Adventures with Gloria

I’ve just had some great adventures with Gloria.

It all started when she made plans to come down to San Francisco and take her ex, who is even crazier than i am, out to lunch for his birthday and then come over to my place and hang out and have dinner and hang out some more and go back to Santa Rosa the next day. What could go wrong?

I should have said, “What could go righter?” We went out for dinner at Mission Chinese Food and had their astonishing Tea Smoked Eel, Beijing peanuts, and a tasty hot noodle dish that has disappeared from the menu. That’s it. The wonderful thing about going out to dinner with Gloria rather than with one of my gluttonous guy friends is that she sets such a good example that i eat more slowly and actually stop when i’m full rather than stuffing myself as fast as i can like in one of those competitive eating contests.

The next morning i made us my acclaimed Baguette Louis by simply splitting half an Acme sourdough baguette lengthwise, topping the halves with Roquefort, sprinkling them with sesame seeds, gently placing them on the bottom shelf of the old Wolf restaurant stove, and cranking it up to 450. Turn it off in 12 minutes, snatch the now crispy baguette out, split each lengthwise, and serve. Fringe benefit: since there’s not a scrap of insulation in the oven, the kitchen got warm enough that Gloria was able to take off her coat.

Then i shaved us a couple of my beloved first-of-the-season sour Marsh grapefruit from the Hamadas. I dearly love these nearly extinct treats. First tear the outer skin off with your hands, then shave off the inner layer of pith as shown below, cut the fruit into quarters, cut off the white central core, pick the seeds out, cut into sixteenths as shown in the lower pic below, sprinkle lightly with salt, and serve. It’s worth it.

It’s much easier if you get your knives sharpened by Jivano and touch them up every so often with a fine steel. I mean, who wants to shave with a dull blade?

Thus fortified, we hung out until lunchtime and drove over to the Japan Center, where we had lunch at a noodle place the name of which i’ll stick in later. Excellent ramen with beef curry. And then we set out for our real destination, the Japanese grocery on the ground level at the corner of Post and Webster. It was packed with shoppers but i had to push a cart around as a substitute for a walker. Lean your forearms on the push bar, and it’ll carry most of your weight while you look like a slightly slumped normal person. The old and lame get cunning.

But not cunning enough to bring with me both issues of Lucky Peach, the first having a long disquisition on ramen and the second a discussion of a dozen different misos. So we had to guess and just got a cartful of random ramen and miso, shrimp shumai, pork and leek gyoza, and brought it all home to feast on.

Do check out Lucky Peach. It’s from McSweeney’s, and through a major miracle i got in as a charter subscriber.