WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

BAD FORK! BAD, BAD!!

GOOD CALAMARI! GOOD, GOOD!!

 BAD FORK ALERT!!

This hideous example of waiter carelessness was at an anonymous North Redington Beach eatery whose ambiance, cleanliness & calamari I recently enjoyed. But not with this fork...or the other one inside the paper napkin! Two bad forks! Eeek!
Note to management: select heavy silverware and have waitstaff periodically check & straighten tines.
Another note to management: not everyone enjoys Jimmy Buffet so loud diners have to shout. No place for an intimate dinner, is it?

A REALY GOOD RED SANGRIA

Summer days, particularly the waiting time before the BBQ fire's hot enough to use, call for something with a little punch to it. Consider Sangria. I use Carlo Rossi Hearty Burgundy or Black Swan Cab. A tempranillo or garnacha from Spain would work well, too. In my view, French reds won't cut it.

1 750 ml bottle red wine

2 tbsp orange juice concentrate
1/3 C Triple Sec
1 L Diet 7-Up
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon or to taste
1/2 C Simple syrup (equal parts white sugar & water, boiled until clear)

 1 juice orange, in half, sliced crossways thinly

Mix first five ingredients in a large pitcher. Agitate with a wooden spoon whirled between your palms. Taste; add simple syrup until it's to your taste. Chill up to two hours. Add orange slices 30 minutes before serving to avoid the bitter oils leaching into the sangria. Should there be leftovers (hah!) remove orange slices before refrigerating. Can be doubled or tripled, but be cautious about the cinnamon. Simple syrup keeps well in fridge for 2 weeks or longer.
There are people who add a hefty slug of brandy to this, but I prefer to stay sober long enough to actually taste the stuff.
TRY THE WOODEN SPOON TRICK. It looks good and it seems to make a difference. Don't, for petesakes, use a plastic spoon. If you've got one of those rare old Mexican hand-carved wooden chocolate frothers, that'd be a nice touch, too.
A Cuban friend says this recipe is as good as any he's tasted. And that's good enough for me.

FOOD MEMORIES: ICE CREAM

What's your earliest serious food memory? Not cornflakes and milk at age four, okay? I'm talking an epiphany, a food that opened your eyes to the unusual, to intensity, to the promise of something mysterious and new. Something that made you take notice...and remember.
One of mine is a double-scoop black raspberry ice cream cone. I was about seven. We used to go up to Taconic, New York for family vacations. There was a general store. I remember a small yellow clapboarded building, three wooden steps up to the front screen door. I was a small kid; the steps were very big. Cool and dark inside, I suppose, but what I really remember is the strange new color of the ice cream, dark purpley red splotches/chunks/swirls in a paler base. Rich color, rich flavor, rich memory. And the flavor was not the usual strawberry or my beloved chocolate. To use a silly advertising phrase: this was big.
To continue the ice cream epiphany theme, in Kusadasi, Turkey about 25 years ago, I stopped at a vendor's cart and chose apricot gelato. Wow! I turned into an apricot! Intense, mouth-filling, perfumed. That scrumptuous stuff was 200% apricot. I returned to Kusadasi in 2003: it's become the Pigeon Forge of coastal Turkey, over-decorated, awash with tourists swilling drinks and stuffing themselves with faux-Turkish food while bored waiters ignore them and greedy plastic souvenir vendors wait outside like vultures. No sidewalk vendors of ice cream. I got outa there in a hurry.
I've been all over europe, I try gelato or ice cream everywhere. These days, I find lots of unusual flavors but the flavor of the flavors is strangely tame. But I keep searching. I found a tropical fruit-flavor in Bogota recently; they do weird fruits very well.
Closer to home for the last memory: South Street Seaport, New York City, in the 90's. Top floor where the food stalls were. A gelato place. It wasn't Italy but the deep dark chocolate gelato with cerise bits and swirls of cerise-flavored syrup still makes me nearly faint with pleasure. I wonder...is that gelato place still there? I gotta check it out.
So...tell me yours.

SALPICON, Colombia's Perfect Summer Drink

I've held off six months on this, because publishing a warm-weather drink in September was kind of silly. Now it's heating up and this delicious, refreshing and healthy national beverage will make your summer entertaining even more fun. All over Colombia (I first tasted this in the municipal market halls in Bucaramanga, an hour's flight from Bogota), marvelously different fresh fruits flavor everything from stews and salads to ice cream and donuts (more on that another time). I've taken this a notch back to what's usually available in an American kitchen. Don't gussy this up with fresh mint, or a rim of tinted sugar, or a pineapple spear, okay? It's a great drink and deserves to stand on its own.

3 C fresh watermelon juice
1 C 7-UP or your favorite pale soda, diet's okay
1 C chopped watermelon
1/2 C each chopped mango, melon, peach and/or other in-season fruit*
Simple syrup**
Juice of one lime
1 banana, chopped, moistened with lime juice

Up to three hours ahead, mix watermelon juice and chopped fruits except banana. At serving time, add soda, lime juice, and chopped banana. Adjust sweetness with simple syrup. Serve in tall glasses over ice, or from a pitcher at table. Serves 4 to 6, depending on thirst, doubles or triples easily, just watch the syrup.
* the mango's a must; for me, cherries and blueberries don't fit (too American). If you have access to Latin fruits, by all means use them. Above all, no kiwi!
** 1/2 C each white sugar and water, boiled until clear; keeps well in the fridge. Or use watermelon juice, and pass a small pitcher of it at serving time. Colombians
NOTE: of course, you could add dark rum, even vodka...but the drink is a standout au naturel, and nicely compliments Latin-influenced cuisine, roast corn on the cob, grilled pork chops, even steak
NOTE: I've never tried a powdered drink mix but it might work if you're desperate
COMING UP: A Reely Excellent Sangria...Memories of Colombian Donuts...Xian Noodles...more

THE CLAREMONT DINER: DIVINE PIE

I'm not a pie devotee. I make a pie crust that a shoe repair shop would welcome. But, once in a while, a pie offering intrigues me. The Claremont Diner in Berkeley, CA has an in-house pie magician who turns out about four different temptations daily. I succumbed to her Chocolate Rum Raisin Pecan Pie. It was to die for! Flaky crust, plump rummy raisins, a gooey but not overwhelming chocolate filling topped by pecan halves. I like this place, with its railroad trains whizzing around up near the ceiling (check the photo). It's clean, economical, serves generous portions - try the baby hamburger plate, you'll waddle away from the counter - the staff is friendly and if you sit at the counter you can watch the cooks do their stuff. I love sitting at the counter. The Claremont Diner's my go-to place when I'm in Berkeley; I'll even make a special trip for that pie (but only from 9 AM to 9 PM). It's been under the same ownership for decades. Now if I can just talk them into opening earlier!

THE GREAT DIM SUM QUEST

A long while back, when I discovered Chinese dim-sum, I took my sister to a restaurant in Washington DC so she could experience my new fave food. The really great part about dim sum is that it's served fresh, ideally from steam carts wheeled by chanting servers who'll pick out your choice - on a plate, in a small steamer, sometimes in a bowl - and bingo, a small helping of, say, shrimp in a rice paper wrapper (about the size of a small egg, usually three to a steamer), or shiu mai, which is a thin dough wrapper pleated around chopped chicken/scallop or, more often, ground pork or shrimp (these open-topped goodies are about an inch across and 1-1/2" high, again three to a steamer).  Pot stickers fried before your eyes, turnip cakes ditto; or congee (thick rice soup); noodles of course, or steamed broccoli or tiny clams in black bean sauce. There are literally hundreds of dim sum, many of them vegetarian, so that ho-hum factor is never going to be an issue. You'll probably never get to taste them all.
I believe the DC restaurant I took my sister to is no longer in business. But they deserved to go out of business; the dim sum were terrible. One of my favorites is barbequed pork bun, which is a delicious mound of chopped, saucy barbeque pork inside a fluffy rice flour dumpling the size of a tennis ball. Imagine my horror when their version appeared to be cheap white bread wrapped around Dinty Moore Stew! Other items were no better. My sister still rags on me about that disgusting meal.

So, right now, I am in San Francisco, on the trail of the ultimate dim sum.I'm polling friends who live here in Baghdad by the Bay, and am going to try as many places as possible. I've only got to one so far, and while it was relatively cheap it was also solidly mediocre. More later!
After ten days in Berkeley and San Francisco, I am still searching for dim sum experiences. Research pointed me to CITY VIEW RESTAURANT (top 2 photos from there) in the Financial District, where I and two friends had an excellent meal. The immaculately clean restaurant offers plenty of choices from both carts and hand-carried trays. The steamed spinach dumplings were divine. The BBQ pork buns had a lot of excellent filling but the enclosing dough was a bit gummy. I'd go back to the City View any time even if it did have white tablecloths and fabric napkins.
If you seek really cheap eats, and can do without ambiance, variety or a lack of grease, there are scores of small hole-in-the-wall take-out joints that most tourists wouldn't even register. I went to YOU'S DIM SUM on Stockton (walking from Union Square? Through the tunnel, then a block further on to You's; it's on the left, see 3rd photo). Three dim-sum of my choice: $1.60. I ate them with a plastic fork at a formica table. I spent an entire afternoon trying these places out and must say that price is the main thing. More later!
Alex and Aggie took us to The New Lantern Restaurant in the Mission district, and of all the places we ate, this one is probably the best, considering they serve dim sum until late at night. They're varied, cooked to order and they were delicious. I love it when good ingredients are used. Try THE NEW LANTERN!