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

Barbecue is literally the slowest of slow foods, not a sauce, but a process, a ponderous and primitive one often measured in days as much as hours. It's much more than mere technique. Like a Bedouin goat roast or a Hawaiian luau, barbecue is a festive carnivorous rite, the sort of party humans all over the world have thrown ever since they could catch the beasts they wanted to eat. Barbecue is a distinctly American tradition, however, and it warrants esteem in our food culture, one that increasingly values authenticity, heritage, and, importantly, a bargain. Historically, barbecue began as poor food. Indirect smoking with hardwood chips and charcoal renders sumptuous feeds from large, inexpensive, uncompromising cuts of meat the non-wealthy can readily afford. Today, due to trend as well as economic circumstance, food writers and chefs champion sustainability, rhapsodize about nose-to-tail eating, and fetishize la cucina povera across cultures. Hip local foodies head to starred eateries to scarf humble ribollita and marrow, and food glossies aggressively explore the homey cooking traditions of everyday people in distant locales.

Even though food tied firmly to a place invariably tastes best in its native setting, barbecue should have a stronger presence here. Sadly, like real bagels and perfect pizza slices, there's something about it San Francisco doesn't quite get.

L.A. export Baby Blues BBQ sits in an old pharmacy storefront on Mission Street at the base of Bernal Hill in San Francisco. The restaurant headed up the S.F. Chronicle's flimsy "new-school" Bay Area barbecue round-up back in February. In the article, the proprietor described his establishment's style as a hybrid, with dry rub from Texas, greens from Kansas City, and grilled shrimp from New Orleans. While only one of those things necessarily has anything whatsoever to do with barbecue, I withheld preliminary judgement, assuming I'd look for proof in the pork. The same writer, Amanda Gold, penned a largely favorable review less than two months later, hailing Baby Blues' offerings as "spot-on," and singling out the brisket and ribs in particular for accolades.

The brisket was, in fact, good -- shredded, not sliced as is customary, slightly sweet, with a broad, warm flavor that belied the stringy appearance. On the other hand, the chicken was desert-dry and the pork shoulder shockingly tasteless. Sauce helped but it shouldn't have been necessary. Good barbecue doesn't truly need sauce, maybe just a splash of vinegary Crystal. The Baby Blues macaroni and cheese was pretty tasty but that came as no surprise. The tidy tureen of pasta, butter, cream, and cheese congregated in creamy, crust-topped ooze resembled a miniature version of one of the less flamboyant goofily greasy things you'd see on thisiswhyyourefat.com. Pork and beans: dreary canned ones of various stripes, topped with some of the same tasteless pork shoulder. Mashed sweet potatoes: one-dimensional and cloying. Great sides are not a prerequisite for even serviceable barbecue but they sure help, especially when a bunch of people are trying to eat until they can't walk.

Dodging categorization is no boon when it comes to barbecue. Homogenizing its varied nuances with the perceived intent of garnering broader appeal smacks of desperation or at least excessive compromise, not inclusivity. Barbecue pit-masters, are curators of sorts. They consciously nurture and carry on a tradition, just making something they really, really know exactly the way they think it should be made for anyone who happens to be interested. Diners prize authenticity when it comes to regional Italian fare; they should when it comes to barbecue as well.

Maybe we're barking up the wrong tree even hoping to find what we're looking for at a place like Baby Blues. Throughout the barbecue belt, you'll eat some of the best barbecue in the world at church benefit suppers, desolate country grocery stores on two-lane roads, and strange little delis straddling dusty cracks in the interstate, not just at grand 'cue emporiums with bright lights and long lines.

Fittingly, in keeping with another current trend, that of back alley catering and restaurant-esque entities sprouting up all over town, the d.i.y. barbecue operations churning away on the edges of the local food scene actually best the likes of Baby Blues, Memphis Minnie's, and Big Nate's. There's definitely something appealing about outlaw status, and barbecue wears it especially well, even here. While the best pork barbecue I've had in San Francisco had to fly 2,000 miles from a deli case in Allen County, Kentucky, there are a few local super-smokers doing it right under-the-radar:

Try ordering a spread from Oakland-based Sneaky's BBQ for your next business meeting. Since 2008, the smoker-in-chief, a native of South Carolina, has been faithfully recreating the barbecue he knew back home -- husky, succulent pork shoulder with pepper-flecked vinegar-laced red sauce and racks of chewy baby-back ribs -- and delivering it, quite sneakily, in an unmarked van (red like the sauce), to homes, offices, and even park parties. It's popping off on Yelp and Chowhound for a reason. It tastes like vigilance. When you're eating it, you easily imagine the whole ritual -- the meat hitting the grill just after rush hour, and coming off, sticky-black, hours and hours later, as well as the sleepless night vigil, the sense, perhaps, of beers drunk and cigarettes smoked, of bleary eyes peering down and smudged hands reaching to open and close flutes at the proper intervals while the rest of the neighborhood sleeps.

The Broken Record is a mildly Zeigeist-y bar in the Excelsior. Chef Ryan Ostler, an alum of Boulevard, doesn't own it but he cooks from behind a wooden, windowed counter buried in the back. He's a Mission Street Food veteran, no stranger to the underground eatery game. The bar's offerings run the gamut from frito pies and amazing 'kraut-topped boar and pheasant sausages (sweet, high-flying stoner-pub party fare, yes, but not barbecue) to pulled pork sandwiches (serious barbecue). Of course, it's a chef's whim kind of place at heart. Sometimes, you show up and the pork isn't done. Or it is done, but it hasn't been carved up yet. Or it was ready hours ago and now there's none left. According to Ostler, they smoke every day, but quantities are limited. If you miss out, eat a sausage. Barbecue is not, after all, on-demand.

Baby Blues BBQ
3149 Mission St. in San Francisco
415-896-4250

Sneaky's BBQ

The Broken Record
1166 Geneva Ave. in San Francisco
415-963-1713

Although I couldn't attend this past weekend's Maker Faire, with its inaugural section dedicated to food, I did have a chance to learn a few new tricks for the kitchen.

It's not a recent phenomenon for cooks to hack their utensils and ingredients—Homo "Handy Man" habilis figured out that meat on the stick thing, Mongol horsemen multitasked by salting and tenderizing and cooking their meat under their saddles, and my mom catches plump frogs with her pasta colander—but the DIY movement has inspired a whole new generation to explore simple, cheap, ingenious ways to accomplish everyday tasks.

Anyone who stocks up on vinegar and baking soda already knows many of the old ways. On the glossier and quirkier end of the spectrum is Ito-ke no Shokutaku (The Ito Family Dinner Table). A wildly popular series, one of those only-in-Japan variety shows in which celebrities demonstrate useful tips contributed by its viewers, it once held the regular attention of nearly 30 percent of households in Japan. Websites, social clubs, and obsessions ensued. These tips are known collectively as urawaza, which deftly applies the word for "unmapped shortcut" to a secret trick.

Local writer Lisa Katayama bundled some of her favorite urawaza into a book, Urazawa: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan. My copy (kindly sent to me by Chronicle Books just in time for this posting) has a few pages marked for testing later: drink green tea after a garlicky meal to prevent a stinky mouth, scrubbing with eggshells to remove scorch marks on pots, tucking chile peppers in your socks to keep your toes warm. Others leave me scratching my head, like the suggestion to add olive oil to a glass of beer to reduce its foam; a spoon seems a much more respectful and easy way to remove unwanted head from a well-crafted brew. Still, Urazawa was a quick and fun read as well as a wonderful reminder to think creatively about life's little challenges.

The interwebs, of course, has many pages dedicated to everyday life-hacking. Googling "food hack" taught me how to peel mangoes quickly and cleanly and how to start a fire with a Coke can and chocolate bar. Here in San Francisco, Mark Powell, a self-described hacker chef of the "anarchist food aesthetic," has set up his kitchen lab at the Unicorn Precinct XIII in Bernal Heights. Chefs, of course, are famous for their trucs of the trade, though these days, nitrogen tanks and pressure probes seem to be more the thing than paper clips and flame-throwers.

I'll leave you with a few of my own kitchen tricks, absorbed from my visits with aunties from Missouri to Malaysia.

• After soaking dried tamarind in water, use the strained fruit and fibers to polish your copper pans and bowls.
• Use the edge of a small spoon to peel the crooks and crannies of knobby ginger.
• After harvesting a crop of onions or shallots from your garden, drop them into the legs of clean but run-ridden pantyhose. Knot the hose to separate the bulbs and then hang in a cool, dry place to last throughout the winter. When you need some allium, just snip a knot. The more colorful your hose, the more festive your cellar.
• Clean out the fragrant cardamom and cumin powder from an electric spice grinder by following your garam masala with a few small pieces of bread. The resulting breadcrumbs soak up all the powdered spice. If you're especially dedicated, you can then use those crumbs in a nice filling or gratin.