Let them eat cake

Turtle Tower Restaurant is a small mom 'n pop place near Golden Gate park. Located on Geary Street amongst many other Asian restaurants, the building is not a particular stand out, but the taste certainly is. The types of restaurants in this section of Geary are purists when it comes to the type of food they serve. For example, a Japanese restaurant explicitly wrote on a sign: NO SUSHI. NO TERIYAKI. This was to keep out the riffraff i.e., those who are accustomed to Westernized restaurant offerings. 

The place we visited made the distinction of serving only Northern Vietnamese style food which means you are served your pho without mint, bean sprouts, or hoisin. My friend recommended that I try #6 the pan fried noodle soup with fresh rice noodles, beef, leeks and carrots. It was a combination of smokey, tender flavorful goodness in a bowl. Definitely worth having seconds and thirds, I should think.

One drawback is that the restaurant closes super early in the evenings. We were the last customers to order food and were rushed out of the restaurant at 8:30 pm. Still it gave us an opportunity to head to Hayes Valley for dessert.

Citizen Cake has been around for years and I came across Elizabeth Falkner on a Food Network challenge a few years ago. Most recently she was on Top Chef Masters competing against others such as Rick Bayless, Ludo Lefebvre, Hubert Keller, Michael Cimarusti, Roy Yamaguchi, et al.  She's the author of Demolition Desserts and I have looked forward to a visit to her shop each time I am in San Francisco. On this visit we sampled the following:

• Retro Tropical Shag - Genoise cake splashed with rum and an exotic passion fruit mousse, covered in vanilla buttercream and carpeted with un-sweetened coconut.
• Mocha Mi Su - Layers of cocoa genoise cake, mocha mousse and crème fraiche mousse. Finished with chocolate ganache and coffee buttercream. 
• Pineapple Upside-down Cupcake - A tropical treat: lots o’ pineapple chunks underneath moist buttermilk cake topped with a passion fruit frosting & coconut
• Carrot Cupcake - Our delicious carrot cake topped with cream cheese frosting and a marzipan carrot.
  

Oh my!

Punchlines

I am so sick and tired of everybody complaining about hangnails today.
Well, excuuuuuuuuse me. Listen sister, that's a lot better than having a bunch of co-workers sing barber-shop quartet about whitlows.

Ferry Building

San Francisco is a wonderful place for gourmands. The inhabitants take their food very seriously as evidenced by the small places that crop up around the city that are small and artisanal in their approach toward food. Small batches. High quality. These are places which specialize in one thing. For example, olive oil. Just that and no other item. Or salted pork products. That's all that's available. One such place that houses these shops under one roof is the Ferry Building Market Place where I find myself each time I visit San Francisco. 

Some great shops to check out would include:

Acme Bread

Blue Bottle Coffee

Cowgirl Creamery

Boccalone

Recchiuti Confections

I can't say enough nice things about this place. It really is a gem. Couple the experience with a farmers market each saturday morning and I am quite tempted to take up permanent residence within the building itself!

Punchlines

We seek him here, we seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? That damned, elusive...

...Scarlet Pimpernel.

Tangled Web

I'm not a fan of spiders. That's an understatement. I'm squeamish about spiders. Can't stand them. So when I found out about this pandemic, I was pretty freaked out. 

Twenty years ago, portions of the movie Arachnophobia was filmed on the Warner Bros. lot. During the filming, truckloads of spiders were brought in because regular Angelino spiders looked a bit boring, I suppose. Well when production concluded, they did not ship the spiders back from whence they came. Quite possibly they tried to, but I suspect they did not manage to recapture all of the spiders. As a result, these little critters dispersed across the Warner Bros. lot and its surrounding environs. 

Let me clarify one point. These spiders are not indigenous to this region. They do not fall prey to the typical cycle of population control by predators in Los Angeles. As a result, these spiders are able to live quite happily and tend to make their presence known in the summer months. 

And so it was that as I was walking from my car to the office this morning, I noticed at the end of the parking structure a beautiful, silk gauzy web which glistened in the morning sunlight. I stepped back and then noticed that, in fact, there were about a dozen webs spun by a dozen spiders... 

...which reminds me. I should probably close my sunroof today.

Punchlines

Have you seen the cash for clunkers new slogan? Show us your Junk!
What a coincidence! I wear the same sign when I go out on first dates.