On Friday, I mentioned the fact that I’m very often thinking about food. So, what better way to start the week than by discussing the weekend’s food?

The highlight, of course, were the crepes. I made them in my new Bialetti Aerternum nonstick frying pan of awesomness. (Christmas present from my parents.) Seriously, this pan is amazing. It’s not Teflon, but food literally slides around in it. Cleaning it is a joy. And it’s cute, too. If you’re in the market for a new nonstick pan, may I suggest one of these? And then, may I suggest you make crepes in them?

The Nutella crepes were delicious and were eaten in about thirty seconds flat. (Recipe here, video here.) I could have eaten a dozen. Next time, I’m doubling the recipe.

My Nutella snack was completely justifiable, in my opinion, because this is what I had for lunch that day:

An enormous salad with homemade French vinaigrette with Dijon mustard and shallots (recipe: here). Jesse and I were quite proud of our vegetable intake on Saturday. Now, if we can just keep that up…

On Sunday, we had lunch with good friends, which was wonderful. Once we’re done with some of our leftovers, I’m going to try my hand at homemade tortillas. Exciting!

I’m easily amused, and I must say–I like it that way.

Make crepes

Buy olives

Boil eggs

…Well, I think that about sums up what I’m usually thinking about. (Read: FOOD.)

Which means, I spent an hour running errands and the rest of the day cooking.

I wanted to bake a pie. A chocolate pecan pie. Specifically, this one. This pie is the easiest pie in the world to make. Assuming that you have pre-shelled pecans. Which I didn’t. I had a giant bag of fresh pecans my aunt and uncle had given us from Charlotte. How hard could it be to shell a cup and a half of pecans? That’s nothing! Or, so I thought.

About five hours later (I am only exaggerating slightly), I emerged victorious with my shelled nuts and turned my attention to the pie crust.

(Insert pie-crust-making-and-errand-running here. I really need a food processor. I hate cutting the butter into the flour by hand. Really really really really hate it. I’m bad at it too. Which is part of the reason I hate it.)

For dinner, I made roasted butternut squash soup, pan-fried salmon with spicy honey mustard sauce, and Israeli couscous. I told Jesse this was the most involved meal he’d eat for the next four months. The dinner was really just an excuse to use some toys I got for Christmas, specifically my immersion blender and my new Bialetti pan (love!).

Then Jessica came over to hang out and play music, and she bravely taste-tested the pie with us. The pie crust had kind of fallen over in one spot, so it wasn’t the most attractive pie ever, but…

…

Ohmygoodness.

Let’s just say, if shelling those pecans wasn’t so gosh-darn difficult, I might make this pie on a weekly basis. And then I would weigh 200 pounds. But I wouldn’t care. That’s how good this pie is.

Today being my last day of break and all, I think I’ll celebrate by eating the rest of the pie.

While I was fighting with the dumpling dough, I thought, this is something I should inherently know how to do. Both of my grandmothers cooked all the time, it seemed, and neither of them used a lot of recipes. They cooked by instinct and habit. This much flour for biscuits, this much water in the pie crust. They knew exactly what things should look like, and they knew how to adjust if something was going wrong.

I cook at home a lot, mostly for budget reasons, but also because I enjoy it, and I feel better physically when I don’t eat out a lot. But I am mostly dependent on recipes, and there aren’t a lot of dishes that I cook over and over (enough to memorize). I’m much better now at improvising or adjusting recipes, but I don’t have a repertoire, if you will, as my grandmothers did.

Perhaps that happens when you reach your thirties. I have, with much practice and determination, gotten fairly good at biscuits. Maybe the rest will follow.

But the problem, really, is that I don’t want to learn to cook from recipes. I want to learn to cook from my grandmother. I don’t want to learn recipes. I want to learn her cooking.

Making chicken and dumplings last night made me nostalgic, made me wonder if my grandchildren will have any memories of my food one day, made me wonder if all this can be blamed on the fact that no one lives near anyone else anymore. I hate living in a different state from my parents and my grandmother. But, what can you do? You’ve got to stay where you have a job, especially now.

In a perfect world, then, I would drive over to my grandmother’s house and have her show me how to make chicken and dumplings. I would take notes. I would take pictures. Then, the next week, I’d go back and have her teach me pie crusts. I’d cook with her and have her correct my mistakes.

In the absence of a perfect world, however, I will call her and write down instructions and then I’ll make my own batch of chicken and dumplings, which will not be half bad, though I will not capture whatever it is that makes her version taste so good. Perhaps with practice, I tell myself. Perhaps with time. And so I will keep trying.

What is a baked pork bun, you ask?

A baked pork bun is heaven in bun form. The bread is soft and sweat. (Tastes somewhat reminiscent of Quincy’s yeast rolls–remember those?) It fits perfectly in your hand, so you can cradle it with one hand and still have the other hand free for driving or holding onto a cable car or gesturing in great joy and excitement. Or, better yet, for holding another pork bun.

Inside that beautiful, perfectly baked roll is a gloriously tasty meaty filling.

(Now, it’s important that you don’t look at the meat very closely and that you don’t think very much about what it is or where it came from. Just enjoy the glory of the pork bun and don’t be a diva about it.)

If you are Jesse, this is how you eat a pork bun:

Look at that face! Look at the joy! Now, don’t you want to try one too? (Don’t answer that unless the answer is “Yes,” which is the only correct answer to that question.)

Our first day included the last nap of the week: from here on out, we were pretty much full-tilt into sightseeing and eating our weight in good food.

In fact, I have a thing for taking pictures of meals. I have always done this, much to the great annoyance or amusement (depending on the person) of my traveling companions. But, I don’t care, because I want to remember what we ate, and the best way to do that is to take a picture.

So let me take you through a little food tour of our week in San Francisco.

At the Ferry Building, we ate organic-beef burgers and garlic-parsley fries and drank sodas from compostable plastic cups. Here’s an action shot:

That was the most American thing we ate. We had sushi, Thai (the best Pad Thai we’ve ever had–the noodles were like silk), Indian, Cuban, Italian. And garlic.

Here’s some garlic shots (from the Stinking Rose in North Beach):

Garlic ice cream:

Not only did we eat good food, but we ate a lot of food. One lunch we spent at an Indian buffet close to our apartment. The food was divine, and we ate plates of it–curries, tikki masala, almond-flavored desserts. A waitress came by to drop off steaming stacks of fresh naan and to refill my cup of chai.

We had delicious Cuban sandwiches in this little Puerto Rican place in the Haight. I love the woman’s facial expression in this picture. Wonder what conversation she was in the middle of?

In Emeryville, across the bay, we ate burritos. Mine was salmon and lime–mmm. And the owner of the restaurant gave us free fish tacos because it was our first time and that was their specialty. Score!

It took us two tries to get this sandwich:

Braised caramel pork belly, organic mizuna, pickled shallots. Yum.

And don’t get me started on the calzones we had in North Beach one of the last nights Jesse was out here. Straight from the oven. Olives, pepperoni, cheesy goodness. Sigh.

Come back tomorrow for the glory of the baked pork bun.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

But, I got to use my sweet vintage Saladmaster grater-thing. (I don’t know what it’s called.) This was my mom’s, and I imagine it was purchased sometime in the 1970s. It will shred and grate anything, and it looks like sci fi. I love it.

Sharon gave me some fabulous veggies from her garden, including some rather massive zucchini.

Check it out. Now it looks like sci fi + horror film.

In fact, the Saladmaster can be quite dangerous. I know from firsthand experience. The last time I was involved in the making of zucchini bread was when I was a kid. I was helping my mom, and we were using this very same kitchen device. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but through some carelessness on my part, my mother’s finger was cut rather badly. I felt horrible. (Perhaps this is why I’ve not attempted zucchini bread on my own, like ever?) Now that I’m an adult, I respect the power of the Saladmaster and try to pay close attention to what I’m doing.

Throughout this process, Oliver was extremely interested. He watched the Saladmaster, and the green shreds coming out of it, completely entranced.

When I decided to try to take a picture of my finished zucchini shreds, Oliver made his move. Chaos ensued. Ah, Oliver. You make life…interesting.

“So,” McArdle points out, “we have something of a mystery. Just when our labor in the kitchen has fallen, we have seen the rise of the gourmet kitchen: the high-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma…the Sub-Zero refrigerators…the $10,000 Viking stoves…the $250 Breville toaster ovens…the Japanese knives with their own display stands. Why are we spending so much money on a place where we spend so little time?”

Her findings and conjectures are quite interesting. She supposes that the way we look at cooking has changed–from a job to a leisure activity. (A leisure activity, I might add, that we now like to photograph ourselves doing.) Worth a read, and worth a ponder. I, for one, can’t wait for the semester to be over so I can jump back into my own kitchen, even with its lack of fancy gadgets and high-end appliances…