I don’t know why it took me nearly a year to make myself a salad for lunch. Clearly the salad bar at Rincon Market just wasn’t as sexy as exploring all the new lunch options available in San Francisco after 2 years of working in Sausalito. Plus a salad bar isn’t social, and most of the time, the FM engineering team goes out en masse. I’d also heard that it was hard to make a salad for less than $10 there (as they weigh everything at $6.99/lb).

Well, now that a year has passed, all the eateries around us are old hat, the team has gotten big enough that it tends to break up into multiple lunch parties depending on who’s available when, and we’re all city-confident enough to cross the street without holding hands.

And then part of it is health. I’ve been feeling like I need to intake fewer calories and more fiber in my diet. Enter: salad.

So I started making salads once or twice a week. It took a while to get the hang of it, as this particular salad bar has a multitude of options to choose from, some of which stretch the meaning of the word “salad”. But what I like is that they have all of the important bits to make a really killer salad. Or at least what I consider a killer salad. I guess I’m doing it right, because on a few occasions, people have wondered if my salad had been preprepared, it looked so good.

My first few tries cost in excess of $8 dollars, but I watched what I liked, what was too much, and what I left behind, and slowly tailored my salad making algorithm. Now I’ve got it down to about $5, and every bit of it is awesome.

Here’s what I tend to include, in order.

1. bed of chopped romaine lettuce
2. few scoops of spring mix
3. 2 half-cucumber slices
4. 2 cherry tomatoes
5. 2 scoops of sliced carrots
6. sprinkle of shredded red cabbage
7. 3 kalamata olives
8. shredded parmesan
9. sunflower seeds
10. croutons
11. drizzle of balsamic vinegar
12. drizzle of olive oil

It ends up looking something like this:

Of course occasionally I mix it up. Some times I add a scoop of corn, or some of those crunchy Chinese noodles. I might leave out the olives if I’m not in the mood. What makes it look so good are the reds, purples, and oranges against the green lettuce, and what makes it taste so good are the salty, crunchy bits.

It’s a small 7″ spatula in a spoon shape, perfect for scrambled eggs and lots of other things. You can find it as part of a set from Williams Sonoma. I got it in my Christmas stocking one year.

On Tuesday, Stephanie and I met up with Andy, Meredith, and Jonathan over at Bloodhound for the third in a series of butchering demonstrations/cookouts held there. The first one I’d heard about from Andy after the fact, and the second one I was out of town for, so I was very happy that I’d finally be able to get in on the fun.

Whereas the two previous events involved a whole pig (ah, memories), this time they were working with a side of beef hung from the ceiling. Stephanie and I arrived just as the two chef-cum-butchers (Ryan Farr from 4505 Meats and Taylor Boetticher from the Fatted Calf), were taking it apart. Over the course of an hour they disassembled the side into various cuts, while all the scraps and fat went into a meat grinder to make sliders.

The whole thing was kind of a spectacle. It was way off the hipness charts, even by San Francisco standards—so you can probably imagine the orgy of cameras, DSLRs, and iPhones all snapping away. I have to admit I did feel a little self-conscious, but I still managed to get a few good shots of the carnage.

While we were watching, they were bringing around homemade corndogs and these amazing grilled peaches wrapped with pancetta and basil to whet our appetites. By the time the meat came off the grill, the place had devolved into a kind of feeding frenzy. They’d bring out trays of food which would be completely picked clean in a matter of seconds. I didn’t get much of a chance to appreciate the various cuts of beef that they’d grilled up, partly because it was such a madhouse to get any. But the sliders—omg they were awesome. I probably had three.

Those last three remind me of pat’s vs. geno’s.

Molly, one of our FM co-workers, is from Alaska, and she recently went back to see her family, which inevitably means she went fishing. She says:

We ended up with 10 fish, which was 95 lbs of processed meat. These were probably 15-20 lb fish originally, which is pretty tiny for a halibut. We call these “chickens”. A few days before I got there someone caught a 354 lb’er….which is what we would call a “barn door” because as you can see they are flat, so it’s like pulling a barn door through the water. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to pull in a fish that big! I caught a 130 lb’er once and that took over an hour.

Anyway, the cool part is, her family sent her home with a lot of the halibut meat, and when I found out she was giving it away, I eagerly offered to take some off her hands. So yesterday she brought in three fillets for us, which we defrosted that night, broiled with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbes de provence, and served over jasmine rice. Simple. Delicious.