And for anyone who missed it last time, The Dinner Diaries by Betsy Block is still funny and believable, if health-foodish (which helps make it believable).

Meanwhile, if you’re still interested in Hungry Monkey, which is hard to imagine, you have three more opportunities to see me, and then I am going back into my lead-lined sarcophagus.

• June 18, 2009, 5pm-6pm, Queen Anne Farmers Market (corner of Queen Anne Ave and Crockett): Signing.

• July 11, 2009, 10am, University District Farmers Market (Seattle): Cooking demo.

• July 22, 2009, 6pm-9pm, Palace Ballroom: “Foodportunity” with Mina Williams, Nancy Leson, Rebekah Denn, Ronald Holden. $25. Buy tickets.

My next book will be about how much I love gold doubloons.

So I’m going to steal a page from MattBites and do a no-particular-order San Francisco top ten.

1. Yellowtail at the Slanted Door. I had lunch at this local institution, and the grilled pork noodle bowl was excellent, but the fish was stunning: four slices of Japanese yellowtail topped with crispy shallots and thai basil, and I tasted a little chile and sesame oil, too. I used my chopsticks to fold them up like little tacos. One of the best raw fish preparations I’ve had anywhere, and I live in Seattle, so I’ve had a lot.

2. Sardine toasts at Contigo. Chef-owner Brett Emerson’s blog is called In Praise of Sardines, so these sardine tartines were predictably fabulous: fresh fish, crunchy toast, creamy avocado. The hot chocolate with churros was also exemplary. Also the pork belly sandwich. This place is also crazy inexpensive, given the quality.

3. Roast beef sushi and burdock-lotus root salad at Delica RF-1. This is the kind of deli counter you’d bypass if it were at your local supermarket, but this is a Japanese deli counter. Their signature item is roast beef nigiri sushi: a slice of rare roast beef with wasabi and grated daikon on a finger of rice. I ate two. But the best thing I had at Delica was the spicy burdock and lotus root salad, which was a superbly crunchy lunch.

4. Stop signs. Many main streets in San Francisco have mostly stop signs rather than stoplights. It works very well. I am an urban design geek.

5. The epicenter of hipsterdom. Have you ever wondered where hipsters come from? The factory seems to be located somewhere around here, which is not coincidentally the location of…

6. Secret Breakfast at Humphry Slocombe. Slocombe is a very grownup ice cream parlor. The other flavor I tried was yuzu poppyseed. There are some slightly more normal flavors, but not many. Anyway, secret breakfast is bourbon and cornflakes. It tastes exactly like bourbon and cornflakes. Great stuff.

7. Pasta shells and beans with nduja. Sorry, this great pasta dish isn’t available at a restaurant, because Anita of Married with Dinner made it, from this recipe. But the nduja, which is a spicy spreadable salami, is very much available, from Boccalone at the ferry building (or by mail order). I brought Laurie a chub of nduja as a present, and made bruschetta with nduja and radish-arugula salad. You have to try this stuff. It’s great spread on bread, but when you put it in a hot pan, it melts and coats everything with spicy goodness. The pasta Anita made was as good as anything I had in a restaurant on my trip.

8. Korean fried chicken at Coco Bang and Italian fried chicken at SPQR. My first night in SF, I was staying downtown and found Korean fried chicken half a block from my hotel. Then, at SPQR, I had hot and juicy fried chicken (not really Italian in any way, but it’s an Italian restaurant), along with plenty of other great stuff, including cumin-scented pork heart and a perfect spaghetti all’amatriciana.

9. Samusa soup at Burma SuperStar. It sounds like a joke: a bowl of rich, spicy soup with falafel and samosa chunks in it. Sog city, right? I suppose you think it’s also silly to put crispy tortilla strips in soup.

10. Origami at Paper Tree. Iris and I love origami, and this is origami heaven. In addition to selling enough different origami products to satisfy the entire population of Japan, there’s a museum section with feats of origami ninjutsu contributed by masters. This didn’t do much for my ego, but wow. I brought home a set of waterproof origami pirate ships and junks and pleasure craft.

On The Splendid Table this week, John Moe (whom I knew back when he used to dress up in a chicken suit and sing comic songs) talks about trying to come up with a dinner that his whole family, including two kids, will eat. Comedy ensues: link (the segment starts at 20:00). (Also on this broadcast, Takashi Yagihashi talks about noodles; I absolutely love this guy’s book, Takashi’s Noodles.)

On Morning Edition today, some guy has written a book saying it’s okay to feed sushi to a baby.

May 8: Lara Ferroni at Cook and Eat
May 9: Rebekah Denn at Eat All About It

The main idea of the VBT is for me to goad these popular and award-winning writers into telling their readerships about the book. Since anyone reading this blog already knows too much about the book, I won’t post every time a new blog jumps in, but the VBT runs through May 17, and you can follow along with the rest on the Hungry Monkey site.

Chris Bianco’s Pizza Philosophy

Like a martial arts student visiting the Shaolin Temple, my friend Brandon Pettit went to the mountaintop to gain wisdom from an acknowledged master of his discipline. The discipline is pizza, the mountaintop is Phoenix, Arizona, and the master is Chris Bianco, chef-owner of Pizzeria Bianco. Brandon asked a question: What keeps Bianco coming back to make the same six pizzas day after day?

“You’re the motherfucker in front,” said Bianco, “controlling the fuckin’ elements, putting the shit in and out of the oven.”

Brandon and I nodded our heads slowly at this zenlike pronouncement.

I go through rice phases. For a while, nothing would do but Thai jasmine. Lately it’s been medium-grain japonica rice from California. Sometimes I get a hankering for basmati.

Thailand and India export a lot of rice, which is why you see bags of basmati and jasmine at Trader Joe’s and probably your local supermarket. Japan exports practically no rice. It’s a small country, and they eat all of their rice and then some. The rice you eat at your local sushi place, assuming your local sushi place is in Seattle rather than Japan, comes from California. Brands like Kokuho Rose, Nishiki, and Neko Neko do their best to look Japanese, but it’s all Californian.

Not that this is a bad thing. California produces some very fine products such as meyer lemons, Korean tacos, and Laurie.

On a recent trip to Uwajimaya, however, I noticed that they do, in fact, carry Japanese rice, in 1-kilo bags selling for $20 to $35. The packaging, naturally, is gorgeous. Hmm…rare, high price, pretty sack. I put out the word on Twitter: anyone tried this stuff?

Hsiao-Ching Chou responded:

Spent waaaay too much money on rice from Japan. I thought the flavor would be transporting. No.

I trust Hsiao-Ching, but I didn’t say no when Jay Friedman of Gastrolust gave me two cups of Koshihikari rice from Tochigi prefecture. Just saying the word “prefecture” is transporting, don’t you think?

I made a cup each of Nishiki from California and the koshihikari. On appearance, the koshihikari won: it’s aggressively milled pearls of rice, shorter grain than the Nishiki. But they tasted the same to me.

Janice Martin of Tanuki pointed me to this blog post about newly harvested fall rice in Japan. Maybe I’ll look for that. It sounds even more expensive!

I also tried one other rice, haiga mai, which is rice (Californian, in this case) milled until the bran is gone but the germ remains, so there’s a little brown spot at the end of each kernel. It’s been called “brown rice for people who don’t like brown rice.” Well, I’m certainly one of those people, but I didn’t like this stuff, either, although I could be cooking it wrong. It cooked up a little mushy and left a weird carpet-like layer on the bottom of the rice cooker.

To make a very long story short, then, if you like medium-grain rice, the basic California stuff is just fine.

1

We ordered some paper towels from Amazon Fresh. When they arrived, I opened the package and found that some water had gotten inside and mildew was growing. Ew. I called the customer service number, and they not only sent the truck back the same day with a replacement, but they didn’t charge me for the paper towels at all.

2

On nights when Laurie is out, Iris and I sometimes order pizza, sit on a picnic blanket in the living room, and watch Harry Potter movies. Sometimes we order said pizza from Pagliacci, sometimes from a national chain. Last week, Iris really, really wanted the chain pizza. I looked at the web site and found there were no applicable coupons and that to order a medium thin-and-crispy pizza would cost almost $20. I balked. “Hey, Iris,” I said, “what about frozen pizza?”

“Could we heat it up?”

“Yes.” I went to QFC and got Red Baron Thin n’ Crispy Five Cheese, which was on sale for $3. I put some pepperoni and red onion on my half. Was it really great pizza? No. Was it every bit as good as Pizza Hut? Absolutely.

Buy it now…

…from Powell’s
…from Amazon
…from your local bookstore
…from Barnes & Noble.

Or ask at your local bookstore; if they don’t have it in stock, they should be able to get it from their supplier within a couple of days.

To answer a common question: you can’t buy the book directly from me, but I will send a signed bookplate if you send me a SASE.

Thanks for reading!