From March 6th – 21st, I’m down in the bay area looking for work as a social interaction designer. I thought it would be fun way to meet people, while down here, to cook for a bunch of Hacker News folk. This is a recording of those dinners.

Two nights ago, I cooked for Gabe Smedresman and Dani Fong and a few of their close friends at their San Francisco apartment.

Gabe was at Yale when he created the Turf game (archive.org link) which became somewhat of a minor sensation on campus and he’s now in San Francisco working on a new game which I describe as SimCity meets Fantasy Football. From what I understand, he plans on building a virtual map of the world in which players can buy, run and sell real businesses in virtual space. It sounds like a fascinating project and Gabe has some really interesting thoughts on social game design, backed by real experiences with his work on Turf.

Dani is a fellow PhD dropout like me but far more accomplished. Dani is the co-founder of a alternative energy startup,working on more efficiently storing energy as compressed air. They had just announced series B funding that day so that put us all in a celebratory mood. Dani also keeps an articulate, fascinating blog with tons of fresh insight.

The Plan

Gabe & Dani’s was the first party where I had no idea about what I was going to cook until I got to their house. Menu planning is somewhat of a skill, independent of cooking ability. The art of coming up with a good menu involves a good many things: Making sure you showcase high quality ingredients, you’re getting good value for your money, you have the right equipment to cook all the dishes at the right times, making the menu descriptions sound appetizing, and dozens more. But by far the two most important criteria are balance and contrast. A dinner that is too rich and fatty will end up leaving diners bloated, too many soft textures can end up resembling baby food. Instead, a great dinner should contain enough variation to keep the palate awake and interested.

For a geek like me, menu planning is like a giant constraint satisfaction problem. Relatively casual cooks will struggle just to fulfil the basic requirements of a good menu but for more advanced cooks with a deeper repertoire, combinatorial explosion happens and the challenge is, instead that there are too many possible menus, all of which would be good.

So especially for cases in which I need to make up a menu on the fly, I will often end up making completely arbitrary constraints on myself that reduce down the possibilities to a manageable set.

In this case, my first additional constraint was that the food should be vegetarian friendly since 3 of my guests would be vegetariants. Once I got to the market, my thinking went that the green beans looked really good and the lamb shoulder was on special so I wanted dishes that would incorporate those two. Salad Nicoise popped into my head since I hadn’t made it in a while and, while no french lamb dishes were instantly appealing to me, I really wanted to explore how lamb and fruit paired together and a lamb & apricot tagine really spoke to me (and chickpeas would be an easy sub for the vegetarian guests). Given two roughly Mediterranean dishes were on my mind, I thought a really interesting theme would be a study of how different countries around the same region would be drawing from roughly the same larder and yet use different philosophical approaches to come up with drastically different cuisines.

With the menu gelling together, lets get cooking!

First Course

Nicoise/Tuna Nicoise Salad

One of the things I associate with the French cuisine was it’s deep classicism and penchant for fussy, technical cooking. Tuna Nicoise is a dish that’s deeply old school without feeling tired or outdated in any way. This is not a reinterpreted or deconstructed Tuna Nicoise, it’s simply a deeply unironic rendition of the original because it’s original components work so well together. At the same time, it’s also an absurdly fussy dish. The eggs, potatoes & beans are each cooked separately, to just the right consistency, components are individually placed on the plate rather than being mixed up in a jumble like a normal salad and eating it requires you to actually pay attention so that you can assemble a complete salad on your fork.

In the end, it was fresh, light and a good way to start off the evening.

Second Course

Tuscan Kale Soup

In this dish, I really wanted to highlight the skill of Italian food at bring out deep flavor from a set of very humble ingredients. The soup was deliberately minimal: kale, onions, garlic, red pepper flakes, olive oil, white wine, vegetable stock, salt & pepper. Italian food is all about little tricks that add just that one iota more flavor that, when combined together as a whole, end up stunning the people who are eating it. The onions were very thinly sliced and then sauteed over low heat for over an hour until they were brown and subtly sweet. The stems from the kale were separated from the leaves and cooked alongside the onions in the last 20 minutes. The kale leaves were briefly sauteed to add just a bit of browning. The blanching liquid from the Nicoise was used to add just a subtle amount of body. All really minor details that separate a merely ordinary kale soup from a truly special one.

The end result was a soup with a stunning depth of flavor for such a humble pile of ingredients. I’m always surprised when I cook Italian food since it’s not a cuisine I prefer cooking but it’s almost always voted as the best dish of the night. This case was no exception.

Third Course

Chickpea/Lamb & Apricot Tagine with Cous Cous

The Tagine was my baby of the evening. Even though I enjoy the ethos French & Italian cuisine, the lamb tagine was far more my style of cooking. The tagine really highlighted Morrocan cuisine’s masterful way with spices so that it all comes together as a harmonious, complex whole. Morrocans have been cooking sheep for generations and their cuisine has gotten very good at using the complex interplay of spice to tame the rich gaminess of lamb. Also, the blurring of the lines between sweet & savory with fruits & honey being a major component of savory dishes is also something I love playing with because it’s so alien to the classical western tradition.

In the end, the Lamb Tagine accomplished all of those things. The lamb was tender and moist, the broth was thick, complex and well balanced and the dish was warm and satisfying. Just when I was thinking that the Tagine was the perfect cap to the meal, one of Gabe’s roommates had another surprise for us all…

Fourth Course

Home Made Banana Bread with Nutella

Gabe’s roommate, Daniel, went and baked us all some banana bread and we all slathered them thick with nutella while they were still warm out of the oven. Remember when I said that the most important criteria for a good menu is balance and contrast and that careful thought needs to go into every course to ensure that they fit well into the meal as a whole? Well, this banana bread was a completely unplanned addition added at the last minute with no consultation with me and, you know what? It was a great addition to the menu because the most important criteria for a successful menu is that it is made with love and care and this had both in spades.

My dinner party with Dani & Gabe was possibly the funnest time I’ve had in San Francisco this trip because, not only was there good food, there were also great people to be sharing it with. It’s experiences like this that made me glad I did this little experiment.

Tomorrow, I will be cooking at the house of Tony Stubblebine & Sarah Milstein for 30 people. Unfortunately, tickets for this event is already sold out but if you’re coming, I look forward to cooking for you!

From March 6th – 21st, I’m down in the bay area looking for work as a social interaction designer. I thought it would be fun way to meet people, while down here, to cook for a bunch of Hacker News folk. This is a recording of those dinners.

In the first of my Hacker News Dinner Parties, I was cooking a vegetarian feast for James and his lovely girlfriend in their Berkeley pad. James is a lone startup guy, with some really interesting thoughts about how do we remake education into a more participatory process and how do we pull in the ambient, out-of-classroom experiences to add depth and context to the learning experience. He’s also, at this very moment, on The Startup Bus on it’s way to SXSW. The Startup Bus is this crazy experiment of seeing whether hackers work like plutonium atoms. If you jam them in a tight space under sufficient pressure over enough time, will something really interesting happen or will we end up with corpses strewn along the road and a suspiciously higher incidence of cancer for the next 50 years? Obviously, anyone willing to do something so ridiculous would be fun to cook for.

Seeing as how we had to pop in to The Startup Bus sendoff party first to drink some of their beer and talk to a bunch of cool hackers, it wasn’t until 8:30pm that we actually got started on the cooking so this first dinner ended up being pretty simple but still delicious. Also, I figured out that night that having a fully charged camera battery is pretty useless when it’s not actually in the camera so apologies for the poor quality iPhone pics.

First Course

Salad of Greens, Pears, Pumpkin Seeds & Brie, Honey Mustard Dressing

The key to a good salad is contrast. This salad had the crunch from the greens & the pumpkin seeds and the softness from the pears & brie. It had bitter from the greens, sweetness from the pears & honey, salty & pungent from the brie and sour from the sherry vinegar in the dressing. As long as you follow these principles, salads are a great platform to improvise & riff from. All the ingredients for this salad were pulled out of James’ fridge because they needed to be used up. Less is more in this case, choose a few key ingredients that you want to showcase the harmony. In this case, the salad had the right balance between all of the various elements and it turned out pretty tasty.

Second Course

Penne with a Roasted Bell Pepper & Grape Tomato Sauce

This is an old standby of mine which I return back to because of the purity of flavors. It’s a recipe that I developed independently although I’m sure it’s a common dish in many cultures.

At it’s core, it’s simply roasted bell peppers and grape tomatoes. Core & flatten a sheetpan’s worth of bell peppers (about 6), brush them with oil and place them under a broiler for 15 – 20 minutes. You want the skins charred and blackened so don’t be afraid that you’re burning them. Once they’re nicely charred, put them in a bowl covered in saran wrap and the residual steam from the peppers will help loosen the skins. Throw the grape tomatoes in the same sheetpan and put them under the broiler again until they’re burst and also slightly charred. After about another 10 minutes, the grape tomatoes should be cooked and the peppers are cool enough to handle so pull as much of the skin off as you can with your hands and then roughly chop the peppers into 1/2 in pieces. Put half the peppers & tomatoes in a blender & puree, then mix in the other half as chunks, correct the seasoning and mix with the pasta and serve. That’s it! The simplest version of this dish is just two ingredients! The puree provides the body for the sauce & the chunks add a bit of textural contrast. This technique also really brings out and highlights the inherent sweetness and complexity of good ingredients. Because it’s such a simple base, it’s also another great jumping off point for riffing off a theme.

At this dinner party, we sauteed some garlic, green onion & chilli flakes in some olive oil, added in some white wine and reduced it down and then hit it with a splash of lemon at the end to add a bit of zing. Basil, oregano or other herbs are great. For non-vegetarians, I commonly do this with some chicken breast, shrimp or pork tenderloin. Replacing one or more of the bell peppers with chilli peppers adds a interesting heat to the dish. It’s really a great starting off point for a lazy weekday pasta dinner.

Third Course

Creme Caramel with Honey Glazed Apples

I’ve never been much of a sweets person so desserts are, admittedly, not my forte. That being said, a creme caramel is really a brainless, easy to knock out dessert. The custard base is some combination of eggs, milk & sugar. I still have to look up the proportions every time so don’t feel guilty if you can’t remember them. In this case, I used a caramel base but any sort of jam also works great as a base (Saffron-Cardamon with a Rose Petal Jelly base is ridiculous). Put them in the oven at 325 in a water bath and just cook until they jiggle like a fat man running up stairs. For the apples, peel, core & dice some apples and sautee them in butter until you get bored. Add some honey and just a little bit of lemon juice to cut the sweetness and you’re done. Simple, brainless and a very “cheffy” style dessert.

I have to say, the first of these Hacker News dinners was a resounding success. The food was good, the wine was plentiful and James was a really interesting guy to talk to. Tonight, I’m going to BayCHI (I’ll be the guy in the red fedora) so hit me up via email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com if you’re also planning to be there.

I’ve posted this before in various venues but I thought it was worth a revisit:

So there’s been a lot of talk in the last few years of “food miles”, eating locally and 100 mile diets. Some of the supposed benifits of eating locally is that you become more in tune with the seasons, you support your local community, you eat fresher food and just general all round feel goodness. Now all of these are valid claims and I am not disputing any of them. But the chief claim that the “food mile” movement is making is that eating locally helps the environment through lowering the use of oil. On the face of it, this sounds fairly intuitive but I wasn’t convinced so I decided to dig a bit further and try and answer the question does the choice to eat locally decrease the amount of carbon emitted and it seems like the answer is no.

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Biofuels have taken off in the last year as prices for oil have soared and corn lobbies have realised another clever gig. Predictably, food prices have soared in conjunction and the media is filled with baffled reporters raking in the easy dough producing sappy human interest pieces. But, seriously… who couldn’t have predicted this would happen?

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