Vegetarian tacos

has been years since my last post and I'm so excited to be back and writing again and sharing my life in the Bay Area. I'll start off with a simple meal I had this weekend at Pancho Villa in the Mission. It's a place I've heard many good things about and the food certainly lived up to the hype. My favorite was the cebollitas, lovely charred string of green onion doused with lime and flecks of salt. The watermelon punch and the vegetarian tacos were quite delicious as well.

pizza & eggs

A long while back, I did a post on a poached egg dish. Two years later I find myself writing about eggs again, this time soft-baked eggs on top of a pizza - Italian style. There is something so appealing about an egg that hasn't been tampered with, hasn't been fried in grease or scrambled about.

I had always wanted to try an Italian pizza with one egg baked onto each quarter, ever since learning about the style from Delfina restaurant in San Francisco. Finally, when I saw an episode of Food Network recently where Ellie put together a simple and healthy, yet oh so satisfying pizza, did I decide to give it a try.

The pizza consists of a whole wheat pizza crust, layered with chopped fresh baby spinach, mushrooms, strips of pancetta, freshly grated parmesan cheese, 4 eggs (one on each corner) and a drizzling of extra virgin olive oil.

















The trick is to cook the pizza long enough for the whites of the eggs to set, and the yellow left runny. Overcooking the eggs will result in a hard yolk resting on top of your pizza, not very appetizing unless you enjoy chalky textures.

The best part of this dish is breaking into the soft yellow yolk and smearing it all over the pizza with your fork... yum, hedonistic.

The pancetta also crisps up nicely and lends some needed saltiness to the dish.


Next time, I'll try this pizza with calabrese sausage instead of pancetta to change things up, and maybe do an arugula base instead of spinach to add some nuttiness.

Slingin' Hash

I had hash for dinner last night. And no, it wasn’t the sort of hash that goes so well with philosophizing and devouring junk food. It was the chopped food sort, the chopped meat mixed with potatoes then browned sort. Behold the glimmering, poached egg perched atop the bed of crispy browned chicken, potatoes, and mushrooms.



While the cubes of russet potatoes were boiling, I quickly chopped some garlic, onion, parsley, and these wonderful oyster mushrooms I found at Market Hall.

I couldn’t resist their creamy white supple stalks and their delicately gilled caps. And I thought the subtle flavor of oyster would be a refreshing twist on the hash, like what real oysters do to a stuffing.

I fried everything together with some chopped up leftover Boston Market chicken. I added salt, pepper, thyme, parsley, and a dash of cream. Then I topped each plate of hash with a poached egg.

The best part about this hash was breaking the poached egg yolk and letting it run all over the hash before eating. Breakfast for dinner is irresistible ain't it?

Andiamo! Delfina, the Mission

Delfina is one of the most talked-about Italian restaurants in San Francisco. After months and months of stalling, we finally sat down to sample its goods.

Let's start with the wine. The first one we picked was the Lagrein "Steinraffler"- Hofstätter 1999 Alto Adige. Try saying that fives times in a row! It tasted thin to all three of us, and neither one of us can be considered a connoisseur (yet). Sensing our displeasure, the server brought out a Capezzana 2003 Toscana, a cabernet/sangiovese blend. This one was much better and had a wonderful aroma, but still didn't taste as complex as the California reds we were used to.

House-cured steelhead caviar with Belgian endive and creme fraiche

We started with a simple, clean salad of endive leaves drizzled with creme fraiche and sprinkled with juicy orbs of steelhead roe. The endive leaves formed canals that perfectly captured the liquid brine of the caviar.

Jewish-style artichokes with lemon and mint

What is a "Jewish-style" artichoke?, we wondered. Turns out it is a deep-fried artichoke (aka carciofi alla giudia) that is splayed out like a blooming flower just before being fried. Anything deep-fried and crispy is right by me: fried cheese, fried fish, fried mushrooms, fried potatoes, fried wontons, fried Snickers - the list goes on forever. But the fried artichoke leaves didn't quite cut it. They were a bit fibrous, kind of what you would expect after frying thin strips of bark. The lemon and the mint complimented the artichoke hearts nicely, however.

Our next course was the spaghettini with sepia, squid ink and marinated uni. The squid ink lent a subtle seafood flavor to the pasta, and like a seafood pesto it coated the noodles with a lovely dark shine. The uni was tiny though, the size of an eraser. We also tried the whole-roasted orata in aqcua pazza with white wine, olives, capers, and oven-dried tomatoes.

Delfina, you sort of lived up to the hype, but the real clincher will be your pizza.

Delfina
3621 18th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110