16 posts tagged “food”

As I discovered during my move from Seattle to San Francisco, wifi in the car makes the trip -- and finding stuff along the way -- much, much easier. Tom set up his own wifi solution (a Sprint EVDO router), which is trivially easy to do. Since mobile wifi seems to be the sort of thing that is quite handy when traveling, it makes sense that Avis is now offering it with car rentals from SF International Airport.

SF Supervisor Aaron "sources say" Peskin is offering a ballot measure that he says will improve MUNI. The unions are already screaming a blue streak about it, which means it just might be effective, if approved by voters.

We're a little funny, a little kooky, here in California. One of our wacky beliefs is that the people who represent us at the city level should actually live in that city. The San Francisco City Attorney isn't quite sure if SF Supervisor Ed Jew (whose offices and home were searched by the FBI last Friday for clues in a corruption investigation) actually lives in the city. The Chronicle helpfully points out that water to his primary San Francisco residence wasn't turned on until 60 days after residency requirements kicked in, and that neighbors rarely, if ever, see him or his family in the neighborhood.

I can admit that sometimes I'm too self-conscious for my own good, and that I especially hate making mistakes or looking like a complete fool in public. Whenever I'm in a new place and situation, I tend to hang back and watch what other people are doing before I dive into the fray, so that's why I really like this quick list of San Francisco "guides for n00bs" as written by one Yelp contributor. I think I'll do my own Yelp reviews in this format from now on.

If that's not to your taste, perhaps you'll appreciate a subjective list of "REAL Chinese food in the Bay Area."

MUNI means business: Nat Ford sent out a diplomatic (and leaked) memo to his management team requesting "that everyone participate in representing the best interests of our organization, the City, and our patrons by following SFMTA's standards for performance." In the business world, this are usually the type of memo that arrives a few months before mass firings begin (at which point everyone realizes "oh shit, management means business" and real change occurs).

Bay Area foodies are kinda-sorta-yes-really pissed off at Slow Food maven Carlo Petrini for slamming the organic wares of the Ferry Building's farmers market as being tailored for "a clientele whose social status was pretty clear: either wealthy or very wealthy".

In the why-bother department, a major hotel chain approached Rosas Farms about using their organic and grass-fed beef in that chain's restaurants. All went well until they demanded all incoming meat be irradiated as part of "a risk management thing." The Rosas showed the hotel executives the door and Erin Rosa wrote some informative words about irradiation.

Democrats may be the Congressional majority (by a slim margin), which at least allows us some point-and-laugh room

when the more shrill of the wingnuts start ranting. This time, Sadly, No! mocks the latest utterances of Debbie Schlussel -- she's some sort of columnist, I guess -- who has decided that Muslim doctor = medical terrorist. Stay classy, Debbie.

And speaking of things that make wingnut conservatives scream, read an excerpt from Al Gore's upcoming book The Assault On Reason.

In the latest chapter of the ongoing serial known as Oh My God Best Buy Sucks, the kids over at Consumerist feature a letter from the latest happy customer victim of the Big Blue Box. It's titled Best Buy Stole My Computer and I think you can figure out the contents on your own.

This Link Lounge is not brought to you by Dee's Nuts, the salty snack treat that's been filtered through a pair of breasts.

Oh. What? Who? Not me. I love sashimi, but I prefer it to be dead before it hits my plate. Not so for Eddie Lin of  Deep End Dining, a blog specializing in documenting culinary experiences that would make even the most adventurous gourmand back away from the table.

For instance, here's an excerpt from a 2005 post where live octopus tentacles were sampled in LA's Koreatown:

One doesn’t grab live tentacles. They grab you. And they grab the plate and the sauce dish and the slices of garlic. In fact, the suckers suction on to anything they contact. If you are able to dip the tentacle into any of the three escorting sauces (a chili paste with raw thinly sliced garlic and jalapeno peppers or the pink, sweet and spicy sauce or a salt and pepper vinegar), then, congratulations, you cleared the first hurdle. Now try getting the thing to come off your chopsticks and into your mouth. This is not a passive piece of toro sashimi we’re talking about. This is an entity that does not want to be eaten alive, dead or otherwise. This is, perhaps, even a thing that would happily take you down with it if it were big enough.

Deep End Dining: Rude Food. Live Octopus Tentacles. The Prince. Los Angeles, CA.

Masked men break into the DMV's Oakland office, steal a bunch of registration stickers and disabled permits that are within weeks of expiring.

NYT asks "Why are so many chefs at all price points — who wouldn’t dream of using vanillin instead of vanilla bean and who source their organic baby vegetables and humanely raised meats with exquisite care — using a synthetic flavoring agent?" The additive in question is truffle oil which, as it turns out, doesn't actually contain truffles.

Controversy! Debate is raging over whether San Diego burritos are better than Mission-style burritos served in San Francisco. According to the comments, the Mexicans cooking in San Diego (land of the horrifyingly disgusting and tragically overrated "fish taco") are more authentic than the Mexicans cooking in San Francisco.

There be whales in Sacramento. The Marine Mammal Center is trying to figure out why the pair of humpbacks is attempting to reach the state's capitol. Maybe they want to have a chat with Arnold?

Milk: It's the secret ingredient in the non-dairy mixture offered by Jamba Juice. Update 04/04: Jamba Juice says this allegation is untrue.

356mph: How fast a French TGV travelled to claim the conventional rail speed record. This is different from the absolute train speed record, claimed by a Japanese maglev consist. Video of the record being made.

De facto homeless shelters: What a crumbling social services infrastructure has turned many American libraries into.

Forget it: What overseas North Korean diplomats are telling the fatherland bureaucrats, who want them to send their children home, in order to prevent defections. Even though diplomatic postings are doled out as rewards to loyal regime supporters, they tend to defect at an alarmingly high rate.

Caught: Fraudster using fraud, forcing YouTube to delete videos that show he's a fraud.

Prove it: What a bus driver asked a double amputee in a wheelchair to do in order to verify he was entitled to pay the disabled fare.

226: The record number of days journalist Josh Wolf spent in federal prison for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury. He'll be released shortly; the feds finally figured out they were creating a martyr of sorts.

I Smell Deprecation Now: Remember when ISDN was the ultimate high speed home networking solution? Well, I do. Anyway, British Telecom says it plans to stop offering it because other technologies like DSL and cable are more popular with consumers. 

I'm doing my best to become a localvore, but it's not easy or all that complete for me, and honestly, since I'm packing up everything and moving back to San Francisco at the end of May I'm not spending a whole lot of time figuring out the network of local ingredient suppliers here in Seattle.

Once I get back on track at my new home, should that buy-local-eat-local ethos should extend to rice?  According to food ethicist Peter Singer, buying rice from Bangladesh actually endorses agriculture grown and transported with a lighter energy footprint than rice grown in California -- something like a total of 400 megajoules per metric ton for the imported stuff vs. 11,000 per metric ton for locally grown.

Here's an interesting essay at The Ethicurean running the numbers on that declaration. The answers seem to be "maybe-sort-of-that's correct" but note that much of the research for that blog post may be outdated by as much as 27 years, however, that's the most current data available. But isn't being a localvore about more than just conserving energy? I think so, and so does The Ethicurean, concluding with this paragraph:

Energy is an important consideration, but certainly not the only one. Our food choices also need to consider how the land and animals are treated, how the food tastes, how the workers are treated, and how the food will affect our bodies.

There's a post at The Vegan Lunchbox discussing how to be a "sneaky parent" and slipping some vegetables into an unsuspecting child's meal:

Sometimes it seems like the only way you can get children to eat vegetables is to slip a bit in quietly here and there. Kids might also be resistant to eating beans, or nuts, or ground flaxseed, or their daily vitamin. What is a parent to do? As those of you who have read my book will know, I love getting sneaky!

I understand, or at least I think I do. It's all done in the name of health and parental love and concern. However, I find it interesting coming from the quarter of the Internet populated by health-conscious individuals who have rejected commercially processed food, in part, because they don't trust labeling guidelines to give them the whole truth regarding what they're consuming.

And I know, it's sort of different when you're talking about home-cooked meals and you know what went in at every step. So maybe that's it, end of story.

But it just seems dishonest to me. And when done with young children, I can't help but wonder if these parents aren't constructing a bad ethical framework here: If I think I'm doing something good, then it's okay not to tell the whole truth. What kind of values statement is that?

But at least it's just vegetables.

Quizno's is all about the money, an appropriate thing for a commercial enterprise. But maybe they should also be a little bit about not pissing off their franchisees to the point of sue or suicide.

Consumerist has the big list of secret chain restaurant menu items. Jamba Juice has something (unofficially) called a White Gummi Bear which one commenter describes as being "better than crack."

Payoff or incompetence? NY officials will figure out how that rat-infested Taco Bell passed inspection just one day previously.

The beer-launching mini-fridge.

It must be consolation to someone that Canada's border-crossing policies are sometimes as silly as the USA's.

QOTD on the Sonics new owners being anti-gay bigots: "To explain it to you coffee-folks, it's like selling Starbucks to Folgers. If Folgers was owned by Nazis." One wonders what the NBA, having just the other week "handled" Tim Hardaway and his anti-gay comments, will do about its homophobic franchisees.

Pork slaughterhouse suddenly becomes deeply concerned about immigration when a union tries to organize its undocumented workers.

When cheese is cheaper than therapy.

This was the Chronicle's above-the-fold major headline in today's newsprint edition. Are they new to San Francisco? And maybe it's just my cynicism shining again, but 70 percent on-time sounds like an improvement over the MUNI I remember.

Speaking of The People's Transit System, SFist's newest feature, Ask A MUNI Driver, debuted today.

You want to know why the Zune is so frustrating for Microsoft? They can't blame its flop on piracy like Steve Ballmer did to explain Vista's crappy sales.

I'll admit it: I've got four boxes of Annie's Shells & White Cheddar lurking in my cupboard. I bought it because I figured it had to be better for me than the perpetually on sale stuff in the blue box found at every grocery store on the planet, right? Over at Salon, Anastacia Marx de Salcedo does a quick rundown of the differences between Annie's and Kraft (spoiler: they're more alike than many people would be comfortable with).

And perhaps I'm having a slow day but it took me a couple of passes at the article to get past Marx de Salcedo's screed about Annie herself,  which read like she was bashing someone because they had the audacity to be successful. Eventually it became clear: Annie got rich from rubes like me who gladly paid the markup for something better when in reality the only notable difference was the design on the box.

And for those wondering "what now?" there's a recipe at the back of the book for making your own mac and cheese. It involves boiling pasta and grating cheese. Oh, and a little bit of butter.

Salon: The bunny vs. the blue box