This means other people are standing in the street, while I'm sitting down with a soju ginger cocktail and a steaming plate of lemongrass noodles: rice linguine piled high with grilled sweet peppers, zucchini, oyster mushrooms, and other veggies, tofu, and a heavenly lemongrass-ginger sauce. It is absolutely heavenly. I've never had a bad thing on the Herbivore menu, but as fabulous as many of the other dishes are (lasagna!), 'lemongrass noodles' is the dish I remember when I'm walking down Valencia, heading there.
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As an added bonus, Herbivore (and Dosa) are just a few blocks away from Dog Eared Books (dogearedbooks.com) and my favorite Mission District bookstore, Modern Times Bookstore (mtbs.com).
This most recent trip to Modern Times, I found two items I couldn't resist (and then fled the store before caving in to others). The first is Theme Magazine (thememagazine.com), which is a magazine of "global Asian culture." This primarily means it's a magazine about Asian designers, illustrators, and authors living in the northern hemisphere in hip cities. I bought it because it had a section on journals and sketchbooks, topics of great fetishism for me. It isn't that I didn't know that professional illustrators keep lovely personal sketchbooks, but I wanted details, and the magazine delivered - which was pleasant to see. The magazine was attractive throughout, and I was only teased by my partner briefly for buying an Asian culture magazine, what with my past "honorary Asian" status and all. (Thanks, Andy. :-)) Westernized Asian culture is quite familiar to me, and has probably been the dominant cultural influence out of many, many cultural influences I had while growing up.
As I was reading it, I had to wonder: what would a magazine devoted to MY global culture look like? Would it be a magazine devoted to bi-racial and/or multi-racial women, or multi-racial people in general? And, would our art (and our diaries and sketchbooks) look any different from anyone else's? Theme was full of photos of Asians, but I don't know that hypothetical publications I produced would be exclusive ethnically - heck, I don't know that many of my kind! I look at my work and my cousin's work, and I don't think anyone would guess what we are right away - even the photos of bears (the big hairy men, not the bruins) at various SF events would only hint a bit about my cousin, but not tell anyone about our ethnicity.
I think we're culturally more big-city (and thus naturally more multi-cultural) in our subjects than many people. I'm going to have to give that some more thought, and perhaps conspire with my cousin to see what he thinks.
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Also from Modern Times, Raw by Roxanne Klein and Charlie Trotter (tenspeed.com), a gorgeous food preparation book with coffee table book styling. I bought it primarily for the gorgeous food pictures, but also because of the fact that it is full of vegan recipes, and that means they are all available to me.
Years ago, I stopped buying cookbooks containing meat recipes, since it didn't make sense to buy a book for a mere chapter or two of things I could use. My ongoing slide toward veganism makes even some vegetarian cookbooks less useful to me. (I had actually gone to Modern Times specifically to buy an encyclopedic cookbook on a wide range of cuisines, which I had long resisted because I didn't think I'd use most of the recipes. A few intriguing recipes in it had won me over, but Steven randomly opened the book to a chapter on eggs, and pointed out the uselessness of that entire section... How many years has it been since I bought an egg? There are eggs in dishes I eat outside of home, especially at crepe places or dessert cafes, but I don't cook with eggs at all.)
I have a girlfriend who goes for various periods of time eating almost exclusively fresh, uncooked foods, which it has an obvious appeal here in a place where we can get some really GREAT fresh produce. There are some obvious health advantages to eating fresh, unprocessed foods, and the book appears to be full of clever recipes for non-salad dishes that I would never have come up with on my own. So I'll give these dishes a try, and will report on how they turn out.
Labels: raw food, Valencia, veganism
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:00 PM
