A Finger in Every Pie

Be Still My Beating Heart

Lest you should think that all of my culinary headspace is now filled with visions of sliced apples in peanut dip, fruit salad, fruit smoothies (this week's classroom adventure; I'm bringing in the blender, lord help me), and whatever else I and my hungering students can manage to cook with no kitchen, no budget and no time,  let me hasten to assure that it is not so.  I have been cooking at home. 

Cooking quite a lot, as a matter of fact.  I wouldn't exactly say cooking with a vengeance, but there's just something about nascent fall weather, even when it's by turns humid and strange and rainy and brilliant.  It makes me want to cook.  Recently our kitchen has been graced with goodies such as chili-lime chicken, baked ziti, apple cobbler, buttermilk-brined pork chops, chicken with forty cloves of garlic (more like 60, really), orzo with peppers and cheese, chili-cheese meatloaf and fresh cornbread, apricot-almond coffee cake, braised lamb shanks with mashed potatoes, Coca-Cola ham and fresh corn pudding, chicken enchiladas, brownies, and cheesecake squares -- and lots of sliced tomatoes, vegetables and salads, too.  That's about the last three weeks' worth, since most cooking happens on weekends, while during the week we eat the pickings of our weekend meals.  And baked goods mainly get taken in to staff meetings or students.  Just so you shouldn't think we're big as houses, 'cause we're not.  Not yet, anyway.

I forewent making a Rosh Hashanah dinner for extended family this year, since the holiday didn't afford us a three-day weekend, and I generally need the extra lead time to shop, cook, and lug it all up to my dad's house.  But I did make plum cake today, just so that we'd have a sweet new year.  I often make the famous and much-published Marian Burros' plum torte, but I usually create variations.  Sometimes I add sour cream and lemon zest; a year or so ago I made something quite like it with nectarines and beurre noisette.  Today I wanted to add almond to the plum, so this year's variation has almond paste along with the beurre noisette.  Quite nice -- the marzipan flavor is perfect with the tangy plums.   Just follow the linked recipe above, but brown the butter first, and let it cool before blending with the other ingredients, and whiz 2 ounces of almond paste in the food processor to blend it with the sugar before creaming it with the butter and eggs.  Oh, and I added some Fiori di Sicilia along with the vanilla.  Lovely.

This weekend has also inspired me to make some other usual autumnal suspects: a huge vat of my mom's minestrone and two loaves of rice bread.  New to our dinner plates, inspired by a lovely crop of party-colored peppers, was a batch of stuffed peppers.  They were made with ground lamb, basmati rice, fresh herbs and lots of cumin and garlic and tomato.  G's comment when he saw the tomato-drenched meat-filled heart-shaped peppers inspired the title of this post.   But they did taste mighty good, and will provide us with a few more meals during what promises to be a very hectic week.

The cooking itself isn't new to me, of course.  I almost always cook on the weekend, making meals for the week to come.  What's different now is that somehow the kids in my cooking elective are always on my mind.  "Would they like this?"  I think to myself.  "Would  they even try it?"  And I wish for a kitchen at school, and a class more than half an hour long and with sufficient prep time to make something more complex than fruit salad.  What I find is that everything we make proves a revelation in some way, no matter how simple.  Take the fruit salad.  We made and ate it on Wednesday and had a little chat on Thursday about making appetizing-looking food.  It had never occured to me that if four different groups cut up fruit, all the pieces would be different sizes and it would all look, well, kind of unappetizing.  The mangoes were in tiny dice and the nectarines were big ol' chunks.   It was all good enough and was eaten down to the last scrap. But for me, the best part of the experience was the raspberries.  None of them had ever tasted a fresh raspberry, so instead of putting them in the salad we ate them, one by one.  "They're fuzzy," Rodney said.  "Tart!" exclaimed Rashida, sucking in her cheeks.  "But I like it."  I can't describe to you the sheer pleasure of providing kids with experiences they've never had -- even something as tiny as a raspberry.

Tomorrow we'll devise our own smoothie recipes, given a list of ingredients (based on the fruit, juice and yogurt I already purchased this weekend).  Tuesday I'll bring in the blender, and let's just hope the walls are not Jackson Pollacked with smoothie ingredients by the time we're finished.  The smoothies, like everything we've made so far, will come with their very own hidden agenda.  Our students are always complaining that they're hungry in the morning and that they didn't have time to eat breakfast.  If even a few of them decide that this is a worthwhile effort, they'll have one more quick breakfast option.  They all like fruit, and several of them are pretty fond of yogurt too, so I'm hoping this will be a keeper -- despite the fact that when I said "smoothie" last week, several of them asked if we could make "chocolate smoothies".   They also commented that the fruit salad would have been REALLY good with whipped cream and chocolate sauce(!)  I've been visited with the teachers'/mothers' sacred curse: "You should grow up to have children just like you."  They want chocolate on everything;  they couldn't be more my children if I'd given birth to them.   Of course, I've promised myself that this wouldn't become a blog about my cooking class at school.  Hmmm.  I'm wishing myself good luck with that promise.  Be still my beating heart.

Later this week I'm off to Missoula, Montana for a work task sponsored by the national office of my organization.  I have a great opportunity to work with a brilliant Native American activist to frame a workshop for a national conference in November.  What's especially good to eat in Montana this time of year?

Update: Cooking With Adolescents

No, the title is not meant to imply that I'm using the adolescents as ingredients, although sometimes allowing them to stew in their own juices is politic during a power struggle.  Just thought I'd post a brief update on my adventures with the cooking elective I've started at my school.

We've had three days of class with no actual cooking yet (I bought some time by insisting that we can't cook until they all bring in aprons).  Alexa (I'm using fabricated names here, since the kids are very protective of their identities -- except on MySpace) brought in a very sexy, tight little apron and is insisting that she wants to wear gloves in order not to ruin her elaborate nail extensions.  Nicqui “can’t boil water,” she claims --  and her friends back her up on that one.  The boys are excited about flouting the school's "no hats" policy, since I've told them they're allowed to wear "do-rags" or caps to keep long hair back.  Elisa informed me that she's taking the class because her grandparents feel that she needs to know how to cook for her future husband.  This generated a discussion of how cooking is a life skill for EVERYONE, boys included -- and that it's a great way for everyone to show others some caring and consideration, as well as a good dating skill.  "Yeah!" Emmanuel said.  "I hear cooking is a good way to get girls!"  Yep.   

Even more encouraging, a number of them expressed a desire to try new things. Rashida wants to learn to cook so that she can have some meal other than “brown stewed chicken” which she claims is served every night at her house.  Quite a few were forthright about wanting to know more about nutrition, which of course thrilled me no end.  Yes, I know I have no life, but these are the kinds of things that get teachers pumped up.  I had forgotten how much fun it is to teach an elective; everyone actually WANTS to be there, instead of teaching to a captive audience.

Today we had a brief lesson on macronutrients, and despite the fact that Marlena seems to think carrots are a protein, they were able to share a fair amount of knowledge about proteins, carbs and fats.  Adriana shared the fact that nuts contain healthy fats.  Shortly thereafter a conversation about meat and meat preparation ensued.  A number of kids postulated the theory that it’s unhealthy to eat beef cooked “partly raw”.  I told them that when I have a choice, I always eat my steak or burgers “bloody”, but that I also try to make sure that most of the meat I eat is organic or grass-fed. This evolved into some lively talk about food safety, including how to avoid salmonella and other forms of food poisoning. 

The interest level is incredibly high, despite the fact that no food has graced our tables yet.  Tomorrow we embark upon preliminary knife safety with sliced apples and a hokey fruit dip made of peanut butter, yogurt and honey.  This may sound strange to some, but I found this recipe printed up by some Greenmarket farmers a few years back, and it turned out to be rather yummy as well as very popular with school kids.

Fruit salad is in our near future, as is a tossed green salad with homemade vinaigrette – or maybe a variety of homemade dressings.  According to their questionnaires, a number of them are interested in making potato salad, which would be fine too, if I bring in potatoes that I pre-cook at home.  Or perhaps we’ll wait until I get the two-burner electric hotplate I’m planning to purchase.  Even so, potato salad will be a multi-day task – boiling potatoes and chopping celery, etc. during one half hour class, peeling and slicing and dressing them the next.  Fresh applesauce will also be possible with the advent of a hotplate, as will homemade cranberry sauce.  It occurred to me that I could bring in my waffle iron; waffles would be pretty do-able in a short time – and not a single one of my students has ever eaten a waffle other than a frozen Eggo, according to a brief poll I took today.  Making yogurt, fresh butter and mayonnaise would all be good lessons in "where food comes from," as well as separately demonstrating fermentation, separation and emulsification. 

I’m also contemplating some foods for Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins on Friday.  I’m sure that kids want to bring in some recipes from home, so I think we’ll have a great time with that too. Quesadillas, various kinds of salsas, fried plantains, guacamole and my favorite rice and bean dish, Nicaraguan Gallo Pinto, are contenders.  Dejanira, whose family hails from Mexico, apparently has a great taco recipe, and I found out that Rafa’s family is Chilean and he’d like to share some Chilean foods with us. We also have Puerto Rican and Dominican students, as well as African-American, so we’ll have a good number of traditions to draw from throughout the year – as well as making and tasting food from some less familiar cuisine.  The fact that cookies and brownies are unlikely without an oven elicits groans and sighs on an ongoing basis, sadly. I try to explain that even if we had a toaster oven, making quantities suitable for 16 of us within a half-hour period simply isn’t feasible.  I have come up with one halfway measure, so to speak:  we could conceivably make cookie dough and portion it into packets for students to bring home and bake on their own.

Tomorrow we take out the knives (not very good ones, either – rejects culled from various kitchens), even if it’s just for slicing apples.  Keep us in your thoughts.   

Kudos go out to Tanna, Cathy, Sucar, Melissa, Bakerina, Tea, Molly and Kelli for their supportive comments as well as a wealth of great suggestions.  Thank you all so much.

Like Kids in a Candy Shop

The beginning of a new school year is never seamless or smooth.  Never.  Especially when you're dealing with a school in a transitional phase -- like the small Bronx public school where I work as a literacy/writing consultant.  We're in our second year of expanding our arts-centric middle school into a middle/high school, which means that our high school has just grown from a single 9th grade class into a 9th and 10th grade.  Our classrooms are crowded and shared; we simply don't have enough space.  But we've all been rolling with the punches, faculty and students alike.  In June of 2009, we'll graduate our first class of seniors. We try to troubleshoot as many situations as possible, but unanticipated happenings always crop up.

As is always the case, the first week has been filled with surprises -- not the least of which was the moment when the principal came up to me and said "You're teaching a high school elective.  What do you want it to be -- cooking or blogging?"  Fortunately or unfortunately, my reputation precedes me, due to the baked goods I bring to staff meetings and my one loyal reader on the faculty, who often mentions to others how much he enjoys this blog.  The problem is that the elective slot is going to be difficult no matter what the subject.  Electives are held for only half an hour, right before lunch.  I couldn't quite see how I would help between 15 and 20 adolescents set up their own blogs in such a limited time space.  Cooking too is problematic.  It's too short a time to actually set up, prep, cook and clean up any dish of substance -- in addition to which, there's no kitchen and no equipment.  The food service staff isn't exactly going to welcome me and my motley crew into their industrial-strength kitchens -- and certainly not in the 1/2 hour before lunch is to be served.  Too bad, because those kitchens might be glad to have real food cooked in them for once, instead of having frozen pizza and hamburgers reheated in the huge ovens, day after endless day. 

Given two impossible choices, I went with cooking.  I made sure that kids knew that we wouldn't actually be cooking every day, that we wouldn't be making things like chocolate chip cookies, since we had no oven, and that nutrition would comprise a large part of the curriculum.  Despite this cold-water reality check, fully a third of the 9th and 10th grade students chose cooking as their preferred elective.  Is it just that food is involved, and they're anticipating lots of snacks?  Or do some of them actually want to learn about what they eat and how to prepare it?  This and the answers to many other questions about how one teaches cooking with no kitchen in 4 weekly slots of 1/2 hour each will eventually be revealed. 

Cooking, interestingly enough, turned out to be by far the most sought-after elective.  Of the 65 students who listed cooking as their first choice (countless others had it second, third or fourth), I chose 17.  I wanted to cap it at 15, since I'm working out of a very small classroom with no real cooking facilities, but I had to let a few more in.  This is one of the few times during the school day when grades actually mix, so I went for a balance of 9th and 10th graders, girls and boys.  I took some of our tougher kids, figuring that this might be a place to grab their interest as we learn a bit, just a bit about chemistry, geography, history, foreign languages, math, literature, and all the other domains that are also ingredients in in the culinary world.

Tomorrow is our first meeting.  I'm creating a little questionnaire, and an introduction/icebreaker activity.  I'm busily making up a sheet of expectations (everyone has to bring their own apron!  Wash your hands before you come to class!) and even homework requirements (bring in a piece of SEASONAL fruit to make fruit salad!  Do you know what fruits are in season right now?).  They get credits for electives, so actual work will be required of them.  Hopefully we'll write a mini-cookbook, complete with anecdotes and reflections from students about what they've made, eaten and tried.   

But what will we actually cook, once we get down to that part of the curriculum?  Well, I've gotten a mini-fridge for my shared office space, so at least I'll be able to store some fresh food.  There's a microwave, and I'm hoping to get one of those electric burner hot-plates, much as I hate cooking on electric stoves.  Years ago, I did quite a lot of cooking with my elementary school students.  But I had them for the whole day, so we could put together a soup and let it simmer on the hotplate while we had other lessons, and then eat our soup at the end of the day.  I could incorporate math lessons and science, reading and writing, geography and language into a unit on Breadmaking.  We made African peanut soup when we studied Nigeria, and did a chemistry lesson with chocolate pudding.  We visited a Greenmarket, and made applesauce with the apples we brought back. 

For now, I'm thinking about salads, both vegetable and fruit, since they will require only chopping boards, knives, bowls and ingredients; possibly salsa and guacamole; sandwich combinations, wraps, and bruschetta. Since I got my new tangerine-colored Waring Blendor at the Broadway Panhandler sale, our old blender can be brought to school to make nutritious smoothies.   Our limitations are not only spatial and monetary, however.  Our kids, for the most part, are not exactly brave tasters.  Many of them eat chips and soda for breakfast, shunning healthier options.  Lunch, as I've said, is almost always frozen pizza or hamburgers, tinned fruits and vegetables that the kids don't even bother with  -- and many of them don't eat lunch at all, unless it's more junky snack foods that they've brought in on their own.  I don't know how many of them actually sit down to a home-cooked family dinner each night, but I doubt the numbers are large.  This will be an opportunity to have them expand their horizons, begin to figure out their own predilections, develop an adventurous palate.  I want them to try new things, venture into new disciplines, learn about places and times outside their experience -- all through a bit of minimal "cold cooking".  I want them to learn to love fruits and vegetables as much as they love candy.  As you well know, I'm certainly not one of those who think that we should completely refrain from an intermittent or even a daily treat.  You will take my sugar and butter from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands.  However, I do believe that a sweet should be a (small) component of a healthy meal.  Far too often our students have candy, soda and junk foods as the entirety of their meals. 

Think of us as we're mucking about with fruit salad and such.  I hope that culinary adventuring will be a window into some brave new worlds.  I hope we'll have as much fun as kids in a candy shop, only instead of tummy-aches and sugar-glut, we'll end up with personal discoveries about tastes and preferences, as well as a few delicious and nourishing dishes.  Knife skills will surely be the scariest part for me, not because our kids will do anything deliberately unsafe, but because we all get cut using knives from time to time.  Since I myself could really use a good knife skills class (Shuna, are you coming to NY any time soon?  In fact, I realize that as I write this, you've just started today's knife skills class in Alameda...sob).  Somehow, I have to figure out how to teach them to use knives safely. 

And so I ask for your help.  Given the limitations I've outlined above, what else can/should I make with my new crop of 15 and 16 year olds?  Give me ideas for dishes that can be made without a kitchen (at moments like these, I like to think of my darling friend Bakerina fermenting sourdough starter and marinating steak in her purse while at the office).  What other kinds of learning do you see as implicit in a high school cooking curriculum?  All replies will be gratefully received. 

The photo above is from Munchies candy store in Sausalito, which has the enlightened policy of allowing shoppers and even browsers to sample as many candies as they wish from the barrels and bins.  You'd think they'd go out of business, but on the two occasions we've visited, we haven't been able to leave the store without dropping at least $20 for bags of our old-time favorite "penny" candies (which we eat in very limited quantities between our fruits and vegetables, of course).  Smart marketing ploy.   

Bay Area Wannabe

The problem with going on a blogging hiatus is that the anecdotes and meals and treats start to accumulate until I can't bring myself to blog again, due to a frenzy of indecision about the next post.  That's how a supposedly short hiatus becomes an unintended silence of far too long.  We've been back from the Bay Area for a couple of seriously insane weeks.  It feels as if the moment we arrived back into New York, the portal to Hell yawned wide and swallowed us up, with an unending round of work and other obligations.   

All excuses aside, here's what I learned on my trip out West.  Don't let anyone fool you.  Those West Coast people have got it all over the East Coast in terms of the quality, freshness and sheer delectability of the food available to them.  The peaches and tomatoes taste like summer produce from an East Coast farmers' market -- times a zillion.   But how to take advantage of all this glory?  I figured the best way to conduct myself while I was there would be to pose as a Bay Area foodie.  After all, I had a wealth of great information from numerous local food blogs and their remarkable authors. 

So, after a week at my darling friend Pat's house in Berkeley, we laid in supplies at my dear pal Betty's house in the Mission, where we parked ourselves for another week while she and her kids took over our New York digs.  There we grilled sausages and crepinettes from the Fatted Calf, just like Dr. Biggles.  I cooked Marin Sun Farms eggs for my breakfasts, as if I were Sam -- that is, when I wasn't having a Saturday morning Ferry Plaza Farmers' market Mexican breakfast with Sam at the Cocina Primavera stand justly lauded by Jeanne and by Brett.  I stopped by Poulet on an almost daily basis so we could keep sampling Shuna's desserts.  We went to Mitchell's over and over again.  G was torn between his Grasshopper Pie milkshake and one made with Kahlua Cream ice cream and oreos, but I simply couldn't figure out which coconut ice-cream I liked better, buko or macapuno -- just like Stephanie.  We went to Zuni Café for the roast chicken and bread salad (like Joy! -- and many another SF food lover) and to Tartine for sandwiches and pastry and to El Farolito at all hours (like Joy again)  and the El Tonayense truck for tacos and quesadillas.  We took a day excursion to Copia and ate a tasting menu at Redd (like Jen, and like Joy yet again).  We ate pupusas at La Santaneca and chaat from Vik's at least twice, and a had a stellar Thai dinner at Be My Guest with my cousin Matthew, who, having married into a Thai family, knows how to order much better than we do.  I had a gorgeous dinner prepared by my lovely friend Lea and her family in San Rafael.   We stopped at Rainbow Grocery for incidentals and I went to the Ferry Plaza Farmers' market three times within a single week.  And all the while I tried to pretend that I never had to go back to New York, to work, to produce that tries its best but just doesn't quite hit the ecstasy zone, even in summer.   

At some point I awoke to the reality that I would indeed have to return home, and so I worked hard to remember all the things I love to eat on the East Coast -- aged Cabot Vermont Cheddar cheese (which, incidentally, we saw on several West Coast menus); thick, dark, Grade B organic maple syrup; the many kinds of wonderful apples that will appear shortly in my local farmers' market.  I thought about smoked fish from Russ and Daughters and Zabar's, pastrami from Katz's,  Eli's bread, Shackburgers and cheese fries and frozen custard at Shake Shack, dinner and cocktails at the Bread Bar. 

Occasionally we did some things that weren't directly related to food, or at least to eating -- walking in the Marin headlands and the Presidio, talking to our dear family friend Steve at his stunningly beautiful store Dandelion, exploring new neighborhoods, spending a few days in Calistoga, taking long drives, hanging out, laughing, watching DVDs with friends.  We went to the Edible Schoolyard, where Pat's daughter goes to school, and I thought about what kind of school I might like to run if I ever decide to use the credentials I'm getting in the terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad administration program.

But I just couldn't leave all that good West Coast food there -- and so I've comforted myself with all of the delicious things we managed to bring home with us.  Despite the insanity that is our New York lives, I've been extending my vacation by continuing to pretend to be a Bay Area Foodie.  In addition to all the jarred and bottled and boxed foodstuffs pictured below, I carried home a variety of sausages from the Fatted Calf (frozen to survive the flight),  eight Blossom Bluff Orchards peaches (individually wrapped to avoid bruising), Acme bread, Tartine brownies and the Meyer lemons I stole from Pat's backyard in Berkeley.  Fortunately Homeland Security has not yet decided that peaches or sausages might contain explosives -- other than their incredible flavor, of course.  I was nervous before we got on our plane.  There was the case of wine we were putting in checked baggage, but all the food was coming with us in my carry-on.  "If they try to take my food from me, I'm not going to go easy," I warned G.  All came through without a hitch, however, and so the other night I was able to made G quesadillas for dinner, using Fatted Calf chorizo along with some pepper jack and cilantro.  They were very good, it's true -- but we missed washing them down with the bottled Mexican Cokes that we found at all the tacquerias in the Mission, made with real cane sugar instead of corn syrup, and tasting like Coke is actually supposed to taste. 

The delights pictured here are culled from a number of wonderful days.  The luscious Recchiuti chocolates come from one of the Ferry Plaza visits, of course.   Then there was our day at Bouchaine Vineyards (in the Carneros region of Napa) with their winemaker Michael Richmond, who also has his own label, Amethyst, that he grows "in his backyard," as he puts it.   G and I received what felt like a very preliminary taste of an education in California wines from Mike, who spent several hours giving us other tastes as well.  G lost count sometime around the point when Mike was siphoning us some sips from the twentieth barrel or so.  As our senses were heightened by taste after taste, Mike enlightened us about not only grapes and their harvest and fermentation, but barrels, their woods and degree of "toast" and the impact that all of these factors have on the resulting wines.  Needless to say, we've begun to appreciate wine in a whole different way these days.  And the bottles that we managed to get back on the plane (we did have to put them in checked baggage, very carefully packed) are all the more precious for our newfound knowledge. 

But of all the days that deserve at least one post of their own, the most memorable would be my afternoon with June Taylor, our own era's virtuoso of preserved fruit.  We were staying in Berkeley, as luck would have it, literally a block away from Ms. Taylor's Stillroom.  When I realized how close I was, I screwed my courage to the sticking-point and called.  I expected to talk with a receptionist, an assistant -- almost anyone except Ms. Taylor herself.  But it was she who answered the phone, and invited me to come for a visit that very afternoon.  When I got there, I saw that indeed there were no receptionists or in fact, anyone other than Ms. Taylor and a young woman, her one assistant.  Small is beautiful indeed at the Stillroom.  I sat on a high stool, drank a proffered cup of green tea, watched and listened.  Ms. Taylor made small batches of apricot sauce in huge pots, bottled them and talked to me of preserving and conserving in both the immediate moment and in the larger sense of what life brings us:  the web of relationships, passion, work, education, and history.  We spoke of the moments that children remember and carry inside always -- of mothers who make something delicious just for them.  We talked about connecting with farmers and other producers, so that the continuum of nourishment is human and not relegated to a factory production line.  We talked of our mutual sense of desire to share knowledge with others -- but to see also that they find their own sense of how to create what they like, rather than relying solely on someone else's expertise and taste; to see that these ways don't die out despite the forces in our world which seek relentlessly to industrialize those things which should still be done by hand. 

Our conversation began with the apricot sauce -- something that Ms. Taylor was inventing right there, right then, so as not to discard the excess of liquid produced by a particularly juicy harvest of apricots.  Almost everything can be used, she said.  And I heard the echo of my mother, and the resonance of my own upbringing -- the eggshell swiped clean with a finger so as not to waste any of the precious egg, the chicken carcass used for stock, the meat and vegetable juices saved to flavor soups, the re-used vanilla bean stuck in the the sugar jar.  So you see, my afternoon with Ms. Taylor wasn't just about jam (and indeed, as she herself will tell you, she doesn't make jam, but rather marmalades, fruit butters, and conserves).  My time with her was about preserving and conserving -- the preservation not only of the fruit but of artisanal ways with it; the conservation not only of foodstuffs, but of the land, the resources and the people who labor to produce them.   

June Taylor is the sort of person you want to learn from, you want to know, and you want to spend time with.  If and when I'm lucky enough to be in the Bay Area when Ms. Taylor is giving a class, I will run and not walk to sign up for that experience.  And we certainly plan to be spending more time in the Bay Area.  G loves it there, for many reasons more than just the tacos and the ice-cream.  I'm lucky enough to have great friends and good colleagues there.  So perhaps some day, perhaps in five years, or in ten, I'll be doing more than just pretending to be a Bay Area foodie.