Food Update: The Working Man's Lunch

Hey hey hey hey hey hey ehey. I have been cooking alot, I've gotten a bit lazy about documenting it all here, plus my camera tends to lose pictures of my best work.
October has taken a serious turn for the better. In fact, it's turning into one of the best I can remember. But after spending a week in a foggy, zenned-out daze, today is to be spent taking care of business-smogging my new car, paying the rent, doing odd jobs around town. A working man's day.
Luckily, a gorgeous woman was graceful enough to give me some fresh herbs and vegetables. It's been awhile since I had such ingredients to work with, it's nice to be overwhelmed by the quality of your stock, makes cooking very easy. So I set out to make a working man's lunch-hardy, nourishing and light enough to keep you moving.

A return to form for me, classic tofu saute. But here the fresh basil and rosemary from her garden really transformed the dish. A nice, spicy bitterness to compliment the exceptional sweetness of the tomatoes. I added a bit of the Benedetti's own Secret Goop (legendary stuff in our circle). I had never cooked with it before, but the buttery flavor of it is a cheap way to enrich the brocolli. The brown rich here was not my usual kitchen-sink, throw everything else in style, but plain instead. Kept it light, worked great with the herbs. I am a lucky man, no doubt.
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I want to tell you about the other projects the camera lost. We've been making the most of pumpkin season. A trip up to Fambrini's farms on 1 gave us a brilliant cooking pumpkin, whose seeds toasted up to total perfection. Never had any like them before. The rest of it went to a prototype Pumpkin-Ginger soup. A bit too creamy this time, not enough pumpkin. I'll revisit it soon.
One of my best audiences for trying out dishes is my friends at the local dinner I used to work at. In a fit of inspiration, it hit me-a homemade Bento box lunch for my Japanese friend. Never mind it was more of a brown bag affair, and I'm beyond white and near clueless about Japanese cuisine. No matter!
A little pumpkin soup, some fresh toasted seeds and seaweed and hummus with pine nuts, garlic and nori (more toasted sea weed). I was damn proud, especially the nori, which has been the odd item out in the pantry. Good to find a use for it.
Sound good to you? Want a bento delivered to you huh? Are you an adorable asian lady? Yeah? Ok, let's work something out.

Hello wayward readers, whomever you msy be. You must be a fascinating group to wind up here, you must tell me how you found this damp corner of the internet, it is most obscure. If you're following my narative, great, more power to you. It is a winding and difficult one to follow.
If you are trying to, then I must bring you back up to speed, as we'll missed a few pages.
After the great bar napkin manifesto (see previous post for a portion of it) we lost a bit of momentum. It was an epic bender friends, but I had to cut back a bit, and by living a normal, working, sober lifestyle I lost a bit of momentum for introspection.
A couple of perfect days seem to have brought the ship to an even keel. The serene drift of shared company, rapid hours, day trips up the cost and shared smiles. That rush I feel when I hear you laugh as loud as I do, feel the same desperate, fleeting passion, watch you struggle to keep it alive. The way your grin is shy yet so beautiful, the way you try to hide it.
And yet, the frustrating fact obvious in something that is going so well. The answer you knew a month ago, maybe even a year. The fact that things are only seeming to get better gives me hope, but I've grown up a bit since last time. I keep my optimism in check.
When I look back at these past few days I can see them only like a happy daydream. That hasn't stopped me. I fetter and scramble and surge forth my efforts to build upon what in the end was most likely only a wisp of remembered fantasy. And the hilarious duality is I can do this, and also plainly see how futile it is. And at 23 years old, that is what growing up feels like to me. I have drawn my feelers in, hedged my bets in advance, learned from past experience.

One Drunken Night-Time To Get Fake

    October 6, 2011
 joe@cafepergolesi.net
    Re: that notebook
the name on it was sergio. found it on the veranda by cedar street with an umbrella. this is some of what was in it. do we have a lost and found for it?
 ----------------------------------------Time To Get Fake------------------------------------------------------
So why am I writing this? Oh, do I need a reason now? Maybe I am fixing to be an author, a real Henry-Miller type. Sounds nice. Be as lazy as a musician, but no tuning the strings, no recording sessions. Just carry a little notebook and pick up the pen when it hits you. it doesn't? No big deal, just guzzle cocktails, cigarettes and cheap women. You would have done so either way.
    I am no author. If I was to be, I would have no morals. Write the world as it is, and throw yourself into every fucked up experience that proves just how bad it is. No, I am writing this like I'm writing to a friend. Except I don't want no friend to hear this. Openess is not a sin, it may even be a desirable quality. but it is something I am guilty of. A gluttony of it.
    I am the true product of the service industry. My personality is all out there, it flows out of me. It wafts around the room, gets imbibed by each person differently, mixed to their taste. I am a social drinkmaker and I know exactly what all my clients want. I know every recipe by heart, the process is grooved in like tire tracks on a dirt road.
    What isn't out there is tucked away in the dusty back boxes, stored away in a corner of my mind. I never get the time to go up and visit it, check the masking tape, so there it sits. Outdated. Circa 1995. 2008.
    Up there lie the best bits. the most violent, vile, creative pieces of me. The parts that leave you blinking stupid, dumbfounded by how off the wall, how disgusting, how goddamned inappropriate what I just said was.
    Left alone with these bits, I am sullen. I sit awkwardly, unsure what to say or do, how to act with an old friend I ignored and now barely know. Easier to float about, it's what everybody wants. Funny, charming, socialable. Always watching, feeling the tide of the conversation. Jellyfishing along.
    Maybe if I had spent the time, unpacked those bits, run the town with them, put in the legwork of friendship. Maybe then I could sit alone and be content. Watch the world go by comfortable with who I am. Not have to leap to my phone for a lifeline, a message from a friend, a girl. Not have to throw words onto the page to make sense of it.
    A man who builds that cabin in the woods, blood and sweat and suffering, who stakes his claim alone, away from it all and alone, is ten time more respectable than the man who dives in the current and floats. Of course we, all of us, will compliment his swimming talents-all we know is the water. We don't see the mountain where that man thrives alone. it is easier to bemoan and cast out those who go under, fail to tread in the surf. Unconventional, illmannered, unsocialble. It's like fighting, shoving your way onto a bus, then feeling contented about how you worked and worked to turn your life over to another's wheel.
        --------------------------------------Never See The Good----------------------------------
    This album; Never See The Good. The working title, but it's about as committed as a 3 year engagement. I listened to it today, and damnit I impressed myself. I am cutting back on one sin, so I may as well import another, here we go pride.
    Such a minimum of filler, so little false to find in it. It is like a little 26 minute paperback book of my last two years.
    And yet, the beauty of it is it's deception. So many hooks, so many quality pop tracks, born from sheer, injected inspiration but polished with the keen eye of a machinist. Tailor made, just quirky enough, digging into your ear. These tracks make me sound so damn simple. Even I can listen to this album and feel like I understand myself. Everyone else who bothers to listen to it will see it like me on my best day. Everything: wit, wisdom, fun, thought and melody.
    Such beautiful deception. It is like a 50 foot bronze statue of myself. Why Love Santa Cruz is the best song I will ever write. Maybe I look back and laugh at my comment, maybe it is very true. maybe never again will I be this deep and inviting, Maybe it's only the begining. Maybe it's so good, all I'm doing is paying for it now.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cynacism is a great emotion. Imagine that for a second--------------.
    That everything you care for, and live for. it can all be dropped at the drop of a hat. The moment it starts to hurt you, you let it fall. You never really cared.
    And when they put the screws to you, really make you bleed for what you love, what do you have? Your life, that's easy to loose, it was never worth much to you at all.
    -------------------    -----------------------------------------    ---------------------
    Revelations are coming a mile a minute, so that means they can't all be good. Or true.
    if all those great philosophers (all those lucky enough to have 30+ years perspective) are correct that life-this life, has no great meaning, good or bad. I would say we are a blank slate.
    Then what do you do with a blank slate? I set this up, naturally. The only great purpose is to be a painter. Life is for us to mark up, spill across. Draw rapid, wild lines and visuals in ink or blood. The point of life is to draw a picture that entertains us.

Fall Humour

Nature's gift to us ingrates is here again-Fall. Firestorm colors made looming by the constant drizzle that makes any movement past your door that much more tretchorous and rewarding. I've wasted no time in falling into the rituals-tucking away in our corner at the RR, plotting corn maze runs and graveyard crawls, letting sullen tunes sooth me away on the jukebox. The real rituals that make the passing year enjoyable, not the hollow, cracked at the edge routines of December. Don't bother shopping for me boyos, the best gift you can expect from me is the bottle of cheap whiskey I bring to your party, the one nobody but me dares drink.

If you're reading this, you probably understand this by now: I'm a funny guy. I will make you laugh, about things you never even thought of, folded into jokes that shouldn't ever work. But goddamnit, they're just so sincere, they have you hopping onto the Koot-Train to Crazy Town. That's what I want really; I want everything I say to make you laugh. Every story and opinion I express: "Is he for real? I can't believe this guy..." I want to keep you guessing, skeptical about everything I say or feel. I am an ocean with no map, and you are Minesweeping in the deep. It's a hell of a lot safer way to live.

See, look at that. Ton of words, who can guess what they mean? Isn't this supposed to be a food blog? Where are the burritos?

OH SWEET POTATO JESUS THERE THEY ARE.
Birthed form a beer-fueled 3am munchie craving, a good idea made better by the light of day.
That's SAUTED TOFU (shocker!), VEGATABLES, and HUMMUS, all wrapped in a couple of leftover tortillaz. Garnished with a side of spring mix, purely for show, don't eat it, it may kill you.

Paired with: coffee as black as the soul of the husky goth girl left alone after Steampunk Tuesday at the Blue Lagoon. Dash of greens for irony's sake. I'm a hipster at heart (ironically!).

The American Dreamcouch

Got home from work. Sitting here on the couch in my boxers and wifebeater, drinking a Coors and checking baseball scores, it occurs to me-I am passing as quite the characterour of the working class American male. Yee haw.

Hippy Fuel-Pt. 1

Just barely having started this up, I introduce to you our first feature.


Hippy Fuel


or aka What Is Sergio Cooking Up Today

I am not quite a chef. I lack the discipline to follow an exact recipe, build a dish to exact standards. But I can take an idea, and remake it in my own style. Typical artistic temperament, I know. Having not eaten meat for about a year, I try to create dishes that will go beyond substitution and trickery. Ones that do more than try to compensate for their lack of juicy steak.


Instead, I end up building around vegetables, herbs, and magical mystery sauces I find or make. City by the sea has plenty of veggies like me, and it's easy to get a reputation as a hippy for it. Oh well, I embrace it. Yes, I don't eat meat. No, I don't care if you do. Yes, I have communed with the forest spirits. No, they haven't been avoiding you, they've just been busy with the new job.

Here's what I ate today-------

 --------Habanero Tofu Scramble, with mixed greens and Pasta Pomodoro--------

A little heat for the browned tofu from our homemade salsa de las brujas (made with help from a real witch). Coupled with a little greens for health, and pasta pomodoro- a fav of mine, garlic, basil and fresh tomato all sizzled together. 


So what do you think? Would you nom it?

Wolfberry: Unfurled.

Hello world. Welcome to my world.

Sergio Wolfberry

Musician. Guitarist. Culinary Adventurer. Left-handed relief pitcher.

Some say a man is of many talents. I am a man of many directions, strings leading off to who knows where, waiting to be embellished. The day to day grind of modern living can constrict, bottle up all that swirls around my head. So here we are, the pressure release.

-Sergio