Quince-a-nera

One of the coolest things about my little house in Oakland is that it came with a quince tree. Some of you may be wondering what the heck a quince is (besides, obviously, a fruit). Quince looks very similar to a small yellow-green apple, but unlike your garden variety Golden Delicious, it's not a juicy, tasty treat eaten right off the tree. It is, in fact, inedible raw - unless you happen to like cottony-textured, astringent fruit. Once cooked, the character of the fruit completely changes - from super-tart to pretty mellow, and very similar in texture to cooked pears. And because quince is a member of the rose family (Rosaceae), it gives off the the slight aroma of rose petals when being cooked.

For the first few years I lived here, I didn't appreciate the quince tree for how cool it is. I even considered cutting it down and replacing it with something more 'useful,' like an apple tree. I couldn't really understand why the guy who lived here before me even planted it. I mean, it's not a very common fruit. Have you ever gone into a grocery store or a farmer's market and seen piles of quince for sale? When you go to the bakery and look at all the yummy seasonal fruit pastries, have you ever seen a quince turnover sitting next to the apple and peach ones? I didn't think so. Sometimes restaurants on the higher scale of things offer quince (most often as a tart) on the dessert menu, and there's a very well-regarded and pricey restaurant in San Francisco named Quince, but other than that, it's languished in relative obscurity.

But it's because of its obscurity that convinced me to keep the quince tree around. I knew as soon as I cut it down, quince would become incredibly trendy and I would be besieged with quince recipes I would want to try but I wouldn't be able to find the fruit anywhere. And then I would really kick myself for cutting down the tree right before it got popular. OK, that hasn't really happened, but that's because I didn't cut the tree down. I know for sure it would have if I did.

One of the cool things about making jam from quince is that, because of the high pectin content in the fruit, you can actually make jelly out of the water you boil the fruit in. This makes it the perfect fruit for me because I'm a sucker for a good deal, and I have a hard time resisting two-for-the-price-of-one. (Even though the 'one' didn't cost me anything in the first place.) Last year, though, we never got around to making the jelly because someone who shall remain nameless drank the leftover quince water before we had a chance. I can't hardly blame him though, because the quince water is slightly syrupy and has the faint taste of roses. In other words, pretty damn yummy.



This year, not only did the water survive long enough to be turned into jelly, we also made quince paste. Also known by its Spanish name, membrillo, quince paste can be found in specialty grocery stores and is most commonly paired with Manchego. Membrillo is made pretty much the same way jam is - peel, core, slice fruit, boil, puree, add sugar and cook down. But after the cooking down on the stove, it goes in the oven for even more cooking down, resulting in a very concentrated block of quince goodness.

When it came time for holiday baking this year, we wanted to incorporate the quince paste into the process. I looked up some jam cookie recipes, most of which call for raspberry or apricot jam, figuring quince would be a good substitute. It took us several attempts to get exactly what we were looking for.

The first recipe we tried was Oatmeal Raspberry (Quince) Bars. They came out kind of like a Nature Valley granola bar with quince filling - very oaty and crunchy. I liked it, but Mark, who favors a softer cookie as opposed to a crispy one, wasn't particularly a fan. Next up, we tried a Thumbprint cookie, which was OK, but the cookie part was kind of bland and the quince not sweet enough to make up for it. A dusting of powdered sugar kicked the sweetness up a notch and improved them quite a bit. With the extra sugar, they were good but not the exact perfect thing.

Our third try was the charm. We adapted a recipe called Apricot Crumbles, which is a bar cookie like the Oatmeal Raspberry Bars, but with a butter/flour/sugar topping instead of oats. They were just the ticket. The pastry part was buttery but simple, and really allowed the quince to shine. Sadly, the recipe only makes an 8x8 pan - so we had to cut them into really small pieces and they were gone before we knew it. At least next year, we'll know what to do with our quince paste. And maybe if you received some quince jam from us this year and you're wondering what the heck to do with it, you can try it too.

Quince Crumbles

Ingredients

* 2 sticks unsalted butter, cold, cut into pieces
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/3 cup granulated sugar
* 1/4 cup light brown sugar
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 egg yolk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 3/4 cup quince paste or jam

Directions

1. Heat oven to 375° F. Coat an 8-inch square baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the butter.
2. In a food processor, combine the flour, granulated and light brown sugars, baking powder, and salt. Pulse to combine. Add the remaining butter and pulse until crumbly. Add the egg yolk and vanilla and pulse until the mixture just comes together but is still crumbly.
3. Transfer 1/2 cup of the dough to a small bowl or cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Use your fingertips to press the remaining dough evenly into the baking dish, pushing the dough up about 1/4 inch around the edge.
4. Spread the jam evenly over the crust. Crumble the remaining refrigerated dough over the top. Bake until golden, about 35 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes before cutting.

The Pizza Philes, chapter 2 - Howie's Artisan Pizza, Palo Alto

As a pizzaphile, I'm always keeping an eye out for new pizza joints that pop up on the landscape. Last week I read in the Chronicle about a newcomer to the scene on the Peninsula - Howie's Artisan Pizza in Palo Alto. We weren't sure exactly when we would be able to make it down there since it's not exactly close by. But as fate would have it, a few days later a friend was celebrating her birthday in San Jose which would put us within striking distance, so we jumped at the chance to check it out.

Howie's Artisan Pizza is the brainchild of Howie Bulka, former chef/owner of Marche, an acclaimed fine-dining restaurant in Menlo Park. According to the HAP press release, Bulka wanted to create a casual family-friendly environment where parents can bring their kids and also enjoy good food made with quality ingredients at a reasonable price. Judging by the number of families at Howie's on Friday night, he seems to have succeeded at this goal.

Howie's is located in the Town and Country Village, a strip mall near the Stanford campus. Although the mall doesn't look like it's been renovated since it was built in (I'm guessing) the 1970's, the restaurant space was completely gutted and redone. The design is well-thought out and creates exactly the kind of vibe Bulka wanted: a cross between casual and stylish. Howie's whimsical logo - a big red splat, presumably of tomato sauce - plus the playful font of the signage and menu speak to the family-friendliness that Bulka was going for, while touches like the exposed beam ceiling, bamboo counters with brass inlays and retro lighting fixtures give the impression of a more sophisticated restaurant than your average family pizza joint, a la Round Table. The most impressive style elements are the amber-colored glass panels that separate the dining area and the bar. They get their color because they're filled with olive oil. It's a really cool detail - which I didn't find out about until doing on-line research for this blog post. I'm disappointed I didn't know about the panels before going there - I would have paid them more attention. You have to wonder if the coolness factor of having olive oil-filled glass panel dividers is negated by the fact that no one knows they exist (unless they read the press release or Carolyn Jung's Food Gal blog). Then again, it's not like they're going to post a sign on the panels saying, 'hey, look at me! I'm filled with olive oil! Isn't that cool?'so I guess it's best as one of those secret little details that people somehow find out about by chance. Or not.



Anyway, enough about the space...let's get to the food. We started out with a couple of appetizers, an olive oil sampling and the eggplant pillows. The olive oil taster came with two different types of oil, thinly sliced toasts, something called dukkah (which I later found out through the magic of Wikipedia is an "Egyptian dry mixture of chopped nuts, seeds and Middle Eastern spices and flavors" usually eaten with bread that's been dipped in olive oil) and shaved parmesan. Maybe it's just that I'm spoiled in that my only other restaurant olive oil tasting experience was at Bar Bambino in San Francisco, which gave you three different oils to try, but I could barely tell the difference between these two. They were both grassy and one was slightly more spicy than the other. They were both tasty, but did not really hold my interest for long.



The eggplant pillows consisted of roasted eggplant wrapped around ricotta and sun-dried tomatoes and covered in chopped garlic and basil oil. The presentation was beautiful and they were aptly named: they were melt-in-your-mouth soft and pillowy bites of eggplant goodness. Surprisingly though, it was somewhat lacking in the flavor department given all that garlic. A little bit of salt went a long way in waking up the flavors.

On to the main event: the pizza. Howie says his pizza is "inspired" by the New Haven style, which according to Slice (the definitive pizza blog) is "cooked in a coal oven, has a very crisp crust that is thin but still typically thicker than New York pizzas. Marked by a characteristic oblong shape, often served on a sheet of waxed paper atop a plastic cafeteria tray." (Doesn't sound that appealing, does it?) Well, Howie's pizza doesn't come on the wax paper or the plastic cafeteria tray, thank goodness, nor is it oblong. Nor is it cooked in a coal oven. So what we have here is a round thin crust pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven...which sounds like a Neapolitan to me, but Howie's pizza definitely has a thicker crust than an Neapolitan, which I guess is what makes it New Haven "inspired." I am a crust person. It's my favorite part of any pizza, and the crust is actually what makes this pizza for me. It's puffy and blistered and charred and bready on the edges and wafer-thin in the middle, just how I like it. For all of the artisan-style pizza we eat, sometimes Mark gets a craving for a good old fashioned 'chain store' one. I understand why. It's not so much about the toppings or the sauce - it's about the crust. Sometimes you just want a thick, toothsome, bready crust and New York Neapolitan just doesn't scratch that itch. To that end, it's really too bad that Howie's is way too far away for us to get on a regular basis. I would much rather order a pizza from here whenever we get that hankering rather than ordering from Round Table.

In the you-take-the-good-with-the-bad department, one other way Howie's pizza resembles chain store pie is the cheese content. As in, there's a lot of it. I love cheese as much or maybe more than the next person, but sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. One of the first things we noticed on the menu was the lack of a margherita pizza, which is what we normally order the first time we go to a new pizza place. Margherita - tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and basil - is usually a good baseline indicator of how good the pizza is because the simplicity of the ingredients let you really taste each one and judge how good they are. With the lack of a margherita or even the option of fresh mozzarella as a topping, we went with our favorite veggie ones - red onion and sweet peppers. The cheese was such a dominating factor that I couldn't even tell you if the sauce was any good because all I was tasting was cheese. And I wasn't too crazy about the inclusion of green bell peppers. I somehow assumed that 'sweet peppers' meant the same thing as 'roasted red peppers,' which it obviously didn't. Green bell peppers on pizza remind me of Pizza Hut Supreme. This was better than that, but somehow I don't equate green bell peppers with being sweet or artisan. As much as I love my vegetarian boyfriend, on occasion his dietary restrictions work against me. (Sorry, honey - kisses anyway!) The most artisan of Howie's toppings are of the meat variety and include house-made pancetta and fennel sausage. And you know how I love my salty pork products. If I made it to Howie's again with a meat-eating dining companion, I'd love to give the pancetta, arugula and egg pizza a whirl. It sounds right up my alley.



One of the things I really liked about Howie's is that Howard definitely did his homework. He borrows little elements from other restaurants that I love, like serving Ritual coffee (a San Francisco gold standard) and Straus Family Creamery soft serve sundaes (popularized by Bruce Hill's Pizzeria Picco, one of my all-time favorite restaurants). Pizzeria Picco was the first place I knew of that was doing soft serve with olive oil and sea salt, and Howie's follows the trend. Having already had our olive oil fix for the night, we opted for the butterscotch pecan praline sundae. Only, our server brought us a peppermint brownie sundae, which last time I checked, doesn't sound anything like butterscotch pecan praline. We found this hilarious because on the way down there we read a review on Yelp where a woman wrote that she ordered a plain ice cream and they brought her peppermint - and that the waiter clearly thought that plain meant peppermint. She was like, 'what kind of place assumes you want peppermint ice cream as a default?' Maybe they ordered way too much peppermint ice cream and are coming up with sneaky ways to try to get rid of it. Anyway, it was weird that the peppermint ice cream thing came up more than once. When we did finally get our dessert, it was great. It's big enough to share but not so huge that it's overwhelming, and there's lots of butterscotch and pralines to go around. It's pretty hard to screw up Straus Family Creamery soft serve and butterscotch. Unless you are trying to replace the vanilla with peppermint on the sly.

Although it may sound like I groused a bit about the pizza, it was still way better than your average family-style pizzeria. It's just that there are so many phenomenal pizza places in San Francisco and Oakland that I'm a bit spoiled and jaded. It's not quite in the same league as Pizzeria Picco or Pauline's, in my humble opinion, but Howie definitely deserves props for bringing quality pizza to the lower Peninsula.

On the "About Us" page of his website, Howie talks about his reasoning for leaving fine dining for pizza making. "There are some serious and pressing issues regarding the way we feed our families in this country. These are issues which affect our health, the integrity of our families and the well-being of our planet. These are issues which I am passionate about, committed to, and have been somewhat powerless to affect, until now. And while it might seem strange, perhaps absurd, to talk about changing the world and building a better, healthier community in the context of a simple pizza pie, that’s exactly what I plan to do."

With a manifesto like that, how can I not want this place to succeed?

The deets: Howie's Artisan Pizza, Town and Country Village, 850 El Camino Real, Palo Alto. Open 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily. Phone: 650-32-PIZZA (650-327-4992). On the web at www.howiesartisanpizza.com.

come for the gas, stay for the grease

The other day I posted a link on my Facebook page to a 'restaurant' review from the East Bay Express of a new place in Fremont. I say 'restaurant' with quotes around it because the place in question a) specializes in deep-fried junk food and b) because it's located in a gas station. Even though the accompanying comment I made on the link was disparaging, I was kind of intrigued by this place. Kind of like that morbid curiosity people have while gawking at a wreck on the side of the road: you know you shouldn't look, but you just can't help yourself.

Now, as much as I might seem like a food snob, I have a confession to make: I grew up on white trash food. I didn't realize it until I was much older, but a lot of what my mom cooked when I was growing up was totally redneck. You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about: 'meat' from a can, Campbell's Soup used as gravy, Jell-O mold with fruit cocktail inside and the like. My mom is actually a great cook, so I'm pretty sure this was a function of growing up in the seventies as more women were working outside the home and looking for quick dinner solutions. My favorite dinner when I was a kid was meatloaf made with Lipton French Onion soup mix mashed in to the ground beef, then smothered with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup with a scoop of rice and Green Giant corn niblets on the side. If I went to visit my folks and my mom put a plate of that in front of me, I would devour it like a starving 10-year-old who just got home from two hours of swim team practice. I wouldn't make it at home for myself - my mom probably hasn't made this dish in 25 years either - but I would still think it was totally yummy.

Like any good American, particularly one who was raised on white trash cuisine, I love fried food. I'm down for pretty much anything dipped in batter and run through the deep fat fryer. So it's a little odd that I've made it to this point in my life without ever having a deep fried Twinkie. But then again, maybe not so odd because that particular delicacy seems to be most easily found at events like county fairs and tractor pulls - two places where I very rarely (if ever) find myself. (Well, there was that one time Kirk and I went to the San Mateo County Fair to see Night Ranger, but we were there to rock, not eat. Wow, did I really admit that in public?)

It just so happens that the following day I was working in Santa Clara and would be driving right past Fremont on my way home, so I made it my journalistic DUTY to go check it out so I could report back to you, dear reader. Wasn't that altruistic of me?

The place is called "The Deep Fried Twinky (sic) and Pastrami Shop," or at least that's what the banner outside says. It's situated in the back of the convenience store attached to the Valero gas station on the corner of Mowry Avenue and Fremont Blvd. Not sure if the misspelling of "Twinkie" is on purpose to avoid any kind of copyright infringement or if the sign maker or store owner is not smarter than a fifth grader. Does anything say 'redneck' more than deep fat fried food from the gas station? I bet they sell rifles and ammo there too.

Besides the obvious pastrami sandwich (which is not deep fried) and Twinkies (which are), this place offers all kinds of deep fried goodness (or should I say, badness) including but not limited to, Oreos, PB&J, bananas, cookies and cupcakes. On the savory side, they have a bacon-wrapped hot dog (deep fried), ham & cheese sandwich (deep fried) and garlic fries (obviously, deep fried). I think the only thing not deep fried on the menu is the pastrami sandwich. Not sure what makes it so special that it doesn't get a batter-and-oil bath like everything else they offer, but I suppose I'll have to find that out another time.

I find the menu a little overwhelming. Which fried delight should I have? For the truly undecided, they have a Sweet Sampler plate which consists of two bananas, two Oreos, half of a PB&J, one Twinkie, two cookies and one cupcake for $9.99. But I am by myself and not looking to give myself a heart attack on the spot, so it's between the Twinkie (hereafter refered to as DFT) and the PB&J. The PB&J sounds a little more exotic and somewhat more satisfying, but I'm actually not all that hungry. I decide to go for the DFT mainly because I figure that if I'm going to pop my white trash fried junk food cherry it might as well be with a classic.



The DFT comes drizzled with chocolate sauce and dusted with powdered sugar. It actually presents well, like if it wasn't being served on yellow fast food paper in a disposable paper tray, you might actually mistake it for a five dollar dessert at some family restaurant chain like Chili's or Applebee's instead of a two-buck one at the gas station.

The first bite is a hot, crunchy burst of molten cake. A little too hot to taste anything, really, so I let it cool down a bit. After a few more bites, I have to honestly say that I'm not a fan. What I like about Twinkies in their original form is the sponginess of the cake and the lightness of the creme center. But the hot oil has turned the cake into a gritty, mushy substance almost the consistency of polenta and the creme into flavorless liquid. At least the batter, chocolate sauce and powdered sugar made it into something that was edible and mildly enjoyable. I think the DFT could have benefited from a scoop of vanilla ice cream to temper the hotness and sweetness.

Even though I'm not impressed with the DFT, I'll probably come back to the DFTAPS to try the PB&J and the pastrami, and of the bacon-wrapped hot dog sounds pretty awesome too. I think the PB&J will hold up better in the fryer than the Twinkie - melty peanut butter sounds infinitely more palatable than disintegrated sponge cake. Of course, I would ONLY be returning here because it's my journalistic duty to report back on these things. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Did I mention that the gas here is really cheap? Like 20 cents per gallon cheaper than what I paid at the ghetto gas station near my house. It's worth the five-minute detour off the freeway just for that. And hey, if I have to fill up my car, might as well fill up my belly, too.

The deets: The Deep Fried Twinky & Pastrami Shop, 4004 Mowry Avenue at Fremont Blvd, Fremont. Phone: (510) 794-7666. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

A Brisk-et fall day

Today's been a classic fall day: sun shining, a nip in air, porch covered in leaves. We've been lucky with our typical Bay Area Indian summer but I think those days are finally (sadly) leaving us. There are still a few tomatoes hanging around on our vines but soon we should be replacing them with winter veggies - leafy greens, maybe some beans and snow peas. We had a really lovely crop of snow peas last year so hopefully we can duplicate that success this year.

I had a little bit of a strange schedule today - a morning appointment in Alameda and an afternoon job in San Mateo that left with me a decent chunk of time to get some lunch out somewhere. I consider Phat Matt's BBQ (www.phatmattsbbq.com), which is opening today on Telegraph and 34th in Oakland, but decided that it was somewhere I'd rather go with a carnivorous friend than alone. I didn't really feel like tracking anyone down, plus I questioned the wisdom of going to a restaurant on their first day of business. But the seed had been planted that I wanted meat for lunch. Then I remembered the brisket sandwich at Bakesale Betty, which I had read about months ago but hadn't sampled yet. So off to BB it was.

Bakesale Betty is one of the cornerstones of the burgeoning Temescal dining scene, literally - it's located on the corner of Telegraph and 51st Streets in Oakland. They make yummy pastries (mainly pies, the best strawberry shortcake on the planet, cookies and scones) and a few incredible sandwiches. On any given day (especially weekends), you'll see long lines of people waiting for their chance to get a BB delectable. This is the only place I can think of where it actually pays to stand in a long line because employees will often come out and dole out free cookies as you wait. One time, the free cookie guy insisted I take two even though one was plenty enough for me. By the time I got to the counter I was so full I didn't really want to order anything. From that perspective I'm not sure if this is a good business strategy, but from a public relations one, it's a home run.

Bakesale Betty is a real person, though her name isn't really Betty. She is Alison Barakat, a transplant from Australia and another Temescal Chez Panisse alum (the other being Charlie Hallowell at the neighboring Pizzaiolo). Betty/Alison is a blue-hair, and by that I don't mean old: she wears a blue bob wig that's become her trademark. The hair and her cat-eyed glasses give her the look of a punk rock version of a 1950's housewife, perhaps an allusion to her modern take on classic food.

The fried chicken sandwich is the one that put Bakesale Betty on the map - the original cause of the lines flowing down Telegraph Avenue. I bet that out of the 1,503 reviews on Yelp, at least 1,425 of them rave about the fried chicken sandwich (and the other 78 were written by vegetarians). It's not all hype either - it really is THAT good. But I didn't come here today to talk about the fried chicken sandwich; that one has had its moment in the sun from many other sources. Today it's all about the brisket, baby.

I got to BB around 11:15 a.m. No line, but that meant no free cookie, either. (Ed. note: What kind of place makes you sad that you don't get to stand in line? I think the DMV should start handing out homemade cookies - there would be a lot less pissed off people there.) As much as I love the cute old ironing board tables that make up the outdoor seating area, today it's a little chilly so I take my sandwich to enjoy in the comfort of my own home.

As I start to unwrap it, I notice little potato chip crumbs falling out of the paper. 'That's weird,' I think to myself, 'why would they wrap potato chips up with the sandwich? Why wouldn't they put them on the side?' Then I realize that the potato chips are actually IN the sandwich. Glory hallelujah! I've been surreptitiously sticking potato chips in my sandwiches since about the sixth grade - they go great in tuna salad with alfalfa sprouts - but I have never in all my sandwich-eating years ever bought one with the potato chips already included in the filling. I've even purchased bags of chips for the express purpose of sticking them in my sandwich. I haven't even taken a bite and already I'm in love with the damn thing.

When I do finally take the first bite, the love just deepens. The brisket is tender - not quite melt-in-your-mouth, but close - and a tad on the salty side, which is A-OK with me. The horseradish cream sauce slathered all over adds just the right amount of kick, not too overwhelming or spicy, and carmelized onions give it a little sweetness. While the horseradish and onions are nice nods to tradition, the addition of arugula (along with the aforementioned potato chips) bring the sandwich into the 21st century. This is not your grandma's brisket sandwich, and amen to that.

The one criticism I have is that the sandwich was served cold. I was able to heat it up because I was at home, but if I had eaten it there, I would have been a little disappointed. It's a lot better warm.

Price-wise, at $8.50 it's a bit steep for a sandwich. Then again, there is no way I could eat a whole one in one sitting. Since I'm getting two meals out of it, that averages it out to $4.25 each - which is a total steal. I'd pay more at Subway for one of their sad-excuses-of-a-sandwich. (Actually, I wouldn't pay more at Subway because I would never go there unless I was stuck out in the 'burbs or desperate...or both.) And it's an especially good deal because I didn't have to buy the potato chips separate.

I still love the fried chicken sandwich, but it's nice to have options. And the brisket sando is a wicked good one.

The deets: Bakesale Betty, 5098 Telegraph Avenue (at 51st), Oakland. Phone: (510) 985-1213, on the web at www.bakesalebetty.com. Sunday-Thursday, 7:00 a.m to 3:00 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The Pizza Philes, chapter 1 - Emilia's Pizzeria, Berkeley

One of the 18,236 reasons Mark and I get along so well is that we share a deep, passionate love for food and for the most part, we agree on what we like. (Our biggest divergence is around pork products, bacon in particular - but that's another story for another day.) Forget about the four basic food groups you learned about in elementary school, we've got our own: pizza, ice cream, breakfast and anything with butter. Sometimes these categories overlap, and all the better (though pizza-flavored ice cream doesn't sound all that great).

Pizza is by far my favorite food. I seriously think I could eat it every day. (My personal best to date is six days straight.) It's made up of three things I love - tomatoes, bread and cheese - how could anything made up of those ingredients be bad? I grew up in a smallish town on the Big Island of Hawaii where the only pizza place was Pizza Hut. (OK, there was also Magoo's, but no one ate the pizza there - it was all about hot ham & mushroom sandwich. But that too is another story for another day.) The choices when I went away to college in Des Moines, Iowa, weren't any better. We had a Pizza Hut near campus (where I worked waiting tables one summer), a Domino's and Home Team Pizza, a locally-owned shop that came into existence my sophomore year. The arrival of Home Team was a big story on campus since they seemed a better alternative to corporate pizza. At first, the quality was better - but by the time I graduated, you could barely tell the difference between their pizza and Domino's.

I feel fortunate to be living here in the Bay Area at a time when pizza is going through such huge renaissance. It seems like almost every week you hear of a new place opening, and they're all top-quality establishments - not the greasy, cheese-laden carb-fest joints that thrive around college campuses. Even a big player in the NYC pizza scene, Anthony Mangieri, closed his restaurant in the Big Apple to relocate to San Francisco. Una Pizza Napoletana will be opening in SOMA next March, and I can't wait to check it out!

Emilia's Pizzeria in Berkeley is the latest addition to the East Bay pizza scene, which is already an embarrassment of riches with Pizzaiolo, Dopo, Gioia, Marzano and Zachary's (among others) already enjoying ridiculous amounts of success. Emilia's owner Keith Freilich first learned the art of pizza making in his native New Jersey at the Hoboken outpost of Grimaldi's, which Zagat names the best pizza in New York. After spending 10 years or so interspersing a career in IT with pizza making, he moved to California and scored a job at Pizzaiolo a few months before they opened in 2005 - where he stayed until opening Emilia's last month.

It hasn't taken Emilia's long to establish a following. Pretty much every night Freilich tweets around 8 p.m. that he's run out of dough and is closing up shop. So finally after weeks of wanting to try it but not being able to make it in time, I planned ahead.

It turns out that Emilia's is located exactly two doors down from the dry cleaner where I take my clothes to get altered. I had taken in a few pairs of pants to be hemmed earlier in the week and planned to pick them up right before 5 p.m. on Saturday, closing time for the dry cleaner but opening time for Emilia's. My plan worked perfectly - or so I thought. I showed up at Emilia's at 4:50 p.m. and the door was open. I tried ordering a pizza but was told by Freilich (it's truly a one-man operation - the guy is the pizzaiolo, phone answerer and cashier) that he just started a new system today where he was taking orders in advance over the phone, and had so many orders already in that the earliest he could get me a pie would be 6:30. I quickly weighed my options. Did I *really* want to come back in an hour and a half after I planned the logistics of the visit so well? Not really. So I put on all the charm I could muster and gave him my sob story about how I had come ALL the way from OAKLAND (a whole two miles, tops, but you know, it's a big enough town where I could have come from far enough away to be a major inconvenience) and planned this trip a week ahead of time and how I kept wanting to come but he kept running out of dough before I could get there, yada yada yada. And you know, for Jersey guy, he sure was pretty nice about the whole thing. He squeezed me in and had my pizza ready in 20 minutes. And boy, am I glad I stuck to my guns and got that pizza.

Emilia's only does one size - 18 inches. No single slices. The pizza comes with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and basil, and there are a few extra toppings that can be added which change from week to week. I got red peppers (because he had tweeted earlier this week that he wasn't sure how much longer he'd be offering them) and red onion.

The pizza is beautiful to look at and even better tasting. The crust is blistered and charred in places, just how I like it. It's also chewy and crisp, just how I like it. The sauce is flavorful and the peppers are roasted to perfection. There's just the right amount of cheese - it's doesn't take over the whole pizza and lets the taste of the toppings shine. I think it's the best pizza I've had here in East Bay in awhile; comparable to Pizzaiolo and Dopo in quality but a lot more accessible since it's basically just a take-out joint with only one thing on the menu. Getting a fully-loaded pie at Emilia's will at most cost you $30. If you go to Pizzaiolo or Dopo, you end up ordering salad, drinks and dessert and leave $70-100 poorer (although richer for the dining experience) and the pizza is much smaller.

Atmosphere-wise...well, there just isn't any. Emilia's is little more than a take-out counter. There are three small tables, but they were more probably more useful when he was doing slices, for people who just wanted a quick bite. This pizza should be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home.

Even with the new ordering ahead policy requiring you to plan ahead and the extra drive to Berkeley to pick it up, I can see Emilia's being our new go-to place for takeout pizza. After all, it's a lot closer than Gioia and I would say even better.

The deets: Emilia's Pizzeria is located at 2995 Shattuck Avenue (at Ashby) in Berkeley. Phone: 510-704-1794. They start taking orders at 4:00 p.m. Hours: 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. (or until they run out of dough), Tuesday-Saturday. Website: www.emiliaspizzeria.com, follow on Twitter @emiliaspizzeria.

A New Beginning

Welcome to my latest (and hopefully greatest) foray into the blogosphere. Some of you (OK, two of you) may remember my baseball and poker-themed one from a few years ago called The Queen of Diamonds (thequeenofdiamonds.blogspot.com) that went the way of the dodo after a mere five months in existence. My very first posting on QOD spelled out my biggest fears in starting a blog: 1) that no one would read it, 2) that people would read it and think it was lame and 3) that I wouldn’t have enough time to keep it up. It was that third fear that ultimately killed The Queen of Diamonds: my very last post happened the day before I started massage school. It was really too bad, because at the time my NL team had been floundering and I ended up winning the league that year. And because I was too lazy and/or too busy to write, I didn’t even get to publicly gloat about it.

For awhile now, various friends have suggested that I write an East Bay food blog. It makes perfect sense because eating good food is by far my favorite activity these days, something I do much more often than check baseball stats (well, it IS the off-season) or play poker (which I haven’t done since RC’s last Super Bowl tournament). And I do spend an awful lot of time following street food vendors on Twitter and taking notes on new restaurant openings from the Chronicle’s Inside Scoop column, so it would be great to have an outlet to share that information. But what of those old fears?

I am not really worried about whether or not other people read this or what they think. I’m doing it mostly for myself, because I really need something more creative to do with my spare time than play Bejeweled Blitz all night. The time and commitment fear...well, that’s to be seen. I figure the only way to find out is to just do it and see if it sticks.

This time around, I am not going to limit myself in scope. I think that was a contributing factor to the death of my old blog. Once I stopped writing, it was hard to start again because I felt the need to ‘catch up’ from where I had left off and it was just too overwhelming. I’m hoping that if I’m just writing about whatever’s going at the moment, there would be no such pressure.

I’m calling this blog The Omnivore’s Delights for several reasons. Obviously, it’s a play on Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which is a book about food. Of course, food will be one of the main topics. Mark and I eat at too many fabulous places and cook too many enjoyable dishes to not share about those. But I’m a consumer of many things in addition to food: music, film, art, books, reality television, plays, fashion, etc. and I want to be open to talking about all these things and whatever else comes to mind.

So welcome to my blog, version 2.0. I look forward to a long, happy, inspiring, entertaining and fun experience with it and you, dear reader. (Assuming you are, in fact, out there.)