Ceviche With Cucumber “Boats” & Nori “Sails” (San Francisco Chronicles Part 4)

For my last week in San Francisco, I went a little bit off the deep end, with food. I staged at two restaurants (Chez Panisse and Bar Tartine), took a cooking class, went to a supper club, volunteered at an Edible Schoolyard benefit called OPENEducation at the Berkeley Art Museum, and threw an epic dinner party on the boat. This was our first course: a tangy medley of fresh peppers, tomatoes, onions, grilled corn and fish piled inside a hollowed cucumber "boat" -- like the colorful characters who came.

Serious Salsas Win Big at SF Food Wars

While stuffing tortilla chips into paper bags in preparation for the second-ever Salsa SF Food Wars last Sunday, a fellow volunteer wondered aloud whether many of the contestants would stick to making salsa, as the locals all know it. "Not pico de gallo," she clarified. I had to squirm. As a New Yorker, I'm used to a chunky mixture of fresh tomatoes, onions, cilantro and peppers -- pico de gallo -- as the quintessential bowl of "salsa" at a barbecue. Not a thin, flavorful sauce that you can blanket a chip with, or drizzle onto a taco for extra juice, be it red, green, creamy-orange, or anywhere in between. Well, I was certainly schooled in salsa-making over the course of the day.

Shakshouka, On A Boat

They say shakshouka, a common Israeli breakfast dish, is difficult or taxing to make, or that canned tomatoes are the best option to create a thick and savory sauce. But it was the first thing I could think of to whip up when I could find little else but ripe tomatoes and fresh eggs in the icebox one morning last week. I don't mean that in a nostalgic way, using the word, "icebox" -- for the past couple weeks, I've been living on a single-hull sailboat docked at the San Francisco marina.