An occasional collection of bites. Eat anything good or bad, or see a good scene while you munch? Send in your short bites to missionlocal@gmail.com. Full names only.
Ali Baba’s Cave (799 Valencia) The falafel is a takeout staple for me. For between $6 and $7 you get a falafel bigger than a burrito that easily lasts two meals. They put everything in that thing — eggplant, french fries, hummus, yogurt cucumber sauce and four balls of falafel. And it’s an alright place to eat in if you score the cave, where you sit on pillows on the ground around a low table.
-Hadley Robinson
Tacos de suadero from TaquerÃa Vallarta at 3039 24th @ Harrison. Really good after drinking the night before. -Andrea Valencia
A decaf macchiato at The Summit. (780 Valencia) Really smooth coffee and a good photography show Mochilla, Ten Years on the Road. Van Morrison in the air. Lydia Chávez
A recent dinner at Mission Local Eatery (3111 24th St.) with two small quail on my plate? Or was it one cut up in many pieces? It felt like too little and the strawberry soubise missed. But, my daughter ordered the halibut on wild rice with artichokes – a generous portion and the rice and vegetables in broth, perfect. – Lydia Chávez
Bad Coffee: (everywhere, especially at diners with lunch counters) When I first discovered what a real cappucino tasted like, it was worth making the pilgrimage to one of the few places in town that could really pull a shot of espresso (In my humble opinion: Ritual, Four Barrel, and Dynamo) These days, though, I find myself yielding more and more to the charms of bad coffee and its unassuming piping hot endlessly refilled charms. Is bad coffee the new good coffee? – Heather Smith
Biked by the Free Farm stand (23rd and Treat Ave.) on the way back to the office last Sunday, and they waved me in. The growing season is beginning to ramp up, and they’d given away so much produce but still had more. My haul:
– enormous bag of dirt-covered green garlic. I’ve been using it when I’m cooking greens, but someone at the farmstand was talking about how we should chop it up, cover it and oil, and freeze it so that I would have the pleasures of it in the cold hard winter. I may do this. If I don’t eat it all first.
– homely plums from someone’s tree in the neighborhood. The yellow ones were tart, and amazing, and I ate them right away. The purple ones were watery and *meh.* There are probably all kinds of great things you can do with not great plums, but I’ve just been cutting them up and leaving them in the bottom of my water glass. Watery plums become plum-flavored water. It has just occurred to me in a genius flash of inspiration that probably someone could do this with alcohol.
-huge monster plant that the internet tells me is sorrel. You can apparently eat this in salad, but I’ve just been cutting it up and putting it in soup. I wouldn’t crawl across a field of glass to get to it or anything, but it does bestow that feeling of satisfaction at having eaten a new thing and not suffered horribly for it. Thanks Free Farmstand!
– Heather Smith
Eat anything good or bad, or see a good scene while you munch? Send in your short bites to missionlocal@gmail.com. Full names only.