no buzzers, just a keyboard

Just took the Jeopardy! online quiz... I think I did better than last year's performance. And hopefully, that's enough to get me on the show, since I obviously didn't get a call from them since last March.

I'm happy that I didn't miss the test today and relieved at how quickly some of the answers came to me... judging by yesterday's program, I thought I'd do worse this year!

eye spy

Several people in line for the Nx bus this afternoon noticed a woman snapping photos of the bus and - most likely - the passengers as well. Passengers on either side of me tried to hide their face with whatever they had on hand, be it briefcase or a clipper card. This didn't really bother me - maybe because the photographer is a woman - but it certainly intrigued me.

Now perhaps she has a valid reason to be snapping photos... if only she'd made it known. Is she working on a school project? Or is she the most unprofessional Muni employee to count the number of passengers boarding a bus?

As a fellow amateur photographer, I usually try to restrict my subjects to inanimate objects or aware participants. I encourage everyone to do the same; if you want to take a photo of a human, just ask! But since no such propositions were voiced, I thought it fair to snap these photos of this wannabe-Lisbeth Salander from my perch on the bus.

Gotcha!

Usually the counting employee just, well, counts the number of people boarding a bus. No photos needed...

so they're not the same?

I'm so addicted to the spicy beef noodle soup at French Baguette on Bush Street that I've had it for two straight lunches. Must not return tomorrow.

For those of you who have already been, you know that French Baguette stands on the grounds of ye olde Hi-Tea and appears to be carrying nearly the same business model. Both serve quick-to-assemble Vietnamese comfort food at happy prices (for the Financial District, anyways.) There are some notable menu differences (Hi-Tea served these great baked rice plates while French Baguette has the secret to a fantastic spicy beef soup) but the flavors and prices are pretty similar.

Now about this spicy beef noodle soup (don't say pho or the cashier will think you're ordering beef balls...) yesterday I got it to go and had to assemble it at my desk. Unlike Hi-Tea, French Baguette does not have those nice wide plastic bowls and I ended up eating out of a tall slender plastic quart. Doable, yes, but not easy or comfortable. So if you can, eat the soup on location. Not only will the spicy beef noodle soup come served in a proper wide bowl but the fixings - bean sprouts, basil, cilantro, pepper, and lime - will arrive on its own ceramic platter. That's mighty fancy, considering that my take-out extras came in a paper bag.

You can't see it but rolled inside that napkin are a metal fork and pair of chopsticks. Metal... not as easy to grip noodles but it does look extra classy.

Now the soup... man the spicy soup is phenomenal! The broth is rich, beefy, and not too spicy and fills you up just right... this spicy pho reminds me of a soup I had in Taipei. Everyone - from kid sister to hunchbacked grandma - hopped on Taipei's metro and ended up in a strange market area. We climbed stairs in violation of basic US fire codes to a cash-only restaurant (no taxes!) where there was only one thing to eat: beef noodle soup. Your only choice was whether to get it original or spicy. Shady? Slightly. Safe to eat? Hopefully. But let me tell you, that tax-free spicy soup in that speakeasy of a soupery was on par with the best pork dumplings in Taipei.

And yes, French Baguette's spicy beef noodle soup really tastes just like that stew in Taipei.

Eater beware: if you're not a fan of the non-beef parts of a cow, French Baguette's spicy beef noodle soup comes with a few pieces of tendon. And even when you count the tendons, the soup could've used a little more meat to fill it out. But I was very happy, due to the memory of Taipei and the fact that I love rice noodles. This filling lunch costs less than $8 with tax and currently, French Baguette offers a free soda with any pho or noodle plate.

I can't speak for the authenticity of French Baguette's Vietnamese-ness but I believe that even if the restaurant is not "truly Vietnamese," it serves tasty grub all on its own.

when only the best will do

When you're missing Italy and you want the best Italian-style pizza around, you need to satisfy your urges at Gialina in Glen Park. Nothing - except a return flight to Napoli - will do.

Warmed up some stomachs with a starter of salted cod cakes. The cakes are lightly fried so they're crunchy on the outside but not too greasy. Despite the name, the fish is not too salty and all but melts in your mouth. The sauce isn't too tartar-y (as in "dang, this sauce did NOT come out of a bottle!" Even the miniature side salad is nice... it's that sort of classy nice you get when your salad tastes good and it's not smothered in dressing.

If you don't know which pizza to get, I recommend my favorite: Amatriciana Like all pizzas, Gialina tops each pie as artistically as they are strewn in Italy and serves them on thin beds of pizza bread. Unlike the others, the combination of ingredients in the Amatriciana becomes something more than the sum of its parts. Tomato, chiles, and oregano form a savory base for pancetta, pecorino cheese, and a single egg. Once you get the pizza, use a slice (or a knife, as my ingenious companion pointed out) to break the egg and swirl it all over the hot pizza. This pie is a little salty, a little spicy, and very tasty... and this softly-cooked texture of egg is what converted me into an egg-eater. I love this pizza and I honestly would not mind eating it everyday.

Even when the Euro is dropping against the dollar, a trip to Gialina is far more economical than a 14-hour flight to Italy.

the SF experience

A truly San Francisco phenomenon that happened not too long ago...

You have family/friends/company visiting San Francisco and you want to show them around town. You want to take them to some interesting spots and some not-so-popular-but-still-awesome places. And you want them to be able to take in the fabulous views of the city.

So I started by taking my friend to the bison paddock in Golden Gate park... skies are gray but clouds are high. Plus, the buffalo are roaming!

Then I drove over to the Golden Gate Bridge and enjoyed the clear blue sky while explaining to my friend that  you can't walk across highways in the USA. Oh, mi lindo Peru...

From the Golden Gate Bridge visitor plaza, we could clearly see downtown. "Wow!" I thought. "No fog!"

And then, around 4 in the afternoon, I drove up Twin Peaks so my friend could look down Market Street and see the Bay Bridge. This was a mistake, especially since I started to see the gray and the moisture coming in. But if I get there really fast, we'll still be able to catch a glimpse, right? I mean, aren't these peaks supposed to keep the fog on the west side of the city?

Not only were we engulfed in dense fog at the summit, but it got very cold. I decided to snap this photo of the great gray view from inside the car.

After thinking about it, I decided that it wasn't so bad after all. No San Francisco experience is complete without a little fog, and we've got enough fog to cover all the moors of Scotland. You hear that, Heathcliff?

ride the pig!

It was only a matter of time before someone started a Peruvian food truck, and even less time before I found my way to its blue plastic windows. Enter Sanguchon, the mobile food kitchen from the man behind three Peruvian restaurants in the Bay Area... I'd been to Piqueo's in Bernal Heights about two years ago and I found the food quite delicious. However, the marinated garbanzo beans - their version of free bread that was highly praised in an old version of the 100 Things to Eat List - was a huge letdown. Let's just say if you want to make garbanzo beans more appealing, don't serve them cold.

Anyways, back to the tasty matter at hand...

Sanguchon is decked out in their cute pig logo and Peruvian flags

how could you not want a lomo saltado sandwich!?

Even though it was raining and I had already brought a lunch and had to set it aside, I knew I had to seek out this vehicle of deliciousness at Truckstop. Here, Bunny shows off her lomo saltado sandwich...

bursting with lomo goodness

I must order a sandwich next time... if not for the lomo (which I already love) then for the adorable little wrappers!

That'll do, pig. That'll do.

Instead, I gave in to my craving for ají de gallina and chose the wrap. Ají de gallina is shredded chicken in a sauce made from the ever-present ají pepper but it's not spicy; the sauce is almost always thickened with some cream. There's also lots of rice, a few potato chunks, onions, and a squeeze of lime, another quintessential Peruvian ingredient. The wrap is comparable to Curry Up Now's chicken tikka masala burrito without the effects of feeling like you're going to burst at the seams.

Also, Sanguchon has the absolute best chicha morada I have ever had stateside. THE BEST! The purple corn is slightly sweet, the punch is spiked with just the right touch of cinnamon, and the little fruit bits make it look like sangria. And faking alcoholic beverages at work is necessary for maintaining that devil-may-care attitude. You know you want it...

ají de gallina wrap and chicha morada...
am I in San Francisco or Trujillo?

For dessert, Bunny offered one of her alfajor cookies to me... the dough is soft to the touch yet maintains its shape. The filling is more of a rich dark caramel than a dulce de leche flavor, which I enjoyed very much. A chewy, not-too-sweet ending to a very happy meal.

Do not pop entire cookie into mouth or you may find yourself unable to chew.

Now to properly represent Peruvian street food, all Sanguchon needs to do is add anticuchos to the menu!

Cuban lechón crisis

Having chosen Colombia over Cuba for my next adventure, I decided to check out what I was missing and try out Paladar, a Cuban restaurant on Kearny Street.

The interior was plenty nice... Cuban flag, brightly painted walls, and a healthy amount of customers...

The reviews for this place fall into the love-it-or-hate-it pattern... I'm still on the fence.

Last week I ordered the lechón asado, or roast pork. The pork was tender for the most part but at moments, it was tough as nails. It also lacked a lot of flavor... the plátanos were really mushy and bland, barely resembling any banana cousin in taste or appearance. The yucca was a weird mass of stringy fibers rather than a chunk or two of the root. The best part of the lechón plate was the congrí, the black beans and rice smothered with onions as it was the only flavorful component in the entire lunch. It's a damn shame when the filler upstages the namesake of the dish.

lechón asado leaves much to be wanted

Now I've read that food in Cuba tends to err on the bland side due to a lack of variety in the provisions available. In that regard, maybe Paladar is truly authentic to Cuban cooking and the food is meant to underwhelm you. Still, I don't relish the idea of paying $13.75 plus tax for dull pork and good beans.

Today I decided to give the place another try and get sancocho colombiano, a Colombian-style stew of rib meat and chicken. I got the stew to go and had to assemble it myself. Once you get over the ick factor of oil-drenched tomatoes flowing over a plastic cup, the stew is pretty good. The beef and chicken are tender and taste good, a revelation compared to the lechón! The broth is nothing special and the dish really depends on the tomato mixture to add a little kick but this stew definitely blew the lechón out of the water.

Still at $13.75 plus tax, lunch comes to a total of just under $15, which is a bit too much to pay for lunch.

sancocho colombiano is huge

Cuban food... quite the disappointment, really. At least this experience reinforces my decision to visit Colombia this August.

things we make

More oatmeal-maple-bacon whoopie pies... because no one (except my mom) can get enough. She always says "I don't like the oatmeal, make me chocolate." Then all the oatmeal pies are gone. Yes, go on and blame my brother for the disappearance.

Hosted a little dinner party where Tater and I made these amazing crab ravioli with lemon butter sauce... wonton wrappers makes the process go by much more quickly. These crab meat and ricotta-stuffed ravioli are downright criminal, courtesy of everyone's favorite jailbird Martha Stewart. A word to the wise: after boiling, place ravioli directly on dinner plates. If you store them on another plate, these babies will stick together like taffy and hair. It's quite a nightmare unsticking them.

Next time, we'll try frying them!

Now we didn't make this but Tater bought the biggest apple pie she could find. It doesn't look extraordinary from the top...

...but when you look at the side, you can tell that this is an extra-deep-dish pie.

This dinner party was thrown last Sunday and I still have some delicious cinnamon-laden apple pie in my fridge.

"getting your ears lowered"

Remember the Nicktoon Doug? It was a bout the life of a teenager in a sweatervest and his assortment of wildly pigmented friends. His best friend Skeeter just happened to be a wild shade of blue. And "getting your ears lowered" is what Skeeter referred to as a haircut.

Anyways, I finally decided to chop off the wavy locks. There are many good reasons for this... for one, I have not brushed my hair in years and I comb it about once every two months at best. My sister found this so silly that one year for Christmas, she gifted me a 99-cent comb in my stocking.

Another good reason to cut my hair: I have tons of split ends, which happens frequently to curly-haired girls because it's so hard to keep the strands moisturized.

And lastly, I've decided that though having long wavy-curly hair is pretty, it is an easy sort of pretty and does not really fit my wacky style or wackier personality. So following in the footsteps of Milla Jovovich, Halle Berry, and other beautiful women who have gone short, I walked in to my 1 o'clock appointment yesterday at Overland One Salon on Noriega Street.

So here it is... before:

And AFTER!

Rosie was my stylist and she did a fantastic job. She was in love with the curly texture but was willing to cut it off and give me a cut that would look good straight and curly. She also used a blow dryer to dry it straight so I could see how it looked that way (I use a flat iron once in a blue moon to straighten my hair and it just doesn't give any volume.) I love it, and my dear Mumsy isn't a huge fan, so I love it even more!

Today I washed and let it air dry for curls (and oh did my hair dry quickly today!) I liked the curly bob look...

... and I love it more when I muss it up, like so:

Let's hear it for fabulous, low-maintenance hair that looks fun and sassy... ooh, we love adding "sassy" to hair, don't we.

The price of this wash and cut service at Overland One Salon was $40... nowhere near the crazy rates at a hip salon with fancy Aveda products but about four times the price of a cut at your average Chinese-owned salon. However, in my opinion, Overland One Salon is well worth it if you have curly hair. No bargain stylist, no matter how much they love my crazy mess, really knows how to deal with curly hair.

Hey Mumsy, it'll grow back!

that explains it

Most of the articles produced by Yahoo! are poorly-researched, somewhat illogical, and riddled with grammatical errors.

However, the site has just redeemed itself with a rather enlightening article on popular diets... the only thing worth reading here is the last sentence under the "What's missing?" portion of the Paleo Diet:

The Paleo Diet is also low in carbohydrates-and there's research that shows limiting or eliminating carbs impacts your memory and your mood.

So that's why I remember everything! All hail the mighty potato and the royal court of pasta, rice, bread, and corn!