Shoyu ramen with pork, spinach, and bamboo shoots.
Living in the Napa Valley, I’ve long been searching for a decent bowl of ramen that doesn’t require a bridge toll. Unfortunately, there’s no realistic solution to this problem, so far as I can tell. For what it’s worth, I can at least find the Vietnamese counterpart to ramen at Pho #1 in Vallejo, which I also recommend wholeheartedly. But despite their superficial similarities, pho is not ramen, and the latter dish still requires a $5 trek across the Carquinez Bridge, if not the Golden Gate. I mention this fact [... read more ...]
After a satisfying breakfast at the Brown Sugar Kitchen in West Oakland last week, I drove up to Black Oak Books on San Pablo, a place where I can always kill a couple hours by browsing their used cookbook section. I have a penchant for kooky old books that are long out-of-print, and when I had discovered an old copy of 1962′s “An Illustrated History of French Cuisine” by Christian Guy, I was hoping that the book would be filled with lots of great vintage illustrations, as the title seems to suggest. Unfortunately, this wasn’t really the case, at [... read more ...]
I found an interesting old paperback at the used bookstore a few weeks ago, 1993′s “California Wine Country Cooking Secrets,” edited by Kathleen DeVanna Fish. The book itself is somewhat poorly conceived — part tour guide, part cookbook, part Napa, part Sonoma — it doesn’t really offer much definitive advice or insight regarding any of these four subjects. Instead, “California Wine Country Cooking Secrets” glosses over the critical details, and simply compiles fluff descriptions for the bigger wineries, alongside a handful of restaurant entries, each offering three recipes. That said, the Napa restaurant section does remain the most compelling [... read more ...]
While killing some time between meals the other day, I finally turned up a copy of “The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc” at a used bookstore in Berkeley. It was a nice find, and one of the best discoveries that I’ve recently made “in the field” (as opposed to trolling eBay for such an item). Originally published in 1987 — just six years after the eponymous author earned his third Michelin star — “Natural Cuisine” earns its stripes for its lavish photography, with the pictures outnumbering the recipes by almost three to one. Although long out of print, the [... read more ...]
In many ways, I feel like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is the companion reader to Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” a book that first sent a shockwave throughout the American food industry in 2005, by holding up a mirror to our current eating habits. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” written by Michael Pollan and published in 2006, raises the stakes by broadening its scope: although Americans can avoid the drive-thru if they so choose, our ability to avoid the litany of industrialized corn byproducts — such as high-fructose corn syrup — presents a far more daunting challenge.
Personally, I don’t have the [... read more ...]
