Modesto: Our Mexican Weekend

I had a taste—a glimmer—of summer this weekend. Up in Modesto to celebrate our nephew Jack's fifth birthday, Joe and I also took an afternoon to stop at Mi Pueblo, our favorite Mexican supermarket, to get some lunch fixings. We shopped well, we ate well, we soaked up the sun.

Moss and Mia eating a tortilla fresh off the press in front of a case of pork rinds.

Pig face: To-go.

Chile guajillo (what we use for our beef short rib tacos at Tacolicious).

Fresh chickpeas and spring onions.

Chicken on the grill outside the market. Mmmmmm.

Fresh garbanzo beans, ready to eat: Parboiled for a few minutes, and tossed in chili, salt and lime.

Lunch: Corn tortillas, fresh garbanzo beans, chicken, roasted salsa that Joe made and Sol. Duh.

Fish & Farm's Chad Newton: The Post-Taco Interview

I figured I've got all these great chefs in our clutches for the next couple months, so I should milk them for their taco expertise. So welcome to the exit-interview series. Introducing chef #1: Chad Newton.

First taco memory? 
I grew up eating tacos because I'm from Northern California. But the first taqueria that really sticks in my mind is San Jose on Mission Street. The tacos there are just so simple.

Favorite taqueria here?
I'm a fan of El Farolito for their quesadilla suiza. Their salsa verde is amazing. Bright and fresh.

How did you come up with your taco for yesterday's market?
When I was the chef at Baraka, I did an octopus dish that everyone loved—slow-poached octopus that's seared with warm potatoes and preserved lemon. For the taco I took out the lemon and put some smoked paprika and sea salt in the crema.

You have an octopus tattooed on your shoulder. Can you flex for the camera while holding the taco?
Oh common, don't make me do it! [Well, he said something to this effect and then grudgingly pulled up his sleeve.]

The Newtonizer Tames the Eight-Legged Taco

Today's farmers market stand marks our first day of our guest taco chefs! Welcome Chad Newton of Fish & Farm.


On the menu, our usual delicious roster of tacos …
PLUS: Chad's Taco with Slow-Poached and Seared Octopus, Confit Potatoes, Cabbage and Smoked Crema. (Smoked crema? Very cool. We can't wait to try it.)


Upcoming taco chef dates:
March 11th, Delfina's Craig Stoll for Tacolicious
March 18th, Betelnut's Alex Ong for Tacolicious
March 25th, Bishop (to be)'s Mark Denham for Tacolicious
April 1st, A16's Liza Shaw for Tacolicious
April 8th, Robbie Lewis (formerly of Bacar and Jardinière)

April 15th, Perbacco's Staffan Terje for Tacolicious

Top SF Chefs Come to Tacolicious

Sure he's a James Beard award winner, but can he make a taco?

We'll find out.

Joe's antsy. It's raining, there's no football any more, no baseball yet. Not to mention our Thursday Ferry Plaza Farmers Market stand , although still clipping along, is not its usual sunny, summery self. The culmination of all this compelled him to drum up something never attempted before, something I'd like to take credit for thinking of but alas, I had (almost) nothing to do with.

Starting March 4th, you're in for a treat: We've asked some of the city's best chefs to create their version of a taco for our market stand, every week, for six weeks. While Joe is thinking of it like "Top Chef Masters" for tacos, I'm thinking of it more as something like Jean Paul Gaultier for Target … except with chefs and tacos.

And should you think that this has anything to do with frivolous gluttony and or self-promotion, rest assured proceeds from these tacos will go to CUESA's educational programs! We just want to give back.

Although all the taco concepts are not in yet, Alex Ong gave us a sneak peek into his Asian creation: Imagine biting into a warm corn tortilla wrapped around pork leg braised in duck fat, topped with fish sauce infused with chilies, anise and Szechuan peppercorns. Seriously.

Meanwhile Mark Denham is working on pork cheeks estofado (a Spanish take on mole) and Liza Shaw is going to be tenderizing some beef tongue. Stay tuned for more details via Twitter.

Thankfully this is not on Bravo; this is not a reality show challenge. It's real life, a be here now kind of thing. In other words, get your butt down to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market or miss out. You have a month and a half of tacos to look forward to. There will be no winners; no losers; just superior tacos.

Here's the very exciting lineup.

March 4th, Fish & Farm's Chad Newton for Tacolicious
March 11th, Delfina's Craig Stoll for Tacolicious
March 18th, Betelnut's Alex Ong for Tacolicious
March 25th, Bishop (to be)'s Mark Denham for Tacolicious
April 1st, A16's Liza Shaw for Tacolicious
April 8th, Robbie Lewis (formerly of Bacar and Jardinière)

Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch

Joe's first love was undoubtedly a girl—a girl dog named Rocksie (yes, that was the spelling—she chased rocks apparently), a fox-red lab that he got when he was 16. And any man that has fallen in love with a dog as a teenager will try to replicate that experience as an adult.

They'll try really, really hard, even if their wife has been labeled as a cold-blooded dog hater. They won't stop until they get what they want.

So welcome Honey, a red-fox not-so-lab looking "lab" rescued from a lab rescue shelter in North Carolina because she was deathly afraid of thunder and brought here to another rescue group in Willits where I found her online. Last week, she made her way to our Bernal Heights flat. She's quiet and kind of shy and follows people around wherever they go and thinks fetching is for the dogs. She's new to this whole city thing.

Honey is not only an apartment dog now but she's also a restaurant dog. While you're eating at Tacolicious, she's upstairs in the office getting love from the staff that walk in and out all day. That, and some fine chicken and rice dinners from our chef Telmo who we call the dog whisperer.

The happy ending to this story is that cold-blooded wife's heart has melted a bit because as Joe says, over and over and over again, "Honey's pretty sweet."

Paul Madonna's Art: Stuck in the Taqueria Era

I knew I liked Paul Madonna when I saw this piece he did for a yearly publication he's doing called "Album"—in Paul Madonna style, it's incredibly simple but it hits so deep. The painting is a sketch of a fanny pack that wryly states: "In What Era Will You Get Stuck?" The first time I saw it, I sat there gazing at the rather beat-up, incredibly familiar lime green fanny pack, thinking, Wow. I get fanny pack. I know fanny pack. I am the product of generation fanny pack. I knew it when it wasn't ironic.

Subtext: I'm getting old. (Damn you Paul, for playing on my mortality and reminding me of my sentiment for 80s icons, like the other Madonna. I will embrace lace fingerless gloves when they come back. And they will.)

I was not surprised to see that Paul was born in 1972, the year after I was was.

I was first introduced to Paul's work by way of his weekly comic, "All Over Coffee " that's been running in the SF Chronicle since 1994. The second time came when Joe and I were pondering what to do for the artwork at Tacolicious and he brought up Paul as an idea. He'd admired him from way back.

We didn't know what exactly we wanted Paul to do, but I think on some level we knew we wanted him to evoke a nostalgia for the food we're serving. To pay homage to the San Francisco taqueria.

So Paul drove over one day with his wife Joen from their Mission District home. They're an incredibly nice couple and we talked tacos and explained our concept for Tacolicious. We showed him our favorite pickled jalapeno cans (designed with a Salma Hayek look alike, her head afloat in a bath of chilies) but other than that, we gave Paul carte blanche to do what he wanted.

What he came back with, you'll now see on the walls. You can't miss the larger than life bottle of Tapatio which just cheers me up, and he followed our lead with the canned jalapenos. But what I think might be the most genius of the four pieces he did for us is the painting of a stack of those mundane little plastic to-go containers filled with things like salsa and limes that are always sent home with your burrito or taco or whathaveyou.

It's a classic San Francisco icon that I never realized had any meaning until I saw it illustrated and hung on our wall. It evokes all sorts of taqueria things for me, from the Banda music on the juke box all the way down to the grease from the chips that soaks through the bag your burrito is sent home in.

However, unlike my conflicted memories of the age of the fanny pack, the taqueria era is timeless, and one I'm proud to be stuck in.

How I Came to Love Superbowl Sunday

The older you get, the more you know what you're looking for in a relationship. Call it wisdom or call it being worn down, but with age also comes the understanding that no partner can be everything.

When I met Joe, I was in my mid(ish)-30s, old enough to ask the important questions:
1. Do you like to cook?
2. Do you often pursue outdoor activities?
3. Do you like sports?

I was gunning for these answers:
1. yes
2. no (and I solemnly swear to never require you to sleep on the cold, hard ground)
3. no (and I particularly hate football)

I got these instead:
1. yes
2. sometimes?
3. yes

Factoring in our relationship's other strong pluses, I figured fifty percent was acceptable. I agreed to replace my four channels and rabbit ears with cable so we could have Sports Center and we got married.

Here we are, our Le Cruesets merged and some amazing home-cooked meals behind us. I've only been asked to camp once in close proximity to our car and beared a fair share of sports on television. The gentlemanly banter and crack of the bat in baseball doesn't bother me; basketball players have interesting hair to look at; but barring a good cheerleader routine, everything about football I find grating. The last time a game was on, I removed Joe's arm from around my shoulder and dramatically shut myself in our room with a book in a martyred, intellectual protest. I followed up by giving Joe remote TV headphones for Christmas that he has yet to take out of the box.

I'm normally not the sort of person to applaud the installation of a flat-screen TV in a restaurant (a growing trend), but I had no issue with it when Joe told me he was going to put one up in Tacolicious, especially since he promised he had no intention of having it on all the time—it would just be used for key sporting events.

Which of course, right now, means football. But I've had a big a-ha: Football games on at Tacolicious means less football on in the house. A beautiful trade-off.

Still, hope springs eternal in relationships and Joe is a romantic. Clearly he didn't get the wisdom memo because the other night he asked me if I was going to come in to watch the Superbowl at Tacolicious this Sunday. I thought he was joking, but he was not.

So, while all of you are having a rollicking time, drinking margaritas and eating chili con queso (that stuff oozes Superbowl), hollering and hooting and doing whatever barbaric things people do that watch football do, I'll be at home, contently curled up with my National Book Award winning novel. I won't see you there. But Joe will, and happily.