Daily Chai

Better than wooden spoons

It wasn't until I was cooking one day when my mom was in town that it finally clicked that you weren't supposed to cook with metal spoons.

"Honey, you should get a wooden spoon," she advised.

I did, and even though the wooden spoon did solve the nails-on-a-blackboard sensation that comes with metal-on-metal, they always seemed sort of counterintuitive to me for cooking, since they don't hold up all that well to heat or soap and water. These Tovolo silicon mixing spoonsare much better! Heat resistant and dishwasher safe, and they don't hold the aroma of whatever it is they're stirring up.

Cheap, easy, healthy lunch

Maybe all the ingredients in Wolfgang Puck's Organic Corn Chowder really are organic, but that is not why I'm recommending it. Personal bias, but I am always skeptical of anything coming in a can being made from all-natural ingredients.

I recommend it because it's yummy: not too creamy but filling enough to make a light meal. It also is clearly a lot healthier than some other big-label soups that taste like chemicals in a can.

Note: This is not an endorsement for all of Wolfgang Puck's organic soups. I was so disappointed by the Chicken with Wild Rice that I never tried another kind, and when straight back to the corn chowder.

Next time you don't know what to order in that upscale tea house

...definitely order the Schizandra tea! I'd suggest trying it iced.

This is the best new tea I've had in years. While I can't vouch for the boxed tea that you prepare at home -- chai out of a teabag, after all, is a totally different experience from a nonfat chai latte -- a Schizandra properly brewed by people who know what they are doing, provides such a fresh explosion of flavors, that when I try to describe them all, I feel like I need to resort to my (woefully limited) wine vocabulary.

It's citrus-y but not too sharp. This is a light flavor that doesn't overwhelm, and if you're like me, you will find yourself taking smaller and smaller sips to help your taste buds process all the rich flavors.

Cafe Gratitude: organic, raw, vegan food that even a carnivore will love

Cafe Gratitudeis a restaurant that any visitor to San Francisco should try, if only to get a real slice of life here, from the passion for organic food to the hippy dippy culture to just having a really amazing meal.

This restaurant makes frothy latte drinks with only almond milk, and tasty desserts with no refined sugar -- not the tasteless desserts you might associate with a vegan restaurant, but real desserts like chocolate mousse and coconut cream pie.

But it's far more than a coffee and dessert place. It's a place that works miracles with the restrictions of raw and vegan cooking, serving up sushi (without the fish), enchiladas (without the meat), pizza (without the cheese, or the traditional crust) and pasta (without the ... pasta ... check it out).

Cafe Gratitude also offers organic beers and wines, smoothies and and assortment of juices from the hardcore wheat grass to a more palatable grapefruit, mint and fennel combination. And if you're feeling really inspired, you can convince yourself the beet juice you ordered is really wine (they serve it in a wine glass).

Yes, you feel healthy when you leave Cafe Gratitude, but the main takeaway here is that the food is simply scrumptious. I avoided this place for the longest time because I'd never had an especially good vegan meal before. Now I go there all the time because the food is just so good; the health benefits, a bonus.

Dishwasher safe, child safe ... and pretty

Andy Warhol's colorful flower designs manage to make these plastic dishes just a little bit fancy yet still fun. A great way to bring a touch of the finer things in life to your every day dining.

The matching plates, which come in two sizes are just as fun and just as elegant. A bonus: these irregularly shaped plates come in an irregularly shaped container. When you line them up properly they slide right in: an exercise in frustration for an adult just trying to get the dishes done, but a fun little, maybe even slightly educational puzzle, for young kids.

Available in various museum shops and online at PlumParty.

 

Soothe the sweet tooth, spare the diet

I couldn't come up with a better slogan for Panda Licorice than the company's very own: An Acceptable Sin.

While it will get you a lot closer to that feeling of real dessert than a piece of fruit, Panda Licorice has just 0.5% fat, no artificial coloring, no artificial preservatives, and less than half the caloric content of chocolate. And it's quite tasty.

Especially good if you're trying to give up sugar, but can't manage to go cold turkey, maybe like the sugar lover's nicotine patch?

Food magazine that even non-cook, non-foodies can enjoy.

I have to preface this post by stressing that I have not made an exhaustive survey of all of the cooking magazines out there (no need as I don't cook all that much). But during one of those short-lived periods that I decided I really needed to cook more, I picked up Eating Well magazine and liked it so much I subscribed. And for that brief period that I read it in the kitchen, I did produce a few good meals, including a great chicken tagine dish, which I'd been planning to cook since a trip to Morocco about seven years earlier. That recipe taught me about the lovely kumquat.

The main reason I like Eating Well is that, unlike some other so-called, healthy eating magazines that define healthy eating by calorie count alone and recommend things like diet soda and spray on butter substitutes filled with nasty chemicals, Eating Well understands the value of fresh, whole, unprocessed foods such as cauliflower, which apparently is now known as the skinny starch and, which I learned in the January/February issue, can be prepared in a creamy chopped cauliflower salad, cauliflower & couscous pilaf, skillet cauliflower gratin, and more. It also devotes considerable space to healthy living, including exercise and realistic diets that incorporate easy-to-prepare recipes with not-impossible-to-follow workout regimens; as well as some serious nutritional talk such as a recent piece on foods linked to inflammation.

The other great thing about Eating Well: it's pretty literary for a food magazine. Meaning not that the editors incorporate discussion of books and politics into its stories on food, but that its stories on food are thoroughly enjoyable, whether you are reading them while standing over the stove or while relaxing on your couch with takeout. They have a wonderful regular feature entitled Meals To Remember, that's one contributor's personal essay on a particular meal.

That proverbial place to get away from "it all" without leaving it at all.

Cafe Claude was one of the very first places I was taken to eat years ago when I first arrived in San Francisco. I just returned from a lunch there and am happy to say that -- while the decor was unrecognizable -- the place is as charming as ever: just the sort of place you want to head to when you're lunching in the financial district but want to chill a bit.

The cafe, which serves traditional French fare like Croque Monsieurs, is located on Claude Street, an alley off of Sutter Street that, unlike nearby Belden Lane, is still pretty low key. Which is not to say that you will find yourself eating in solitude at Cafe Claude. The word has long since gotten out about this little gem tucked away from it all. Still, the feel is more "vacation" and less "quick break from work."

Room for dessert in Palo Alto?

As someone who would take second helpings of a good meal over dessert almost any day, there's one place I'd always opt for dessert instead: The Prolific Oven right off University Avenue in Palo Alto, on days when they still haven't run out of their yummy chocolate rum cake.

Until just now, when I finally bothered to look it up, the ingredients eluded me. Turns out it's a sour cream chocolate cake with cream cheese icing. Sounds a little on the dairy side, and maybe not something to indulge in daily, but definitely worth checking out when you have room for dessert.

The Prolific Oven is a relaxed, college-style hang out where you can linger over coffee, tea and desserts for hours without being bothered. At least it started out as a college hang out, before Silicon Valley professionals took over Palo Alto and, I'm told, the Stanford students started heading to Mountain View ... or San Francisco

Whatever you order, start with the Greens and Gorgonzola

Fritto Misto, a casual neighborhood restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. is, at the same time,  hugely popular and an unknown gem.

This Italian eatery located at 601 Colorado Ave. in central Santa Monica not far from Lincoln Blvd. is good enough to have long ago morphed into a chain, if only a tasteful mini-chain with a separate location in Beverly Hills, a la Newsroom Cafe or Ivy. And legend has it (Fritto Misto is popular enough among its loyal followers to be the stuff of legend) that its owners have for years been approached with offers to expand it, an offer they have consistently turned down, in favor of maintaining a single superb, out-of-the-way, dining spot.

Far from Santa Monica's restaurant hubs like the Third Street Promenade, Main Street or Ocean Ave., Fritto Misto draws many customers from the immediate neighborhood, but it keeps them long after they have moved away. Most people who dine once at Fritto Misto come back. It features a rich assortment of pasta dishes that are so well prepared that even people like me who don't really like pasta, end up devouring it; a couple basic desserts including flourless chocolate cake and lemon bars, which have have been staples of the menu for at least 10 years; and an absolutely to-die-for "greens and Gorgonzola" salad that is fresh, far too tasty to be "just" a salad, and large enough and hearty enough that, depending on your hunger level, may be more than enough to make a meal out of.

The space is simple and happy, the service quite friendly and the wait, if you get there much after 6 p.m., is often long. But since they let you drink wine and mill about out front, sitting if you wish, in the plastic patio chairs scattered around the sidewalk in the front, it's usually a pleasant wait, in the company of other people who are not looking for a place that is "in," but are just returning to a place that they love -- and probably hope no one else finds out about.