I love exploring neighborhoods and during the weekend, we walked through Hayes Valley. It’s yet another adorable little neighborhood, just north of the mission. There are tons of shops, restaurants, etc. There’s even a cool teeny tiny park with a giant metal female statue. They also have a blue bottle coffee on a side street that’s basically an alley way. And the shop itself is literally in a garage. Even though it was slightly windy and brisk, J wanted to get the new orleans style iced coffee. Ordering at this particular blue bottle is kind of a mess. There’s no system. It’s just sort of a jumbled free-for-all that really needs to be worked out. Note to blue bottle coffee, please come up with some sort or ordering and handing out procedure. It could use some organization and efficiency.
Oh this is a good drink. So good that we wanted to try to make it. So we scoured the internet for some recipes. Basically, it’s a cold brewed coffee using ground coffee and ground chicory. What is chicory? Well, the root chicory is baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute, but it has no caffeine.

Well, we couldn’t find chicory (although honestly, we didn’t try very hard), but we did find french market coffee which is a premixed coffee and chicory blend. Since we were just experimenting, this seemed like an easy solution.

We found several recipes but didn’t want to use a pound of coffee to end up with tons of the coffee concentrate. So we just did a tiny little experiment. I took 1/4 lb of the french market coffee and mixed it with 3 cups of cold water. You’re supposed to take only part of the water to wet all the grounds, and then pour the rest of the water in, agitating as little as possible. You get this crazy dark coffee slurry. It’s pretty groovy.
After leaving the cold brew out overnight, then you have to strain! You need a sieve with holes small enough that the medium ground coffee/chicory grinds will not fall through. So then you just sieve away. Depending on the recipe, you’re supposed to sieve twice, the second time through an even finer sieve, but we only did it once. It was a pain in the butt even trying to find one sieve, let alone two with finer mesh. Once you’re done sieving, you have your concentrate.

As you can see, it was quite a messy experiment. But then we actually made the coffee. Take 1/4 cup of the concentrate and 3/4 cup of milk. Pour over ice. Add simple syrup to your liking. And there you have it! It turned out quite amazing, if I do say so myself. It’s incredibly smooth, rich, and creamy. There’s absolutely no bitterness at all. It wasn’t as good as blue bottle’s version, but then again, we didn’t use blue bottle coffee. Even with our cheapo version, it turned out quite well. There’s something to be said about this cold brew business!

So I really like the mandarin orange chicken that comes in the frozen packages at Trader Joe’s. I tried the teriyaki chicken once, and it was gross. But I thought I’d give the Tempura Chicken with Sweet and Sour sauce a go. I’m not sure why they call it that, because it’s basically sweet and sour chicken, the kind you would get at your local chinese take-out. But for whatever reason, tj’s decided to slap a japanese name on it. It even says “Trader Joe San” at the top, which is clearly japanese. Do they think chinese and japanese are the same? Well, it’s slightly offensive, but I’m quick to forgive because it tastes freakin good. It really does taste just like sweet and sour chicken.
It’s pretty easy to make. You either heat up the chicken pieces in the oven or pan fry it. Then you heat up the sauce in the microwave and drizzle it over the chicken pieces. It doesn’t get much easier than that, aside from ordering in. And even though I could order this from my neighborhood chinese joint, there’s something about “making” it myself that makes me feel better. As if I’d made it myself, even though clearly, I haven’t. But I’ll take whatever credit I can pretend to give myself. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m much better at eating than cooking.

I love cabbage, I really do. And the other day, I had bought a couple bags of preshredded cabbage so that I could just eat it. I didn’t make cole slaw with it or anything, I’ve just been eating it like a salad. But with just cabbage. I love the crunch. But I had bought so much and I didn’t want any of it to go bad. So I decided to make up a quick little stir fry and throw a bunch of the cabbage in there. While I was at wegmans, I picked up a pack of extra firm tofu and a pack of fresh chow mein type noodles, the skinny flour kind. So here’s what I did.

I sliced up the tofu and then browned them on each side with a tiny bit of oil. Mushy tofu is fine to me as well, but I like it when it’s a little brown so that it’s even firmer on the outside. Then I mixed soy, mirin, and honey in a 2-1-1 ratio and then threw it into the tofu. The flavor is just perfect for your little tofu nubs. They soak in the flavor and you can just eat the tofu as is at this point. Or at least I could because I love me some darn tofu. For me, tofu is not a meat substitute. It’s just tofu. I guess that comes from growing up with it, and not discovering it later on in life as something you can use instead of meat or chicken. That seems to be the case for lots of meat-averse americans. But I just love tofu for what it is. I like how it tastes on its own. I could just eat a block of silken tofu with just a tiny smidge of soy and sesame oil and call it a day. I don’t just want it because it’s taking the place of something else in my dish. Ok, enough of my ode to tofu.

Anyhoo, I then cooked up the noodles in water, threw them into the pan along with a crapload of shredded cabbage. I then added a little soy, sesame oil, and a bit more cooking oil, and then just heated it up a little bit. And that was my super quick and easy stir fry. It’s not exciting at all, but I liked it. And really, you could add whatever flavorings you wanted to it. Want a little broth? Go ahead. Some oyster sauce? Add that too. It’s fun to just make it up as you go.