San Francisco

I've been a resident of San Francisco for two and a half years now, and given the number of other food bloggers and free time spent doing so many other things, I have not wanted to do a half-start of this blog again every time I cooked a great recipe or encountered a noteworthy restaurant. Which, if you've been to San Francisco, you know are aplenty.

I still think of many of Bethlehem and the Lehigh Valley Area restaurants fondly and look forward to returning at some point, especially to see the changes I hear of on the South Side.
For now, I am developing some writing around the fascinating changes occurring on San Francisco's Market Street. There's a bit of closure for the time being.

I'll end with a food-related catalyst for anyone who encounters this post expecting that:
sweet potato-parsnip latkes with homemade applesauce.

We've made them a couple of times lately, and it feels appropriate, perhaps more so for those of you who are Jewish, in anticipation of the upcoming Hannukah/Thanksgiving coincidence.

We've used a few recipes, I encourage you to find the one you like best. Enjoy!

The Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich: A Cross-Section of Dinner

The Thanksgiving Sandwich

It seemed like a tall order to attempt to describe every dish that went into our Thanksgiving dinner. So what I decided to do was describe our dishes through the cross-section of my Thanksgiving leftovers, sandwiched between two slices of delicious home-made bread by my Aunt Cindy.

Perhaps the following can serve as inspiration for your next Thanksgiving. Recipes for most of these can be tracked down, and I'll give you the main ingredients that give them their signature flavors.

From the top:

The mustard: Spread across one slice, Trader Joe's Garlic Aioli Mustard. I'm a big proponent; no sandwich, Thanksgiving or not, is the same without it.

The turkey: A standard recipe, stuffed with celery, carrots, and onions. That grossly understates how much goes into wrestling a turkey into the perfect final product but for the purposes of this description will do.

The cranberry sauce: A sweet sauce made from fresh cranberries, Aunt Cindy's recipe.

The mashed sweet potatoes: That's right, two types of mashed potatoes. This one is based on a Julia Child recipe that includes butter, grated fresh ginger, and ground white pepper. We also added a dash of cinnamon sugar.

The swiss chard and kale: Based on my favorite way to prepare these two greens, I sauteed a head each of kale and swiss chard with garlic, red onion, and olive oil. Squeeze juice of lemon, salt and pepper to taste. Add cranberries and blue cheese and it's a dish.

Sauerkraut dressing: A staple of the Thanksgiving meal for my family, in honor of our Lithuanian heritage. Essentially pork sausage, sauerkraut, onion, and celery.

The Ingredients
Clockwise from 12 o'clock: Mashed Potatoes, Sauerkraut Dressing, Kale/Swiss Chard Greens, Turkey with Cranberry Sauce and Mustard, Mashed Sweet Potatoes

The End

A few other aspects of our dinner didn't make it to leftovers, but included of course the gravy and a salad with red onions, goat cheese, and an orange vinaigrette that I concocted.