The Lunar New Year, or Tet as my peeps call it, brings with it many favorite dishes. Fatty pork and sugar dominate the holiday table, harking back to a time when ingredients fat and sweet were much more difficult to obtain, precious to use, and delightfully rare to enjoy.

While I can now buy a 10-pound bag of sugar and an equal amount of meat for less money than a couple of movie tickets, the most traditional new year’s dishes are still special for one resource that does remain valuable: time.

Soi Nuoc is one of those meditative, celebratory foods for me. It means, literally, Sticky Rice in Water. Unlike the Chinese, the Vietnamese can be rather literal and unromantic when naming their food. No matter. Who needs fancy language when you have in your hands a beautiful bowl with pale, round balls of chewiness floating in spicy-sweet ginger syrup? Inside hides a spoonful of rich filling: black sesame seeds or red bean paste or golden mung beans bound with lard. (These days, butter or oil makes a fine substitute for those of us watching our pork intake.)

Each perfect dumpling evokes purity and completeness. It celebrates the return of the festive, fertile full moon. It embodies the richness and sweetness of life. The sweet rice dumpling even inspire poets, such as the famed Ho Xuan Huong, an 18th-century Vietnamese woman famous for her intimate, elegant verses:

My body is white and my destiny round,
I float and sink, water and mountain.
Hard or soft, I depend on the skills of
the person who kneads me.
Despite everything, I always keep
a consistent heart.

In China, where they’re known as yuan xiao or tang yuan, the dumplings are traditionally served during the Lantern Festival, which falls on the 15th day of the 1st lunar month. During an especially important season, the festival comes on the first full moon of the new year and marks the end of the new year festivities. Here in San Francisco, this is typically the time when the Chinese New Year parade winds its way up the streets of Chinatown. The dumplings are also enjoyed throughout the year at many dessert houses throughout the Bay Area. Look for them on menus at your favorite Chinese restaurant or boba tea house.

The recipe for soi nuoc is very simple. You can buy finely ground glutinous rice at nearly all Asian markets (look for California’s own Blue Star Mochiko, produced by the Koda family in the San Joaquin Valley since the late 1940s). You’ll need just a handful of other basic ingredients, a friend or two to help roll, several more to eat, and — most importantly — a break in your routine to enjoy the simple, sweet things in life.

GINGER SYRUP

1 1/2 cups sugar
2 cups boiling water
3 inches ginger root, peeled and crushed

In a small, heavy pot, melt the sugar over medium-high heat. Swirl for even melting, but do not stir to avoid crystallization. When the sugar is a dark amber, remove from heat and pour in the water — take care, as it may splatter. Stir to melt the sugar completely. Add the ginger, return to low heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.

Alternatively, dissolve dark brown sugar in water and simmer with the ginger for 10 minutes. Don’t tell your mom.

Remove the chunks of ginger and set the sauce aside.

SESAME FILLINGS

1/2 cup white sesame seeds
1/2 cup black sesame seeds
6 tablespoons lard or melted butter, divided
4 tablespoons sugar, divided
Salt

Toast the sesame seeds separately, taking care not to scorch them. In a mortar or pestle, blender or mini food processor, combine the white sesame seeds with 3 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons sugar and a pinch of salt. Puree to a thick, coarse paste. Transfer to a small bowl. Repeat with the black sesame seeds. Set both aside.

SWEET RICE DUMPLINGS

2 1/4 cups glutinous rice, plus more for kneading
1 cup very hot water

To make the dough: Place the rice in a large bowl and make dimples all over the surface with your fingers to encourage faster incorporation of the water. Pour the water evenly over the surface of the rice in a spiral, then immediately stir with a wooden spoon to mix into a shaggy dough. Transfer to a clean surface and knead for about 5 minutes to obtain a smooth, soft dough. Sprinkle lightly with additional rice flour, if needed, to prevent sticking to your hands or to the work surface. Roll the dough into a long log, cut into 24 pieces, and set aside, covered with a moist cloth.

To form the dumplings: Roll each piece of dough into a ball, flatten slightly, and then pinch up the outer edge to create a small bowl. Place about 1/2 teaspoon of sesame filling into the center, then gather up the side and pinch together to seal tightly. Roll again between your palms, pressing gently, to create a smooth ball. Continue with 18 of the pieces. Cut the remaining 6 pieces of dough into 4 smaller pieces, then roll each of those into a compact ball with no filling.

To cook the dumplings: Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the large, filled dumplings and boil for about 5 minutes. Add the small, unfilled dumplings and continue boiling for another 2 to 3 minutes. The dumplings will float to the surface of the water as they cook. Turn occasionally to keep them moist and evenly cooked.

Remove them from the water with a slotted spoon, place in a bowl of cold water to rinse away excess starch, and then transfer to the ginger syrup. Serve in individual bowls, mixing large dumplings with small ones and drizzling generously with the syrup.

Watch This Week in Northern California tonight, Friday February 26 at 8pm to see Leslie Sbrocco, host of Check, Please! Bay Area in a new segment on local food and wine trends. This week, a conversation about celebrating the food and traditions of the Chinese New Year with Bay Area Bites bloggers, Thy Tran and Stephanie Im.

For years, locavores and vegetarians, calorie-counting suburbanites and couscous-loving Sephardim and even heeb-hopping hipsters have been bringing their own favorite dishes to the Jewish table. You might not know this upon stepping into a deli, where piles of salty, fatty meat and schmaltz in the chopped liver and never-ending free pickles every day of the year define good eating. It’s supposed to be a carefree zone where all the generations and sects can enjoy some chicken soup in relative peace.

Leave it to Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt in Berkeley to begin shaking up this world a bit. As the owners and hands-on managers of Saul’s, these two widely read, passionately opinionated individuals are working hard to keep Jewish delis vibrant, relevant and delicious far into the 21st century. From adding Mediterranean mezzes to offering locally grown, locally made pickles, they’re crafting a new sensibility for an old institution.

A multicultural, sustainable deli might seem like a quixotic pursuit, as many would argue that we should leave well enough alone. Any real and authentic Jewish deli doesn’t need to concern itself with all this modern fancifying. But if you’re a deli owner and you see your customers coming into your dining room less and less often -– how many pastrami sandwiches does one person eat these days? — you realize that things need to change to keep going.

Of course, ideals do have a way of bumping up against reality. Let’s take the last thing on the menu, that list of drinks at the end of the page. Such a minor thing, no?

Well, as it turns out, simple it most definitely is not.

For diners, drinks are usually just an afterthought. For green-minded business owners, though, the environmental costs of transporting flavored water, the impact of corn syrup and artificial sweeteners in our communities, and the waste of thousands upon thousands of empty cans and glass cannot be ignored. If you’re somewhat concerned, you might just put out a recycling bin and offer a few cents off on coffee poured into insulated mugs. If you’re a little more committed, you might try sourcing local sodas.

But if you’re Karen and Peter, you have a much, much longer road to travel. You begin by studying the history of sodas and the science of bubbles. Along the way, you learn about the monopolistic technologies of multinational food corporations. You connect the dots between individual soda jerks, creative spirit and community values. You daydream down a short detour, one that takes you past designs for a working seltzer tap at each and every booth. You decide to compromise, backtracking to install a central seltzer dispenser. You call up a beer tap specialist to design a brand-new beverage system for you. You track down stronger fittings that can hold up to the pressure of C02. You convince colleagues that going back in time 60 years to revive obsolete tastes and technology will be a good thing for the business. You train special “seltzer baristas” to use the finicky machine with its nonstandard formulations. You develop recipe after recipe from scratch. (Cream Soda #8, you think, seems especially promising.) Then, years later, you launch your own house-made seltzers and, in a moment of unrestrained ambition, you decide to stop selling bottled, commercial sodas entirely. Even Dr. Brown’s. Yes, even the Black Cherry and Cel-Ray.

And it’s still not done. Now, you smile politely at your customers’ dismay when they can no longer grab a can of soda with their take-out lunch and nod synpathetically at those most earnest of drinkers, the Diet Coke loyalists. You accept losing thousands of dollars in beverage sales. At the same time, you account for higher food costs because your drink bases, made from real fruit, are good for only four hours. You create and hope that your customers will enjoy the special syrups that taste slightly different day to day in flavors that come and go with the seasons.

You stand back and imagine a dining room full of people sipping sodas made by friends and neighbors from fresh fruit and whole spices.

You win some — these sodas are phenomenal and you’re proud and ecstatic, if a bit exhausted. They more than make up for past battles lost. There’s still that ongoing campaign to source enough briskets from grass-fed cattle to feed your hungry customers. And let’s not forget the recent Pickle Squirmish, when you tried charging for kosher dills — in a deli! — and took a fatal stab at explaining the seasonality of cucumbers.

Yes, one step at a time, one step at a time.

For now, you’re happy to offer a taste of history: the sweet satisfaction and elusive effervescence of real seltzer flavored with homemade syrups.

Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen
By David Sax (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Sax’s campaign to save the deli, as one mom-and-pop sandwich shop after another closes, brings him to the Bay Area this week. Stop by and meet him at Saul’s this Saturday afternoon or at Book Passage on Monday at the Ferry Building. Listen to him read from his new book and then ask him for yourself: which city makes the best pastrami and why do we have to drink egg creams so fast and, yes, that most important question, what is the future of the Jewish delicatessen?

Saturday, October 24, 2009
4:00 pm
Saul’s Restaurant and Deli
1475 Shattuck Ave Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 848-3354
Map

Monday, October 26, 2009
6:00 pm
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building, #42
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 835-1020
Map

Just a mile from the skyscrapers of downtown Pasadena lies a tiny plot of land that has become the heart of an urban homesteading movement. The raised beds of the Dervaes family farm cover 1/10 of an acre. Imagine the area from a football field’s goal line to the very first 10-yard mark, or if you’re an average suburban homeowner, scan your backyard. Now, imagine harvesting 3 tons of organic food from this short span of soil every year.

Robert McFall’s documentary, Homegrown, is an intimate family portrait that reveals both the visionary inspiration and the resolute dedication required to grow one’s own food. For Jules and his adult children, Justin, Anais, and Jordanne, the Dervaes farm began as an experiment to see how much of their own food they could grow. A natural extension of the father’s experience during the back-to-the-land heyday of the 60s and 70s, their gardens soon led to living off-the-grid. They catch rainwater and recycle grey water, keep animals for manure and collect oil from nearby restaurants to produce their own biofuel. They order hand-cranked appliances from Amish catalogs. They put up their own green beans and illuminate their home with a self-reliant mix of olive oil lamps, biodiesel lamps, homemade candles, daylighting and the occasional fluorescent bulb.

Jules speaks of how we can save the world by taking care of our six inches of topsoil. Like farming, living off the grid began as a political statement and personal challenge. It has since grown into an integral part of their working farm. His children have absorbed his lessons and, like him, have chosen to make it a way of life.

The film includes the usual scenes of the family picking and eating ripe tomatoes from their garden–a trope of any story remotely related to sustainable agriculture. What distinguishes the kitchen and dining room scenes in Homegrown is the image of the Dervaes repeating this meal day in, day out. In a country where one’s teen years are simply an extended, fight-filled countdown to the freedom of flight, it’s astonishing to see all three grown children living and working so closely, so contentedly alongside their father. Organic, locally based, and ecologically sound agriculture requires huge amounts of labor. We often forget the “family” half of the equation in family farming. Watching older and younger generations working together is a reminder that there are still deeper cultural changes required for a truly sustainable society.

After a meal at their table, we’re invited to sit in on one of the family’s operational meetings. Here, the reality of business collides with the purity of the Dervaes’ ideals. An extended discussion about accepting advertisements on their website highlights the challenges of making real-world decisions while pursuing deeply philosophical and political goals. With over 4,000 visitors each day, PathToFreedom.com could bring in significant income. The opportunity to make an additional $10,000 a month on a farm that grosses under $40,000 a year cannot be dismissed, and the debate marks a milestone for the family.

Jules fears that once they walk the path of easy money, they’ll never return to the hard work of farming. His children, the ones who design, code and maintain the website, believe ads are a minor concession: why shouldn’t they benefit financially from the enormous amount of experience gained through their own hard work and offered so long for free? The thought of ads, even for supportive seed companies they favor, visibly pains Jules. The younger generation is respectful enough to allow their father to override, for now, their willingness to take on a bit more of capitalism’s gloss as their homestead matures into a profitable business.

It’s obvious that there will be many more meetings and delicately balanced debates about the future of the farm. Building their client list, gathering a strong community of supporters, making wise choices, growing their business as purely and sustainably as the delicate lettuces they harvest, and establishing new homesteads in turn for each of the children–it will be a lifetime of growing and learning for the Devaes family. Homegrown is a privileged gaze onto that rare, difficult journey.

UPCOMING SCREENINGS

Mill Valley Film Festival

Sunday, October 11, 1:00 PM
CinéArts at Sequoia
25 Throckmorton Ave.
Mill Valley, CA 94941
Map

Tuesday, October 13, 6:45 PM
Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
1118 Fourth Street
San Rafael, CA 94901
Map

San Francisco Documentary Film Festival

Saturday, October 17, 7:00 PM
Thursday, October 22, 9:15 PM
The Roxie Theater
3117 16th Street
San Francisco, CA
(415)-863-1087
Map

Everyday cooking means taking lots of shortcuts. For the most flavor with the shortest amount of time in the kitchen, especially when you’ve splurged or gone out of your way to buy good ingredients, it’s a delicate balance between paying attention to the details and just trying to get dinner on the table.

We’ve all done it — cooked tomatoes with their peels and seeds, served pureed soup unstrained, fried the potatoes just once, not twice. It’s healthier, right?

As a cook, I embrace shortcuts. But as a cooking teacher, I always try to explain to my classes why, over the centuries and millennia, certain techniques have developed. Sometimes it’s cultural. Usually, though, there’s a very real change in texture or flavor, nutrition or shelf-life.

Two simple techniques increasingly omitted from recipes now are salting eggplant and browning butter. Neither are absolutely necessary. Both, however, are worth doing every once in a while to remind yourself just what amazing flavors you can create in the kitchen.

BROWNED BUTTER

Simmering whole butter until all its water bubbles off and its protein solids separate accomplishes several key improvements. It allows the butter to sit at (tropical) room temperature much longer without turning rancid. It significantly increases the butter’s smoke point to allow high-heat cooking. And it transforms the milks sweet flavor, adding deep, nutty, caramel tones. Indians call it ghee, while the French call it beurre noisette, or hazelnut butter for its rich color and flavor.

You need just five or ten minutes to make browned butter. Melt good-quality, unsalted butter in a small, heavy pan over medium heat. (A lighter colored pan will allow you to judge more easily the color of the butter as it cooks.) Continue cooking it through the foamy bubbling stage, while all the water evaporates off. Reduce the heat if you want to give yourself some extra buffer time, especially if this is your first time browning butter. As the bubbles subside, swirl the pan occasionally and keep an extra close eye on the butter. The protein solids will sink to the bottom. When they turn light brown, transfer the hot butter immediately to a heat-proof bowl. Be sure not to scorch the butter, as blackened protein will taste sharply acrid, not pleasantly nutty. It will darken a little more as it cools.

For frying or long storage, be sure to separate the milk solids: skim off any remaining foam and spoon or pour off the oil while still liquid, leaving behind the darkened protein at the bottom of the bowl.

Browned butter can be used while still melted to saute or to garnish. It’s excellent for vegetables like asparagus, broccoli, and green beans. If you’re trying to use less butter, deepening its flavor will accentuate the effect from smaller amounts. For a super simple yet elegant entree, sear chicken breast, pork chops, or fish fillets in browned butter and then serve with fresh lemon wedges.

Let browned butter solidify and substitute it in baked recipes for extra delicate cookies and cakes. (Remember that less water means less gluten development in flour, so be sure to allow for some trial and error as you figure out the fulcrum point between flavor and structure.) Use it in rice pilaf to serve with full-flavored stews and roasts. Or simply offer it at the table in your regular butter dish and spread it on crusty bread or flaky biscuits for a flavor epiphany.

SALTING EGGPLANT

With ever smaller, younger and fresher vegetables making their way to our markets in the past decades, old rules have lost much of their imperative. Peeling, trimming, salting — these were techniques required when vegetables were allowed to mature completely on the plant, transported long distances without the benefit of refrigeration, and served within days not weeks of harvest. Tender carrots no longer require peeling. Young celery stalks can be cooked with leaves. And most eggplants now, especially the narrow Asian varieties, are fine going straight from the cutting board the pan.

Occasionally, though, salting eggplant is critical and will remind you just why this vegetable has been embraced in classic dishes around the world. It’s a hassle, but the extra step draws out bitter juices in older vegetables, whether those missed in the back corner of your garden or forgotten in the bottom of your refrigerator. More importantly, salting alters the cell structure of the vegetable’s flesh, creating that famous silken texture while preventing excess absorption of oil.

To salt eggplant, halve, dice or slice it as needed. Sprinkle generous with kosher salt and set aside in a bowl or colander. To encourage the purging of juices, weight the eggplant. (The most effective way is to fill a zip bag with water and plop it on top of the pieces. The age-old method is a flat plate topped with a rock.) Leave the eggplant for 30 to 60 minutes. When you return and peek into the bowl, you’ll see a surprising amount of dark brown liquid at the bottom. Rinse the eggplant quickly in cool water, drain well and then dry it by wringing in a clean cloth or patting with paper towels.

Salting eggplant will noticeably improve recipes that call for stuffing eggplant halves or rolling thin slices around a filling. It’s also a good technique for dishes where keeping its shape is important, such as stews, curries, ratatouille, or parmigiana. If you’re deep-frying eggplant, salting is essential for preventing greasiness.

And what if you’re making baba ganoush or using tiny, little adolescent eggplants? Nope, no one will care or notice if you skip the salting.

Cooking is an investment of time and money, energy and love. Like all decisions, judging the costs requires knowing the benefits. And then choosing wisely.

These last two weekends in the Bay Area have been a celebration of the best and the biggest of food on the go. La Cocina and Eat Real both showed that there are indeed thousands of people willing to stand in long lines in the full heat of summer to try any tasty treat served from a bicycle or cart, tent or renovated taco truck.

But it was a bit like eating Thanksgiving dinner, my cousin’s 12-course wedding banquet and my mom’s new year’s brunch all in the same week. The specialness of each blurred together, and the meaning of each was lost in the flurry of food.

If we would like to see the creativity of those festivals extended to the other 362 days of the year, we now need to divert some of our gustatory energy to ensuring systemic support of microenterprise. Yes, I know, public policy and economic reform is not nearly as sexy as a coconut-basil popsicle. And, yes, talking about immigration and community development is such a downer. Tweeting is way more fun than writing letters to our city supervisors.

In the U.S., our concept of business has always been closely bound to owning or renting property. With the words legitimate and legal defining benchmarks for entrepreneurs, street food rarely receives the kind of public awareness and support that other countries have long embedded into their daily rhythms. In some countries, nearly half of the food consumed comes from street vendors, and in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the street food sector employs from 6 to 25 percent of the urban work force, often involving entire families across generations. (See Street Foods: World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, ed. A.D. Simonpaulos, 2000.) Consumers International, an independent organization working in 116 countries, has been researching and working closely with governments to support street food for over 30 years.

India and Singapore may serve as useful examples for us. Their burgeoning street food scenes are both relatively young. Singapore was established in 1959, and within ten years, the government realized the need to regulate street food vendors without diluting the island’s distinctive culinary culture. Any eater who has made the pilgrimage to Singapore knows well that hawker centres a.k.a. food centres, with their endless stretches of food stalls, are the very effective and delicious compromise. While a few taxi drivers and old-timers may still grumble about how chicken rice just doesn’t taste the same in air-conditioning, no one would think of giving up their neighborhood food centre. Located in the first floors of apartment complexes as well as concentrated in specially zoned, multi-level, sprawling malls, food hawkers are truly a day-to-day part of life in Singapore.

In India, where maintaining the purity of food was inherent in cooking and eating and where strict adherence to caste distinctions limited eating food prepared by strangers, street food has only become popular in the past few decades. Since then, it has grown into such a huge, sprawling aspect of the urban landscape that its Supreme Court recently moved to ban the preparation of food in public areas in New Delhi. Vendors will have to prepare their food at home and then sell them pre-packaged. (Caffeine, however, was specifically not criminalized: coffee and tea vendors enjoy a special dispensation.)

As expected, there was an outcry from vendors all across India. More interestingly, Indians who depend on street food for inexpensive meals complained that they wouldn’t be able to watch the food being cooked, thus would not be able to witness its freshness and cleanliness. In countries where immediate quality is much more important than gimmick or branding, enforcing safety with off-site facilities may well give way to the transparency of a sidewalk stove.

Thailand’s “Clean Food Good Taste” campaign, launched in 1989, is a program that values the needs of small street vendors as well as restaurants. Especially critical to its success, the plan includes a public education program and cooperation across several government agencies at municipal, regional and federal levels.

Here in California, Sacramento has tried to rein in taco trucks, while San Francisco this summer attempted to both welcome and regulate food carts in its city parks. Similar to New Delhi, the city adopted an ordinance requiring street food to be prepared in certified, off-site kitchens. With higher fees and the need for larger, more expensive carts, street food will more likely become an extension of well-established restaurants and more deeply capitalized entrepreneurs. While protecting our public health is certainly important, new laws need to be considered and discussed within the larger context of our city’s culture and economic development.

If we as eaters want creative, locally based and locally relevant street vendors integrated into our culinary landscape, then we as citizens need to push our legislators to build a system that supports–not weeds out–very small businesses. It’s one thing to push a cart around Dolores Park on the weekends as a hobby during your salad days. It’s much another to bring in a living wage and move your family up the ladder while providing food for others day in, day out.

The whole issue of diversity was an obvious part of both street food festivals. We all like to think that San Francisco is one of the culinary capitals of the world. I’m counting down the years until San Jose or Santa Clara, Fremont or Fresno take over the reputation of truly international cuisine that they already deserve. Until then, I’d still like to see our city become more willing to support the full spectrum of culinary businesses. This means not only seeing unusual foods spelled out on the menu board. It means seeing a variety of people pushing the carts and pocketing the money.

There was a time, before Pyrex and Oxo, calculators and even cookbooks, when rules of thumb ruled the kitchen. My mother taught me my first one when I was six and still standing on a barstool to reach the kitchen faucet, the infamous and eerily accurate “one-knuckle” rule for cooking rice. Like all good R.O.T., the measures were flexible. It didn’t matter how much rice or what size pot or what kind of stove. It worked.

Through the years, others joined my mental chart of measures. Start frying spring rolls when a dry chopstick, lowered into the oil, sends up a rush of bubbles. Don’t eat at a restaurant with the word “authentic” translated into English. A thin girl eats one bowl of rice, a polite girl two bowls. The brownies are ready when only a few crumbs stick to the toothpick.

Cooking school and restaurant work lengthened the list of informal guidelines. Cook a fish ten minutes for every inch of thickness. A properly butchered beef carcass will produce 1/4 steaks, 1/4 ground beef and stew meat, 1/4 roasts, and 1/4 waste. A classic mire poix is 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot, 1 part celery. Roux is equal parts flour and butter by weight. A cake is done when it springs back from a loving tap.

Professional caterers employ some of the most specific calculations for feeding people that are, in their way, merely interconnected rules of thumb. Are the guests standing or sitting? Sipping lemonade or knocking back cocktails? Celebrating a friend’s birthday or waiting around to sign big, fat donation checks? Are the plates 5″ or 7″ wide? Are there mostly women or men? Is it a cold morning or a hot night? Each factor changes what kind and — more importantly, how much — food appears on the tables. In the end, it’s as much a guesstimate as that thumb in the rice: based on experience, fluid, and as exactly right as it needs to be.

At his ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable website, RulesofThumb.org, Tom Parker has collected thousands of informal guidelines from around the world. The simple rules were originally sent to him on postcards in the 80s, when he started the project, but he’s since gathered them onto a site where readers can search by keywords, contribute their own R.O.T., and rate those submitted by others.

Just a few from the Food category:

• One elephant provides the same amount of meat as one hundred antelopes.
• For long trips, plan on at least two pounds of food per person per day.
• The quality of food at a restaurant is inversely proportional to the size of the restaurant’s freezer.
• If at their first daily feeding, catfish rapidly swim to the surface, stick their heads out of the water, and gulp for food, everything is O.K. If they are sluggish or don’t come to the surface, promptly change the water.
• One pound of clay thrown with reasonable competence on a potter’s wheel will make a vessel large enough to hold one average serving of most kinds of food.
• When you order Chinese food, order one entree less than the number of people in the group to avoid unwanted leftovers.
• To dissolve, without cooking, 17 pounds of sugar requires 1 gallon of hot water. This makes two and a quarter gallons of liquid sugar.
• If cows remain lying in a group on a rainy day, then fish will not bite.
• Don’t drink water downstream from the herd.
• The hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” sung in a not-too-brisk tempo makes a good egg-timer. If you put the egg into boiling water and sing all five verses, with the chorus, the egg will be just right when you come to Amen.
• If a choking person can verbally request the Heimlich maneuver, he or she doesn’t need it.
• You can live three seconds without blood, three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

Each of these reminds me how much more interesting human-based measures can be. Forget the conversion charts and fear-inducing recipes that crackle with numbers. What we need are more colorful stories embedded in plain advice.

What’s your favorite rule of thumb in the kitchen? And where did you first learn it?

The best summer desserts are simple to make, portable for picnics, and highlight the season’s sweet, luscious fruit. Trifle would be at the top of my own list.

While its name might lead you to think that this dish is of little consequence, it belongs in the pantheon of fantastic frugal food, along with panzanella (another wonderful summer dish) and pain perdue (good anytime of the year or day). Back when little bits of bread or cake were far too valuable to toss away, even if stale as a board, cooks invented ingenious ways to use up every last crumb. Dry cake has a way of soaking up endless flavor and, in the process, transforming itself into a silken gift.

A recent pile of cake trimmings, a bit too much creme fraiche in my refrigerator, and a few overripe peaches, combined with favorite pantry staples, Knob Creek Bourbon and Sonoma Syrup, melted together into a most heavenly dessert. Sherry, amaretto, Cointreau, or even orange juice could have stood in for the simple syrup and booze, but do keep in mind that the English call this Tipsy Cake for good reason.

While trifle properly appears in a glass-footed, straight-sided bowl, making it in a portable container means you can bring this dessert to a picnic to share its goodness.

Following its humble, serendipitous origins, I think it best to avoid recipes when making trifle, as no two will be the same. (Otherwise, you’ve actually gone out to buy all the ingredients rather than looking around your kitchen for odds and ends to use up.) A quick run to the corner store is fine for one or two, but if you’re ticking off every ingredient on the list while at a grocery store, then you’ve kinda, sorta lost the heart of this dish.

MAKING SUMMER TRIFLE

What you’ll need:

1. Enough stale cake or cookies to fill 1/3 of your container.

2. Enough fresh, summer fruit to fill another 1/3. If you don’t have enough, good-quality jam is good, too.

3. Enough yogurt, whipped cream, mascarpone, creme fraiche or similar creamy ingredient to fill the final 1/3.

4. Booze or juice sweetened gently with simple syrup or sugar or jam.

5. If desired, flavorful gilding such as vanilla, citrus zest, fresh herbs or cocoa powder.

Like a lasagna, it’s all about layering and eyeballing. The most important steps are making sure the cake gets brushed with plenty of liquid and that it’s in direct contact with the creamy diary. That’s how it will melt into lusciousness. If you’re fancy, you can take extra time to arrange the fruit into colorful layers, like those sand-filled souvenirs you see at truck stops.

Finish by smoothing the top with a creamy layer. You can reserve a few pieces of fruit for garnish later, or enjoy — like I do — that lovely expanse of white that magically hides so many layers beneath.

Now comes the tough part: waiting. The trifle needs its beauty rest just like we do. A four-hour nap in the fridge will bring together the ingredients, but eight hours is what it really needs, if not a full-on, twelve- to twenty-four hour deep sleep. After that, a few serving bowls and spoons are all you need to serve and enjoy.

One of my favorite culinary mash-ups of recent years is the Vietnamese-Chinese-Cajun crawfish boil served with rice or garlic noodles. Following the arc of families moving from Vietnam to New Orleans to Southern California to, finally, San Jose and San Francisco, mud bugs have taken a garlicky turn and shown up, of all places, in Little Saigon’s across the country.

Red Crawfish in San Francisco’s Tenderloin is the one closest and dearest to me, as I head over that way anytime I’m craving familiar, comforting flavors. Boiled crawfish is a new tradition among my peeps, but it’s one that I’m very happy to adopt, too.

Eating here is a dress-down, messy affair that requires friends with absolutely no pretensions about food. The red, steaming, spicy crawfish come out from the kitchen in pails and are plopped down on the paper-topped table inside plastic bags, rather than piled right on the table, to hold in all that the thick, rich broth.

I love very spicy food and found that the medium was just fine for me. If you’re hungry and a bit of a glutton, you could eat two pounds of crawfish with nothing else, but it’s definitely hard to resist popular side orders like batter-fried sweet potatoes, buttery garlic noodles, buttery garlic toast, or just plain rice. You can also order potatoes and corn on the cob, and they’ll throw them right in with the crawfish. If you don’t suck the heads (and the purists among us would insist that you do), you should at least order some garlic noodles or a bowl of rice for soaking up all the juicy goodness that spurts out of each one.

There are other entrees on the Red Crawfish’s menu — the usual suspects of Vietnamese fare dominates over the Cajun influence — but I haven’t yet strayed far from the namesake of the restaurant. The huge bowl of spicy seafood soup is definitely worth sharing, while next on my list is one of my favorite dishes, bun rieu, seafood and tomato-tinged broth served over rice noodles.

For the DIY folks, there’s also plenty of local crawfish harvested from the Sacramento Delta and from California’s rice fields. Although the Isleton Crawdad Festival was canceled last month, another victim of the recession, you can still pick up live mud bugs (more for the rest of us!) from Bob’s Bait Shop a.k.a. The Master Baiter. Located near the Sacramento Delta and the premier sources of live bait in the area, the shop also provides local crawfish for cooks picky about freshness. Be sure to call in advance, especially if you need more than 15 pounds. Check also with large Asian supermarkets near you, especially 99 Ranch Market, where crawfish can often be found crawling around live in the tanks.

Those of us who have no shame will even ask the server at Red Crawfish to leave all the shells on the table so that, at the end of the meal, we can bag them up, spices and all, to make a very tasty stock back at home. Add some Cajun trinity, some dark roux, stir in a little heavy cream and lots of dry sherry, pull out a blender and a mesh strainer — and you have a pot of mighty tasty soup.

RED CRAWFISH
611 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 771-1388
Map

BOB’S BAIT SHOP
302 2nd Street
Isleton, CA 95641
(916) 777-6666 or (916) 777-6806
Map

As California’s road trip season begins, it’s time to pull out that list of foods that are worth a detour or two. If you’re passing by or through tribal land, allow time in your day and space in your stomach for a stop at roadside stalls offering fry bread or, even better, Indian tacos. Many of us are all a-twitter about the mash-up of Korean bbq and tortillas. But this much quieter and long established blend of taco toppings on soft, still-hot flatbread is better than anything I’ve tasted from digitally hyped menus.

For the taco aficionados among you: Do not pepper me with hate comments about what constitutes a “real” taco. Take it up with the Indian Nations. For the politically minded, I acknowledge that the physical and cultural repercussions of making refined white flour a daily staple, is not something to celebrate, especially in communities stranded both literally and figuratively in the middle of vast food deserts. Like many foods we love, from latkes to lumpia, eating more isn’t eating better.

But for those who are open to the culinary creativity of everyday folks, then this is food worth savoring. During your summer travels, look for stands located on busier strips near post offices, grocery stores or tribal councils. For the best fry breads, plan on arriving earlier in the day, as they will sell out. Peek around and see if there are cast iron pans at the ready. Each round of dough should be patted by hand and fried to order, and if it’s your first time, order a plain one to enjoy fry bread at its humblest. If you like funnel cakes, doughnuts, angel wings, or those little bits of leftover pie dough that your mom fried up just for you, then you’ll be right at home.

Many give Navajos of the Southwest the blue ribbon for making the best fry bread, but tribes all across the country have perfected their own versions. Some use baking powder; others have developed yeasty variations. Big or small, round or square, thin or hefty — everyone has their favorite way of making it.

I wish I could say that fry bread has a happy history. Stories that includes broken treaties, prison camps and reservations, surplus commodities and starvation are not the ones usually passed around while we’re stuffing our faces. But like bitter parsley and unsalted bread, times of suffering are also passed from table to table with pride. We are here. We survived. We are together. We will prevail.

Pow wows are one of the best places to enjoy native foods. Celebratory gatherings, these were banned by our government until the 1960s, but fortunately, they now appear annually in every region. Search this pow wow calendar for California to see if you’ll be near one this year. Be sure it’s open to the public, and check for special events that the kids will especially enjoy.

Fry bread is super easy to make, and kids will enjoy patting their own rounds. For a healthier version, try grilling the bread, another trick that is family friendly and even easier.

FRY BREAD

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in the excellent book, Foods of the Americas, by Fernando and Marlene Divina, published in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Fry bread is usually cooked until golden, without deep browning or char marks. You can sprinkle the rounds with cinnamon and sugar for a sweet treat, or wrap your favorite sandwich fillings for a savory meal.

Makes: 8 small rounds.

Ingredients:
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/4 cups warm water
Vegetable oil, for frying

Preparation:

1. In a bowl, combine and stir together the flour, baking powder and salt. Make a well and then pour in the water. Form a soft dough, and then knead very gently and briefly to form a ball. Roll into a log, cover with a clean towel and let rest for 10 minutes.

2. Cut the dough crosswise into 8 pieces, keeping the pieces covered while you’re working. Patting with floured hands and using a rolling pin, form rounds that are about 1/4-inch thick. Dust both sides of each round evenly with flour, stack and cover with a cloth until ready to cook.

3. To fry: Heat 1 inch of oil in a deep, wide pan over medium-high heat. Cook 1 to 2 pieces of dough at a time, taking care not to overcrowd. Cook, turning once, until golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes on each side. Cook one first, and test for doneness before continuing with the other rounds. The fry bread should be dry and crisp on the outside, moist on the inside. Drain on paper towels and serve will still warm.

4. To grill: Prepare charcoal or heat a gas grill to medium-high. After forming the rounds, place the dough on the grill rack and cook until bubbles form and the dough has risen slightly, 2 to 3 minutes on each side. The surface of the bread should be dry to the touch.

Last month, Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez, an outspoken leader on food safety and animal rights, hosted a special screening of the documentary, FOOD, INC. for a roomful of legislators in Sacramento. Thanks to a friend who works at the capitol, I was able to sneak in. It’d been a very long time since I’ve been surrounded by that many people wearing suits, and discussing public policy is not one of my favorite ways to make small talk (SBX2 3 or SB 135, anyone?). But seeing this important film with a roomful of legislators who were excited about sustainable food and who could actually institute change was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in a movie theatre.

You will soon be hearing a lot about FOOD, INC., a documentary directed by Robert Kenner, winner of both a Peabody and an Emmy for his previous film, Two Days in October. Opening in San Francisco on June 12, this latest release by Magnolia Pictures tackles the unenviable job of educating consumers about the agricultural industry. It’s being called the Inconvenient Truth of the food world, and the quality of its production certainly compares well. Super-saturated colors, animation, engaging graphics, a sprinkling of humor to lighten its distillation of immense amounts of information, and a line-up of articulate, passionate speakers all meld into a highly viewable documentary.

Eric Schlosser, co-producer, and Michael Pollan, both ground the film with their journalistic approach. The soundtrack, with its ominous rumbling beneath mass production and the folksy guitar accompanying underdogs, manages to reveal the film’s underlying stance, but FOOD, INC. strives admirably to present multiple views. Of course, that’s a challenge when corporations refuse to take part in the conversation. (Monsanto, Tyson and many others declined to appear in the film.) The film offers a surprisingly evenhanded treatment of Walmart executives accompanied by Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm. Even more, rock stars of the sustainable food world, such as self-proclaimed grass farmer, Joel Salatin, inadvertently reveal the gray areas of their own much praised business models. After all, how sustainable are loyal customers who drive 400 miles to buy happy, healthy meat?

As someone who has visited feeding lots and blood-slicked slaughterhouses, once worked a very long day in a chicken processing facility, and still wrestles with her decision to continue eating meat, I attended the screening expecting another sermon for the converted. When one of the press contacts reminded me to use all caps whenever I referred to the title of film, I concentrated very hard not to roll my eyes. Yet I there I sat later, stunned by what I was learning.

There’s Barbara Kowalcyk, a lifelong Republican who dedicated her life to changing food safety standards after her son died from eating a hamburger contaminated with E. coli and who now refuses to reveal what she eats for fear of being sued by the meat industry. (She doesn’t have as much money for a legal team as Oprah does.) There’s the fleet of Monsanto “private investigators” who knock on uncooperative farmers’ doors to threaten, ever so politely and quietly, to put them out of business forever. There’s the seed cleaner ruined for providing non-GMO seeds to his neighbors…and the deals struck by employers of undocumented workers with the border police…and the $18,000 that an average chicken farmer makes for a year of hard work…

But there’s also the woman willing to lose her contract with Tyson in order to shed light on an oppressive industry, the farmers banding together, and the scores of other individuals in the film who are working to make a difference in ways both huge and small. It’d be an overstatement to say FOOD, INC. is optimistic, but it does end with some modest suggestions for what each viewer can do to help move us toward a safe, sustainable system. More importantly, its wider release will, like the Obamas’ garden, help push the topic to center stage for the public and policymakers alike.

Anyone who needs a good, clear primer on the food industry and the state of agriculture in the U.S should see this documentary. If you’re already well versed or long converted, it’s an important film to see and discuss with others — your mom who is addicted to the big box stores, your friends who aren’t convinced that local or organic is worth the extra effort, or your children who have a full life of choices ahead.

For as the film reminds us repeatedly, we cast our vote every time we eat.