After the Starter Lab Suzanne and I attended at Local: Mission Eatery, we were eager to actually go there to eat. We dropped in for brunch today.

But first a bit about Local.

Local: Mission Eatery is a new place to eat in the Mission, on 24th Street. In fact the owner Yaron Milgrom takes inspiration from 24 St., including having a collage of the intersections of 24th along one wall.

Located between Folsom and Shotwell, it’s just a couple blocks from The 24th & Mission BART station and just down the block from Philz Coffee. You might not need to go to Philz for after-lunch coffee, however: Local (more accurately Knead) brews a very fine cup of FourBarrel.

The focus is on fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. The menu changes daily to reflect this focus. From their site:

All of our vegetables and fruit, all of our meat and fish, all of our dairy and eggs, all of our olive oil and rice, are sourced from the astounding bounty of California.

From this bounty, we craft the elements of the sandwiches, soups, salads, sodas, and dinners. Our sauces, spreads, preserves, fresh cheeses, and more will be housemade. It’s about quality and transparency. It’s about real food.

The menu (which can be found on their landing page at www.localmissioneatery.com is simple, with typically 5 items on it, plus a few daily specials. The pricing structure so far is clean and simple, reflecting the menu’s contents: $3 for drinks and simple plates (e.g. the Pickle Plate), $6 for soups, salads, and the cheese plate, and $9 for the entrée style dishes (sandwiches and brunch specials).

The place is nicely appointed as well, and very comfortable to eat at. As you walk in, the wall to your right is covered by a couple of planter hangings: flowers and herbs.

The decor is a combination of rustic and modern, with materials ranging from natural wood to brushed stainless steel.

The kitchen is open. You order at the counter and they call you when your order is ready. You bus your own table when you’re done. Very casual, very low overhead. Focus is firmly on the food. Where it should be.

Brunch

With two things on the menu for brunch, and wanting to do a fairly thorough review, we got one of each to share (which we usually do: we’re cute that way, as well as both wanting to try everything), and a couple of the drinks.

The Asparagus Sandwich (slow-poached egg, meyer lemon mousseline, open-faced on knead’s brioche) was very nice.

The eggs poached just right with nice runny yolks. The asparagus was tender, but with just enough crunch. We both love asparagus, and this delivered.

We had the Grits (grits from ridgecut gristmills, 4505 meats breakfast sausage, smoky greens, ricotta) as well.

I’ve always avoided grits in the past (I’ve spent some time working in North Carolina and Georgia where such things are staples at breakfast buffets) but decided to give it a try today. I’m glad I did. Creamy with a bit of texture. Very tasty as well. The sausages (from 4505, as noted) were fabulous. The greens gave a nice edge to grits.

The dishes were well designed for a couple to share (keep that in mind if you’re thinking of a brunch date) having 2 eggs and 2 sausages, respectively.

For drinks, Suzanne got the Tangelo Cream Soda which was very good. I opted for the Iced Sun Tea. It was nice enough, but not spectacular in the way the Soda was.

Knead

What about breads, pastries, and (most importantly at brunch) coffee? At the back of the restaurant, directly behind you when you are ordering, is Knead Patisserie.

Wanting to see what they could do we had one of the morning’s specials: a Rum-Raisin Cinnamon Roll. As mentioned above they brew FourBarrel coffee. I ordered a mug and was pleased when it was just what I like as a breakfast coffee.

To top it all off, Local has a cookbook lending library. These folks are serious about food and the sharing of it.

I’m all for supporting local restaurants, and this one is only a few blocks away. Given that, I expect to drop in occasionally. Monday I’ll be checking out their lunch offerings. You should check them out as well.

Suzanne and I went to the first “Lab” (aka class) at Local: Mission Eatery. They had a guest presenter from Sour Flour in to tell us *ALL* about natural starters. There’s way more to know about starters than I was aware. Way more.

Class started off by the instructor putting a couple loaves of bread in the oven and describing what went into each.

He spent some time talking about the oven and it’s effects on the bread (temperature, humidity, the baking stone, etc.).

He talked a lot about care of starters. There’s so much to it: hydration ratios, feeding schedules, type of flour. It seems to be as big an undertaking and effort as a child or puppy. These folks even have names for their starters. Frankly it was getting a little creepy how they were anthropomorphizing them!

This loaf was interesting.  It had been touching the other in the oven at first and he pulled them apart the first time he checked them. This resulted in it “oozing out” (That’s a technical bread baking term?) resulting in a loaf that looked something like a turtle.

And the final result.  Turtle-looking or not, it turned out well.

Despite hearing far more about starters than I wanted to know or even thought possible, the class was fun. We did learn some interesting things, and got to sample some yummy bread. My biggest takeaway was that I should continue buying bread at a bakery, made by people who take it seriously. Like the folks at Sour Flour.

I’ll be eating at Local soon. The menu looks good and I’ll post my impressions of the food here.

Suzanne wrote a humorous account of the class based on our discussion afterwards. Go read it.

As a followup point, the guy who taught the class runs Sour Flour, which will be setting up retail operations. Check them out.

Local: Mission Eatery is located in the Mission, on 24th St. between Folsom and Shotwell.

This post was originally going to be about the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market which is restarting on Tuesday & Thursday. Suzanne and I caught the bus into downtown and made our way to the Ferry Building. Alas, it was pretty lame. A few booths around the front door (and nothing in behind). Most of those were selling prepared foods. So we started home, walking down Market Street.

It was late morning by now and getting near time for lunch, so we started brainstorming as to where we should stop to eat. We eventually decided to visit Split Pea Seduction, a small place run by a friend of Suzanne’s.

Alas I have no picture of the food. I find that the food arrives, the food looks good, the food gets eaten, “Oh shit! I didn’t take a pic.” I do however have a collage shot of the interior. Very minimal, very to the point.

Likewise the menu is spare and to the point. It changes daily based on what’s available as they strive to base the menu on “seasonal ingredients purchased directly from small farms”.

We had similar leanings with regard to the menu so decided to split a salad and sandwich. For the salad we had the “Baby Spinach with Pickled Vegetables, Pecans, Sieved Egg and Green Garlic Vinaigrette“, and the sandwich we chose was the “Roast Spiced Natural Chicken, Avocado, Feta, Chimichurri, Aioli and Lettuce on a House Bun“. Both were very nicely done and tasty. The salad was plentiful, and served in a takeaway container for no-fuss handling of any leftovers, of which we had none.

I travel a lot these days, both for business and pleasure, and that used to mean subjecting myself to horrid coffee and middling tea. No more, thanks to a couple of simple gadgets and my wife’s ever-present patience during packing.

We carry with us a Mukka Express by Bialetti to make cappuccino-like and latte-like drinks that, while not as good as one gets at a great cafe, a far sight better than what the average North American restaurant serves, and on par with average European coffee. In Europe we use a grinder we’d bought at a Monoprix in Paris, but it works on 220 volts, and doesn’t give us a fine enough grind at 110 volts, so we either need a North American option or a dual-voltage converter system. We usually carry coffee beans from Kicking Horse, a good Canadian company and demerera sugar, leaving only milk to buy on site, and most places have milk. (This proved a little tougher in Bangalore, but I’ll leave that for another story.)

Tea requires less work and less complicated equipment. We’ve recently grown fond of a portable, durable infuser by ForLife Design, and leaves from TeaHaus, another fine Canadian company. No more Tetley; no more Red Rose. Even most hotel coffee makers heat water hot enough for good tea.

So it takes some more effort, and some extra room in our suitcases, but when you travel as much as we do, you value a good cappuccino in the morning and good tea to aid the digestion later in the day.

I was about to make french toast for brunch, when Suzanne says “Why don’t you make a frittata, you could finish up that bit of broccoli.” Why yes, I think, and the mushrooms. And since I had just beat the eggs and cream, and not gotten any further … why not? After all, french toast & frittata are basically the same … up until you have the eggs beaten anyway. Then they start to diverge.

8 eggs
some cream
some red onion, thinly sliced
half a dozen med/lrg mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 head of brocolli, chopped
half pound of peppered bacon
Parmesan cheese to taste, grated

Start by frying the bacon until just crisp. Drain and crumble. By starting with the bacon, you have lovely bacon drippings to use in frying the rest. Saute the the onion. Add the mushrooms, then the broccoli. Cook until they’re just soft. Beat the eggs & cream, season with salt and pepper and pour over the vegetable mixture. Mix in the cheese and bacon. cook over low heat until the egg is set.

At this point, I hear you’re supposed to switch to the oven to finish the dish. Not having made a frittata before, I wasn’t aware of that (I was just winging it), and actually got the thing flipped into another skillet to cook the top, then flipped back onto a plate to serve. Very adept flipmanship, if I do say so. Here it is:

Remember that mozzarella roll we made for the dinner party?

It was like a jellyroll of cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and basil. It struck us that it would make the perfect filling for a paninni. So I picked up some nice bread, sliced up the roll, and laid it out between slices of bread and grilled it to perfection.

Why was this idea so great? Because when you usually make paninni, the filling is layered. The cheese melts but doesn’t always/usually bind everything together. With the roll, the various bits of filling are more or less evenly distributed. Most significantly the cheese is everywhere. Omnipresent cheese … mmmmm.

Anyway, it turned out very well. Ya, I know, this is the internet … pic or it didn’t happen. So here you are:

We recently had our February dinner party. This time we went with an Italian theme as mentioned in a previous post.

Things played out pretty much as planned. The only real change was that a few people had to bail so we ended up with 6 including me and Suzanne.

While we finished cooking the pasta, there was antipasti for people to nibble on. Top to bottom: sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, grilled eggplant, artichoke hearts, and roasted red peppers.

We also had a selection of Italian cheeses.

The final bit of antipasti was a mozzarella roll. Suzanne got the cheese at the Fancy Food Show (possibly NSFW if you work somewhere uptight). It was a sheet of mozzarella rolled up into a cylinder. The idea is to unroll it, put stuff on it and roll it up again. Like a jelly roll or sticky buns. Suzanne filled it wirh sundried tomatoes and fresh basil. Neither of us are quite sure how we felt about the result. I later found a great way to put it to optimum use. That’s for a latter post.

Then there was the pasta. We cooked up some dried faro linguini that @daksis had given me to try. Very nice flavor and texture. Also I made (from scratch) a ricotta gnocchi. For sauces we had a basil pesto and an “almost” puttanesca (leaving out the anchovies as one guest was vegetarian).

Then there was dessert! Suzanne made an incredibly good Ligurian lemon cake with raspberries, and I made tiramisu from the recipe in The Silver Spoon (also see this, which includes the tiramisu recipe) which I recently added to my cookbook collection (at the suggestion of @daksis).

Throw in lots of wine and plenty of coffee, and we had a very pleasant evening.

We were looking around in the fridge tonight for something for dinner when Suzanne pulled out a big bag of mushrooms I’d picked up last time I was at Wholefoods. It was a lot of mushrooms. “I could make Cream of Mushroom Soup,” she said. “Yes, please!” I responded.

She started with this recipe from epicurious.com:

Ingrediants

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
3 leeks, halved, thinly sliced (white and pale green parts only)
2 pounds button mushrooms, sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup long-grain white rice
3 1/4 cups (or more) canned low-salt chicken broth
3 1/4 cups canned beef broth
1/2 cup whipping cream

1/4 cup chopped fresh chives

Preparation

Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add leeks and sauté until tender, about 5 minutes. Increase heat to medium-high. Add mushrooms and sauté until mushrooms are soft and dry, about 10 minutes. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute. Stir in rice. Add 3 1/4 cups chicken broth and beef broth to pot. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until rice is very tender, about 30 minutes. Cool slightly. Working in batches, puree soup in blender until smooth. Return soup to pot. Stir in cream. Thin with more chicken broth, if desired. (Soup can be made 1 day ahead. Cool slightly, cover and refrigerate. Bring to simmer before serving.)

Ladle soup into 8 bowls. Sprinkle with chives and serve.

Some tweaks were made, largely because she was working with what was around the kitchen.

• 1 leek and some onions instead of 3 leeks
• brown rice instead of white, putting it in earlier
• 4 cups beef broth, and 3 cups vegetable broth
• and of course, using a stick/immersion blender (if you don’t have one … get one