don't normally cook well with others, but I trust her cooking judgment, especially when it comes to risotto. It's nice working with someone when you don't have to worry that she'll "dice" carrots into uneven chunks. And partly it was that after we baked our anise-almond biscotti, we took off to go eat sausages at Rosamunde's and then went for a walk at Crissy Field, where it was unusually sunny and characteristically gorgeous. I've never done that before, go somewhere in the middle of cooking an elaborate dinner for anything other than a missing ingredient.

So when we ended up being late getting home, and Anne had to stir the citrus risotto for another hour after all the guests arrived, I didn't really care. I did care how good the Zuni pistachio "aillade" was on the roasted asparagus, which required Lika to pound away at 2 ounces of pistachios for a good 20 minutes, pulverizing them to a dust that I could bind up with a couple of tablespoonfuls of olive oil, a mashed garlic clove, a splash of grappa, orange zest and salt and pepper. If you have a friend with a powerful arm, I can't recommend this enough. The flavors blend together as you let it sit, and it's so much more complex and delicious than you could have imagined. We were torturing Elena, who's allergic to raw nuts, with our oohing and ahhing. The citrus risotto, also a Zuni recipe involving sections of grapefruit and lime, was also surprising and tasty, the tartness cutting the usual heft of risotto in my stomach. It eased the pain when it turned out the scallops were pretty low-grade.



But I think the star of the show was the meyer lemon ice cream we served with anise-almond biscotti and early strawberries. Happy birthday to me!

Don't be grossed out, it's really good

Be forewarned, what follows are less delicate aspects of Korean cuisine.

In Mexico, people would often express surprise when I sat down to eat barbecued goat or a spicy stew of innards. I would shrug and merely say, “But I’m not really American, I grew up in Korea,” and immediately, the questioners would nod understandingly. I wish I could say my willingness to eat all kinds of random things comes from great bravery and open-mindedness, but it’s because I grew up never really knowing what I was eating.

I love tripe. I love it cooked in tomato sauce at Babbo, I love it in meaty Korean soups, I love it in a warm Spanish stew. But growing up, I thought it was lamb. The word in Korean for tripe is 양 or yang, which happens to be the same word for lamb. Somewhere in my little kid head, I thought the curly fur of the lamb somehow got transferred to its meat, resulting in the curly, rough surface of the tripe.



I had no such excuse for not knowing what 족발, jokbal is. After all, it literally means “pig foot.” But I somehow never put “pig” and “foot” together, probably because I was so distracted by how much I loved the contrast between the simple boiled pork meat, the extremely chewy fat, and the salty, shrimpy sauce in which it’s traditionally dipped. It is really, really chewy, as Koreans just love chewy things.



Don’t knock it till you try it.



순대, soondae, I do take credit for simply being brave even if no one ever told me it was blood sausage, because only an exceptional kid, or perhaps a supremely uncurious one, would eat something so dark and strange. I have a vague memory of some kid telling me that the casing was intestine, but I thought she was just trying to scare me. The filling is mainly rice, and blood of course, though many places will also add chopped up Korean glass noodles. Actually, the noodles scared me more; I thought they might be worms. I figured out it must be blood sausage only a few years ago, when I learned about the existence of blood sausage in other cultures. (That’s liver on the left—one thing I’ve never liked.)

I am proud of my Korean heritage for many reasons, but particularly thankful that when organ meats became cool, I was ready.

Jamón, jamón

Perhaps even more than potato chips, the advertising campaign of a Spanish bank speaks volumes about the country’s values.

(Translation:

Achieve a future full of advantages.

And a ham!!!!!!

Come in and find out.)

Roast suckling pig in Segovia

By the time we got to Segovia, our fourth full day in Spain, Anne and I were full of culture, and not in a happy way. Our first day, we arrived in Madrid at 7 a.m. (1 a.m. NY-time), felt a rush of energy from the thrill of being in Spain, and marched out at 9:30 a.m. to see the Palacio Real, the Royal Palace. We kept this up somehow for a couple of days, seeing museums and palaces and cathedrals, and by the third evening, when we had gotten home from a day-trip to Toledo, I said to Anne wanly from my bed, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll sit in a café while you look at the Alcázar in Segovia tomorrow.”

But as we sat on the bus to Segovia, my spirits lifted as I read about Segovia’s specialty—roast suckling pig, or cochinillo. Segovia itself was beautiful, sunny and inviting, in a way that Toledo with its dark, cramped alleys just hadn’t been. I was moved by the 2000-year-old Roman aqueducts, and even enjoyed the Moorish Alcázar, with its Sleeping Beauty turrets and large picture windows, revealing views of rivers, minor castles, and enormous sky. And when it was time to eat lunch, I realized just how much I liked Segovia.

We chose Narizotas, more for its sunny patio than anything else, and ordered the “menu del dia turistico,” which includes a soup of judiones, or white beans, cochinillo, ice cream for dessert, and the glass of wine that is so obligatory, it’s almost always included in the prix-fixe lunches. We also added a plate of jamón ibérico, our first taste of Spain’s famed ham.



The jamón was as delicious as it looked, and we congratulated ourselves for eating vegetables, the ripe tomatoes and herby green sauce, sharp with mustard, that came with the jamón. It’s good that Anne is a doctor, as she was able to reassure me that despite the serious lack of vegetables in my life here, I would not get scurvy in 7 weeks.



The soup of judiones beans was simple, lots of tomatoes and chunks of meat. Good, but not exciting, and to be quite honest, I had a little bit of trouble eating meat that still seemed to have some hair stuck to it.



But the cochinillo was everything I had dreamed it would be. Cochinillo is always made from a 21-day-old piglet that has eaten nothing but its mother’s milk. I don’t know any more because I didn’t have time to do sufficient research on Spanish food before leaving, but luckily, I didn’t need to know more to eat with gusto. The skin didn’t merely crackle, it shattered, and the meat was incredibly tender, melting in its own fat.



We sat in the sun, drinking wine and sparkling water, eating roast pig and watching Segovia locals and tourists walk by. It’s what you imagine life in Spain to be like, no?

How to Pick a Good Ham

Before I left for Spain, I had a friend say to me, “You know, my friend So-and-So didn’t really like the food in Spain.” To which I replied, “But she doesn't eat pork!” And my friend had to agree that So-and-So would probably not be the best judge of food in Spain.

Spain is famous for its jamón, or ham, giant hind legs of the pig, complete with hoof, that you see hanging everywhere. The hoof, I’ve learned, is attached to the leg for an important reason, but I’ll get to that later. The first time I saw them displayed, I got very excited and started taking pictures, but the sight of them is almost passé to me now. Eating them, of course, will never be passé.

Anne and I arrived in Barcelona on Monday afternoon and stayed in Barcelona proper for two nights before heading to Vilafranca del Penedés, a town of about 35,000 people an hour outside of Barcelona, where our friend Mao-Mei lives with her Catalan husband, Isaac. (I’m going to have to go back and write more about Madrid.) Barcelona immediately felt very different from Madrid—warmer, both in terms of temperature and attitude, and very open, with its Paris-like wide boulevards as beautiful and as striking as the medieval warren of streets of the the Barri Gotic. The Moderniste architecture by Gaudi and others adds an immediately whimsical feel to the city, but Anne and I may also like Barcelona so much because after all the churches and castles of Madrid, we took a bike tour and a cooking class in Barcelona.



The cooking class included a market tour of La Boqueria, the oldest market in Barcelona and the most famous. Located right off the Ramblas, the main thoroughfare as touristy as Times Square but more attractive, La Boqueria draws a lot of tourists as well. But it’s also a real, functioning market. I saw one butcher showing off pictures of her granddaughter to a regular, and as Bego, our teacher pointed out, you could see the changes in Spanish society by the new stands focused on Asian or Latin American ingredients. I even saw a Korean stand called “Macitta,” which means “delicious” in Korean, though they seemed mainly to sell a lot of prepared food and instant ramen.



For an American who glories in gory food, La Boqueria was heaven. There were chickens with their heads still on, heads of lambs complete with eyeballs, and skinned rabbits laid-out with their little butts facing up, like darling little sunbathers.



And the seafood! My God, when I think of the fish stands of your average American supermarket and how you can’t find a freakin’ whole fish. I saw big octopi with their tentacles spreading like blooming flowers, shiny little herrings, entire stands devoted to bacalao or salt cod, and funny fish heads that I almost wanted to talk to.



But the highlight of the market tour, to be sure, was when Bego explained how to pick a good ham. First, you get what you pay for. Second, the “pata negra” or the black hoof belongs to the best pigs, the black ones who feed on acorns and wander free-range in the Extremedura. This is what is called jamón iberico, and as it’s the priciest, you need to make sure that you are truly getting jam from a black pig. Show me the hoof! One seller we saw had a flat-screen TV showing his pigs, presumably, frolicking in the meadow.



Once the ham has been sliced through, you can look for things like a thick, white rather than yellow layer of fat around the ham. There should also be small white specks in the red part of the ham itself, as that indicates that it has been well-cured.

Once you have such a fine ham, Bego advised that it had to be served correctly, always at room temperature. If vacuum-packed, the ham should be opened for at least half an hour before serving.

When I asked how long a ham would last, Bego smiled and said, “It goes very fast.” But if you ration yourself, your ham can last as long as three months. You can leave it hanging out at room temperature, using the outer layer of fat to cover the cut area. I instantly had a beautiful image of a ham hanging from the ceiling in my Brooklyn kitchen, but can you imagine me trying to squeeze a giant leg of ham into my backpack? Dreams, sueños, dreams.

My friend who eats everything I feed her

One obvious benefit to cooking and living alone is that you're the only one around to lick the batter bowl.


But what you really need is a good eating friend, someone who is willing to eat whatever you make. I make fun of B all the time, for preferring Breyer's ice cream to premium gelato and otherwise being the child of a mother who never cooked with butter, but she really is the best friend I could have. She doesn't really like the taste of fat, yet she graciously lets me feed her braised short ribs rendered meltingly tender by their own fat, roast chicken with potatoes roasted in the chicken's own fat, and cakes fatty with butter and eggs.

We were supposed to go to Greenpoint last night to eat Polish food with some friends, but with the piles of snow and ice around, she suggested we make Irish soda bread, innocently not even realizing it was St. Patrick's Day. It was the perfect excuse for me to make the "World's Best-Braised Cabbage" from "All About Braising," fry up some turkey sausage from DiPalo's stand at the farmers' market, and roast some rosemary-garlic potato chunks. I'm sure turkey sausage isn't particularly Irish, but it seemed Irish, and it was hearty and warming on a cold night. I pointed out to her that it was a pretty healthy dinner, since there wasn't much butter or oil involved, but she didn't really believe me.

And bless her heart, she didn't even protest when I told her I wanted her to come back for dinner the next night, when I was planning to make lasagna and chocolate pound cake, courtesy of Candy on Chowhound Home Cooking.



Oh Sunday. Is there anything better than having a chocolate cake baking in the oven and a bolognese sauce simmering on the stove on a lazy Sunday afternoon?