Beautifull!

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Cookies that have no butter in them.

Don’t blink. That isn’t a typo. It’s the name of a new food company in San Francisco that wants to make it easier for you to eat healthful.

Beautifull! opened its flagship store/cafe in San Francisco’s Laurel Village Shopping Center this spring. More locations are planned, including one in Palo Alto early next year.

The stores make prepared foods that are free of hormones, steroids, additives, preservatives, refined sugars, refined grains, butter and cream. A team of chefs and nutritionists have come up with dishes that can be enjoyed in the store, wrapped up to-go, or delivered to your home or office in whatever amounts that suit your needs.

I know you’re thinking, “That sounds way too healthy to taste any good.” Admit it.

Heck, I thought that, too.

But I ate those words, along with some tasty samples that were delivered to my house recently.

Wonderful whole grains, along with fresh, delicious fruits and veggies are staple ingredients in the offerings.

Tea-smoked salmon ready to be toted home.

The “Tea-Smoked Salmon with Red Quinoa & Edamame Salad” (market price) is a signature dish. The salmon, house-smoked over Asian tea leaves, is moist, tender, and yes, wonderfully smoky tasting. It tops Peruvian red quinoa, buttery edamame, carrots, red peppers, and crunchy hijiki seaweed, tossed in a gingery vinaigrette. It’s a dish redolent of Japanese flavors.

The “Chinese Chicken Salad” ($9.99 as an entree salad) also is a taste of Asia, with nutty sesame oil and tangy rice wine vinegar in the Asian honey mustard dressing. The roasted chicken breast was just a tad dry, but that can happen when it’s pre-sliced ahead of time and refrigerated.

Enchiladas with zesy, spicy salsa verde and creamy feta cheese.

The “Whole Grain & Bean Enchiladas with Salsa Verde” ($7.99 as a prepacked meal) are corn tortillas filled with scrambled free-range eggs, golden quinoa, pinto beans, and yellow pepper, then topped with feta, cilantro, and spicy salsa verde. There was so much flavor going on that I didn’t miss the meat at all in this dish.

Turkey meatballs with Kamut grain.

Kids will love “Kamut Spaghetti with Turkey Meatballs” ($6.99 a pound). Parents will love how good it is for the wee ones. Lean turkey meat combines with rolled oats, spinach, Dijon mustard and herbs for big, bountiful meatballs atop spaghetti made of Kamut, a grain high in protein and minerals. It all gets tossed with a simple tomato-basil sauce.

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Discover the Produce Peddler in San Francisco and San Mateo’s Thriving Downtown

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Fresh, organic Yolo County Farms' produce now featured a select neighborhood corner stores in San Francisco. (Photo courtesy of Brian Collentine)

Corner markets aren’t the first places you’d normally seek out produce — unless you need something basic and fast.

Brian Collentine is seeking to change that.

When the economy fizzled, the freelance creative director found he had too much time on his hands. So he came up with the idea to set up displays of fresh, organic produce and flowers inside San Francisco neighborhood bodegas where you’d normally be hard pressed to find a squishy onion amid the six packs and cigarettes.

Instead of jumping in cars to shop at supermarkets miles away, city dwellers in certain parts of the San Francisco now can walk around the corner or a mere block away to buy just-picked potatoes, peaches, and figs from Yolo County farms.

Read more about Collentine’s fresh and delicious endeavor in my story in the October issue of San Francisco Magazine.

While you’re perusing the magazine, also check out my other story on San Mateo’s lively downtown, which has managed to thrive when other downtowns on the Peninsula have suffered untold business closings this past year.

Fancy soap from a 1905-era hardward store in San Mateo.

With its sprawling 70 blocks, downtown San Mateo is an intriguing mix of centuries-old businesses (Wisnom’s hardware store opened its doors in 1905) and new, unique attractions. It’s where both YouTube and Napster got their starts, too.

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Not Your Kid’s Milk Chocolate & Food Gal Contest

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Yes, it's milk chocolate.

Milk chocolate doesn’t get a whole lotta respect.

Dark chocolate aficionados turn up their noses at the stuff, sneering that it’s weak, sweet, and uncouth.

But there’s a new milk chocolate in town that just might change even those snobby taste buds.

Dark chocolate lovers already know Amano Artisan Chocolate, the Utah specialty chocolate maker, for its amazingly complex dark chocolates. The company, founded by a scientist who develops search engines, has now gone the milky way. It has created two different milk chocolate bars, ($6.95 for each 2-ounce bar), which I recently received samples of. So just how do they taste?

I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.

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Mooncake Time, Dining Deals & More

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Fresh mooncakes at Ming's. (Photo courtesy of Ming's Chinese Cuisine & Bar)

Enjoy fresh-baked moon cakes on Oct. 3, Moon Festival Day, when the moon is at its fullest and brightest.

Ming’s Chinese Cuisine & Bar in Palo Alto will celebrate the Lunar fest with free mooncake-making demonstrations, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. Oct. 3. A lion dance will be performed that same afternoon at the restaurant at noon and 1:15 p.m. Stop in for a taste of specialty Moon Festival dishes, or buy some mooncakes to tote home.

Sip fine wines and nibble on gourmet treats while you shop. You can do just that at “Wine & Dine Around,” 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Oct. 10 at San Jose’s Santana Row.

Participating shops and restaurants will host in-store receptions with refreshments and shopping discounts available only to ticket holders. Among those participating will be Taryn Rose, Cole Haan, Ted Baker, Footcandy, and The Blues Jean Bar.

Tickets are $25, and available at the concierge office. Price of admission includes a commemorative wine glass, and a chance to win two tickets to see David Foster at HP Pavilion in San Jose. A portion of the proceeds benefits Hospice of the Valley, the oldest non-profit hospice in Santa Clara County.

The South Bay’s own Saratoga Chocolates has opened a second store in addition to the original one in Saratoga, of course.

The new San Francisco shop, 3489 – 16th St., took over the old Joseph Schmidt space. Look for bonbons such as Marzipan le Orange, Mojito, and Grapefruit Honey.

In downtown San Mateo, 231 Ellsworth restaurant has added a new four-course tasting menu that’s available nightly.

The prix fixe is $64 per person; with wine pairings, it’s $99 per person.

Key lime pie. (Photo courtesy of Marie Callender's)

Craving pie? Head to Marie Callender’s for its pie sale going on now through Oct. 31. Whole pies are only $6.99, a savings of up to 55 percent. How tempting is that?

Choose from more than 30 varieties, including apple, banana cream, and lemon meringue. Cheesecakes and fruit pies are excluded from the sale.

If oysters are more your style, sign up for a tour and tasting at Hog Island Oyster Company’s farm in Marshall, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Oct. 6., when it will host a special event with Stubbs Vineyard.

Learn the history of oyster growing in Tomales Bay, and the perfect way to shuck an oyster. You’ll get to taste plenty of sweet bivalves and Chardonnay, too.

Tickets are $40 for members of Marin Organic; $45 for non-members. To reserve a spot, call (415) 663-9667.

For more oyster fun, McCormick & Kuleto’s Seafood Restaurant in San Francisco is hosting its 16th annual “Shuck & Swallow Oyster Challenge,” 5 p.m. Oct. 6.

A dozen teams, whose members are Bay Area restaurant employees, will compete in this free event to shuck and eat as many oysters as possible in 10 minutes. The current record is just under 200. Goodness!

Afterward, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., enjoy an oyster and wine pairing. Tickets to that are $30. Net proceeds will benefit the Marine Mammal Center.

More seafood mania gets underway 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Oct. 11 with the ninth annual Crabby “Chefs Seafood Festival” at Spenger’s Fish Grotto in Berkeley.

Enjoy an “Iron Chef”-like cooking competition, and an assortment of food booths selling clam chowder, cracked crab, and crab cakes. There also will be live music. A mobile Pacific Seafood retail store will be selling fresh seafood to prepare at home. A portion of proceeds from prepared food sales will go to the Berkeley Cal Recreational Sports Development Fund’s Camp Scholarship Program.

Dine at Il Cane Rosso in San Francisco’s Ferry Building on Oct. 11 for a good cause.

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Tantalizing Tofu

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A tofu dish you'll be excited to eat.

Yes, I’m well aware that ”tantalizing” isn’t a word that one often associates with tofu.

After all, a brick of white soybean curd is not something that gets a whole lot of people excited. Not like an In-N-Out burger done animal-style, or Ad Hoc’s beautifully crisp fried chicken, or a glorious Red Velvet cupcake.

No, tofu doesn’t elicit that kind of impassioned response. But it should. It’s a versatile, inexpensive protein that’s low in calories that we all would do well to eat more of in these lean and mean times.

To that end, I offer up this beauty: “Warm Tofu with Spicy Garlic Sauce,” which has got to be one of the easiest dishes around.

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