Melted Cheese

Meatless Mike at Ike's Place (photo by DocPop)

Ike’s Place is amazing! A true gem, I had no idea I could like a sandwich (or sandwich place) this much.

They have a creative menu with great names and signs that are fitting to the effort that goes into the recipes. I was thrilled to find tons of veggie options.

They also seem to always have a line from which you have time to study the menu. This is a feature, not a bug.

My first choice was the Meatless Mike. (If I weren’t a vegetarian, I’d have jumped on the limited edition Doctor Popular collectible sandwich, and not just because I was dining with him.)

Fresh bread is baked to order. I had Dutch Crunch since they recommended it as the perfect combination for this sandwich — a crisp crust but soft bread inside to soak up the sauce.

A bit of pepper Jack really pulled together the vegan meatballs over-the-top messy marinara and the works: lettuce, pepporcini, pickles. Insanely goo. I’m still salivating just writing about it.

I will definately return to review more selections, and hopefully will have a guest blogger to cover the DocPop.

As an engineer at Commodore-Amiga, I had unlimited access to an endless supply of Coke in a commercial beverage refrigerator stocked daily. I’m sure that fridge was the main reason that access to engineering required a specially coded card key.

A bit of melted cheese and a side of imported Coke. Made with real sugar, not corn syrup.

This quickly resulted in the discovery that too many Cokes made my mouth sticky.

I switched to diet not because of my waistline but for mouth-feel. The taste didn’t matter to me much, I sipped it while programming anyway.

As I learned later, the problem of a sticky mouth comes from corn syrup.

The Coke made with real sugar tastes as much better than corn-syrup-coke as it is better than diet, and it isn’t nearly as sticky. But how do you get the Real Sugar Thing?

Only in the United States is corn syrup cheaper than sugar and therefore used in beverages despite it tasting worse and making us fatter than regular sugar. Our government appears set on creating this undesirable situation with subsidies for corn and taxes on imported sugar. Though the sugar taxes really go back to the first congress of 1789.

The obvious answer: smuggle your Coke across the border.

Or go to the Mission for Mexican Coke that they import for you.

In this case, Taqueria San Jose on Mission at 24th served my sugar-Coke with a plate of three cheese enchiladas. I love that here they come with three rather two (as more common elsewhere).

More cheese is better. Duh!

Alas, I found the plate a bit flavorless, wanting for lack of fast sauce and suffering too-watery. The Coke was the high-point of the meal.

Frozen Cheese will do in a pinch.  This is one of my favorite kinds of frozen cheese to turn into melted cheeze.  For some reason, it is inconsistent.  Sometimes it hits the perfect consistency: stringy, chewy, meaty.  Other times, it just doesn’t quite come together.  What, like the cosmic rays have to be right along with the microwave?

Beecher’s brand claims to make it, available frozen at Rainbow for $12.

“Straight from the heart of Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market.”

Ingredients include “flagship cheese” and “just jack”.

Serafine stopped by Palo Alto and I made her some, along with a beet and baby greens salad (my nod to eating more plants, I at least included Parmesan).

Serafine said “the best I’ve ever had except homemade, this would definately let you get your fix. Also better than some homemade ones. Really thick, really cheesy, really flavorful (I hate the ones that have runny sauce).”

It was warm this morning, so I went outside to enjoy lunch in the sunshine. It cooled off, but not enough to prevent enjoying my favorite sandwich in the city: Hot Seitan with garlic aoili and melted jack cheese. This time from Duboce Park Cafe, though my usual is from Dolores Park Cafe.

Yum, the toasty bread with the hot seitan, the tomatoes and the gooey mix of aoili and melted jack hit the spot!

One advantage of Duboce: I enjoy talking with the cashier who eats hearts.

Burrito Exquisito is a place I’ve often enjoyed when driving north from San Francisco to go camping with friends outside of Willits.

Authentic Mendocino. Great hippie style food.

On the lighter, healthier side, but still yummy.

The menu is a delight, most offerings a little different from standard burrito shop fare.

They have lots of great meatless options (including both tofu and seitan), and tend toward more veggies and whole beans in putting together each dish.

Last fall I had a heartily satisfying cheese quesadilla along with my burrito.

Most recently I had heuvos rancheros for a late brunch on my way to Memorial Day weekend.

I liked the purple tortillas and the look of the whole plate.

Thoroughly enjoyed the last of the bright sun from their back patio seating.

Then I finished off Jody’s second veggie hard shell taco.

A friend works as an Interactive Strategist and just started at a new agency. She’s their first full-time hire in analytics and strategy, so she has a lot of catching up to do.

Today we caught up over lunch at Hotel Utah on 4th and Bryant, close to both our offices.

Much of her focus will be on clients Electronic Arts and Boost Mobile. Her agency has an established Account Planning function, so the qualitative work is already there. They’re transitioning the quantitative in-house over time while bolstering it.  Developing the insight sounds really interesting to me, but I wonder if it would be interesting doing the research.

Anyway, about the cheese…. (more…)

For Cinco de Mayo, Jody offered to make nachos.

She asked how I wanted them, and I invited her to do it exactly as she liked, to make Jody Nachos.

Like a sandwich, I said, it’s always better when someone else makes it and does it their way. For some reason, it just never works as well to try to make it for yourself. If any philosophers out there can tell me why this is so, please put forth your theories in the comments below.

Anyway, she had me go shopping… (more…)