Foodie T’s and A Food Gal Giveaway

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Show your love for kimchi with this bold T-shirt. (Photo courtesy of Flavour Gallery)

You’ve heard of wearing your heart on your sleeve?

Now, you can wear your favorite food on  your torso.

Flavour Gallery, which launched about a month ago, specializes in specialty T-shirts that are all food-oriented.

The shirts, almost all made in Los Angeles, come in men’s and women’s sizes with artsy graphics spelling out “kimchi,” and “Gigi’s Oyster Bar,” as well as designs featuring knives or a hand sprinkling salt.

Recently, I received a sample of a women’s “medium” in the short-sleeve “kimchi” design.  The soft, 100 percent-cotton T is thin like a man’s undershirt. It fits pretty true to size. It’s cut long enough to cover the hips, so it’s perfect for jeans that sit at belly-button level or lower.

How's this for a "sharp'' shirt? (Photo courtesy of Flavour Gallery)

The company also makes scarves, tote bags and memo pads adorned with its distinctive designs.

Prices range from $4 for a memo pad and $20 for a scarf to $28 for a woman’s tank top and $68 for a man’s hoodie.

Contest: One lucky Food Gal reader will win his/her choice of a Flavour Gallery T-shirt, as well as a tote bag and memo book. Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST April 23. Winner will be announce April 25.

How to win?

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New Vietnamese Eatery, Cyrus Japan Fund-Raiser, Food Truck Fun & More

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Bun Mee's version of a Vietnamese Sloppy Joe. (Photo courtesy of James "Slim'' Dang)

San Francisco Welcomes Bun Mee

While her friends were scarfing down burgers, Vietnam-born Denise Tran was enjoying banh mi, the bargain-priced sandwich of her homeland made with roast pork, tangy pickled veggies, and paté stuffed inside a fresh-baked baguette.

Now, she’s reincarnating that favorite sandwich with modern twists at her new Bun Mee cafe on upper Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights, a short stroll from the Best Western Tomo in San Francisco.

The 16-seat restaurant, decorated with corrugated metal finishes and bicycle wheel chandeliers, specializes in Vietnamese street food, with most dishes priced at $5 to $7.

Choose from nine different banh mi, including a “Sloppy Bun” with curry ground pork, shaved onion and Thai basil; and the “Bun Mee Combo” of house-carved roast pork, paté de champagne, mortadella, house garlic aioli, shaved onion, pickled carrot and daikon, jalapenos and cilantro.

You just want to take a bite, don't you? (Photo courtesy of James "Slim'' Dang)

For more variety, the menu includes salads such as the “Mekong Shrimp” with grilled prawns, sliced mango, tofu, pickled daikon, and julienned cucumbers over mixed greens with blood orange vinaigrette; and “Momma Tran’s Crispy Egg Rolls” made with ground pork, crab, wood ear mushrooms, glass noodles and lettuce. Then, quench your thirst with Vietnamese coffee, kaffir limeade, and strawberry lychee aqua fresca.

“From my own travels to Vietnam to spending hours cooking with Momma Tran, I am really excited to bring the Vietnamese street food experience to Pacific Heights and introduce guests to one of my favorite things to eat,” said Tran in a statement, who collaborated on the restaurant with her mother.

Celeb Chefs Come Together for a Japan Benefit

Chef Douglas Keane of Cyrus has invited some of the biggest names in the Bay Area food scene to cook for a very worthy cause: the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund, which is administered by the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California.

April 19, Keane will be joined by the likes of David Kinch of Manresa in Los Gatos, Corey Lee of Benu in San Francisco, James Syhabout of Commis in Oakland, Michael Cimarusti of Providence in Los Angeles, and Nicole Plue of Cyrus for a spectacular tasting menu.

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Take Five with Pastry Chef Rodney Cerdan of the Village Pub, On His Candy-Filled Childhood

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Rodney Cerdan, executive pastry chef of the Village Pub, who is never far away from a good cookie.

Rodney Cerdan is a very dangerous man.

If left to his own devices, he will ply you with chocolate honey mousse cake, peanut butter brownie bars with fluffs of toasted marshmallow, chewy almond cookies and bags of homemade sticky caramels to no surrender.

He can’t help himself. As executive pastry chef of the Village Pub in Woodside, Cerdan, 33, has been baking since he was 7, when he’d commandeer his mom’s toaster oven before taking on the full-size one.

After stints at Roy’s Restaurant in San Francisco, Delessio’s Market in Bakery in San Francisco, and Bi-Rite Creamery and Bakeshop in San Francisco, Cerdan took over the head pastry job at the Village Pub in October 2010.

Recently, I had a chance to try a sampling of his newest desserts (about $10 each) on the house that reference homey favorites, but have been reborn with contemporary flair. They included a fluffy, airy chocolate honey mousse cake with spicy ginger ice cream; and a Meyer lemon pudding cake with an ethereal texture made all the more luxurious with dollops of lush white chocolate.

Cerdan's chocolate honey mousse cake with ginger ice cream and ginger chocolate bark.

Cerdan, who is of Spanish-Basque and El Salvadoran heritages, joined me at the table to chat about his failed attempt at an acting career, what it was like to grow up with a mom who worked at See’s Candies, and what his all-time favorite dessert is.

Q: Your Mom wrapped candies at See’s. That must be every kid’s fantasy, right?

A: She used to bring home 10-pound boxes. The fruit-filled chocolates were always my favorite. I used to take a knife to the bottom of each candy until I found the ones that I was looking for.

I got pretty good at identifying them just by sight. But it’s been a while. I’m not sure I could do it now. I’d have to brush up on it.

Q: When you were 7 years old, you wanted an Easy-Bake oven?

A: Yes, but I couldn’t have one. But I found that the toaster oven was better. There was none of that pushing a tiny pan under a light bulb.

I would grab a box of Bisquick and make all the recipes. Then, I’d make my own coffee cakes and pigs in a blanket. I made my own pasta at 9.

I’d watch all the PBS cooking shows, especially Julia Child and ‘Yan Can Cook.”

Q: So was this how your love for baking started?

A: My Mom would come home smelling of chocolate and vanilla. That pretty much did it. (laughs)

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A Lovely Lunch at Farmstead Restaurant in Wine Country

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The secret to this fabulous chicken at Farmstead Restaurant? Grilling it with a brick on top.

In Wine Country, the options for lunching are practically endless.

One place certainly not to miss is Farmstead Restaurant at Long Meadow Ranch in St. Helena, where Executive Chef Sheamus Feeley turns out lusty, farm-fresh food.

Recently, I had a chance to lunch as a guest of the restaurant, which is housed in a soaring barn that’s been done up in rustic-chic with polished wood tables, a rough granite bar, farm implements turned into contemporary light fixtures and glass milk bottles holding sprays of wild flowers.

The restaurant is housed in a former barn.

It’s a restaurant you can saunter into in jeans or shorts, and park yourself for a good long while.

That’s because you won’t want to stop eating.

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Getting Acquainted with Goat

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Fluffy dumplings made with goat milk, goat butter and two types of goat cheese.

Seventy percent of the red meat eaten around the world is not cow, nor pig, nor lamb. Would you believe it’s goat?

Yet for most of us in the United States, goat merely brings to mind a creamy chevre, and little else.

The prolific food writing duo of Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough are hoping to rectify that. Their latest cookbook is “Goat: Milk, Meat, Cheese” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), of which I recently received a review copy. This comprehensive book includes a wealth of information about all things goat, as well as recipes that include “Goat Shanks with Cabbage, Port, and Vanilla,” “Chilled Blueberry Tzatsiki Soup” made with goat yogurt, and “Goat Cheese Brownies.”

They realize that a lot of folks are predisposed to hate goat meat, even if they may never have tried it. So many people fear it’ll be too barnyard-y or funky tasting. But goats that are slaughtered between six and nine months possess none of that. Instead, the meat is slightly earthy and quite tender. Ounce per ounce, goat is also lower in calories, fat and cholesterol than chicken, beef, pork or lamb.

Latin chefs have had a love affair with goat for generations. Nowadays, more and more chefs are discovering how fabulous the meat is and even spotlighting it on pricey tasting menus.

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