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Travel
Photography
Jamaican Salads
I recently spent a week on Negril Beach in Jamaica at a very comfortable resort with excellent restaurants. If I ever get to go back to the Carribean, though, I'd want to have access to a little kitchen and a town market so that I could play around with some of these ingredients myself. Lots of chicken and fish. Bananas, plantains, and pineapples. Peas (what I call 'beans' they call 'peas'). I liked that steamed greens played a part in meals from breakfast to dinner. At breakfast, what I thought were eggs and codfish, actually turned out to be 'ackee' and codfish. Ackee is the national fruit of Jamaica but it's not sweet. If you eat it too soon, it's poison. If you cook it with codfish, it looks and tastes like eggs.
On the left is a picture of a simple salad made up of fried plantains, bacon, onions, corn and peas.
On the right is a salad of chicken, pineapples, peppers and onions.
Cacciuco di Ceci
Cacciucco is an Italian seafood stew. This recipe, though, is made with ceci (garbanzo beans) instead of seafood - so no real Italian would even consider it to be cacciuco at all, even though we found this recipe in La Nazione, an Italian newspaper.
Outside of Italy, it doesn't really matter what it's called - it's only important to know that it's cheap, easy, and very healthy. In my experience, it doesn't really go over well with children or the Swiss, but for everyone else, I think it's worth trying out.
Start out by sauteeing some onions, garlic, and about half a tin of anchovies. OK, so there is a little bit of seafood. And if this is a problem for someone who will be eating it, don't tell them - they'll never know. It's kind of like using fish sauce in Thai cooking. The actual fish sauce has a pretty wicked smell, but it's an absolute must in Thai cooking. These anchovies will add the salt to the cacciuco and they do something to tie the garbanzo beans together with the spinach. Trust me.
Add a package of chopped spinach leaves to the sautee and let them melt down into a mush. 
Drain a can of garbanzo beans and add it to the mix. 
Finally, add a couple of cans of tomato sauce, and simmer away.
To do it right, serve it over a toasted piece of garlic bread.
Norwegian Sandwiches
I spent the last week and a half travelling in Scandinavia. A few days in Oslo and a few days in Stockholm. Design is big up there - in their furniture, in their personal styles, and in their food. They would never just slop food on a plate. I could eat sandwiches like these all day long. They've got all kinds of variations on seafood salad and they use a lot of dill and mustard as well. The best part of breakfast each day was the senapsil or mustard herring. The pickled herring or inlagdsil isn't bad either.
Cake
I've been too busy painting lately to do anything too interesting with cooking or eating. I usually just run down to Taco de Mexico on Main St. in Morro Bay for an al pastor burrito to get me through. I did, however, have some birthday cake with my niece, Allison, who turned one the other day.
The Canvas Cafe
The Canvas Cafe at 1200 9th Avenue in San Francisco is another cool spot to stop for a coffee or a snack in the 9th and Irving part of SF in the Inner Sunset. They've got a lot of local art on the walls, open mics and concerts in the evening. Lots of couches and tables tucked away in all corners of the cafe and a full bar. It's right across the street from Golden Gate Park.
Here's a picture of some of their waffles. Everything is good and everything is expensive - but that's just San Francisco!
