Sometimes the weirdest-sounding combinations turn out to be much better than expected. I once had a pizza topped with cilantro pesto, apples, pecans, and smoked mozzarella, which I thought would be totally weird, but was actually very very good. The other day I happened to have corn tortillas, cheese, and cilantro in the fridge, an apple in the fruit bowl, and pecans in the baking cupboard, and I figured that a quesadilla is sort of like a Mexican pizza, right?…
Salad Lyonnaise with Candied Salmon
Just a quick note to say that I have another guest post on the SeaChange blog: Salad Lyonnaise with Candied Salmon. In addition to the candied salmon, there’s golden fried garlic, buttery toasted croutons, and a perfectly poached egg. I think it’s a good one – go check it out and let me know what you think. 
Eating Out in San Francisco, Part I: Lunch at the Zuni Café
My recent trip to Pacific Grove/Monterey, California, to visit my aunt and uncle contained horrific travel (delayed flights resulting in missed connections in both directions, leading to one miserable overnight in the San Francisco airport on the trip down and another 8 hour “layover” in the same airport on the way home. Plus the airline lost my luggage. A word of advice: don’t fly United!) and amazing restaurants. The day after I arrived, we drove up to San Francisco for a day of shopping (I needed a dress for the wedding I’m making the cake for ;)) and eating: we had lunch reservations at the Zuni Café, and dinner reservations at Millenium Restaurant. Both were highly anticipated, and I was pretty excited.
The Zuni Café is an award winning restaurant that has been around since the late 1970s (in a slightly different incarnation than it is now, involving a Weber grill and espresso machine that also doubled as an element to scramble eggs on?!) and as such is pretty well-known (at least in the San Francisco food scene, of which I am not a part!). In addition to their focus on seasonal ingredients from sustainable sources, and one of the things the restaurant is known for is their wood-burning brick oven, which is smack-dab in the middle of their open kitchen. They bake their own bread in that oven, and they also do a whole roast chicken, served on top of a bread salad, which has a reputation for being awesome, which is why we ordered it. But I’m getting ahead of myself….