Into the Flames

Don’t miss this weekend’s third annual San Francisco Street Food Festival, organized by the non-profit restaurant incubator La Cocina. Last year’s event was organized chaos with folks packed for blocks either eating the great food or braving the lines to capture their next taste and I expect this year’s event to be bigger and better. The Festival takes place on Saturday in the Mission on Folsom Street between 22nd and 26th from 11am until 7pm. Make sure to build your plan of attack with the Vendor Map.

Vendors will include restaurants, bars, local food trucks, and a handful food trucks invited from other cities around the country. A range of world cuisines from will be represented with dishes ranging from the Glutonous: Big Ass Sandwiches, Stimulus: Cocktail Snow Cones of Rye on the Road, Famous: Flour + Water, to Adventurous: Don Bugito’s Moth Larvae Tacos.

I’ll see you there!

What would inspire me to combine Italian gnocchi with an Argentinean-inspired chimichurri roulade? Well, the regulars here know that each month I participate in an Ingredient Challenge with my friends where we each incorporate the same four randomly chosen ingredients into a meal and cook the protein component outdoors. This leads me to make some interesting meals. At the end of this post, below the recipes, you will find a brief description of my friends’ blogs and links to their great creations using the same basket of ingredients. Don’t miss them!

This month’s Challenge was to create a meal featuring four components:

• Flank Steak
• Gnocchi
• Kumquats
• Beets

Continue reading Grilled Chimichurri Flank Steak Roulade and Beet Gnocchi with Crisped Sage and Brown Butter

We have spent the last week and a half in Sydney and Melbourne touring the sights, meeting friends, and having a diverse array of culinary adventures. I thought I would share a brief update on our current adventure to the Royal Mail Hotel. I will be writing more about this adventure in future posts so stay tuned!

Continue reading We Arrive at the Royal Mail Hotel

We have been in Sydney, Australia for four days and had a big day planned Friday. Our game plan was to stroll through the Royal Botanical Gardens to the Art Museum of New South Wales, take a trip to the top of the City Tower for some stratospheric views, and then finish the day in Chinatown with a nice dinner.

Continue reading I Get Crabs in Sydney’s Chinatown

We have been four full days in Australia and we still are fighting the local time a bit. We find ourselves hungry for dinner in the mid-afternoon but most the bloody restaurants are closed from 3 until 6pm. So we have had a couple forgettable dinners with their origins in the words food and court. Food Court fare here is MUCH better than that typically found in the States but not exactly what we had in mind when we planned a trip around culinary adventures.

So today we were hellbent on having a great meal to put the mall food behind us. We went in search of the Aussie Equivalent of California Cuisine and taking advice from several locals as well as some internet sources, we ended up heading to Cafe Sydney. We love well done California Cuisine with it’s emphasis on seasonally produced ingredients smartly sourced from chefs who know the local producers along with it’s philosophy of highlighting those ingredients through a mix of techniques and cultural influences. The equivalent cuisine here is called Mod Oz or Modern Australia and Cafe Sydney is known as on of the best places to experience it. When we travel we look to eat at a mix of dives, institutions, and upscale eateries and this definitely fit in the latter two categories.
Continue reading I Eat Bugs at the Refined Cafe Sydney

After a day of rolling around in our hotel room fighting jet lag and subsisting on fast food udon and room service we decided it was time to venture out to see some sights and get a real taste of Sydney. We planned a day out to Darling Harbour to explore the Wharves, Maritime Museum, Wildlife World, and Fish Market. Those of you who know our home city of San Francisco may think it comical that we would travel 8,000 miles to visit is the equivalent of our tourist-packed Fisherman’s Wharf. But locals informed us the harbour was beautiful, adored and frequented by the residents and that we could meet our two biggest objectives of the day there – to snuggle a koala bear and sample the fresh local seafood. After a half hour stroll down to the harbour from our hotel in city center we realized that we were hungry again despite just having had breakfast so we bee-lined for the Fish Market.
Continue reading A Morning at the Sydney Fish Market

I am on holiday in Australia with with my wife Recha and Daughter Tessa. For some reason we chose a 14 hour flight as Tessa’s first. The flight over went better than expected and the bulkhead baby bassinet was a lifesaver.

We will be spending a week in Sydney, a few days exploring mythical and pastoral Dunkeld and its legendary Royal Mail Hotel and Restaurant and wrap up with another week in Melbourne including some time with friends. I plan on blogging every few days with updates of culinary adventures and beyond. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post!

.One of us was able to fly “First Class”….View from our 17th floor hotel room