Category Archives: More Food Gal — In Other Publications

Born to Cook

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Dominique Crenn, chef of Luce restaurant, serves up melon specialties in her home.

Dominique Crenn, chef de cuisine of San Francisco’s Luce restaurant, was practically born to be a chef.

After all, as the adopted daughter of a well-known French politician and his wife, Crenn grew up with an adventurous palate thanks to her mother’s fine cooking highlighted by fresh, seasonal ingredients from farmers markets in France.

With her father’s best friend a famous restaurant critic in France, Crenn also found herself often accompanying the two powerful men on excursions to Michelin-starred restaurants when she was all of 8 years old.

“When I was 8, I told my mother I wanted to be a chef,” Crenn says.

“Or maybe a policeman or a photographer,” she adds with a laugh.

It may look like tuna sashimi, but those are actually slivers of pickled watermelon rind atop that tomato-melon salad.

Cooking did win out, but not before she had to battle French culinary school directors who discouraged her from becoming a chef because she was a woman.

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An Ode to Cowgirl Creamery Cottage Cheese

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Cottage cheese that will change your mind about cottage cheese.

My early recollections of cottage cheese are not the best of ones.

Like so many of you way back when, I ate it — but not happily.

It was, of course, diet food, associated with canned cling peach halves or bare burger patties alongside a forlorn leaf of iceberg lettuce. We ate the white, creamy curds because they were supposed to be good for us, because we were counting calories, because we wanted to feel virtuous.

We certainly didn’t spoon them into our mouths because we wanted to.

But I do now.

That’s because I’ve discovered a cottage cheese that actually makes me revel in eating cottage cheese. It’s the clabbered cottage cheese crafted by Cowgirl Creamery of Point Reyes Station.

It starts with organic non-fat milk from Marin County’s Straus Family Creamery. Clabbered cream (similar in taste to creme fraiche) is then added. The result is a creamy, rich cottage cheese. Unlike the standard mass-produced ones that have a sort of sour milk-taste to them, Cowgirl Creamery’s has a pure, fresh milky flavor.

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Spanish Flavors

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Tender pork flavored with rosemary, white wine, and pomegranate juice.

Antonio Banderas. Penelope Cruz. The architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

Sangria. Cava. Tapas. And melt-in-your-mouth Iberico ham.

I love all things Spanish.

When I spied the new “One Pot Spanish” (Sellers Publishing) cookbook by Spanish cooking authority Penelope Casas, it brought back delectable memories of my trip to Spain long ago, when I got my fill of seafood paella, briny olives, and bracing gazpacho.

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Take Five with Roy Fong — Educator, Importer, and Connoisseur of Fine Teas

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Top quality jasmine tea leaves.

Nobody knows tea quite like Roy Fong.

The 53-year-old entrepreneur opened the first traditional Chinese tea house in San Francisco in 1992. Now, he overseas two Imperial Tea Court locations in the Bay Area — one in Berkeley, and the other in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

A visit back to his native Hong Kong when he was in his 20s, changed his life. As he wandered around the old tea district there, he knew he had found his destiny. Now, he sells about 300 types and grades of teas, priced at $16 to $480 a pound.

Roy Fong enjoying the fruits of his labor.

His two tea houses also are thought to be the only restaurants in the Bay Area that feature an all-organic, sustainable dim sum menu.

With the exception of a few sauces, everything else on the menu is organic and sustainable. The flour used to make the wrappers and the tea oil used to fry the green onion pancakes are organic. The shrimp is wild. The pork is family-raised and sustainable. Even the tea leaves used to flavor the broth for the won ton soup are organic.

Read more about Fong’s organic dim sum — and other purveyers jumping on that bandwagon — in my story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle Food section.

I had the chance to sit down to lunch with Fong recently at his Berkeley tea house. He poured cups of jasmine tea, the favorite variety of Northern Chinese.

Dumplings made with wild shrimp, organic flour, and organic jasmine tea leaves.

Before pouring water over the rolled-up leaves, he had me take a whiff. The aroma was very floral. It was an indication that the green tea picked in early spring was quite fresh, because jasmine tea takes on a more citrusy fragrance as it ages. Surprise your guests at your next party by pairing jasmine tea with brie cheese. Fong says the two are an exceptional match.

Q: You’ve won quite a loyal following for your organic dim sum, haven’t you?

A: People drive hundreds of miles for it. We have regulars who come from Monterey for lunch all the time.

Q: The wrappers on the shrimp dumplings are so incredibly translucent. How do you do that?

A: You have to control the water temperature, and roll the dough very thin. The water can’t be too warm or too cold.

Q: I’m guessing you won’t tell me the exact temperature?

A: Nope. (laughs)

Noodles being pulled to order.

Q: What’s the most popular dish here?

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Chef Victor Scargle to Bid Adieu to St. Helena’s Go Fish Restaurant

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Chef Victor Scargle.

If you’ve been a fan of Victor Scargle’s deft cooking over the years, you might be disappointed to hear that the talented, young chef won’t be cooking in restaurants any more when June rolls around.

But with good reason.

Scargle will be leaving as executive chef of Go Fish restaurant to become an instructor at the nearby Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone Campus in St. Helena, starting June 10.

The teaching gig will allow him more regular hours so that he can spend more time with his wife and toddler son. (Yes, ladies, sorry but he’s taken.)

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