Foodie Extravaganza

I've got tons of places to review for this blog, so sit back and prepare to take notes!

Wino and I took our journey to "The City" (as those of us in central CA often refer to San Francisco) for our cooking class through Sur La Table (in February).  The series we took was Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Basics.  No, he does not teach the class, but he designed the series and all of the recipes seemed to be basically his own, and using his styles and techniques.  The first class was knife basics and included cooking tons of starches. It was fun!  We made mashed potatoes (using a potato ricer, which I would not waste my money on, I'd rather just mash mine using the old fashioned masher), rice pilaf (a little bland, but with a few alterations would be pretty good), spaghetti with tomato sauce (very basic, but really good), fennel and haricots verts salad (basically fennel, blanched green beans, orange slices and a citrus vinaigrette-this was my favorite recipe from this class, I'm SO excited to make this!) and last a french omelet.  I did not partake of the omelet, I'm not a fan of eggs.

This class was on a week by itself so we did an "up and back" trip that day.  It was nice but we didn't really get to mill around the city much.  However!  The next two classes were back to back and on a Monday/Tuesday, so we decided to make it a little vacation and go over on Sunday.  Here's where the real adventure began!

Sunday, we decided to go over early and hit SFMOMA.  I love MOMA (Museum of Modern Art)!  They were having an exhibit on wine, and well, you know how much we both love wine!  It was a fantastic exhibit!  We had a blast, and only paid half price to get in since half the museum was closed due to setting up new exhibits.  After that we went to dinner.  We had heard about this place called American Cupcake from the Food Network and wanted to try it.  We were intrigued because they touted their wine and cupcake pairings, and even did a tasting flight with three mini cupcakes and three different wines.

At first we thought they just had cupcakes, we were SO wrong, they also had a pretty basic "savory menu" (their words).  Things like mac and cheese, grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup, Cobb salad, fried chicken, etc.  You get the idea.  We figured we would just eat whatever they had and go for the gusto with desert.  Ho, ho, ho boy were were surprised when even the dinner food was fabulous!  Here's what we had:

I had the basic Cobb salad.  The pulled pork sliders sounded good too, but I wanted to keep my dinner light to enjoy the cupcakes....when the salad came out it was beautiful!  Little fresh cherry tomatoes cut in half littered the top of the luscious greens, a quarter of a beautiful green avocado lay sliced vertically and fanned out over the pieces of crispy apple-wood smoked bacon which was a lovely compliment to the moist roast chicken breast.  It was gorgeous! It was delicious!  I would say the best salad I've ever eaten at a restaurant, EVER!  My mouth is watering as I write....

Wino had the Red Velvet Fried Chicken.  Now, before I describe this don't sneer!  You have to try it to really appreciate it!  This is chicken dipped in their red velvet cupcake batter, then rolled in crumbled red velvet cupcakes, then deep fried.  I sneered when I heard this and promptly opted for the salad.  BUT I tried some to be a good sport and O.....M.....G.....you wouldn't even know it was cupcake batter that the chicken was fried in!  It also came with the most creamy, flavorful mashed potatoes, and a delightful "slaw."  Ugh, it was good!

Ok so that was just dinner, we were both thoroughly impressed already, but the best was yet to come....desert!  We wanted to do a cupcake flight.  We did each did a "Walk of Shame" flight, which consisted of a lemon, a butterscotch and a coconut cupcake, paired with a Sav Blanc, a Chardonnay, and a Merlot, respectively.  The cupcakes were light and moist on their own but what really made them was the light, airy, but rich "frosting" (I'm hesitant to call it frosting because to me frosting is heavy and too sugary).   It was like a little yummy pillow of loveliness set atop the cupcake and I nearly died and went to heaven when I took that first bite of the lemon....I love lemon anything that this blew. my. mind.

Needless to say were were highly impressed by this place, even the ambiance was great.  It was all white (counters, floors, walls, ceilings, furniture) and they had probably a hundred globe lights hanging from the ceiling of various sizes that had multi-colored LEDs that would shift color depending on the music.  It was great!  We had a blast.  I highly recommend this place to everyone!

--Ok intermission time--If you need a potty break here you may want to go.  I've still got two more days to talk about!--

So Monday we had session two of our cooking class.  The topic was stocks, soups and sauces.  This was my least favorite class, most of what we made was seafood and I don't care for seafood.  There wasn't much to eat at the end of this class.  Most of what we made was being saved for the next day's class.  Here's what was on Monday's agenda: rich chicken stock, fish stock, mushroom soup (yicky!  but then I don't like mushrooms, Wino enjoyed it though), mussels steamed in white wine (Wino loved this, and even though I wouldn't eat it I wouldn't mind making it for friends because it's so easy!), and lastly sauteed chicken breasts with Bearnaise sauce.  The real technique for that one was the Bearnaise sauce.  That is REALLY hard to make.  We blew it and ours turned to scrambled eggs.  It's very temperamental, so instead we made the chicken breasts for the rest of the classes' sauce to go on.

Since there wasn't much to eat during this class we decided to do an early dinner at a little place called Spice Kit (again something we found from the Food Network).  They do "authentic Asian street foods."  Their set up reminded me of Chipotle, super fresh ingredients, very simplistic menu - choose your starch, choose your meat, choose your side, ba-da-bing you've got a delicious meal!  I had the Banh Mi sandwich with the beef short ribs and it was SO good, Wino had the Ssam (I called it a huge fresh spring roll) with the roasted pork and was also very impressed.  They also do something cool for a side: lotus chips.  Very yummy and I highly recommend.  The one thing neither of us was crazy about was their ginger-peanut slaw. It was ok, but nothing spectacular.

We wandered SF for a while then decided we needed to treat ourselves to our ritual Ghirardelli sundaes.  They were great as usual though we left feeling stuffed!  The next morning we set out to find some breakfast (smart phones are SO handy!) and we found this quaint little mom n' pop Crepe place.  I'm in love with Pacifica now and I want to move there, just so I can go to this place every Saturday morning for breakfast.  I had their pesto chicken crepe and it was phenomenal!  Yum!  We were so stuffed that we didn't really eat for the rest of the day (yes, even in our class!)

So for our last day of class the following was made beef bourguignon (I really thought this would be more interesting than it was, it's just beef stew!), we learned how to roast a chicken (SO simple, but kind of messy, we've tried this one at home and had a little snafu, but it was still good), seared steaks (yummy!), and fish stew (again I did not partake).  Overall, I'm glad that we took these classes, we really had a lot of fun and now we both feel more comfortable in the kitchen.

Sigh, ok, that was the trip.  If you have any questions about my babbling, feel free to shoot me a comment!