Consuming Ambitions

Death by Chocolate at COPIA on Saturday

Gotta love COPIA! Tomorrow the Napa-based non-profit center for food and wine is throwing its biggest ever chocolate-fest: over 40 chocolatiers and wineries participating in a festival dedicated to all things chocolate. Enjoy food and wine pairings, confection samplings, and dessert demonstrations. One highlight is a tasting led by San Francisco chocolatier Gary Guittard (10:30am). What better way to enjoy the balmy weather than to dash up to the wine country to gorge on chocolate?

The festival runs tomorrow (Saturday, February 17) from 10:30am-4pm. Festival pass costs $45, or $35 for members.

COPIA
500 First Street
Napa, CA 94559
(707) 259-1600

Tofu Cabin

Tonight the wife was in the mood for something spicy -- food, that is -- so we headed up to the recently opened San Mateo branch of Myung Dong Tofu Cabin. This cabin does not feature logs or fireplaces, but instead a clean interior, attentive staff, and plenty of solid Korean dishes. The menu is extremely accessible to those uninitiated with Korean cuisine. I like that the menu lists each dish in Korean writing translated clearly into English, with a phonetic description of the Korean writing so you can learn how natives call each dish. There are also nice color photos of some items.

As is traditional, the meal started with a selection of banchan, complementary small side dishes. At some Korean restaurants, the banchan is so bountiful that we have been known to fill up on them while waiting for the ordered food to arrive, so that when our entrees hit the table we really just want to ask them to pack our main dishes to go, to allow us to head home and digest. At Tofu Cabin, the banchan consisted of kimchi, bean sprouts, seaweed, spicy radishes, chap chae noodles, and a salad of firm tofu. A nice selection that left us plenty of room to enjoy our entrees.

On a cold winter's night, there is nothing better than soon doo boo, tofu stew. This zesty dish is served in a small iron cauldron, with the reddish-orange broth literally boiling as it is set in front of you. Traditionally a raw egg is broken into the bubbling soup immediately after serving, leaving you with a tenderly soft boiled egg to enjoy (sometimes I like to remove the egg once it's cooked and mix it into my rice). A warning, this dish comes in three varieties: mild (which some might consider ever so spicy), regular (which is spicy), and spicy (which is, as one of my Korean friends likes to say, a recipe for "fire ass" the next day). In a reckless move, I decided tonight to go with what they call spicy, or I call fire ass, and paid the price as I alternated quick, painful bites of tofu stew with long sips of tea, and bites of blissfully bland rice and cool seaweed. As I sniffled and dabbed at my nose with the napkin, my wife had to ask a few times, "Are you okay?" So I'll be going back to "regular" (which is actually spicy) next time.

My favorite order so far is the combo which gives you a choice of tofu stew (choice of seafood, beef, pork, mushroom, vegetable, salted soybean, or combo) plus kalbi, broiled short ribs, for $17.99. This is a lot of food, and most people would be perfectly satisfied with a normal single entree (which runs $10-12 depending on what you order) plus all the banchan. So Tofu Cabin is a pretty reasonably priced dinner out.

The original location of Tofu Cabin is down in Santa Clara. Both branches are open 7 days a week, 10:30am-10pm.

Myung Dong Tofu Cabin

2968 S. Norfolk Street (in the Marina Plaza, off Hillsdale)
San Mateo, CA 94403
(650) 525-1484

1484 Halford Avenue
Santa Clara, CA 95051
(408) 246-1484

Sharp Bites

Yesterday's New York Times featured an article entitled "Sharp Bites" describing the growing popularity and clout of hard core food bloggers, particularly in NYC, the city that never stops noshing. Nothing like people out on the fringe to make one feel perfectly normal!

Bruschetta for your Superbowl party

When Chris Yeh emailed me saying, "I'm going to send you a lazy man's bruschetta recipe," my first thought was, how damn lazy could Chris be? Bruschetta is already a lazy man's food. You take some day-old bread (because you're too lazy to get fresh-baked), toast it up, and throw some tomato and basil on top. Languid. But Chris is a good source of foodie tips, so I humored him. He replied with an explanation:

Recently, I've been reading Under the Tuscan Sun, a wonderful combination of travelogue and cookbook which would make anyone long for Tuscany. One of the classic Italian dishes described in this book is bruschetta. The basic bruschetta recipe is simplicity itself:

1) Drizzle olive oil over thick slices of bread.
2) Grill.
3) Slice a garlic clove in half and rub the cut end on the bread.
4) Make a topping with some kind of vegetable and/or cheese--the most common is tomato and basil.
5) Spread the topping on top of the grilled bread slices.

Unfortunately, I'm American rather than Italian, so I'm too lazy to even be bothered with that much work. My lazy man's bruschetta is a bastardization that cuts corners and dispenses with subtlety in favor of standard national over-the-top strategy. Naturally, it's enormously popular. Here's what you do:

1) In a bowl, mix together chopped tomatoes (preferrably with the seeds removed), thinly sliced garlic cloves, a big dollop of olive oil, chopped basil (if you have it), and salt and pepper to taste. If you're really lazy, just dump whole tomatoes and basil in a food processor along with the other ingredients. Me, I'm too lazy to wash a food processor, so I stick with old-fashioned chopping.
2) Toast slices of whatever bread you have handy.
3) Spoon topping on to the toasted bread and eat.

Keep in mind, as with anything else in America, enough is never enough! Be sure to use lots of garlic, olive oil, and salt, so that the flavor comes through strong. For parties, make the topping ahead of time, and toast and top right before serving.

Hey, thanks Chris for a very well written and entertaining explanation! Now I can knock off early and go to bed so I can get plenty of rest before the Superbowl (gotta get ready for lots of extra lifting...of chips, appetizers, and beer!). My slight value add to this blog post will be to point out that if you want to serve bruschetta at your Superbowl party, it's fine to toast the bread in advance (and even rub on garlic if you're using the purist's recipe) but leave the topping for your guests to apply on a just-in-time basis, or else the bread will become soggy and unappetizing.