I often look at housing prices around here and think, “Gah, if I ever lose this apartment I’m probably going to have to leave the Bay Area entirely!”  At other times I am reminded that Republicans exist and I think, “Gah, I’m probably going to have to leave the country!”  But then I think, “Wait, no⁠—I can’t leave!  Where would I get groceries?”  For I have been spoiled by the existence of my beloved local grocery store, Berkeley Bowl.  A while back I wanted to make an eggplant recipe, but it was late and Berkeley Bowl was closed.  I figured, no problem⁠—Sprouts is still open, Whole Foods is still open, Safeway is still open, and even ol’ Tradey Joe has a little bit of produce… I’ll just go to one of those and check out its eggplant section!  It was then that I discovered that, whoops, only Berkeley Bowl has an eggplant section, with Italian eggplants and Indian eggplants and Chinese eggplants and Japanese eggplants all competing for your eggplant dollar; at the other places, there might be a couple of globe eggplants and that’s that.  And Berkeley Bowl is cheap!  Limes for nine cents each!  In season, a bunch of scallions might be only nineteen cents, and an extra dime on top of that is enough for a bunch of celery.  Sixty‑nine cents will fetch you a large bunch of basil or a whole pomegranate.  For cryin’ out loud, there are milk chocolate Gavottes in the cookie aisle now⁠—I don’t have to pay the shipping from France anymore!  So when I walked into the Berkeley Bowl one day and saw that there was a display near the door offering a hefty discount on a handsome volume called The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook, I snapped it up.

In a sense, this is silly.  How can a grocery store have a cookbook?  Show me a dish and tell me that it was served at Vij’s Restaurant or that it was developed by Yotam Ottolenghi and I’ll have a pretty good idea of how it’ll taste.  Telling me that the potatoes came from Ralphs tells me nothing.  But the point of this cookbook is that it’s not about potatoes.  The point is that you’re at the Berkeley Bowl, you’re looking at a basket of milperos, and you’re thinking, “What the hell is a milpero and how do I cook one?”  Now you have a cookbook to tell you!  And as it turns out, Laura McLively writes a decent recipe.  So far I’ve played it fairly safe and have tried the recipes for pea shoots, Taiwanese spinach, fresh chickpeas, squash blossoms, purple cauliflower, cranberry beans, long choy sum, purple potatoes, moquas, Anaheim chiles, Indian eggplants, and the aforementioned milperos; none of them changed my world or anything, but with only one or two exceptions the dishes were surprisingly tasty.  So maybe I should go ahead and try that alba pioppini, whatever that is.

Tartine All Day
Elisabeth Prueitt, 2017

Checking this cookbook out of the library was also kind of silly.  Tartine is a world‐famous San Francisco eatery that invariably has lines out the door… but I, uh, don’t actually like it much.  I’ve had a couple of interesting desserts there but most of their pastries are baked too dark for my taste.  But this book was sitting out on the New Arrivals table, I flipped it open to a chickpea recipe that looked like it might be a winner, and library books are free, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.  When I got it home, I discovered that these recipes were designed to be easy to make.  (That’s good!)  I also discovered that they were all designed to be gluten‑free.  (That’s bad.)  The first time I made one of the recipes full of rice flour and oat flour and tapioca flour, I didn’t know that, and thought that the author must just have discovered some magical new flavor combination.  But when the resulting pancakes turned out to be a flop, I did some more poking around and discovered that, no, it was just part of a general policy of avoiding wheat.  I have no such policy, and since the recipes that weren’t grain‐based (e.g., an herb‑heavy Persian omelette, a cauliflower soup, some roasted ) were no great shakes either, back to the library this book went.

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