Rourke's Random Musings

Do you enjoy bagels with smoked salmon, cream cheese, onions, and capers? If you do, then you’ll really like this dish.

You’ll need the following to serve two:

• 8oz. smoked salmon, cut into small rectangular pieces (I like the sockeye, personally)
• 2tsp. capers
• 1 yellow onion
• 1/2 lbs of pasta (angel hair work well)
• 1 lemon, zested
• dill
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• pint of cream
• 1 clove of garlic, minced

Make the pasta, drain, toss with 1tbsp of olive oil and set aside.

After breakfast one morning at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market, Jen and I wandered into Golden Gate Meat Company. They had an unusually large amount of game meat, so we spent some time salivating over the selection and trying to one up each other by finding cool and unusual meats. We ended up walking out with about a pound of ground elk.

I reshaped the ground elk into proper, thick burger patties. Jen showed me how to do this by mushing them up into balls in my hands and then flattening them some by throwing them from hand to hand. I then placed the patties into a griddle pan over medium heat (6-7 on our stove) with a little olive oil.

Cooking steak is hard. Why did I think all you had to do was slap the meat on the grill for a few minutes, pull it off, and eat it? It’s not that simple. I managed to spoil two nice pieces of grass fed, dry aged New York strip steak in the last week.

What did I learn?

• using a thermometer inside the steak doesn’t make things easy
• you can’t tell anything by looking at the outside
• you can’t tell much by cutting it open and looking at the inside

REALM CELLARS VINTAGE 2004 RELEASE PARTY - Nectar Wine Lounge, San Francisco (5/24/2006)

As usual, a great event. All the wines were awesome, and I’ll be buying a bunch. In trying to differenciate, below are my notes.

• 2004 Realm Cellars The Tempest - USA, California, Napa Valley
  Nose of dark fruit and chocolate. This seemed a little soft and hot to me. I enjoyed the wine, but there didn’t seem to be enough tannin and structure to hold up to the alcohol and fruit. I tend to like hugely tannic beasts, though, so it might just be me. (89 pts.)

Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco sells the best ice cream I’ve ever had. San Francisco has more “microbrew” ice creams than anywhere I’ve seen (eg: Tuckers, Double Rainbow, Lappert’s) and Mitchell’s is easily the best of them. I highly recommend the Thai Tea.

Jen and I stopped over on Sunday night after dinner because it was a rare warm day in San Francisco. We saw the above as we got there. This crowd continued down the street and around the corner. Mitchell’s calls people by number — we were #88 and they were calling #12 when we arrived. We just grabbed some prepacked ice cream and were in and out within ten minutes. Mitchell’s is good, but not an hour good.

DASHE AND JC CELLARS OPEN HOUSE - Oakland, CA (5/7/2006)

We went to Dashe and JC Cellars’ open house in Oakland with Jimmy on Sunday afternoon and tasted through some of the Dashe and JC Cellars releases. There were excellent finger foods that all paired well with these big Zins. Jen particularly enjoyed the sausage in puff pastry.

There was live music, food, water, coffee and lots of indoor and outdoor seating. A great little event.