Tom and I returned from a long weekend in San Francisco on Monday evening. Guided by Tom’s brother Mike and a rented PT Cruiser (never even consider buying or renting this car by the way… it will only confuse you!), we walked the Mission, Upper and Lower Haight, and a drove through several other neighborhoods. Coming from Minneapolis’ very new spring, it was wonderful to see so much green and so much color in the architecture of the city. On the downside, much rain welcomed us to San Francisco but as you can see in the above photo there were moments of sunshine in between. I was happy to get to know the deYoung Museum, particularly its viewing tower of the city, and the SFMoMA. Thanks to Mike for sharing a great dinner at Contigo, where we enjoyed fantastic tapas accompanied by a bottle of cidra and plenty of tips on local beers, bars, and eateries.

We’re still sorting through about 400 pictures to determine just what to do with them. Finding photos of what we ate and drank, however, was quick and easy.

We’ve enjoyed an unusually mild March with no snow fall–something that hasn’t occurred in Minnesota since 1878. Tom and I have been taking advantage of the weather with bike rides, after dinner walks, patio happy hours, and Bell’s Oberon (released this week!). The coming of spring has another thing on our minds as well: the opening of the Midtown Farmers Market on May 1. On the home farming front, Tom wanted to start the herb [window] garden, but it turns out, in spite of the glorious weather, herb plants won’t be available in gardening stores till late April. Try telling that to our chives, who have valiantly pushed their way up from parched soil to herald the spring.

If you have a long weekend ahead of you, enjoy it!

A beer’s name doesn’t necessarily tell you what you should pair it with: a porter might not complement a porterhouse, and just because it’s a Kwak doesn’t mean you should eat it with duck. But happily, sometimes names make things easy; take India Pale Ales, which in the first word of their name make as good as a suggestion as you could hope for. Drink me with Indian food!

The affinity of Indian food as we know it in the West and India Pale Ales is no mistake – the beer and the cuisine grew up together. IPAs, distinctive above all for their extreme hoppiness, were first popularized among Britons working in India in the days of the British East India Company and the Raj, at least partially because the extra hops helped the beer survive shipment halfway across the world.

Indian food as most of us know it – the kind you get in Indian restaurants everywhere from London to your local strip mall – is also a product of the British presence in India, as Britons and their local cooks adapted Indian culinary traditions to suit the British palate – particularly the British taste for meat. You can bet that as these Brits and Indians worked to develop this new cuisine, they made sure it paired well with the beer that was most widely available – that is, India Pale Ale.

Popular though they may have been in India in the 18th century, I think it’s safe to say that IPAs are even bigger today – it seems like craft breweries are leaping over each other to bring out the next big IPA, and to see how many more hops they can cram in. The selection of IPAs in a decent liquor store can be pretty overwhelming. Looking for something a little bit different, I picked up a six pack of Summit’s latest addition to their Unchained series: an India Style Rye Ale – an IPA with rye thrown into the mix (an IRA if you will).

Summit’s IRA pours with very little head and is quite dark in color, reminding me of a brown ale. As the beer hits the tongue, the brown ale description continues to be apt: the first flavor note is a very strong roasted, caramel flavor. After that initial impression, the beer takes a turn into more traditional IPA territory; that is to say the hops hit and hit hard. I thought I detected a slight grassiness in the flavor from the rye, though that might well be the power of suggestion (a power that should not be underestimated in beer rating and pairing!). Although the beer poured with very little head, it had great carbonation, with little spritzy bubbles that danced across the tongue. Overall, this is an enjoyable, well balanced beer, provided you like hops. And if you’re drinking India Ales, that seems a safe assumption.

With India Style Ale in hand, all that was needed was some India Style Food. As a centerpiece for our meal, we turned to that mainstay of the Indian buffet: chicken tikka. Starting with a recipe from Bon Appétit (a practice I don’t normally recommend) I marinated a cut up whole chicken in yogurt, cilantro, salt, garam masala, and garlic. After an hour in this yogurt bath, I roasted the chicken pieces for about 40 minutes at 500ºF, until the meat was cooked through and the skin was starting to blacken. Following through on Bon Appétit’s full menu, Martha roasted carrots with oil, salt and cumin seeds, and I made raita and white rice. All these elements combine to make a fulfilling Indian food experience: moist and roasted-tasting meats and vegetables accented by warm and citrusy spices that fill the mouth, all cooled and brightened by the yogurt and cucumber in the raita. Comforting and enlivening at the same time, it’s the kind of food that could help you feel at home in a place a few thousand miles away from home.

Food like that, or a cold beer. Better yet — the two of them together. I had a hard time trying to explain intellectually why the India Style Rye Ale and the Chicken Tikka worked so well together; each seemed to tame and complete the other. Maybe it was the acid in the yogurt cutting through the hops’ bitterness, or maybe the fact that the big flavors of the beer were a match for the big spice flavors in the chicken. Perhaps the beer’s roasted malts found their soulmate in blackened chicken skin. None of these elements really suffice in explaining what made this combination so satisfying. Ultimately, their affinity may owe to their shared history; a few gulps and bites might be enough to express the perfection of 200 years of codevelopment, but they are probably not enough to understand it. I’d better do this again.

After a long hibernation, this morning was my first opportunity to return to work in the Common Roots Garden since the final fall harvest. Danny Schwartzman, owner of Common Roots, was up early to help me and fellow volunteer Elise (pictured below) to get some of the early seeds into the ground.

As you can see in the images here, some of the plants from last year (garlic and lettuces) are already coming back on their own. Other pieces of last year’s harvest also remain. A few frozen beets with their bright flesh stuck out from the now-thawed earth, leftover dried bean-pods spilled their contents, and turnips littered the freshly turned soil.

Today’s work went toward planting peas, spinach, arugula, and radishes and re-stringing the twine surrounding the planted beds both to help us know where we’d already planted seeds and to prevent others from walking over the beds. Danny took care of spreading fertilizer over the planted areas, using a liquid sourced naturally from worms fed on coffee grounds.

In its second year, the Common Roots Garden is still in need of volunteers for mulching, planting, and weeding throughout the season. If you lent a hand last year and would like to return again or if you’re looking for a new volunteer opportunity, contact the café at info (at) commonrootscafe (dot) com.

For Christians, Lent is a season of solemn reflection on the trials of Jesus Christ in the desert; its central themes are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. All very noble concepts, if a not a little dour. Lent is also a time to enjoy delicious fried fish on Fridays, all thanks to a longstanding Catholic ban on Friday meat-eating during the season (which may or may not have been a giveaway to fisheries special interests – some things never change).

Martha and I have been taking full advantage of the season: we started with the wonderfully iconic Fish Fry at Saint Albert the Great’s. The very next week, we were off to the Red Stag Supper Club for the restaurant fish fry experience. I go out of my way to avoid talking about restaurants on this blog, so of the Red Stag I will say only this: I have seen the future of fish fries and it is sprayable malt vinegar. That’s right, malt vinegar in atomizers. Everyone should be doing this.

Having done the church and restaurant things, the only venue remaining for our Lenten self-denial was our own home. Part of my motivation was a desire to pay tribute to the recently destroyed Blackbird Café, who for a long time sold a “Fish Fry” on their menu consisting of deep-fried breaded salmon fingers, fries, and tamari-beurre blanc, garnished with a lime and pickled ginger. I have vivid memories of this dish: my burning of the beurre blanc not once but twice occasioned my first severe dressing down in my short time in a professional kitchen (there would be more!). A dish tinged with penance and regret, what better meal for Lent?

Our fish was salmon, which I cut in to strips, salted and peppered, and had Martha take care of the breading, using flour, eggs and breadcrumbs. Martha learned the hard way the importance of strict adherence to a wet-hand, dry-hand regime when breading. All Lenten meals should offer such learning opportunities.

On the side of these salmon fries, I cooked french fries using the usual two-stage method (blanch at 325ºF and finish at 375ºF). Since I had no reason to expect my beurre blanc to turn out any better than it had the first two times, I steered away from it for the sauce, choosing instead my old Turkish friend tarator. Tarator is, after all, a natural accompaniment to fish. To be extra fancy, I sieved the tarator after blending it, making it nice and smooth.

Comparing the home fish-fry experience to that of the church and the supper club, I can say my biggest deficiency at home is the lack of a commercial fryer. Whereas the cooks at the Red Stag can throw a pound of fish or potatoes in the fryer and expect a fluctuation of no more than a few degrees, my addition of that much food to a pathetic gallon of oil drops the temperature by more than 100ºF. And our pitiful little apartment stove just can’t kick out the BTUs to improve the situation very quickly. It doesn’t mean you can’t fry at home, it just means it’s going to take longer. But really, what’s your hurry? It’s Lent; use the extra time to reflect, damnit.

Just don’t spend so much time reflecting that you don’t realize the season’s almost over! In fact, this Friday is the last day to enjoy delicious Lenten fried fish, be it at a church, a restaurant, or at home (Good Friday is a fast day, FYI). Of course you could also fry fish after Easter, but that just wouldn’t be the same, would it?