SHOP: Artisanal Cheese – Abbaye de Belloc

(Click above image to go to Cowgirl Creamery’s Website)

This sheep’s milk cheese from France is made in the traditional manner by Benedictine Monks at the abbey of Notre-Dame de Belloc, located in the Western Pyrenees. It is a semi-hard cheese with a strong flavor that is smooth, buttery, fruity, and nutty, and has a high fat content. I have learned, thanks to the Cowgirl Creamery website, that the milk for this cheese is brought into the monastery from the neighboring farms. After tasting several cheeses at Cowgirl, this one stood out as one of my personal favorites, just like the cheesemonger gal who sold it to me.

Available through Cowgirl Creamery Artisanal Cheeses, either online or at their store, located at the SF Ferry Building Marketplace.

TIPS: The Basic Kitchen – Part Deux

Once you have outfitted your kitchen with the proper equipment, you are not quite ready to start cooking. When I moved into my apartment, I had to think long and hard about what to buy from the grocery store because I had NOTHING in my cupboards – I’d been used to living with roommates who already had their kitchen staples, or my parents who always had way too much in the pantry (“What am I supposed to use this for?”). After having my own place for the past four years, I have finally compiled a list of what you should have at all times.

Vegetable Oil, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Non-stick cooking spray (canola) – duh.

Salt and Black pepper – if you can, try to get salt & pepper grinders and use sea salt and whole peppercorns.

Vinegar – white, balsamic, and perhaps malt varieties.

Soy sauce – very useful, and keeps for a long time.

Spices – only buy what you need, don’t buy a spice rack unless you’re really planning on using every single spice on there. I like to buy a bunch of containers from Cost Plus World Market and label them, and refill them with spices as needed. My personal staples are basil, oregano, parsley, cinnamon, red chili flakes, and Herbes de Provence. Anything else, I tend to buy it as I need it, like when a recipe calls for it.

Sugar, Flour, Cornstarch – always necessary for some reason or another. Flour can be used to make a roux, cornstarch can be used to thicken sauces and stews, and sugar is always handy.

Red & White Wine – I keep one bottle of red and one bottle of white on hand, not to drink, but in case I need them for cooking. Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw wines are $1.99 and worth every penny.

Other Foodstuffs:

White rice, pasta, can of whole peeled tomatoes, eggs, butter, milk, yogurt, coffee/tea, wine (to drink), garlic, onions, cheese, one box of chicken broth (for when you don’t have time to make your own), condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo), and for “just in case you have guests” – a bottle of champagne.

SF BAY AREA SPOTLIGHT: Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market (San Francisco, CA)

It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to be able to wake up at 7:30am on a Saturday, grab my canvas shopping bag, and drive down to the Embarcadero (praying for parking) for the Ferry Building’s Farmers Market, a mere three miles from my apartment. The experience of the Ferry Building’s Farmers Market is far from ordinary, as we San Franciscans are lucky to be in fairly close proximity to a mecca of agricultural bounty – the outlying cities of Petaluma, Watsonville, Santa Cruz, Healdsburg, Sebastopol, as well as the Central Valley, are full of produce, dairy farms, artisanal cheeses, wine, you name it – it is made somewhere nearby. The quality and variety of produce is unparalleled, in my book. The best part of the Ferry Plaza market is that the merchants are hand selected – operated by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) – all of the vendors are local and most of them are organic.

This morning, a good friend and fellow food-lover and I, wiped the sleep from our eyes and walked from our (metered) parking space straight to our first stop, Blue Bottle Coffee Co., located outside of the Marketplace. The line was already long at 8:30am, but we waited patiently for the $3.00 cup of iced coffee with vanilla soymilk that is pretty close to the nectar of the Gods where coffee is concerned. For the regular drip coffee, each cup is brewed to order – hence the wait, and the priceyness…but it is so worth it.

We decided to stroll the stands and actually made a beeline for one of our favorite vendors, Marin Gourmet. They have samples galore at their tent, and they MAKE you try them (you can get full just by standing there for a few minutes). My favorite product they have is Affi’s Aubergine Pesto, a very flavorful mix of roasted eggplant and garlic, great to eat with pita chips or on bread. Luckily, if you can’t make it to the Ferry Building, you can get their things at Whole Foods & Andronico’s. Next door was the Della Fattoria tent, showcasing baskets and baskets of bread of all varieties, definitely worth checking out. After an amuse bouche of aubergine pesto, we were ready to get our grub on – we needed breakfast. Next stop: Hayes Street Grill.
It’s pretty impressive that these guys can run a pretty organized line in a makeshift kitchen. In place of dupes on a slide (thank you, Kitchen Confidential), they use bright orange post-it notes stuck to the end of the counter. I ordered the chorizo scramble, and my friend ordered the Hobbs bacon, tomato and eggs on a baguette. The Early Girl tomatoes topping my chorizo scramble were, I kid you not, the best freaking tomatoes I have ever had in my entire life. I would say it was close to a religious experience. HSG makes pretty hearty fare, and it gave us energy to keep powering through the farmers market, which was beginning to get packed (and it was only 9am).

Here are some more photos:

left to right: A bounty of peppers, baby artichokes, and Early Girl tomatoes

See what I mean? Produce that not only looks amazing, but is absolutely fantastic. How do I know? Because most of the vendors will let you sample what they have. I ended up picking up some really robustly flavored Early Girl Tomatoes at Dirty Girl Produce based out of Santa Cruz. Their little booth was quite busy, because of the cases of dry farmed Early Girls and the selections of beans, haricots verts, carrots, and mixed greens.

I also ended up buying some more tomatoes – this time, Green Zebras and Lemon Drops, from Devoto Gardens (Sebastopol). I wanted to buy a bag of mixed greens too, but seeing as this weekend is a busy one for me, I wasn’t sure when I’d get to use them, so I will probably have to come back next weekend if I have the time.

We stopped by Marin Sun Farms (Point Reyes) to check out the meat, per a recommendation from my friend AJ – they have a pretty impressive assortment of cuts. And they sold the avant garde as well….goat spare ribs, chicken heads….not my cup of tea but I’m sure someone out there eats that. A quick stop by G.L. Alfieri Farms (Escalon) yielded a sampling of nuts and almond brittle – they specialize in fruits & nuts. My friend bought some honeycomb from Marshall’s Farm American Honey (American Canyon), then of course, we had to stop at Cowgirl Creamery for some cheeses to go with the honey. One final sweep around the plaza, mostly for more photo opportunities, and we decided to head home – it was starting to get hot, and some of the tents were already running out of stuff to sell (and it was barely 11:00 am). Armed with a bagful of ripe tomatoes, some goat cheese from Bodega Goat Cheese, a hunk of cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, and inspired by all of nature’s bounty on display, I think I’m going to have to cook for a few people tomorrow…now what should I make?

Here are a few more photos worth sharing:

Left to right: Della Fattoria breads, a gaggle of grapes, Dirty Girl’s Early Girls, and a variety of eggplant

For additional photos by yours truly, please click here!

For more information, please visit http://www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com or http://www.cuesa.org.

SF BAY AREA SPOTLIGHT: Kara’s Cupcakes (San Francisco, CA)

Kara’s Cupcakes
3249 Scott Street (between Lombard and Chestnut)
San Francisco, CA 94133

P 415 563-CAKE
F 415 563 2252 for ordering

hours Daily 10-6

Speaking of Giant Cupcakes, if you didn’t already know about Kara’s, you need to get on a bus, get in your car, get on your bike (useful to burn off the calories you will eventually be consuming once you get to Kara’s) and GO to the best cupcakery in the Bay. Or at least, the only cupcakery in the Bay that I know of.

I fell in love with cupcakes as an adult on my first solo trip to NYC in 2003, when a friend of mine and her roommate took me to the ever-so-famous Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street. I had a vanilla cupcake. I was hooked. Since that fateful day, free-standing cupcake shops have gained enormous popularity, like Sprinkles in Los Angeles, and now, Kara’s. What’s special about Kara’s is that they care to use only the best local ingredients, like fruits from the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market, Clover Dairy milk (Petaluma, CA) and Scharffenberger Chocolate (Berkeley, CA).

What to order? My favorites are the Fleur de Sel (a moist chocolate cake with a caramel center and chocolate frosting, topped with a tiny bit of Fleur de Sel), the Coconut Vanilla (vanilla cupcake with coconut cream cheese frosting), and my personal favorite, the Buttermilk Vanilla (vanilla cupcake with a Madagascar bourbon vanilla buttercream). They also do a fantastic Meyer Lemon filled cupcake. Prices range from $2.00 (mini cupcakes) to $3.25 (filled cupcakes). A little pricey, but you can’t really put a price on a little piece of heaven, now can you?

SHOP: Wilton Giant Cupcake Cake Pan

I have dreamed of making something like this, but my attempt was going to be a freehand cake sculpture. However, I need not worry about how to do it, because Wilton has come out with a two-piece cake mold in the shape of my favorite dessert, the cupcake!

Made of cast aluminum, it features a reflective, non-stick surface for quick release, and can stand heat up to 450 degrees. Available at Sur La Table for $27.95 MSRP