On my way back

2011 was a busy year - new job, lots of work trips away, weddings in far away places, a trip to Cambodia volunteering in an elephant sanctuary and some end of year mojitos in Cuba. I have loads to write about, back really soon

I left my heart (and stomach) in San Francisco

I spent a fabulous although very broke summer in San Francisco in the late nineties and at the time the fanciest eating out I did was at local Mission district Mexican burrito places where the most English they could speak was to warn this gringo that the salsa I was pointing at was not for me. Everyone I knew lived in the Mission District or Tenderloin, the most run down parts of the city that had and still have some of the best food.

Although I have been back a few times for work, it took me a long time to get back for a proper holiday which I did recently for a long weekend. San Francisco is a good trek from Dublin, but has enough to see and do to keep you happily busy for a weekend. This is before you even start to look at the loads of fantastic eateries in the city. 

San Francisco has a heap of high end restaurants, but for me, I always think of it as my favourite city in America for good Mexican, Chinese and Italian. The best bit is that all of this can be had at very reasonable prices. If you are planning a trip this list might help you with some ideas, but Ive tested out some of these and others here to give you a hand too.



My first stop once off the plane was to check in to the lovely, central and fairly reasonable Hotel Vertigo (of Hitchcock fame). Then we got on the road to the House of Nan King. The first time I visited this place was about 6 years ago when fresh off a long haul plane which had robbed me of my sense of smell, taste and ability to concentrate long enough to read a menu. One of the older waitresses took pity on our table and asked whether there was anything we didnt eat and then told us she would bring us plate after plate of food to share until we told her to stop.



This place almost permanently has a queue outside the door, but is worth the wait for their delicious and very much no frills food (3 of us with beers and 4 or 5 mains came to $60). The calamari were melt in the mouth tender with a beautiful spicy lime sauce, the sesame chicken with sweet potatoes was also to die for. Im sure there are other places in Chinatown that are good, if not better, but this is the place I go on my first night every time - its exactly the kind of mothering you need after flying long haul.



The following morning after a bit of a walk and a cable car ride (it had to be done), we went to the outdoor market at the Ferry Building (open Thursdays and Saturdays) for lunch. I had, without knowing what they were, promised my lovely American friend that I would go to the Primavera stand and eat some Chilaquiles. We need a place that does these in Dublin, they would bring those with near death hangovers back from the brink, they could certainly get the country moving again. I hope the picture does them justice - perfectly scrambled eggs, the softest refried beans, salsa, sour cream and softened tortillas.



There was also some chicken burger eating and some browsing through the lovely shops in the market building. There is a particularly good kitchen ware shop here along with a shop that specialises in Tasty Salted Pig Parts and a very fantastic coffee shop called Blue Bottle Coffee. An hour or two later and any shred of jetlag you had will be long gone. If you are visiting San Francisco, this is the only pier area you should visit - avoid Pier 39 at all costs!

Over the next few nights my dinners were all Italian, first pizza and cocktails at the lovely Beretta and then the following night the most amazing fresh Italian pasta at Delfina. The pork sugo with pappardelle pasta was so good that it was one of the first things that I endeavoured to copy for a dinner party when I got back home. If you cant make the trip to San Francisco, I would certainly recommend giving this recipe a try. Delfina, Beretta and the best ice-cream in San Francisco all sit within a few blocks of each other in the Mission district (which coincidentally is also the best place to get yourself a burrito should there be a queue at any of the above).



Bi-rite creamery, which is a name that sounds far too much like they do discount ice cream which consists more of ice than anything dairy, will have a queue right out the door. Sometimes this queue will curl back on itself a few times, but it is very much worth the wait for their handmade organic icecream. The flavours, as you will see above, will give you plenty to think about while you wait.

On our final day in San Francisco we had decided to cylce across the Golden Gate bridge and as such we needed a good hearty breakfast. Not all that far from the hotel we found what Yelp told us was one of the best places for breakfast in San Francisco. Dotties True Blue Cafe, is so popular that it has a sign outside the door to remind you to be polite and not ask the waiters to get customers that have finished eating to leave, that you will be awarded the same respect when you are finished. Even on a grey Monday morning in February this place had a good 30 minute a queue outside. This is no surprise when you finally get a peak of whats in store inside. They have a massive menu of breakfast foods, all prepared in front of you as you wait along with breads made onsite. I had an amazing French toast made with a type of pecan corn bread which was definitely the best French toast I have ever eaten. I wanted to grab something from every other plate nearby. On looking it up to see if they have a website I found the following video which will definitely have me going back there. Do not cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge, visit Alcatraz or climb any of those hills without first coming here!

Ill be heading back to California this weekend with the fabulous Peggy for some dining experiences on the other side of the scale. More to come shortly.

Olive Festival - Liguria, November 2010

In November last year I took a trip to Italy and the only excuse I can give for not posting about it before is the overwhelming desire to lick the computer every time I have tried. This was without a doubt the most fantastic food holiday Ive had and was all organised through a friend of mine, whose Dad has an apartment in a small medieval village in the hills of Liguria. My friend John now has a lifetime of soup and bread coming to him!

Through Johns Dad we managed to get an invite to the fantastic Olive Festival in Colletta di Castelbianco. This is the kind of festival that you only get invited to by locals and the people that have somehow managed to find out about this lovely little village in the hills of Liguria. Its certainly not every weekend that you can go to Italy to pick olives and then see them being pressed into olive oil. Then again as you will see below, the amount of olive picking I did was fairly dismal after a 13 course dinner the night before!

Liguria isn't terribly difficult to get to from Dublin, only a short hop to Nice by plane and then little more than an hour and a half by car to the lovely seaside town of Albenga and suddenly you find yourself in a land where food takes on a whole other meaning. Coletta di Castelbianco is a beautifully restored medieval village, renovated into a higgeldypiggeldy warren of beautiful apartments. The majority of the apartments are owned/rented as holiday homes by people living in other parts of Europe, most of whom have been coming to Italy for years and years and are treated as locals.

not enough for a bottle of oil

Over the course of 3 nights I must have eaten about 30 different courses, of which two of the dinners were in restaurants nearing their 100th birthdays with rich traditions and recipes passed down through generations. Homemade ravioli, gnocchi, tiramisu. I left feeling like a fatted goose.

gnocchi to die for

The first night we had a 13 course dinner, with no idea from one course to the next what might arrive. Arriving in Liguria during truffle season definitely has its benefits, then again I suspect that its very hard to get a bad meal in this part of Italy.

wild boar

I love the way they did the tasting menu on the first night. No pretentiousness of balanced bits and pieces of veg cut into precise circles and flowers, in this fabulous restaurant we were first brought a round of clean plates and then the waiter would return with a large serving dish and serve us each a large spoon of whatever was on the plate.

Everything we ate was locally sourced and in season, something so difficult in colder climates like ours. There is something really special about knowing that the wild boar you are having for dinner probably traveled a shorter distance to the restaurant than the mile you just walked to work up your appetite (I spent a good part of the weekend expecting to see one jump out at me!)

should need no introduction

The restaurant had an beautiful wine cellar, with some fabulous old Barolo's. Amazing food with a feed of amazing local wines. Ive already started saving for an apartment in Italy!

Scola, the restaurant we dined in the following night was also excellent, again with an emphasis on fresh truffles as they were in season. Having a love for mushrooms I happily gobbled them all up, mostly without snapping any decent photos at all unfortunately. I hear that once a year this same restaurant holds a ten course mushroom feast once a year which I'm hoping to get back to at some point. The highpoint of this meal was when the waiter accidentally left a bottle of 35 year old balsamic vinegar. I now have a similar bottle in my kitchen which is the most amazing ingredient Ive ever laid my hands on.

Had I not had so much wine the night before I would have seen how nets were laid out below each tree as the trees were then beaten to shake the olives out of the tree. On going to Italy I thought we were probably late in the season for olives, but as it turns out that November was early for olive picking. The reason they were picking so early this year was because the wind had blown them off the trees in previous years when they had been left until after Christmas. 

After some strenuous olive picking by all the locals (see sum total of my olives above), off we went to the neighbouring press where a long lunch was awaiting us. This lovely grandmother was the head chef with half her family helping out, her husband the master of ceremonies for the olive crushing. This was the point that I wished I could speak Italian fluently enough to get a job as assistant in the kitchen. I can only imagine the lovely recipes that this granny has passed down to children and grandchildren, the kind of recipes that us non Italians have no chance of ever cooking.

This (above) was the first of it the oil to be pressed. The olives were taken, washed and then passed under massive mill stones. Once crushed to a paste it went through a very noisy process of centrifugation to remove the water from the oil before removing all of the bits of olive and stone that were left over. The leftovers are then used as fuel apparently. The whole process took about half an hour before the oil was bottled for us to bring home.

the first bottle

My few bottles that came home with me are very much prized possessions. It was also beautiful to see all the locals take part in the process to collect the olives and then join together to cook and eat at the olive press. I definitely will heading back there, Im just wondering how much bribery baking it will take.

Vietnam - Saigon cookery school

I have tried to get a cookery class in on a few of my last holidays and every time this has ended up as one of the best bits of my holiday. Even if you arent crazy about food its a brilliant way of meeting people, getting to understand the ingredients and methods used in what you have been eating while away, staying in from the maddening humidity and in this case also getting to see ingredients that would be far too intimidating to buy and try out in a hotel room!

In Ho Chi Minh City we visited the Vietnam Cookery Center. As we were there during the rainy season the class we went to on a Saturday was fairly quiet and there was only four of us that met our teacher and translator early in the morning at the Ben Thanh market. The other half of the class were an American couple living in Manila, one half of which was the incredibly talented and lovely Abby Mott.

I really enjoyed the market trip because despite being in the same market a few times over the previous few days there were parts that I felt intimidated by visiting and although I really wanted to know what some of the fruit and veg were I knew that they wouldnt be able to explain them to me. Having a guide walk us around was great, even if the teacher wasnt buying that much within the market itself. 

Millions of dried shrimp

As we walked through the market we were shown as many mountains of dried shrimp as mountains of rice, dried fish and fruit. In visiting the meat section of the market we saw how every single piece of each animal was used (no pictures here as it was far too close to my breakfast) including the tails and ears.

Rice

The back part of the market was probably the most interesting as there were little stalls that sold the ingredients just for the one thing that you were making much like all of the restaurants we had seen that only serve one meal,  like everything you need for making Pho or the herbs used with Banh Xeo alone. There were stalls that sold nothing but a variety of eggs, including unlaid eggs which took me a while to figure out. 

Unlaid eggs

There was also a large fish section to the market which was divided into further sections for freshwater and saltwater fish. This seemed to be the only part of the market where there was a distinction between the different areas and the reasoning we were given was due to Bird flu strangely enough. 

Most of the work was being done by women in this part of the market, whether it was skinning frogs, shelling clams or knocking out and scaling fish. I couldnt help but feel that if we had such an impressive market in Dublin that I would have felt any less gob-smacked by how everyone went about their daily business. 

I would love someone to prepare mis en place for me at home!

Once we got to the school we sat and had tea before going to our perfectly prepared workspaces with these perfect arrangement of mis en place in little bowls. Almost all of these little bowls were used in each of the 3 recipes we made. If I remember correctly there were shallots, spring onions, soy, lime juice, tamarind paste, fish sauce, chicken stock granules, chopped chillies, garlic, salt, pepper and sugar. 

Our menu for the day consisted of

• Spring rolls with mushroom, pork, crab meat and prawn and a fish dipping sauce
• Sour Clam soup with dill
• Caramelized pork served in a clay pot with rice steamed in coconut juice

The recipes all had such a delicate balance of flavours and textures and were enough to convince me that the simplicity of everything I tasted over the few weeks had a real complexity behind it that one day in cookery school was never going to teach. 

This is the last of my posts on my holiday in Vietnam but if you would like to see some more pictures you can review some more here  and you can enter my competition to win some coffee from Vietnam here

Ngon Lam Viet Nam

Before I went to Vietnam a lot of people told me that I wouldnt want to see so much as a grain of rice for months afterwards. For those not so keen on rice this definitely wasnt the case. Theres plenty to eat that is not rice, as long as you are keen on noodles!

The food, like the coffee was fabulous and addictive in its freshness.

The minute we hit the hotel the first stop was Pho 2000 a speciality pho shop that was seriously and very rightly proud of serving Pho to Bill Clinton on his visit to Ho Chi Minh city. Even veggie daughter Chelsea had some pho at the time, although after a few weeks in Vietnam Im pretty sure that there was no such thing as a vegetarian pho and that all pho is made with a good stock using plenty of bones!

Pho is almost always served with plates of fresh herbs, chillies, lime wedges and bean sprouts. Its an incredibly tasty and complexly flavoured broth with rice noodles and meat. Saying this, after having almost a bowl of this a day the quality varies massively, its all down to that initial stock and the spices that are used in the making. When I asked at the cookery school we visited about pho recipes I was told that it would take 3 days of teaching to learn how to prepare the perfect stock No surprise then that a lot of places that serve pho (and many other places for that matter) serve only one or two dishes in total.



One of the places I was most excited to visit in Saigon was Com Nieu Sai Gon which came heavily recommended by Anthony Bourdain on his show . This place was the first and only place that I tasted Ban Xeo, which had been much recommended before going to Vietnam. When the plate arrived I didnt have a notion that what you are meant to do is wrap the pancake stuffed with bean sprouts, bits of pork, shrimp in the many different leaves to the right before dipping in fish sauce. What cant be seen in the picture is the very fat rat that crawled out from behind our table after our first few bites. I didnt get to finish the Ban Xeo but wasnt crazily keen on trying them again after seeing the rat.

The best thing we did foodwise was take a 4 day motorbike trip up through the central highlands in Vietnam. Once we got out on the road every bite we ate was very local and extremely fresh. We saw fruit and veg grow on either side of the road for 200 odd kilometres every day.

The picture on the left is of the food that was brought to our table at a truck stop miles away from anywhere. The bits that I remember from this were chicken cooked in a clay pot with lemongrass and chili, morning glory, an omelet, a veg soup with beetroot and some fried pork - all amazing.

This trip was where we also had one of our more interesting restaurant visits with our guides. We had absolutely no idea what we were going to as we walked down an alleyway between houses to a building that looked like it had been built in someones garden. The only thing we knew is that chances were we wouldnt be getting a menu.

Soon after we arrived a little gas burner was brought out with plates of seasoned goat meat with lettuce leaves, sliced green banana, starfruit slices, cucumber, tomatoes, loads of fresh herbs and rice paper pancakes.

Little bowls were brought out with fish sauce, birds eye chillies and satay sauce for dipping.

Our guides fried up the goat and instructed us on how to dampen the pancake, what to add and how to roll (one of my better specimens above). There is always something quite fun about making your own dinner and having plates of such fresh ingredients to chose from made this my tastiest as well as most fun meal washed down with quite a lot of banana rice wine.

As I quickly learned to say "Ngon lam" (pronounced mon lamb) - that was delicious.

The best however was yet to come.  I was fairly squeamish about this so Im going to put these photos behind that little "read more" link down there. Whether or not you read on, dont forget to enter the competition to win some Vietnamese coffee!

Vietnam - all that grows

Im recently back from a few fantastic weeks in Vietnam and as half my photos are food related Im going to have quite a few posts to put up over the next week or two. I also have a special competition prize carried back from Vietnam which Ill post among the photos so keep an eye out.

The first thing that hit me as our bus left Ho Chi Minh City was how green the countryside was. We arrived towards the end of 5 months of rainy season in the south and every small patch seemed to have something growing on it. Farming is massive in Vietnam and rice not surprisingly is the main crop with more than half the population working to produce rice alone on over 94% of the arable land. I got the feeling that some of the other crops we saw were relatively new attempts at making more money than rice is bringing in.

Over the course of the few weeks I spent 4 days sitting on the back of a motorbike going through the highlands which is where most of the photos here are from. My guide was always amused by my enthusiasm for fruit and only understood when I explained that we cant grow any of what he showed me in Ireland. If you ever get a chance to go to Vietnam its well worth a few days off the beaten track to taste all this fruit straight from the trees!

This is what pepper looks like on a tree, its then taken and dried in the sun before ending up in our mills. There was only the slightest hint of a peppery smell from it.

Its always a bit surprising to me that bananas hang this way around

Possibly Papaya

I had no idea what this was and our guides werent much help at all but fortunately a reader gave the the answer in the comments. Its Bixa Orellana and the pigment from the seeds is used to colour foods (commonly seen as Annato or Achiote in ingredients)

Cocoa beans, I was dying to rob one for some further investigation but it was such a small plantation that I couldnt.

Coffee, still a while to go before roasting

Guess what these are? They look so different by the time they make it to our shores

Passion fruit just picked and as addictive as nicotine

Green tea, still very green

Dragonfruit,  a cactus that is trained to grow around cement posts

which produces these beautiful flowers

and the most succulent and  sweet fruit

Corn being dried out in the sun

Finally rice, loads of it:

Rice as far as the eye can see

which is picked by hand and fed through a machine to remove the husk from the plant

Which is then left to dry before de-husking and milling