The Well Fed Bachelor #1; 3 Ingredient Tomato Sauce

The internet was all chubby over this super simple tomato sauce. I was intrigued by its simplicity, and by the fact that the onion didn't need to be chopped. I was unable to resist the urge to crush a couple of garlic cloves into it.

It was good. Easy as advertised. but if i did it again, and keep in mind that the only cookbook I owned before my mid 30s was Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen, I would cut back a little on the butter and maybe go this route, with the bay leaf and herbs. I put on some green fettucini. Came out ok. I'm not gonna go evangelizing it, but I ate it all.

Torpedo From Lucca Bros.

There are times when the thought terminating cliches are true. Rarely is "it" "all good". But, in the case of torpedo sandwiches from the Lucca deli, it really, truly is.  The torpedo is a semi-random collection of coldcuts, whatever the early meat cutter has a lot of or just plain fancies, on a hard sour roll. The morning shift makes up a bunch of them early and wraps them up for sale at $3.00 a pop over the course of the day. They usually sell out early, so I can't really go in planning to get one, but whenever I go and they have them, I buy one, no matter what else I came in to get.

When I went in for some sandwich meat Friday, it was late in the afternoon, the time of day when the torpedoes have usually long since been sold and eaten, so I was surprised to see torpedoes in the case.  It was tasty. Hot coppa, some kind of large-format, summer-sausagey wet salami, pepper turkey, and pastrami on a hard, sour roll. Couple mustard packets and some napkins. Three dollars. All good, I ask? What part isn't?

Moronically, I left my camera charger someplace that is not my home and where it does not help me in charging my image-capturing device, so I don't have a picture of the sandwich. You've seen a hard roll with some cold cuts on it before, though. Seeing it is far from the important sensory component with regard to this sandwich.

7x7 Made a List.

7x7, they made a list of 100 singularly delicious San Francisco experiences. It is similar the the one they made last year, significantly different, too. I have some issues with it, but I will refrain from line-item nitpickery here. I will mention that it bothers me in a "streets where dreams are made of" sort of a way, though, that it is both an local, annual list and a things one must do "before you die" proposition. Do the 7x7 editorial staff know something? Just call it Big Eat SF, like they already do, and leave my fucking mortality out of it.

I know these lists move magazines. I know because I can't wait to read them even when I know that they are going to be infuriating (not that this one is overly so). It is an mixture of rage and vindication that surges up my throat into the back of my mouth when a favorite is either included or omitted. It is an uncomfortable combination of wanting validation and wanting to be smarter or hipper or whatever than the listmakers, and every option works both ways, so if my favorite place is on the list I am both validated in print and devalued by the making of this place that I found and loved available to the general public to come in and form a line in front of me and use up all the tomatillo salsa. And, if my favorite place is omitted it works in reverse.

This is the phenomenon I call the Yamo Effect, after one of my favorite hole in the wall restaurants. Yamo is an awesome Burmese lunch counter run by several women who span a couple/few generations. It's all short order stuff, stir-fries and tea salads and rice plates and cold noodle and curries. Every dish is $5.25. You heard me. Except for some appetizers, which are $3.75. The place is just wide enough for a long counter with stools on one side and workspace on the other. It gets crowded fast. It has been in heavy rotation for me for better than a decade. In the past few years, though, it has become immensely popular with many of the skinny-jeaned/giant-optics-framed youth who have become the genpop of my once proudly Mexi-boho neighborhood.

I don't begrudge the the restaurant its popularity or the newcomers their places at the counter, really; by rights this place should be more popular than free beer endorsed by Oprah and each and every one of the ladies that works here should become Roseanne Barr rich. What we are talking about here is our own little neighborhood Tu-lan, after all, with every potential Tu-Lan drawback--the grime, the grease, the limelight loving cockroaches, the freelance parking attendants/doormen, the byzantine system of ordering and serving--answered in spades. Yamo makes Tu-Lan look positively expansive though. Like I said before, it gets crowded fast, and it is just one cook and a couple of servers, so the line at the wok can back up pretty fast. And there I am, just waiting for my goddam black bean fish, stuck behind a couple of people talking about bike culture and PBR, wishing I could pull Marshal McLuhan from some nook, not so much to refute the very idea of a so-called "bike culture" as so there will be someone older than me in the room.

So Yamo Effect is my annoyance at the Jenny-come-latelys in line in front of me and their sense of discovering this place that I already fucking discovered. It is my annoyance at their taking so long to discover the place, and now that they have, thinking that they have achieved something other than lunch, and doing all of this in front of me in lines, deliberating over the simple menu like it is goddam Rumi. The Yamo Effect then, ultimately, comes down to my annoyance at people acting like me after me, and /or in line in front of me (For the record, I order quickly, especially if I have had a lot of time in line to ruminate on the menu, or if I'm in a taqueria or cafe. Step it up, genius, they have lattes and cappucinos. Pick one and get outta my way.)

I didn't say I was going to be sympathetic. Or even interesting. Or even make sense. I just said 7x7 made a list, and I had a few issues with it. I guess the primary one is that I didn't make it. Another is Katana-Ya. It is pretty rare that I would steer anyone away from barbecued pork, but, I have three words for you: Fried chicken ramen.

Little Chocolate Doughnuts.

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18 Reasons Hog Butchery Demo With Morgan Maki, Week 1

So, a few weeks ago, on a rainy Tuesday evening, myself and several other swine enthusiasts/Bi-Rite hangers-on, gathered at the little 18 Reasons gallery on Guerrero, to watch Morgan Maki break down the market's weekly half-a-hog.

The guest of honor is pictured above, open side up. It had arrived into the the store a few days before. It came headless. It could be that the head travelled with the other half of the hog. Sometimes, Morgan explained, you get a half a head, or a whole head, or, as in the present pig, no head whatsoever. Different cutters have different methods, and sometimes, because markets don't have a huge demand for pig faces, workers at the slaughterhouse can take the head home and make head cheese or something I think is called manchale. I'm pretty sure that is what they were saying. I haven't been able to find it searching on the web for any of the ways I have thought of spelling it, or anything on Mexican or Filipino cooking sites that seems like it might be it. The butchers kept mentioning it, though, and my not being able to find any information on it has piqued my curiosity, so if you know anything, come forth please.

The 232 there refers to the weight of the whole pig, we are looking at something less than half that weight here on the block. He, meat artist Morgan Maki, mostly used that little pirate's-dagger looking knife laying on the table there. The hacksaw only came out to cut through a bone, and the cleaver only made a couple of cuts all nights. In this picture, he is separating the shoulder. He will cut the trotter off. He said he had customer had requested them, but the next week we would learn that the customer had not only not shown up to collect them, but had called in to request the next set.

After making the cuts in the shoulder, into the butt and the picnic, we moved on to the belly, the middle section. First he removed the back leg. Then he flipped the belly over and removed the tenderloin, the most expensive cut on the hog, which runs right underneath the animal's spine, from about where the ribs stop to just past where he has separated the leg. In this picture, Morgan is pointing the tenderloin he has cut off as it tapers into the back leg.

The prime cuts. Belly, which will be bacon or pancetta or porcetta. He will make a rack of ribs by cutting those meaty bones there off that rack of chops. Then he will french (An excellent and extremely dirty sounding term I learned or maybe relearned here, meaning exposing the ends of the bones in preparation to cook. There was, I note with equal parts disappointment and relief, no tongue involved.) the tips of the bones and tie it up with rosemary and butcher's twine to be sold as a roast or cut into individual chops.

He's separating some of the primer cuts here. There was a lot of discussion of off cuts and bones and skin and fat, all of which were collected for use in the store's kitchen, to be made into sausages or cooked into stocks and sauces and what have you and sold to the public or eaten by the store staff. Several times reference was made to "the boys", who I visualized as somewhat puppyish just from the initial gloss, but then became aggressively canine in my imagination when it was revealed that sometimes they will take a bone from a scrap bucket, roast it, and then stand around picking and gnawing at it. At one point, he, Morgan, takes a  hunk of fat cut from another part of the animal and lashes it to a lean roast with butcher's twine, so that it will melt and sort of baste the leaner cut as it cooks.

Removing the trotter from the back leg. 

"H-bone" removal. Separating meat from the leg for pierna, pork knuckle, &c.

Pork leg. Could be submerged in salt at this point and then hung or smoked and made into a prosciutto or country ham.

Shaggy, bespectacled, native New Orleanian Morgan Maki butterflies a pork leg. I'm not so big on the mancrush/bromance thing anymore, but if I was, this dude could be a candidate. A solid candidate.

Since I said mancrush, I will also say bone bucket. Mancrush. Manchale. Bone bucket.

Final products of our evening. In the next installment, we will discuss cutting up the hog in preparation for curing.