Drop by any participating Haagen-Dazs store, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. May 12, for a free scoop of any “bee-built” flavor.
Don’t worry, that’s not ice cream with bees mixed into it. Rather, it’s ice cream flavors made with ingredients that bees help pollinate.
As you may know, one in three bee colonies in the United States has mysteriously vanished over the past few years. Bees are essential to our food supply, as they are responsible for pollinating one-third of it.
For those who couldn’t get enough of the wild and woolly Duckathlon held last Sunday in New York, here are a few more pics to entertain your peepers.
As you recall from my original post on the crazy event, this was the fifth annual Duckathlon, hosted once again by D’Artagnan. Teams of chefs from some of New York’s most celebrated restaurants competed in the most off-the-wall events ever conceived to garner the title of Top Duck.
The Pluckemin Inn’s sardonic T-shirts:
The BLT Steak team attempts to “Put the Piggie Together Again.”
Team DB Bistro Moderne competes in “What the Fork?” — in which chefs have to make mayonnaise by whipping oil and egg yolks with a barbecue fork. Yeah, you try that at home.
When a new pizza joint opens in San Francisco where the pies are made by a guy who placed sixth one year and seventh one year in the World Pizza Championship in Italy, you can’t help but have carb-loving, high hopes for the place.
Pizzanostra SF, which opened in March in San Francisco’s hip Portrero Hill neighborhood, delivers on that.
The executive chef is David Bazirgan, who has worked with celeb chef Todd English, and who has cooked at Baraka, Chez Papa Bistrot, and Chez Papa Resto, all in San Francisco. The pizza maestro is 37-year-old Giovanni Aginolfi, one of Europe’s foremost pizza chefs with 18 years of experience.
Recently, I was invited to try the pizza at this industrial-looking eatery that seats 36 inside and 45 outside when the fog hasn’t rolled in too thickly.
We started with an antipasti of tender, smoky grilled octopus tossed with nutty chickpeas, lemon, and celery ($9). Pizzanostra SF serves a variety of pastas ($9 to $16), and even a grilled burger ($12). But of course, we were there to test the pies.
Sometimes you never know what you’ll end up missing.
For me, it turned out to be — of all things — a most humble Cantonese dish of steamed ground pork, strewn with finely julienned ginger and copious amounts of preserved, pungent mackerel.
Yes, stinky, salted fish is what I longed for. Who would have thought?
This steamed pork hash or cake, otherwise known as hom yu jing jiu yok bang, was not something I missed at first. Not when my Mom had a stroke, limiting her ability to cook this dish and so many others I had grown up with. And not even years later, when my Mom passed away, and this home-style dish faded into memory.
It was only a year after her death, when I happened to be at Asia Village, a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Sunnyvale, when I saw the dish on the menu and decided to order it for old time’s sake.
It came to the table, looking a lot like what my Mom used to make — a 1-inch-thick pressed round patty of ground pork, topped with a couple small pieces of salted fish, all floating in its own lovely juices.
It was tender, a bit briny, incredibly succulent, and the perfect foil for plain, fluffy rice. One taste is all it took to make me sigh wistfully.
I’m not the only one. I started asking my Chinese-American friends if they remembered this dish. All did fondly from their childhood, but almost all of them had not eaten it in years. They didn’t cook it now, having never learned how to make this basic dish. And they didn’t eat it when they went out, because of its scarcity on menus.
“It’s classic Cantonese comfort food. It was truly one of my favorites growing up,” says Chinese cooking expert and cookbook author Grace Young, who grew up in San Francisco and now lives in New York. “Steamed pork cake dishes are seldom found in restaurants. I think they are so simple to make that when people go to a restaurant they want to eat dishes that are too complicated to make at home.”
It’s a family-meal dish beloved by both the Cantonese and the Hakka, neighbors in Southern China, according to Bay Area food writer, Linda Lau Anusasananan, who is writing a book on Hakka cuisine.
“It combines pork, preserved ingredients, and strong seasonings — all main elements in Hakka cooking,” she says. “I love the dish for its simplicity.”
If I wanted to enjoy hom yu jing jiu yok bang regularly, I realized I would have to learn how to make it myself. The key would be finding just the right fish to use. That turned out to be far easier said than done.
Monday night, the country’s most celebrated chefs traded their whites for black-tie (though Mario Batali still wore his trademark orange clogs) for the Oscars of the food world, the James Beard Foundation Awards.
Renowned chefs and big-name cookbook authors walked the red carpet leading up to Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. As the lights dimmed, a bevy of the country’s most talented women chefs took their bows in a salute to this year’s theme, “Women in Food.” As they retreated back to the lobby to finish prepping the show-stopping food they would be serving after the ceremony, co-hosts, actor Stanley Tucci, restaurateur Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, and a very pregnant Cat Cora of “Iron Chef America” took the stage. Cora, who is expecting a baby boy any day now, joked she had been craving chocolate big-time lately.
As a judge for the cookbook awards this year, I was invited to be a guest at this year’s festivities.
The Bay Area contingent applauded ecstatically when the first big award of the evening was announced: “Rising Star Chef Award” for the most promising chef of the year under age 30. It went to Nate Appleman of A16 in San Francisco.
Chef Douglas Keane of Cyrus in Healdsburg took home the “Best Chef Pacific” award.
San Francisco’s Yank Sing restaurant was honored with “An American Classic” award. Dan Barber of Blue Hill in New York pocketed the “Outstanding Chef” award. Jean Georges won the “Outsanding Restaurant” honors.”
Best New Restaurant” went to the impossible-to-get-into, 12-seat Momofuku Ko in New York.
Daniel Boulud’s chic Daniel restaurant won for “Outstanding Service.”
Gina DePalma, pastry chef of Babbo in New York, had been nominated six times before and come away empty-handed.