Right now I'm sitting with a glistening dressed bowl of greens from Little City Gardens, thanks to the lovely Rosita belonging to their wonderful CSA program. Little violet and yellow blossoms, fronds of purslane (more on that later), thin and fierce arugula and the usual carrot/radish/avo thrown in with shredded parm and hand-smooshed sungold tomatoes.
The day started with a delicious meet and greet with Geets at the top of dolores park. The air, the whole day in front of us, was tasty.
Then on to Wise Sons Deli, my first time to visit. I felt like a pro. It was pretty empty, what I took as a reward for being there by 10....turns out we were the suckers who missed our chance for a reuben due to being there before 11. No charming of chef Leo could change our fate, so we sated ourselves on a combo of the rest:
-smoked trout salad sandwich on rye. This was like clouds of pink fishy magic on the softest, moistest rye you've ever had, with a great cornmeal crust
-the sons' pickle plate: overcoming all odds due to my current state of SF pickle fatigue, this plate wowed me between the pickled purslane (my new favorite veggie), pickled spring onions, and pickled cukes which tasted decidedly different from the pickled cukes served with the sandwiches
-chopped liver plate: so satisfying spreading the sweet/salty/funky paste on slices of fresh rye
They sampled their chocolate babka throughout our visit, and despite a bit of confusion around the service format (for some reason our group was slow on the uptake that it's an order-at-the-front-and-set-your-own-table kind of place), I ate it up. Must have been the combination of nostalgic warm and fuzzy feeling from eating the food my jewish ancestors ate in nyc with inspiration watching two guys my own age pull off such a delicious spread.
From there it was on to kimchee making, about which i'll write about separately because it's a story unto itself; fast forward through an amusing burning man shopping trip in valencia's vintage stores and it was time to think towards dinner.
What was so satisfying about my dinner choice is that it was the third thing I crossed off my list of things I'd wanted to do for months. Along with learning to make kimchee and trying wise sons deli pop up, I've been wanting to grill sardines ever since we got a backyard grill.
I had fun gutting the sardines, vacillating between feeling conviction about my recent vegetarian tendencies as I cringed at sacs of burgundy guts trickling out of the middle of each fish, and feeling proud about getting my hand dirty. The grill was easy enough for this laywoman to figure o
ut, so after a brush of the cilantro chutney I'd made from other Little City Farms CSA box treasures, I laid em on there. A few minutes on each side and my dinner was made!
I'm not sure whether most people put as many of the whole sardines with bones still in right into their mouth, but I think chewing through a few featherweight bones puts a little hair on the old chest. Thus with a different version of satisfying fishy moisture, I closed my delicious day!
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