Judith's Profile
Chalkboard Cafe, Lodi
I have had occasion to be in the Lodi area a couple of times in the last few months, and about two months ago had breakfast there. I couldn't remember the name of the place but it was a local, non-chain place so I hunted around on google and turned up the Chalkboard Cafe. It turns out that was not the original place, but another local place so I had breakfast there today.
It was fantastic. It's a tiny little place, seats maybe 20 people. They bake their own muffins, barbecue they're own tri-tip and pork, and serve an incredible breakfast, fresh ingredients, generous servings, served hot. The meatloaf hash is worth the trip. And everyone is as lovely and attentive as you would ever imagine. While we were there, a local regular retriever-doodle appeared at the door to ask for his treats, and it was obvious he gives the place five stars. So do I.
I don't have much occasion to go to Lodi, but I think I'd go again for breakfast, and also to try the pulled pork sandwich and the house made apricot cobbler. I just didn't have room for dessert!
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The Chalkboard Cafe
322 N California St, Lodi, CA 95240
HELP! Passover Brisket techniques
I'm adding my vote to the idea that there is nothing the least bit odd about using tomato products. I use Negro modelo, tomato sauce, brown sugar and onion soup mix along with real onions. And for the leftovers, I add sliced green olives and turn the whole thing into ropa vieja.
Carrot Tsimmes
I've looked at a whole bunch of recipes for carrot tsimmes on line and I have the general idea, but several of them suggest that you cook the carrots in the liquid until the liquid is gone, but the only "liquid" in the ingredients is oil and three tablespoons of lemon juice (could that be right, we're talking about a lot of carrots).
Others suggest cooking the carrots in broth, water or OJ. I can probably improvise on this with carrots, golden raisins, honey and lemon juice, but I'd love a foolproof approach. I need to make enough for about twenty people. Any tried and true recipes would be much appreciated.
Cyprus Bistro & Cafe, Campbell -- lovely place
We had dinner this evening at the fairly new Cyprus Bistro in Campbell. The food is excellent. It has a slight Mediterranean slant but it's really quite interesting and creative. Everything is fresh, beautifully prepared and presented and delicious. The mohammara appetizer, a spread made of roasted red peppers, walnuts and pomegranate molasses was indescribably delicious. They ought to package it and sell it. i'd eat it for breakfast.
The place is lovely . . . simple and tasteful and, at least on a Sunday evening, quiet enough to have a pleasant dinner conversation. The wine list is worth mentioning. It's extensive and varied and wines are identified by "sustainable," "organic," and/or "biodynamic." Every wine on the list is available by the glass. i don't know how they do that, but it's a neat trick!
The service was somewhat inept. Our server took forever to get our drink orders, and didn't really get that we had ordered the appetizer, so we had to ask again when he came for our drinks. Our entrees took way too long to come, and mine was not sufficiently hot. And although the server promised me salmon and shrimp, I got only the shrimp. When we got home I noticed he had charged for the salmon. I think the place is relatively new, and less than perfect service seems to be the hallmark of newly opened restaurants, like it or not.
Still I'd go back. Cyprus is a real restaurant, not a corporate side-show with computer generated cuisine. Gracious restaurants with a sense of individuality at the less than astronomic end of the price scale (entrees approx $18-24) are in short supply, and I hope it lasts.
What ever happened to Bistro Clovis?!
We went to Bistro Clovis a couple of weeks ago as a prelude to a concert at Herbst. We hadn't been in years, since before the renovation. What has HAPPENED there? It was a rainy night and the restaurant was nearly empty. So I'm hard pressed to imagine what was bothering the server, who treated us with near disdain from the moment we walked in.
And then there was the food . . . I had a braised beef dish which would have been OK except the side dish was spinach fettuccine, cooked to middle school cafeteria perfection. My husband had some kind of rabbit casserole, where the rabbit had left the room. Maybe 'rabbit' is French for 'potato.'. The only Cote du Rhone by the glass was a Luberon, and it was a weak-kneed wine at best. Given that the place was totally empty, you would have thought a request for a glass of Gigondas could have been negotiated. But there was that server again. Nothing doing, girlfriend.
But the piece de resistance was the cup of coffee that my husband ordered. It came ice cold. Not cool or luke warm, but ice cold. Apparently the server had grabbed somebody's old coffee that was sitting at the bus station, and my husband was the lucky winner. A brief and uninterested apology was accompanied by a slightly warmer, presumably fresher, but definitely mediocre cup of coffee.
The coffee alone should have comped something, never mind the quality of the rest of the meal. I guess I know why you could have shot a cannon through the new lavish space and not hit a living thing. Bistro Clovis used to be a wonderfully warm, quite and pleasant place to enjoy a well cooked meal at a reasonable price. But that's so over.
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Bistro Clovis
1596 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94102
SF with a teenager
You've all nailed my dilemma. We're adventuresome eaters and the whole idea of this trip is to show this kid that there's a world outside of his town of 1318 people and three restaurants, which is 30 miles from Lockhaven, the big town and county seat, which boasts a population of 9000. But one of the reasons we invited him is that he shows clear signs of understanding that there is more to be seen. I'm loving Lers Ros, it sounds great, and I'm also thinking we might have to do a big lunch and a bite after the tour. Thanks for all the suggestions.
SF with a teenager
My grand nephew, 17, is coming to visit in August. He comes from a little town in PA and has really been nowhere. We're taking him on the Alcatraz evening tour on a Saturday and we'd like to do a 4 PM dinner beforehand. I was thinking about Chinatown or North Beach but don't have the first clue. Any recommendations much appreciated.
Estrella Damm, Inedit
Since I like hefeweisse, I followed a New York Times story to Inedit, an interesting blended and spiced beer brewed in Spain. It took a little finding, but if you like very light (not lite) beer, almost in the same parenthesis with champagne, you'll find it imaginative and worth the hunt. It's ten dollars for a 25.4 oz (750 ml) bottle.
To migrants, ex-pats, aliens and transplants, what do you miss?
Grew up in New York and have lived more than half my life on the west coast. I miss rye bread, Jewish corn bread, real bagels and true bialys, cannolis and bakeries where you can buy cake by the pound. I do need to say that I get back to NY every six months or so and a lot of those things are really disappearing on the east coast as well.
Mama's Curry on E. Brokaw in SJ
The Merc has coupons with significant discounts for this place so we dropped in two nights ago to check it out. We had goat curry, tandoori chicken and aloo gobi. Most of the food was basically unexciting, but the portions were ample, it was incredibly inexpensive, and the aloo gobi was wonderful . . . the cauliflower was really fresh and cooked to perfection. We also had onion kulcha and it was the best I've ever had.
It is NOT a place to go for ambience. It looks like it might have been some kind of big chain fast food place that went out of business. There's a nominal attempt at decor and mercifully absolutely no music, but you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time there. Styrofoam plates and plastic forks. Also there's no beer or wine, although they do have lassi and chai. So we're thinking it could be great for take-out, especially if we can figure out which other things they make as well as the aloo gobi.
The coupons are in the Merc Eye section, if you're so inclined.
desserts a lot of people do not like but you do?
I'm not big on pumpkin pie. I don't eat dessert all that often, and I hate to waste the opportunity on it. It's predictable and unexciting. If I'm going to have pie, it's definitely key lime or really good berry pie. I also like rice pudding, which I think a lot of people really hate. I like the kind you get in Greek diners in New York, but the best rice pudding I've ever had was at Cascal, a tapas restaurant in Mountain View, CA.
favorite guilty snack food
Trail mix. It's the raisin and nut combo, sweet and salty. I like the high end kind that has raw cashews in it and the low end kind that has some m&m's. I also like licorice allsorts, but somewhere along the way I read the calorie count and it was a lot higher than I would have guessed. I wish I had never looked :-)
Store Bought Hard Boiled Eggs??!!!
Cut cleaned celery and peeled carrots are handy when you're packing kids' lunches. I guess it's better to eat vegetables than not and if it's a convenience to buy them pre-cut and you're willing to pay for it, I can't see any harm. But hard-boiled eggs??!! That really does seem a little crazy. I suppose that if you consider that we all pay for bottled water, which is apparently mostly tap water in bottles, they can sell us anything.
What foods should I ask for from Turkey?
Turkey is no stranger to tourism and they package all kinds of things that your sister can bring back. She will undoubtedly visit the spice market in Istanbul and/or local markets wherever she goes. Just about everywhere you go they sell nifty assortments of spices prepackaged and tons of Turkish delight. All these things vary in quality, but your sister's Bf's family will surely be able to help her make her selections. Actually I thought the best Turkish delight was for sale in the Istanbul airport, and the prices were not particularly high!
Why do you wash lettuce?
Life of a farm worker here in California is not always nice either. Despite years of attempts to improve working conditions, there aren't always proper toilet facilities in the fields. If iodine and bleach seem like overkill, Trader Joe's sells an inexpensive organic vegetable wash. I have no idea how effective it is, but it makes me feel better.
Matzo balls and latkes?
At this point I'm convinced that you can freeze them but reheated they will never compare to fresh. I've reached the point where I just serve them out of the pan, don't even let them sit around while I finish a batch. That means I don't get any until everyone else has eaten their fill, but it's worth it for the rave reviews. And I'm in the shredded camp. The other kind makes me think of some weird fast food potato breakfast thing.
"Smokiness" in thai iced tea?
I'm just guessing, but the tea in Thai iced tea, at least the kind you get here in CA, tastes a lot like lapsong souchong.
Looking for a new Indian restaurant, South Bay
I'm in the mood for Indian food (northern), preferably not Pakistani, because I want a beer option. I don't want to travel to Amber in Mountain View and don't much care for the one in Santana Row. So what I'd like is a comfortable, casual, modestly priced kind of place in the South Bay. There are a lot of places on El Camino, but the one time I just dropped in on one it was dreadful (I can't remember the name, I think I blocked it out). Any recommendations?
which products have you stopped buying because of price increases or volume decreases?
Some time ago, coffee went from a pound bag to 12 ounces and I started holding out for sales. Then we joined Costco. We use a plain old automatic drip pot, and maybe we're just tone-deaf on coffee, but we discovered that we get acceptable AM coffee with Costco house brands, at about three dollars a pound.
your favorite diner foods
Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast, and whatever it is, a toasted corn muffin, no butter. All of this only works on the east coast. Out here on the west coast there really aren't diners as I knew them growing up in the NY metro area.
Kitchen renovation on the smart budget
Drawers are good . . . we have two very deep, sturdy drawers for dishes, because this is earthquake country and storing dishes in cabinets is ill advised. I had never thought of drawers for other things. I have rollouts for pots, but they're down low. If this thread keeps going I might have to tear out whole sections and rework them :-)
Kitchen renovation on the smart budget
We did Corian because granite seemed too grand for the space and there were less options ten years ago. It's attractive, easy to clean and it has held up well. Corian doesn't take big heat, but we brought the tile down from the walls next to the stove top so that we wouldn't have to worry about where to put a hot pot. So I'm wondering why you would say "anything but Corian?"
Kitchen renovation on the smart budget
This is true. On our last remodel we had a bid from a big contractor who added in $20K for job management. We took another bid, and ended up with several delays and a fair amount of hassle around things that were poorly done. Ultimately the $20K might have been an economy. But that takes me back to the big payment at the end.
And yet another thing . . . on our first project, my tendency was to just kind of ooh and aah as things progressed. My husband, OTOH, came home every day, whipped out a level and a tape measure and went to work. I quickly learned that when you've coughed up big bucks and people have just removed large chunks of your house, he had the right approach. So definitely monitor the project every step of the way.
I'm with DGresh. We did our cabinets to the ceiling with crown molding. We have high ceilings and the verticality of the cabinets is gorgeous. I use some of the high up shelves for paper towels (which can't really do much damage if they hit you in the head :-) For other things, I just use a step stool.
I'm really loving this thread. I've been meaning to retrofit our "appliance graveyard" with cantilevered shelves and put rollers in one of our cabinets, and now I'm feeling motivated.
Kitchen renovation on the smart budget
We did our kitchen ten years ago. First rule of all remodels is to read the contract. And negotiate. You're allowed to make changes to suit your own needs. You hire a contractor. That's the actual word. If that person can then do the work, that's a plus, but in any event you want a really good contract. Put a big payment at the end, payable on completion. Contractors love to do demolition and then head off to do something exciting elsewhere. You don't want a kitchen remodel to take forever. It gets old to live off a microwave and a toaster oven in your family room.
Getting more specific about the kitchen . . . If you have the space, get your contractor to set up a cheap sink somewhere, like your garage or even your patio, so you can do dishes during the work. It's relatively easy to figure out how and where to cook while you're out of your kitchen, but doing the dishes gets nasty.
If you don't have a big budget, make a list of things that really matter to you. We put bucks into getting a top of the line fridge. For you might be the stove-top. Whatever you do, get a stove hood that really works. It's not the sexiest part of the job, but if you hate setting off your smoke alarms it's a good investment. When it comes to storage, there are definitely things I'd do over. If you have deep cabinets, make sure the shelves slide out. And watch out for corners. You can easily end up with inconvenient spaces. Our designer goofed and we've got one. Be careful about lighting. You want several options of light level and you may want cans in one place, fixtures in another. And another small thing but if I had it to do over I'd be more careful: watch where you put your light switches. Make sure they're convenient.
Finally, based on my experience with three major remodels, no matter what you do, figure it'll take longer and cost more than your original plan.
Why does pork sausage have sugar in it?
I suppose there's a possibility. But honestly, if you read labels, you turn up sugar and salt in remarkable places. And given that we don't live in caves, preserving things probably doesn't require sugar in canned beans. If you followed the thread on expiry dates, lots of us toss things that have been around for a while. Some people toss them the instant they pass the date. We have refrigerators, freezers, and fairly constant indoor temperatures. And then there's the trade-off. We have literally an epidemic of type 2 diabetes, reaching even to young children, and rampant obesity. The average kid eats more McD's french fries than you'd imagine. The tastes we develop in childhood stay with us our entire lives. Surely there are better things to do with a potato than take out the flavor, reinstall it chemically, fry it in something ghastly, and then dump a bunch of salt on it? Woops, ranting here.
Why does pork sausage have sugar in it?
R&R1, that was my first thought and I figured I was just being my usual cynical self. I'm amazed at what has sugar in it. I occasionally use canned beans when I'm in a hurry, and some of the well known brands have both salt and sugar. Trader Joe's beans don't, and some of the Mexican brands are also sugar free. Salt is another issue. It's in all kinds of things where it isn't remotely necessary. Not only is diabetes epidemic, but so is obesity. Lots of people can't even taste decent food. They're completely sold to the sugar-salt taste spectrum.
Do You Hang on to Expired Food?
Funny you should mention. I threw out a package of dried apricots this morning that had expired in early 08, and wondered if I was being a little silly, but I knew we'd never eat them if we haven't eaten them by now. I think they had been to Europe and back in a carry on a few years ago. I suspect I'm over cautious about expiration dates, and I have a feeling things last well beyond their sell-by date, maybe not years, but certainly months. I recently opened a Greek yogurt that was several months out of date and it seemed fine. The dates are probably calculated to eliminate any seller liability.
I hate throwing out food so I'm trying to buy only products we really use and also to stay on top of what's hanging around and use it before it gets too old. I have the luxury of a second fridge, and I keep cereal, grains and things of that sort refrigerated. I like having a stash of lentils, split peas and various kinds of rice and I think that helps.
Need meal ideas while at the hotel
Can you plug in a toaster oven? When we remodeled our kitchen I used ours to make steaks and chops. If you have the luck to be anywhere near Trader Joe's has frozen potato pancakes, frozen eggplant slices, and premade meatloaf that could all work in one. If you're not near a TJ's, there might be comparable products that would work as well.
How important is using seasonal produce to you, as chowhound?
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we're really lucky because there's always a good variety of fresh seasonal produce. The seasonal stuff is generally relatively inexpensive and just looks better, so we tend to buy it. I also get the feeling it's really spring when there's strawberries and asparagus, summer when there's corn, winter when there's an abundance of butternut squash. And tomatoes are basically inedible out of season, and around here, along with zucchini, everyone is giving them away.
Lately I've decided to really pay attention on the general theory that we're all part of the system and it's probably healthier to eat seasonally and locally. Not really a behavior change but a different kind of consciousness. I did, however, buy asparagus from Peru for a dinner on New Year's Eve. So I guess the answer to your questions is yes I do and yes I care, increasingly so.
