Date night ended with lively conversation at the beautifully designed Barbacco bar. iPad wine list was fun to play with but lost on us teetotalers. Photos, unfortunately, came out way too dark to share.

Sashimi fluke with strawberry, shaved fennel, and dill vinaigrette
Roast mushrooms and herbed ricotta. Not my favorite but a safe choice. 
House made salumi
Rims de Trentino cheese with pomegranate gelatina, rich like a fine balsamic, matched perfectly with a hearty rye bread
Tender grilled squid alla piastra aka spicy tomato sauce
Mint Lemonade

Unfortunately my local grocer was out of taro, so I bought some sweet potato instead. I imagine taro will give the sauce the right consistency.

8 oz paneer, cubed
1/4 cup yogurt

1/2 cucumber, small diced
2 cups yogurt
1/4 cup mint
1 tsp kala jeera, lightly dry roasted

beef short ribs
soy sauce
red miso
mirin, sake
sugar, brown or palm
water or beef stock
peppercorn
butter
herbs - bay, thyme

Marinate meat overnight. Remove from liquid let rest for at least 30 minutes. Pat dry and lightly brown in butter. Add herbs and slowly braise beef in the marinade and enough stock to cover, about 2 hours or till tender. Crockpot also works well. Reduce sauce separately if necessary.

1 1/4 cup blanched almonds
1 tsp cornstarch
1/2 cup granulated sugar, caster sugar or powdered sugar
2 large eggs whites. Old eggs or eggs whites left for several days, covered, in the fridge are supposed to promote cohesive cookies. I don't know why.
1/4 cup granulated sugar
pinch of salt
3/4 tsp almond extract. This amount depends on your taste and the strength of the extract. Or several drops bitter almond oil extract* in addition or as a substitution to the almond extract.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cover two baking sheets with parchment paper or Silpat.

Toss almonds with cornstarch and run through a coffee grinder in two batches till very fine in texture. Run the granulated sugar through the coffee grinder. The texture should still be a little gritty and not as fine as powdered sugar. Whisk to combine.

Separate eggs and beat with hand mixer or mixer till frothy. Add salt, almond extract, and 1/4 of the sugar and continue beating. Little by little, in a continuous stream, add the rest of the sugar and mix until the sugar is incorporated. Keep beating till the eggs are thickened, glossy and stand in stiff peaks that fold over.

Gently fold almond flour and sugar into the egg mixture in two batches, till the batter is just incorporated but there are no streaks.The texture should be a little bit like meatloaf. With a tablespoon, shape the dough into balls and use another spoon to drop a rounded 1 1/2 mound onto the sheet 3 inches apart. Likewise, use a piping bag with to create the rounds. Rest for 30 minutes.

Bang the baking sheet on the counter twice. Bake until the cookies begin to crack, about 15-20 minutes. Turn the sheet and bake at 200 for another 30 minutes or until the shell is crisp. Use a wooden spoon to keep the oven door ajar very slightly. To check if the cookie is done, turn one over and poke the bottom. The center should smooth and dry, rather than moist moist or crumbly. The tips should be slightly golden, with a thin crackly shell and chewy paste inside.

Beware the amount of egg white. Too much and the cookie will be flat.

Recipe Planet on Italian Macarons
Dessert First on French Macarons

The original from No Recipes
And below... how it plays in my kitchen.
Hayashi Rice

olive oil
1 lb beef, sukiyaki or thinly sliced angus
3 medium onions, thinly sliced, caramelized
2 tsp garlic paste

2 cup red wine
1/4 lb pearl onion
1/2 lb mushrooms, quartered
3 cup water and 1.5 tbsp demi-glace, or 3 cup strong beef broth

Lovely no fuss pasta recipe from 101 cookbooks that works great as freezer food. I used large pyrex pie pans for baking, and gouda instead of mozzarella. All my lemons were missing their zest, so I just substituted several squeezes of juice, and added green onions to the cheese.

1 lb large pasta shells


filling:
16 oz ricotta
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup gouda, grated
2 green onions, sliced thin
1/2 lemon, juiced


sauce:
olive oil
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp garlic paste
large can crushed tomatoes

Pretty dessert shop in San Mateo with beautifully molded ice cream cakes, small batch gelato and tender flavored mochi.  Mini french pastries are asian inflected with tropical flavors. The above is the Lychee Bavarian cake, tasting slightly artificial (like sweetener), a dry sponge, and a floral aroma (personal turnoff). I will probably try another flavor next time, but will definitely go back for the superb black sesame gelato.

1 cup AP flour
1 cup whole wheat flour

To the fundamental question belying model asian american career choices and how academics/expectations stifles self expression/desire, comedian (and certified M.D.) Ken Jeong answers:

"I don't think I was stifled, I think that I was worried that I would feel trapped, that I would lose my window of opportunity to do something I wanted to do. So I split the difference, I compromised.
In the back of my mind, I always secretly wanted to be an actor.
Once I got into residency, that changed my life. My residency director in New Orleans [Donald Irwin], said to me: 'I know you want to do comedy, but you have the potential to be a great physician. Have you ever thought of blending both? You can not only use your comedy to help your medicine... but you can also use your medicine to make you a better comedian. Have you ever thought of it that way? This experience would be good for you, and you would have a unique perspective in comedy that no one else in the world will ever have.'
It's because of him I wasn't miserable as a physician. I found a way to love what I did. I found a way to enjoy it because of my comedy and because I had a director that actually nurtured and encouraged me to keep doing comedy while being a physician. It actually made me want to be a doctor even more." -- Koream, June 2011, Volume 22 Number 6

Meatballs

Beautiful and voluptuous, tactile. Such is the exhibit of Borchgrave's paper art on display at the Legion of Honor.  A hard seed though, of the uncanny, pokes at me as a I walk through the compact exhibit. Here are beautiful gowns and jewels of Bronzino's Eleanor of Toledo, historical, complete, but stiff and mummified and slightly cartoonish in the rendering of the real, which is in itself fantastical to our modern eyes.


Each interpretation is a museum piece come to life as another museum piece, a transference of 2d documentation writ large and slightly dis-remembered from the original into a 3d paper mache, displacing the copy with cutout copies that are slightly stiff and visibly lossy.


In opposition to the showier and more ornamental dresses, in themselves reflective of ornamentation as a function of the originals, certain experiments blend material and construction in a way that loses the qualities of neither. One cape in particular suits the materiality as an origami monolith, a folded, spacial mobius garment that sweeps from the floor into a magician's hood (shown briefly in video 4 from the back.)


Borchgrave's artisty shows best in the details: lenspaper "fabric" recalling burnout velvets and silks, pleated constructions a la Fortuny, or intricate lacework built up from corrugated papers like a messy nest made by fractal avians.

The illustrious Perdido Street Station was an interesting read with a lot of ideas, but well... enthusiastic with clunky young writer prose. Even the the author himself admitted in an interview that the writing was perhaps not quite up to snuff. But China Mieville has grown up. Or rather grown into his skin. And Kraken is just so. Incorporating street slang and meta hipness with egghead meta philosophizing. Mieville has perfected the expository paragraph - compact and communicative, drawing in with clauses and expelling with statement, inserting 411 packages rhythmically into the windup structure and noir dialogues to make the story hum.

Kraken is a grown man's Harry Potter (a comparison that Mieville slyly references), set in a London underworld teeming with magic but dirtier, grittier and much more violent. Mieville's obsession with the urban world and contingent conspiracy is less cut and dry in Kraken than Perdido Street. Reversal and intrigue reveal the man behind the plan, behind the other man behind the other plan and all the cockroaches taking advantage of any weakness in between. This is no criminal mind forcing his vision lockstep into being, but a messy sort of survival, where bits of meaning catalyze and go extinct on the constantly mutating fodder of human belief. Not surprising then, that the battle between Faith and Darwin is the fulcrum on which the story revolves.

There really is a lot of esoteric to chew on in this novel but the cranky, sarcasm and breakneck pace throws you into the fray front-loaded with information; an experience of truth seeing as malleable and consensual, elided meanings, always being made and broken and never really understood till just too late, a messy process that not only rewrites history but revises it as if the former never was.

Also known as An Actor's Revenge, director Kon Ichigawa combines stylized pulp and arthouse purity in a film built of precise, rhythmic compositions, illicit conversations half concealed by foreground objects, a comically loose patter of dialogue hiding razor sharp intent. The theatrical staging, traditionally japanese, is swathed in saturated mid-century film stock, and a hip 60's soundtrack. A suggestion of international modernism makes the film seem timeless and fresh, though the improbable material dates back to the 1930's.

Woman of the Dunes

Barren and sensual, desperate and resigned, Hiroshi Teshigahara channels the surrealism of Kobo Abe in this film of entrapment and drudgery in a ghostly nowhere town. Moments of fluid beauty punctuate the unremitting emotional desolation of the collective life.

Enjoyed this simple cake from 101cookbooks.com, which fluffed better than expected when baked in a 9" cake tin. Below is the recipe with my adjustments. Floured pan and parchment on the bottom does the trick when it comes time to flip.

2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 tbsp baking powder
3/4 cup fine-grain natural cane sugar (or brown sugar)
2 tbsp buttermilk powder

Biographies are a kind of mirage, a layer of one person over another, a layer of time over the past, everything constructed, artificial, or perhaps overly factual in an effort not to be artificial, although there's always a feeling that the entire narrative is an act of fiction and that the subject not only disappears but will never have been once the film is inevitably wiped away. Truth in identity, then, is illegible in domestication, and best avoided. However, the biography of Science Fiction author Alice B. Sheldon, also known as James Tiptree, also known as Racoona Sheldon, compels for illuminating exactly that conflict.

"To grow up as a "girl" is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to by falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing - and nearly to become that thing. To have no steady routine of growth and training, but only a series of explosions into unwanted adulation - and then into limbo. The world was not my oyster." - Alice Sheldon 

Julie Phillips doesn't create a vivisection for our study, but delicately knots together the contradictory desperation, drives, and desires that eventually allowed Sheldon in the guise of a man, to reveal herself to the world. From Phillips, we empathize with the intensely, internally mercurial Sheldon and her public elusiveness, even to herself. The relief then, when Tiptree allows Sheldon to drop her own baggage for a moment to speak and be heard, is both in the biography and the work. Her fatalism is there too. In a way, Sheldon's entire life is a coming of age story that is cut short, one in constant flux with it's own narrative, self aware and disguised, but much realer for it.

"Tip" started publishing only in her late years, and that work is some of Sci Fi's best. Dr. Ain, the short story on which 12 Monkeys, and before that, La Jetee, is based, come on like a fever, quaking through the theme of suicide dreamlike and neurotically towards the impending apocalypse, and carrying the fatalism heavily and rationally. Often told from the perspective of "innocent" contemptuous male narrators, Sheldon's stories express a deep outrage for the workings of gender politics, letting slip the masks of female acculturation for those in the know, to reveal the deep rage and violence beneath. At once fielding the morally squishy and hard science with instincts of a thriller, Sheldon's work defies gender authorship but is labile with feminism.

Accordingly, the book takes the temperature and meaning of Sci Fi through decades, first personally for the author and culturally, as context. As a fan, this peep into the heady world of Golden Age and New Wave editing rooms is a particular treat, how our tastes are shaped, what humanist principles those editors were trying to sculpt, and in particular, how institutionalized ideas of gender restricts our understanding of the hard/soft paradigm of Sci Fi at large. Pleasant asides: Sheldon's tentative wooing of various authors through erudite letters assigned to Tiptree, and his penetration into the circle of sometimes similarly reclusive people, their collective work creating a safe harbor for the deranged, the damaged, the insightful and oppressed, in other words - the alien.


Note: Reading this biography was a highly personal experience. But I think anyone who has suffered from or is interested in the effects of repression or depression may gain something from both Sheldon and Phillip's insight. While Mad Men's Sally Draper is definitely an unsympathetic character, I imagine that in some sense she, and all the other women on that show, would empathize in a primal way if not fully understand Sheldon's personal despair of "seeming" just a woman yet "being" so much more.


NPR interview with Julie Phillips.


Rare, for me, promotional Amazon link to Sheldon's short story collection,  Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

People who feel out of control in their lives, trying to do the wrong thing by the right means. Channeling that adolescent sense of invincibility and anger. That wistful nostalgia. Lovely winsome film that reminds you that no matter what, you do have a choice.

With all my time devoted to learning Revit as quickly as possible, I havn't had a lot left over for cooking and dishwashing. I found this article for 101 "fast" foods in the New York Times. Some of these are intuitive, we do sausage dogs as well as cannellini bean salad a lot, but a nice consolidated list is convenient for those quick restocking trips at the grocer. I would pick up some spring salad mix, bread or make a big pot of rice or quinoa to round out these dishes. Mark Bittman is The Minimalist!