Yeah, I didn't get the Dualit toaster that I'd been asking for over the last couple of months. How much joy would I have really gotten out of the thing? Would it have become the latests kitchen albatross like our yogurt maker? We may never know. What we do know is that Berkeley is a fantastic place that has an incredible love for food. We also know that something as simple as a little disk of bread dough can bring me back to my childhood. More on this last part later...
We went to Berkeley for my birthday, because we really needed to get out of this town(which seems to only excel and being spectacularly mediocre). A wonderful woman that used to work with me over at the coop, Jill, gave us this great little map of all of her favorite spots to go while in Berkeley. Why follow the map of someone that could be completely MAD!?...what the hell...what do we know of this place...besides how bad could it be? She listed this fantastic little Jewish deli that we plan to go and check out next time that we're there...Chez Panisse, and this place called the Cheese Board Collective.
I've never been anywhere that had such an incredible selection of cheese. There's this amazing little bar in Georgetown that has 700 some odd beers, but a place that probably has that many cheeses?! unhead of.....and they let you taste ANYTHING(definitely not a possibility with the beer joint). [By the way the beer place in Georgetown is called The Brickskellar(sp.) if you ever make it over to our nation's capital and need to find the Mecca of beer.] Everything about this place just made me happy..from the board proclaiming all of the cheeses that they had available that day(as you can see from the pic, you almost can't read them all...there's just too damn many), to the breads that were being baked perpetually while we were there....to the incredible pizza shop that they run a couple of doors down. We were in love with this place as soon as we walked by it. Yeah...we were famished by the time we got to Berkeley, thanks to a rediculous traffic jam in Sacramento that stranded us for 4 HOURS....so we went for the pizza first.
I LOVE this little place. They have the concept of what a restaurant should be down pat. Offer just one thing to eat. Yeah...screw the Friday's or Applebees, or whatever concept you want..of offering 85 bazillioin badly made things and just do 1 thing great. The one pizza that they were offering that day was mozzarella, feta, roma tomatoes, lemon juice, lemon zest, olive oil, and cilantro. We ordered a 1/2 pie and ate the whole thing(just barely)...and it was worth every last remaining bite. At just $9 for that half it was also a really good deal. I could continue to wax poetically about this place for at least a couple more paragraphs, but Brandy would kill me for making this post way too long...so I'll stop.
I know that Brandy was just overwhelmed by all of the cheese at the main shop.
(When loading the blog Brandy writes in this thought: I looooooove cheeeeeeese). Their selection was very impressive....okay...it was too much for me too (and I know a good bit about cheese...although most of my knowledge is in American atrisanal cheeses, and Italian cheeses....with highlights in just a few of the bigger known ones of the world). They had a huge selection of foreign cheese, with just a little bit from bay area producers(which is a little disappointing. You'd think that with Chez Panisse right across the street from them that they'd be pushing local with a vengeance too???...hmm). I tried to steer things towards cheese that I thought that Brandy might like(my personal tastes and hers are not always the same...I like having the richness of a soft ripened cheese with the sharpness of bacterial bloom in the background, she tends to like things a little less aggressive).
(Again, Brandy interjects: I think my tastes are generally MORE aggressive with hard cheeses like sharp, cave aged gruyere's where most of his hard cheeses are...milder. He just goes more tangy with soft cheeses) So I tried to let her pick out all of the cheese...mostly because I was completely enamored with the smile and the gleam in her eyes as she tried each new cheese.
The woman that was helping us was very gracious, very friendly, incredibly helpful..and completely unlike what we would have found in Sacramento, very polite. Overall it left such an increbly positive feeling in us for the whole experience. We just can't wait to go back.
Okay, so what was the point about the little dough round that sparked memories of my childhood? Well while we were stuck in traffic..listening to the radio...something in my head thought back to living in Chicago and to this weird little Jewish bread thing that I hadn't had since leaving there. They're called bialys, and they're just little rounds of dough with some ingredients on top of them...kind of bagel-shaped, but without the hole. I can remember living in Chicago and going with the family out somewhere to a shop that just made these things and nothing else. They'd have every topping under the sun on them...but the only ones at that point in my life that I wanted had sauce and cheese, just like a pizza. As I was thinking about these little disks while we sat in traffic...I tried to come up with the word for what they were called(simply so that I could try and look them up on the internet..and maybe make them someday)...and it just hit me. Coincidentally...someone out there remind me to make them and I will do it...and post the results...with troubleshooting tips. it was the very last food that I thought that I'd find 2000 miles away from when I'd had them last. It was the last thing that I'd thought that I'd have 24 years since the last time that I'd had them. it was this stupid little round of dough, topped with roasted onion and poppy seeds that brought me closer to childhood than anything has in recent memory.
Thank god for Berkeley. Thank god for the Cheese Board Collective on Shattuck in Berkeley. Thank god for bialys, and thank god for those great childhood memories of Chicago.
She: Besides cheese, we did other foody things in Berkeley for Mark's b-day. We went on the Sharffenberger tour, for starters. (and mark looked oh-so-snazzy in his paper hairnet). 
We tasted lots of chocolate, learned about cocao, and how they actually build their own chocolate instead of buying it. Meaning, they go straight from the bean. 
She: we also went to two dessert places. For immediate gratification, we went to Ciao Bella Gelato. I must say, I loved their selection. The colors were like a beautiful pallete. I tried quite a few flavors before succumbing to one scoop of Jasmine Cassis and one of Passionfruit sorbet. Lovely. They were both tangy, and while sweet, filled with lots of fruit flavor. The jasmine stayed on the back of my tongue for hours and is my new favorite flavor. 
She: The other dessert place we went to was Love at First Bite. The cupcakes came in interesting flavors like ginger or pistachio chocolate, but alas, the didn't have each every day. We picked up a four-pack for home. The lady at the register was really sweet, but I have to say that if there was anything that was a tad off-putting, it was the chef. She was a tad curt...and I was overflowing with cupcake adoration (but not in a scary stalker way), so it was baffling. At home I tried to lemon pistachio, which while the lemon cake was good, the icing was almost...chalky. I dunno. I didn't dig it too much, but it was a flavor adventure. The one I truely adored was the strawberry. The cake was light and pink, and the icing was sweet and crammed full of tart strawberry flavor. It was amazing. 
