Taste of Uptown

Taste of Uptown Hillcrest will be Saturday April 21! We’ve never been to Taste of Uptown – but a few months ago we went to Taste of Ocean Beach and it was awesome! You get to walk around, go into a restaurant and get an appetizer-sized portion of their featured food and a cocktail (which, due to ABC laws, costs a quarter) and then you move on down the street. Repeat 30 times, or until you are too stuffed to walk.

At Taste of OB we had steak tartar and scallop ceviche at Thee Bungalow; lobster bisque at Shades Oceanfront Bistro; fish tacos at some place I can’t remember; tortilla soup at Ranchos Cocina; crab cakes at O'Bistro; Afgani kabobs; NY pizza slices; Southern pulled pork sandwiches; pecan french toast; and 20 other things I can’t remember.

I would highly recommend getting tickets early – it’ll be the best $25 you’ve ever spent on food. You can purchase tickets at Wine Steals, Bacione Ristorante or on the Uptown website.

Some of the restaurants are:

Brian's American Eatery
Bacione Ristorante
Lalo's Tacos Mexican Grill
Ono Sushi
Taste of Italy
Taste of Szechuan
Urban Mo's Bar & Grill
Baja Betty's
Mama Testa
Nami Sushi
Taste of Thai
Bai Yook Thai Cuisine
Crush
Kous Kous
Kemo Sabe
Ortega's Mexican Bistro
Bamboo Lounge
T Deli
Lucky Buck's
Wine Steals
Khyber Pass
Amarin Thai
Tractor Room

Join us for an afternoon of gluttony and gastronomic over-indulgence. The party parade will leave our house at 11:45 – first stop is Bamboo Lounge, just a block from our house. Wear strechy pants and running shoes.

El Agave, Corn Fungus & Tequila

This weekend we went to El Agave in Old Town, which is the second largest Tequilería in the world.





They have over 800 bottles of tequila – it is like being in a library of tequila! D was like a kid in a candy shop, or perhaps more aptly, like an adult in a library of tequila.

The food is an blend of Baja, Sonoran & Aztec Mexican. The Tlacoyos Cuitlacoche (blue corn masa tlacoyos, stuffed with black beans and cuitlacoche (corn fungus), salsa verde, cheese and onion) were the best thing I’ve ever had! I found a recipe for tlacoyos cuitlacoche and am going to try to track down corn fungus and avocado leaves. But until then I’ll settle for making Black Bean Tlacoyos, which calls for normal supermarket ingerdients (well, if you live within 100 miles of the border).


A little about cuitlacoche:
The Aztec named this dark growth found on corn huitlacoche which translates to "ravens excrement". The Aztec's fashioned the fungus into dishes of crepes, soups, and tamales. American farmers call it "smut" and "devil's corn" and consider it a disease to be irradiated. The peoples of Mexico as well as the American Hopi Indians consider the fungus a delightful delicacy.

Today in Mexico the product is actually cultivated each season providing an ample supply to be eaten fresh, then frozen and canned. While the product is not easy to find in the U.S. most typically it can be purchased canned.

Corn smut is a disease of maize caused by the pathogenic plant fungus Ustilago maydis. Although it can infect any part of the plant it usually enters the ovaries and replaces the normal kernels of the cobs with large distorted tumors analogous to mushrooms. These tumors, or "galls", are made up of much-enlarged cells of the infected plant, fungal threads, and blue-black spores. The spores give the cob a burned, scorched appearance. In fact, the name Ustilago comes from the Latin word ustilare (to burn).

For culinary use, the galls are harvested while still immature — fully mature galls are dry and almost entirely spore-filled. The immature galls, gathered two to three weeks after an ear of corn is infected, still retain moisture and, when cooked, have a flavor described as mushroom-like, sweet, savory, woody, and earthy. Flavor compounds include sotolon and vanillin, as well as the sugar glucose.

My alma mater is in the news for something other than the fraternities filming porn on campus

ASU is the “new American university” – which I guess means huge, cheap and for the masses. They accept 92% of applications and they offer a degree in golf course management.

Once again I've been robbed!

Hey! They stole my idea! And to think I could have charge $4 for those grease sponges. Somehow I think they won't follow up with the Jager Soaked Deep Fried Twinkie though.

Law of Difficulty

Consensus is reached that science is so hard “it's honestly not even worth the effort”.

Project Linus

Project Linus was featured on the NBC Nightly News a few weeks ago (click here to see the clip, scroll up to the top of the page). Check out The Quilt Blog to the quilts I’ve made for Project Linus.

This is a true story: While we lived in Tucson I made blanket deliveries to TMC. One day the Tucson coordinator lady called me to say that the she has a set of 50 or so blankets ready to go out for delivery. She lived way over on the east-side of Tucson and by the time I got home from work I was tired and didn’t want to drive all the way over there. But I went anyway. I was sitting at a red light at Golf Links & Kolb when I was rear-ended. I sat in the car while calling 911, thinking “god damn it – I try to do something nice and now I’ll have to spend all night filling out police reports and talking on the phone to insurance companies. My deductible is $500 and I don’t have that kind of money. My car will be in shop for weeks. SUCK!!!! #$%&#@!!!!!” I hang up with the 911 operator and get out of the car to see how the other drive is and to check the damage. He is fine, but the front end of his car is smashed. My car (my plastic Honda with a plastic bumper) is fine. Not a scratch. No kidding.