Category Archives: Brunch

A2 > SF

Where to begin!

We left Ann Arbor on the 1st in the middle of the afternoon, a flurry of bags and mopeds on the porch and cats wanting attention. Part of our trip was paid for with flight vouchers, so we had to fly through a Midwest hub – which meant that the much more convenient Detroit airport was out of the question. Instead we drove two hours to Grand Rapids, left our car with Shane’s moped acquaintance, and were ferried to the GR airport withOUT the much desired side-trip to Founders for Nemesis. Sorry, Shane.

Our flights – first a 20 minute hop to Milwaukee, then about four hours in the air to SF – were uneventful, and we enjoyed the free cookies, even though they were served cold. “Fresh baked”? Riiiight. Our second flight was operated by Frontier, each of whose planes bear an animal portrait. Get it, “bear”? Anyway, our animal co-pilot was Sarge, the bald eagle, who took good care of us and of Nancy Pelosi, our flight’s VIP.

We rolled into SF around 9pm local time, but by the time we claimed our luggage, took the airport shuttle to the BART, rode the BART to downtown, and walked a mile mostly uphill to our hostel, we were feeling every minute of the time difference and the long day. Our hostel – the Green Tortoise – was conveniently located near Chinatown and a bunch of sex shops, none of which were particularly interesting at that hour of the night. What was interesting was our private room, comfy bed, and sweet oblivion.

In the morning, refreshed by a hot shower and a good night’s sleep, we queued up for breakfast at Mama’s on Washington Square, just a few blocks’ walk from our hostel. Now, it’s not that I’m opposed to waiting in line for good food. I think there are times when this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do – like when you’re trying to get brunch in Chicago, for example. This might also explain why we rarely find ourselves getting brunch anymore – we wake up hungry, and the idea of standing in line for an hour when we’ve already delayed breakfast by an hour or two is just unbearable. We were subsequently told that the line at Mama’s can take more than an hour, but since it was 8:30 on a Thursday, our wait was between 20-30 minutes.

Who in their right mind waits in a 20-30 minute line for breakfast at 8:30 on a Thursday? Tourists, that’s who. And every dang person in the line was a tourist, replete with guidebooks and maps and loud conversations about Cleveland. As tourists ourselves, we had little room to talk, but I think the line strengthened our resolve to seek out neighborhood places, not ones in the guidebooks. Once inside, we ordered our breakfasts – a French toast sampler for Shane and a tomato and prosciutto Benedict for me – then settled down for coffee and people-watching.

I look somewhat stricken in this photo, but really I’m just hungry and undercaffeinated. Breakfast fixed all of that promptly:

Oh beautiful pile of delicious savory things! The eggs were overdone and the prosciutto overly salty, but the hollandaise was mild and the slices of heirloom tomatoes helped to even it out. The breakfast potatoes were excellent. Shane was less satisfied with his breakfast – the French toast was dense and barely, well, French toasted – but between our two plates, we left full and happy.

If you go:

Green Tortoise Hostel
494 Broadway (Broadway and Kearny)
San Francisco, CA 94133
(415) 834-1000

Comfortable, clean, and free meals – breakfast every day, dinner three nights/week. Bring your own towel or pay $1 to borrow one. We paid around $65/night for a single room with a shared bathroom, which is absolutely cheap by SF hotel standards.

Mama’s on Washington Square
1701 Stockton Street (Stockton and Filbert)
San Francisco, CA 94133-2914
(415) 362-6421

Go early, or go prepared to stand in line for 30-90 minutes. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

0605 Leland Palmers and A Very Market Brunch

Olivia has already done a great job of documenting what we baked, so I’ll focus on the rest of this morning’s bakefest: brunch. Also the Leland Palmer, featured in this month’s Bon Appetit.

I can’t fairly say that I was a Twin Peaks fan ‘back in the day’, as I didn’t discover the show until 6-7 years after it aired, but at that point, I more than made up for lost time. My dorm neighbor and I binged on Twin Peaks while studying for our art history final – and all the rest of our finals – and it’s fair to say that Twin Peaks has had a more lasting impression on me than most of what I was studying for that week in 1997. I dressed up as Laura Palmer for Halloween one year (“she’s dead, wrapped in plastic”), and the only recurring nightmares I’ve had as an adult have involved Bob (to whom I would provide a link, but it’s too scary). One of the most exciting parts of our trip to Seattle last year was the daytrip out to the Double R Diner, where Mel and Ray and I had cherry pie in honor of Agent Cooper:

This is all to say that when I saw a drink named after Laura Palmer’s creepy dad, whose hair turned white from an intense shock, I had to make it, even if it is only spuriously connected to the show. The drink recipe comes from a Brooklyn bartender who was inspired to doctor the classic Arnold Palmer while nursing a hangover with said drink and with old episodes of Twin Peaks.

With jasmine tea, two kinds of citrus, gin, limoncello, and a honey syrup, the Leland Palmer is sort of a halfway point between gin-and-juice and the more refined Arnold Palmer – floral and a little bit boozy, dangerously refreshing – just the sort of thing that could land you in trouble if you drank too many of them on a hot summer day. Today, though, we exercised restraint – not that we needed to, what with a ridiculously delicious and also good for us and also super local brunch like this:

Over-medium egg over rapini and a slice of excellent toast, bacon, sauteed mushrooms and radishes, and a couple of perfect strawberries

Oh yeah, and the final product of our baking day – brioche a la Jefferson Market filled with vanilla cream and chocolate chips:

Thanks, ladies, for another month of good baking and good eating!

0523 Radio Maria Love

photo by inhisgrace

Before heading home (arriving just in time for LOST), we had brunch with Molly and Jenn (and then drinks with Carl and Kayla) at Radio Maria, another downtown establishment with no clear replacement. Radio was one of a couple of special occasion places for us – birthday dinners, happy hours, brunch with out of town visitors – but too expensive for regular dining.

It struck me this morning that Radio was particularly illustrative of the difference between the restaurant scenes of Champaign and A2. Our brunch this morning ran us about $35 – two entrees in the $8-12 range, a (bottomless) Mexican coffee, a fancy beer for Shane, and a 20% tip. When we lived in Champaign, this would have been an indulgence – something we could afford to do once in a while. When we moved to DC, we came to expect to spend at least this much when we went out as a byproduct of living in a big city.

When we moved to A2, we were surprised that the expenses related to going out haven’t gone down significantly. When we’re in town, we rarely go out for anything more than fast food, grocery store take out, or a quick lunch because when we do, two drinks and a meal run us $30 or more. I’m of the opinion that good food is worth good money – but I also feel pinched by the prices in A2 when I know that comparably good, if not better, food costs a lot less in comparable cities.

But back to breakfast! I had a hard time picking out of all the fantastic options, but went with the very filling Vegetarian Masa Boat – a cornmeal “boat” with soft chevre, scrambled eggs and veg, black beans, chipotle salsa, and warmed tortillas. Shane had a pulled pork torta in a really interesting and sweet barbecue sauce. There were at least half a dozen other things I would’ve liked to eat – and that’s without touching the tapas menu or the fantastic beer list.

Oh, Radio. We’ll be back, I promise. Shane might even eat another tiny burger.

0424 A Perfect Spring Brunch

Shane left in the wee hours to drive to Indiana for Dark Lord Day, which, along with the drizzly spring weather, made it a perfect morning for brunch and baking – or, as I like to think of it, Fancy Lady Baking Brunch.

After last month’s relatively successful batch of Twinkies, we settled on pop-tarts for our next baking adventure, nudged on by the good fortune of a recipe in this month’s Bon Appetit. As it worked out, I had very little to do with the preparation of the actual pop-tarts, as I was busy with the main brunch event: bacon-wrapped asparagus and soft-boiled eggs.

Susie and I washed and snapped the asparagus, fresh from the farmers’ market, and wrapped each little spear in lovely bacon from Sparrow Market.

Jamie’s recipe recommends baking for 10 minutes, but I’ve found that it takes a LOT longer to get crispy bacon. In this case, 25 minutes, with a break in the middle to switch the pans around. While the asparagus soldiers were in the oven, I boiled a dozen 5 minute eggs – long enough for the whites to be set but the yolks still lovely and molten.

In the meantime, Olivia, Shana, Shannon, and Maria were busy rolling out pastry and filling it with a panoply of jams.

For me, asparagus, bacon, soft-boiled eggs, and toast are all simple pleasures. Put them all together, and you’ve got something magic. Add some local greens, a homemade dressing, and a spoonful of thinly sliced potatoes baked with a fair amount of herbs and cheese, and you’ve got a fantastic spring brunch, made all the more amazing by what came out of the oven an hour later:

I’ll take one of everything, please.

Recipes:
Crispy Asparagus Soldiers with Soft-Boiled Eggs from Jamie at Home (oops, temperatures in Celsius)
Strawberry “Pop-Tarts” from Bon Appetit

Thanks to Maria for her photos!

Oh, and how great is it that we totally made these before Smitten Kitchen posted her version?

0321 Delicious Scone, Disappointing Brunch

Our meals this morning/afternoon hit both ends of several spectrums. We had delicious baked goods, and underwhelming sandwiches. We had good coffee in questionable cups, and questionable coffee in regular cups. We had an uninterested server, a nice server who was wearing her pajamas, and a server whose demeanor concealed a hidden evil (according to a fantastic Yelp review). There was a pancake-eating contest. It was that kind of morning.

While Shane’s family went to meeting, we grabbed a quick breakfast at The Root Cafe, which offered a dizzying array of vegan and non-vegan baked goods – we went for the latter, and were very happy with our warm and buttery savory scones. Shane had heard good things about their coffee, but the barista taking orders seemed pretty blasé about both his job and their offerings, and we felt similarly blasé about both the coffee and the Styrofoam cup in which it was served. The Root apparently has a recycling program, but honestly, what’s the likelihood of the average coffee-to-go person bringing their dirty Styrofoam cup back at some later date?

After taking a scenic drive down to Berea to check out our reception site, we met up with the family and had a late brunch at 56 West. The brunch buffet deal – $7.56 all you could eat! – was perfect for the guys, at least two of which immediately engaged in a pancake eating contest. The brunch options just weren’t appealing to me, so I ordered the B.E.L.T – a BLT with roasted tomatoes, a fried egg, and arugula = hooray! Unfortunately what I actually received was an over-hard egg, a smushy oily tomato, arugula mixed with regular lettuce, and some tasty bacon sandwiched between two VERY LARGE pieces of baguette. If I could open my mouth very wide and also had metal teeth like Jaws, I might’ve been able to eat this sandwich as a sandwich. Instead, I ate it in pieces, and saved my sweet potato fries for the drive home. I’ve mentioned that eating out often serves as cooking inspiration – this is definitely a meal I think we can improve upon at home.

June in brief!

June was, in short, insanely busy. First, Tina and I ran in the Race for the Cure and raised money for a good cause. And then we ate waffles.

Then the next day Mel and Ray arrived from Seattle and hung out until we went to Bonnaroo.

Photos of Mel, Ray, and Fred stolen from Kevin’s wonderful Flickr. Kevin, Jill, and Fred joined us for a fun brunch and a lot of catching up. The next day Shane went to Michigan, returning the day after that so that we could go to Bonnaroo:

We saw some science bears play video games.

and connected with a bunch of Shane’s college friends!

After getting home and trying to beat summer colds, I flew to Illinois for my sister’s bridal shower:

I also got to be home for Father’s Day, which was especially excellent since I thought it was the previous weekend! We made brunch for Pop since everyone was home.

No sooner did I return, then the next wave of visitors arrived. Dan stayed with us for a few days while wooing Basil:

We went to the first Fort Reno of the season with a bunch of friendos:

Linda and Jeremiah came to visit for a week from Colorado, which was very excellent. We went to a baseball game and yelled at the Red Sox:

The last day our friends were here, we got the news that we’ve already posted about, which is pretty awesome! Also Richard and Piotr were in town and we had dinner with them, but I forgot to take pictures. And then we took two days of vacation for a staycation, during which we wore funny glasses and went to Baltimore. More on that later!

A truly beautiful breakfast

(from last weekend, when I felt inspired to make a Spanish tortilla but only had a single fingerling potato in the larder)

Our weekend

Another lovely visit from friends:

Another trip out to Mount Vernon on a perfect day:

though this time things were still in bloom:

Sarah and Greg came up for the weekend – we hadn’t seen them since the beginning of May – and we spent two days trekking about the city and our neighborhood. We revisited the Jim Henson exhibit – only in town until the beginning of October! – and the Botanic Gardens, which were even nicer since it wasn’t 1,000,000 degrees out. Andy and Claire joined us for amazing burgers at Good Stuff on Capitol Hill, and for dinner and games out in our ‘hood.

On Sunday we got up and had a fabulous bluegrass brunch at Fireflies, recommended to us by David and Mary Claire a while ago. I liked it enough to write a glowing yelp review – my Italian benedict was great, and everything else that I sampled made me definitely want to go back for more. We walked our brunch off at Mount Vernon on a perfect afternoon – the lines were short, the weather was lovely, and by the end of it I was quite ready for a nap. A very nice weekend indeed.

Saturday in the City

Today we’re heading into DC for the day before spending all day Sunday painting our apartment. First up is brunch at Kramerbooks with my friend James, who I will be meeting for the first time. Brunch looks pricey – come to think of it, we need to start blogging about brunches – but it includes drinks! and snacks! and we like both of those things.

This afternoon we’re going to go on at least one of the free walking tours organized by Cultural Tourism DC. I’m leaning towards the tours in either Capitol Hill or Georgetown, and then maybe wrapping up with the Washington Waterfront tour.

I haven’t been into the District since moving here two weeks ago, so I’m very excited. The high today is 77, and it was sunny and beautiful out when we took our coffee on our balcony a little while ago. It’s going to be a perfect day.