One thing that I love about cities is how often you just turn a corner and find yourself in a totally different place. San Francisco in particular is a city of a thousand disjunctions.   It packs more geographic variety into a smaller area than any other major city in America, and it is this constantly changing landscape that drives the creation of small, distinctive neighborhoods.

Given that Rebecca and I like this so much, it is somewhat embarrassing that we have never walked west from our apartment through Alamo Square Park and into the Western Addition.   Sunday we decided to fix this.

I'm cooking a lot these days.  For the first time in awhile, the rate at which I'm cooking postworthy dishes far outstrips the time I have to blog about them.  I've decided that I'm not going to let that stop me from posting, since I do need to some relevant details about the food, if only for my own purposes.  Be warned, though, that many of these posts will be spare, and the pictures may not be quite up to par.

One recent dish was goat stew with couscous.  The goat has been in my freezer for months now, and since I recently acquired a whole pork loin and several other items which demanded freezer space, I decided it was time to cook it up.  I used to occasionally buy goat in Santa Ana when Rebecca and I were in exile in Orange County.  I hadn't bought it while in San Francisco until last fall, when I ran across some at random in Draegers (of all places).

At least two weekends a month, Rebecca and I wake up, throw some clothes on, and head down the Hayes St. corridor, and walk in to Arlequin for lunch.  She orders the Sage and Portabello Mushroom sandwich, no onions, and I order the Pear, Bacon, and Cheddar sandwich, both of which are toasted lovingly on levain bread in the panini machine until crisp and tasty.  We stop by Blue Bottle on the way home, and when we arrive back in our living room, put something on the telly and unwrap our delicious booty, Rebecca will attempt to convince me that I want to trade half of my sandwich for hers.  And she will fail.

I'd originally intended this to be a pan-seared Steelhead fillet with shiitake mushrooms in a light milk sauce of some sort.  Early in the day, though, word came down that one of my dinner guests did not like mushrooms.  At around the same time, I ran across a recipe for "almond milk" (not real almond milk; really just toasted almonds braised in milk), and I thought that toasted almonds might add a similar woodsy note that I was going for with the shiitakes. 

In a note to the recipe, the authors mention something about clam chowder, and my mind was off racing:  a milk-braised Steelhead fillet as the centerpiece in some kind of deconstructed chowder nouveau.  Well, maybe half-constructed.