Sick Food

The one thing I dreaded most about getting my wisdom teeth out this last weekend was not the pain, not the swelling, but the promise of the dietary restrictions that would follow.

I like soft food just fine. A hot bowl of cream of wheat? Wonderful! A tasty fresh fruit smoothie? Refreshing! Soft scrambled eggs with avocado and melty cheese? Delicious! But the thought of limiting myself to only these foods for even a few days feels like an identity crisis. Who will I be if I'm not chowing down of a crusty piece of bread every few hours? If I can't make chillaquilles for another 6-8 weeks?! If I can't enjoy a bag of crunchy salty potato chips with my sandwich?!?

Before my surgery, my boss (just as much of a food lover as I), told me that dietary restrictions can sometimes be a good thing because they force you to get creative. And after only two days of soft, mostly liquid foods, I already see what she meant. Yesterday afternoon I made about a quart of hummus from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty (Hummus with ful p. 210), but did not yet feel confidant in my ability to eat it with pita (even the softest breads take a surprising amount of molar chewing, as I learned from the tortilla I had tried and failed to eat earlier in the day).

But the thought of just eating hummus with a spoon for dinner was pretty distressing. The phrase "Hum and Eggs" kept bouncing around in my head as I tried to think of ways to dress up my hummus. I think "Hum and Eggs" was the name of a dish served at The Bagelry in Santa Cruz...a bagel with hummus on one half and egg salad on the other. I've also enjoyed hummus and eggs together in the inimitable Sabich, an amazing combination of fried eggplant, boiled eggs and potatoes, hummus, mint, and cucumber-tomato salad all stuffed in a pita. So I though, what the hell, I could just put an egg on my hummus and call it dinner.

I dolloped a few spoonfuls of hummus into a bowl and sprinkled on a bit of cayenne and za'atar over it, adding a little drizzle of olive oil on top. I decided to poached would be a good way to go for the egg. I placed the poached egg on the hummus and sprinkled a bit more cayenne and za'atar over the top, along with some salt and pepper, before digging in with a spoon. The result was surprisingly satisfying, even without any crunchy bits to break up the softness of both hummus and egg. The hummus was still warm underneath the warm egg, enhancing the flavor of the spices, and the garlic and lemon in the hummus added a nice complexity to the flavor. And the best part was that I felt like I'd eaten a real meal!

After eating I promptly passed out like a happy animal, the best sign of a good dinner I can think of.

Wisdom Tooth Hum and Eggs
Any store-bought hummus will work fine for this recipe, but making hummus at home is fun, easy, and gratifying.

For the Hummus (adapted from Plenty):
makes about a quart

1 1/4 cup dried chickpeas
1 3/4 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 cup tahini
juice of 1 to 1 1/2 lemons (more or less to taste)
3-4 garlic cloves, crushed
salt

For the final dish:
1 egg
1 teaspoon white vinegar
cayenne pepper or paprika
za'atar
olive oil
salt
pepper

To make the hummus, place chickpeas and 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda in a medium pot. Cover with double the volume of cold water and stir to combine. Bring the pot to a boil, then remove from heat. Let soak for 3-4 hours.

Drain the chickpeas, then return to the pot and cover with double the volume of cold water. Add the remaining baking soda (1/4 teaspoon) and stir to combine. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer gently until the chickpeas are very soft and easy to mash with a fork. The amount of time will depend on the freshness of the chickpeas, but can take anywhere from 1 1/2 to 3 hours. Add more water to the pot if necessary to keep the chickpeas submerged.

Drain the chickpeas, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid. Transfer the chickpeas to a food processor while they are still warm. Add the tahini, lemon juice, garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Process the mixture for a minute or two until it is totally smooth, then add a little of the cooking liquid (I started with 1/4 cup) and pulse again until you have a very soft, almost runny mixture (it will firm up as it cools). Taste and add more salt (I ended up adding another 1/2 teaspoon), lemon juice, and or garlic to taste.

Scoop a portion of hummus into a bowl (I used about 1/3 cup). Sprinkle with a pinch of cayenne and a generous pinch (1/4 teaspoon) za'atar. Finish with a little drizzle of olive oil (1/2 to 1 teaspoon).

To poach the egg, carefully fill a nonstick pan with cold water and the 1 teaspoon of vinegar. Heat the water on medium heat until it just simmers. Crack an egg in a small bowl and carefully pour the egg from the bowl into the pan. Cover and reduce the heat if necessary to maintain a gentle simmer. Poach for 3-5 minutes, remove from water with a slotted spoon and place on the hummus. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and more za'atar.

Eat immediately while everything is warm, creamy, and aromatic.

Colored Gutter Dots

When I moved back to San Francisco, I started noticing layer upon layer of spray-painted dots on a lot of street corners. For a long while the top dots were pink, and then today on my way to work I discovered that they had all turned purple! Thinking that this was just fascinating, I started taking pictures of (almost) every one I came across on my way to work and realized that they weren't just at the corners, but instead marked every sewer grate.

I don't know what these dots are for -- I assume that they're related to some municipal process -- but I find them absolutely delightful. I took some pictures on my way home, too. And looking through them now, it seems that someone else has also noticed them...note the pink, thistle-like stencil that appears in two of my shots. (Next project: follow the stencil! It's probably not at thistle.)

In which I get all gooshy about bread

Here's what I love: baking bread.

Here's why: it just feels so damn good!

But really, I have been trying to capture just what is so great about baking bread since I baked the best loaf of my life last week. It's very hard for me to put into words. Certainly one of the best parts about it is what a surprise the results always are. And not so much even a surprise that it "turns out," but a surprise that home baking with natural leaven has yielded such consistently amazing results for me.

My best loaf to date

In the year and a half since I got Tartine Bread for Christmas and started baking with a wild yeast starter, I've come to see baking an excellent loaf as a mysterious combination of work and not-work. On the one hand, I know it is my hands that do the mixing, that feed my starter every day, that constantly take notes to see if I can determine what works and what doesn't, that shape and slash and load the loaves. But...the end result of this labor always feels like so much more than the sum of it's parts. In the end, I mostly wait around and do other things while large communities of microflora eat, belch, and reproduce in my rising bowl.

And maybe that's why I love it so much...it makes me feel both proud and humble. I can sort of say, "I made that," but really I'm just one part of a centuries-old, multispecies project that continues to fill the hearts and bellies of Homo sapiens.

And what a tasty project it is.

Don't forget the butter.

Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd. Bicycle

Walking to work is something I became passionate about while living in Santa Cruz. I moved to a spot on the edge of that small town, right where Mission St. becomes Hwy 1 again and makes its winding way up the coast. Having no car, and not being a particular fan of buses, I decided to try walking to work...a feat that at first seemed unnecessary and a little ridiculous. It took around 50 minutes to get downtown from my house, and while it was occasionally grueling, it quickly became my favorite part of the day.

Since I moved back to San Francisco in March, I've had the privilege of working a 30 minute walk away from where I live. My daily walk to work takes me down the block of Green St. wordily renamed Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd. Here at the star-burst intersection of Green, Stockton, and Columbus, I have seen the same sight every day since I started taking this route: a dark red Centurion LeMans bicycle with blue bar tape locked to a pole. It has been there every day now for five months.

 I like to tell myself stories about this bicycle.

At first, the story was that the bicycle owner's schedule matched mine in such a way that the bike only appeared to be always there, but that it did in fact come and go every day. Its rider simply arrived before I passed by and left after I passed again on my way home.

After only a few weeks, though, the bicycle was knocked to the ground. It lay there, looking wretched, for several days....long enough for me to decide that no one was, in fact, riding it on a regular basis.

Perhaps because I pass the Green Street Mortuary just seconds before the bicycle, I often imagine it's owner lying dead in a sunny apartment near by. White walls, white curtains shifting in front of the open windows, a featureless body on the bed, limbs tangled in white sheets.

After three months of wondering about this bicycle, a seat cover appeared stating "Your Bike Is Money." The same day I saw this, I noticed a note stuck in the handlebars. I hoped the note's author would ask the same questions I had been wanting to ask...

Who are you?
Where have you gone?
Do you have a new bicycle?
Does it have blue bar tape?

Or...
I am going to take your bike one week from today if you haven't moved it.

But it was just scribbles, gibberish. I stuck the note back on the handlebars and in a few days it was gone.

I showed the bike to my girlfriend, who was just as shocked that no one had stolen it. We toyed with the idea of breaking it free in the night. But then she thought up a story of her own. "What if it's an elaborate sting operation orchestrated by the cops?!" We are both avid This American Life fans, and recalled the episode "Bait and Switch" in which a man innocently breaks into an abandoned car in front of his house to discover who owns it and finds himself arrested. We imagined that as soon as we broke the lock on this bicycle, we would be surrounded by sirens and flashing lights.

Then I imagined night after night of arrests by the SFPD. A perpetual sting operation that had nabbed hundreds of bicycle thieves over the past five months, all for going after this same blood red bicycle with the blue bar tape.

This same neglected bicycle.

Night after night.

Day after day.

How long can this go on? I'm certain that this bicycle will not stay locked to that pole forever. One day, I'll walk by and it will be gone, and then I will tell myself some stories about where it went.