Friday Food 07-17-20

High on the list of things I am missing these days are desserts!  I suppose this is obvious if I am willing to drive to Long Beach for a carrot cake.   I've always been big on desserts, which has made me big in reality, I suppose.  And I look back at pictures of desserts I have eaten at restaurants and long to look over a dessert tray at a fancy joint!  Here are a few memorable choices. 

From Solare at Liberty Station, San Diego  Feb 2013

This sphere is semifreddo with a filling of raspberry and a light coating of cookie crumbs.   I can't remember what it was called on the menu - not a word I have ever seen.

  I checked with Solare and found that their name for this spherical desert is "Sfera".  I believe they have named it after this sculpture:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfera_con_Sfera

Cutting it open reveals the raspberry heart.  The semifreddo was different in this, more like frozen mousse than ice cream.  I think this is one of the best desserts I have had in quite a long time. 

Also in San Diego at a Japanese restaurant. 

This was a huge scoop of green tea ice cream heavily drizzled with chocolate sauce.  Memorable.

Also at Solare   September 25, 2012

I can't give you the exact name, but it was a ricotta lemon cheesecake with a lovely crust served on a plate decorated with lemon sauce and strawberry sauce. 

In my dreams!

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Friday Food 11-01-19

Mystery Food tonight!  These are all pictures I could find searching my photo files.  But the captions are gone, so I am only guessing what and where.  

This looks delicious.  I think it is salmon at Solare in San Diego.

The inside of a homemade BLT on good bread from Con Pane in San Diego.   I only had a couple BLTs this year because I only like them with homegrown tomatoes and I didn't grow any.  And only one friend shared hers.  

This is the outside of the BLT.  That is a regular dinner plate, it was a big sandwich.

This one and the two below must be from Solare in San Diego.  Looks like their plates and elegant presentation.  

Surely it is salmon with a nice array of veggies. 

Maybe beet salad?  It is a favorite of my friend Carol. 

 A salad!  Looks like it might have asparagus and crumbled blue cheese and crumbled bacon.  Makes me hungry. 

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Friday Food 10-11-19

Last week I had lunch with friends at Solare at Liberty Station in San Diego.  It is in the same block as Visions Art Museum, but at the other corner.  I took the advice of my friend and ordered the Portofino, which is seared yellowfin tuna, lettuce heart, green beans, caper berries, free range organic boiled egg, and purple potatoes cooked under sea salt.  It was excellent.  I especially enjoyed the sour whole caper berries which I have only been served a couple of times in the past.  

The other lady in the group had the Caesar salad with chicken and the dressing on the side.  

I have always enjoyed the food at Solare, but it is pricey.  We also ate on the patio since it was such a lovely day.  However, the planes taking off from SDiego airport are deafening, I won't do that again! 

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Friday Food - Lunch at Solare near VAM 05-24-19

On Tuesday after seeing the current quilt exhibit at Visions Art Museum in San Diego, Carol and I went to Solare for a lovely, peaceful lunch.  There were no other diners at about 1:30pm, so we had the complete attention of our waiter.  The service was excellent!!

We did not eat dessert first, but I am still struggling with importing pictures into my blog and this is the order they came out.   

My choice for dessert was the raspberry tart and if I hadn't been in hog heaven I should have taken a picture of the inside.  It was a creamy filling, almost like zabaglione - delicious.  And their dessert presentations are always so artistic. 

For my actual lunch I had lamb lasagna, which I have never eaten before.  Very nice and enough for my dinner the next evening.  

Carol chose chocolate salame for her dessert.  I have had it before and it is exceptional with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

And for her lunch Carol ordered the Chicken Piccata.  She let me have a taste and it was lovely.  Lots of nicely cooked veggies. 

It rained while we were inside, but when we were finished the rain had stopped and the sun was trying hard to break through. 

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Friday Food on Saturday! 08-11-18

I don't know why I missed posting last night.  I didn't go to bed early.  I was still sorting yesterday and again today and managed to clean out six boxes.  So, I'm making progress.  I repeat - "get busy and organized your stuff, lest you get hit by a bus."  Of course, it will take me months to wade through my mess.  So I shouldn't be admonishing anyone else!

Crusted sturgeon w/risotto, asparagus and coleslaw at Hops - Kalispell, MT  06-06-12

The first and only time I have eaten sturgeon, it was fantastic, but it isn't something I usually see on menus.  This small restaurant in Kalispell was a real find and I ate there several times during the week I was there.  When I returned in a later year the place was still called Hops, but it was an entirely different menu.

 Salmon in caper sauce - Lunch at Solare - SDiego  02-01-13 

In looking through my photo files I find that I mostly have pictures of sushi, sashimi, or cooked fish.  I usually do eat fish when I am out because I don't do a good job of cooking it myself.  When a friend and I were on a road trip she finally asked me if I was going to eat salmon every day.  My answer, "If I can!".  And I did.  

Dinner at Solare in SDiego 01-20-15

Visions has new exhibits which opened on Saturday and I drove down for the opening reception  It was very well attended and a number of the artists were present.  Fun to have a few minutes visit with people I don't see very often. And to meet some artists I didn't know before.  Some very nice work; some serious, some witty - a nice selection, I think. 

After the reception some of the Visions people went to dinner at Solare.  I've always enjoyed their food in the past, but they must have been having an off night.  Not only did we have to wait for our table (we had a reservation), but then we waited on the waiter whenever he felt like coming around.  Here are two of the main dishes at the table.  

This was the beef selection on the special menu for the evening.  The diner said it was very good.  And it certainly was a nice presentation. 

This was my chicken selection, it was a little tough and I'm not sure what all was in the melange underneath - mushrooms mostly.  I only ate about half so brought the remainder home to have for dinner last night.  The chicken was still tough and I cooked some Swiss chard to go with the mushrooms and whatever. 

This was sort of a corn cake atop burned onions and, maybe, spinach.  I skipped the burned onions and whatever, but the corn cake was very good. 

I think I won't dine at Solari very often.  I'd rather go to Ikiru and have sushi, anyway!

It was rather late when we finished dinner, but I decided to just drive home rather than stay at a motel.  I wasn't sleepy and I do sleep better at home.  The next day I took a long nap - driving is more tiring now than it was even a year ago.  Old bones! 

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Lunch with friends 02-02-13

Yesterday my friends Carol Bednar and Teresa Malinowski went with me to San Diego to see the "Brainstorms" exhibit at Visions Art Museum.  It was an absolutely gorgeous day - sunny and in the low 70s.  And it was an easy drive down - nice to be able to use the carpool lane since there were three of us in the car. 

I gave my docent tour, which Carol and Teresa seemed to enjoy.  I'm always surprised that no matter how many times I looked at the quilts I discover something I haven't noticed before.  There are some wonderful pieces and three of them have been sold.  The exhibit closes on Sunday, Feb 17th.  If you haven't seen it yet I hope you can squeeze in a visit. 

Then we went to lunch at Solare, which is in the same block as VAM.  It has changed owners and I am still  not sure it is my favorite restaurant, but it comes close.  I have a problem with the very heavy cologne worn by some of the waiters - interesting that the waitresses don't douse themselves.


Carol had beet soup that we expected to be cold, but it was hot.  I, of course, had to have a taste on the tip of my knife, and thought it was delicious - so did Carol and Teresa.
 

Carol followed this with a salad of different colored beets with with greens and shaved Parmesan.
 

Teresa ordered a pear/Gorgonzola salad which looked marvelous.
 

I couldn't resist the salmon with caper sauce and veggies - perfectly cooked, delicious.
 

Teresa and I both have a "sweet tooth" so we decided to share two desserts.  This is the out-of-sight chocolate torte with semifreddo (basically it is wonderfully rich ice cream).  The chocolate was like fudge - m-m-m-m-m-m.
 

This sphere is also semifreddo with a filling of raspberry and a light coating of cookie crumbs.   I can't remember what it was called on the menu - not a word I have ever seen.

  I checked with Solare and found that their name for this spherical desert is "Sfera".  I believe they have named it after this sculpture:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfera_con_Sfera

 

 

Cutting it open reveals the raspberry heart.  The semifreddo was different in this, more like frozen mousse than ice cream.  I think this is one of the best desserts I have had in quite a long time. 

 

We headed north on I-5 and stopped at Oceanside Museum of Art to visit the Quilt National quilts on display there.   This exhibit ends on Feb. 10th.   There are some extraordinary quilts in this section of QNational.  I especially enjoyed Elizabeth Brimelow's "Rook Road", so original and so beautiful.  Heide Stoll-Weber's " King Lake 3: Ghost Trees" is also awesome.  And ....  well, I like a lot of the quilts that are currently hanging at QMA.   I hope you get a chance to see them. 

 

Carol, Teresa and I are in the Book Group, so we spend some of the drive time talking books which makes the drive go much faster.  It is about two hours each way.  We were home about 6:30pm.

 

Friday Fish 11-30-12

The day was bound to come when I had no feet and no fannies to post.  So, I decided to share this image which is from a display at the Naval Training Center in San Diego along the hallway we walk from Visions Art Museum to have lunch at Solare restaurant.  This picture just tickles me.


This lady is so nicely dressed in what I suppose is a cannery workers uniform, white stockings, a necklace and a gardenia corsage.  And yet she is holding a sticky, smelly fish.   This was surely before women were permitted to wear trousers, so pre-WWII.   What an incongruous image!  But that's advertising for you - tricky and deceptive. 
 

This is the sign alongside the picture, telling about a canning industry that has long ago moved overseas. 

A Day at Visions Art Museum 10-18-12

Today was a docent training day at Visions Art Museum.  This event was in preparation for the  biennial exhibit "Brainstorms" which opens on Saturday.  There was a huge crowd of willing volunteers, about fifty, I believe.  I hardly had a chance to really enjoy the quilts, but I will be going back many times before the exhibit ends in February.  I hope you will be able to visit this wonderful collection of quilts.  I will be doing docent duty in December and January.

  Pictures are not allowed inside the gallery, but with so many ladies the quilts were hardly visible.

   

After the training session a group of eight went out to lunch at one of my favorite spots in the area, "Solare".  I didn't take a picture of my chicken sandwich (which was way too salty for me) and have decided that next time I will just order what Beth orders.  This is her seared Ahi salad.  She also had butternut squash soup with a lovely presentation in a very wide brimmed bowl.  I tasted it - delicious.  Her selection always seems more interesting that mine.

Food again 09-25-12

A week ago Sunday I did a trunk show of quilts from TCQC at the annual meeting of Quilt Visions, the group that operates Visions Art Museum: Contemporary Quilts & Textiles in San Diego.  Afterward nine of us had an early dinner at Solare, one of my favorite restaurants at Liberty Station (which was the Naval Training Center until it became "surplus" and turned into a destination with galleries, shops, restaurants, etc.).  The food, service, presentation are all excellent and we were there before the dinner hour so there were not a lot of other guests talking and enjoying themselves.  Very nice because it seems to me that these days most restaurants are so noisy it is impossible to carry on a conversation.  Not having that problem the nine of us chattered away and enjoyed each other's company.   I didn't photograph my dinner which was pasta in a sauce with shrimp - delicious, but it looked like every other pasta dish we have all eaten in our lives!      

 
On either side of me the ladies ordered Kobi beef which was gorgeous and tasted gorgeous also, they let me have a taste. 

 
When the huge proportion of beef was "de-towered" the lovely veggies underneath were revealed. 

 
We only ordered one dessert, which came in two portions, or else the chef had cut it in two for us.  We passed it around the table so everyone could have a bite and when it came back to me I ate the bits that remained!

 
I can't give you the exact name, but it was a ricotta lemon cheesecake with a lovely crust served on a plate decorated with lemon sauce and strawberry sauce.