So I’ve decided I’m going to start blogging again after a 4 or 5 month hiatus. I really haven’t had anything all that interesting to talk about. I’ve been fairly bored in Santa Barbara, and have become even more bored updating this thing with some of the mundane activities of a given weekend. I’m going to try to change the focus of this space to something I really care about, and that is food. I’ve spent a lot of my free time in the past few weeks reading cookbooks and cooking. I would be eating at fancy restaurants, too, if I had a somewhat reasonable salary. In essence, I have become a “foodie.” I’m the guy that looks down on others for using pasta sauce out of a jar. Make it from scratch, it’s really not that hard. Start with large can of tomatoes, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, and some fresh herbs. You’ll already be closer to good food than some goopy red shit that comes out of jar. So, instead of going through the usual updates of what went down over the past weekend, I’m instead going to talk about what I’m cooking. I’ll post some recipes of thing I’ve cooked, along with some photos, and talk about why the dish worked or didn’t work.

But before I get to that, I’m going to write about San Francisco. I’m staying at the Palace Hotel with my parents. My mom is here for a national school board convention, and my dad and I are tagging along just for fun. Tonight we went out to a hot new restaurant called Ame. I don’t know much about the chef, but if I had to guess he’s Japanese with classical French training. To start I had a octopus bolognese over potato gnocchi. For a main course I had grilled lobster tail, scallops, and cuttlefish. My dad had a pork chop that I thought was the best dish of the night. The pork most people are used to is from the supermarket, and has been robbed of most of the fat that makes pork taste like pork. This was definitely not supermarket pork. It looked and tasted more like a meaty veal chop than the pork chops I’m used to. It was served with “mac & cheese.” The cheese was a hard chedder, a little bit of Parmesan, and some black truffles. Overall I thought our meal was excellent, and definitely one of the more memorable meals I’ve had.

While my mom is working tomorrow, my dad and I are going to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They have a Picasso exhibit comparing his works to the American artists he inspired. We’re planning on meeting up with my mom for lunch at the Slanted Door, a popular Vietnamese restaurant at the Ferry Building. For dinner we’ve got reservations at Aqua, so I’m sure I’ll have a post tomorrow (or Sunday) about that.