FoodBuzz Fest Street Food Fare

The kind people at FoodBuzz (--> I am a featured publisher!) held the inaugural FoodBuzz Food Blogger Festival in san francisco this year. That was my other reason for going out there for this trip. On the first night, they had a street food fare at the Ferry Building. Street food... Ferry Building... put them together and it's like a dream! There were tons of local vendors who let us grub on their fine grub. It was a nice variety as well, and everyone was super friendly. Even though we only ate little plates, I was beyond stuffed by the end of it. And yes, all this food was prepared on the site!
What's a trip to sf without tacos? Beef, of course!
The food above is not only completely vegan, but also completely raw. Scary sounding, I know, but surprisingly tasty. The cheesecake was good, even though there was a slightly funny this isn't real cheese taste. I still liked it!
The star of the evening... the porchetta sandwich from roli roti. What is it? Pork belly rolled into pork loin with crispy skin rotisseried the crack up, with fresh herbs, onion marmalade, and curly cress stuffed in between bread. Oh. My. Word. Yes, it is that delicious.
Delicious thin crust pizzas. Yes, the oven was there!
Freshly shucked oysters from Hog Island Oyster!
Mini meat pies! These ones were steak & gruyere. This was my second favorite of the evening!
Adorable little mini cupcakes of various flavors from Mission Minis. So cute and so tasty! You can even find these at whole foods in the sf area! Schmancy!
Freshly fried chicharrones. Ok, obviously, this wasn't an event for the health conscious.
Ok, here's one thing that was slightly healthy... vegetables! I had the beet salad which I loved. You heard it here people, I love beets! I love street food. I especially love it when it's within one confined area so I don't have to walk far between gourd stuffings.

Little Star Pizza

From vegas, I headed over to san francisco. J had recommended this deep dish pizza spot, so we headed over to Little Star Pizza. Apparently, President Obama's favorite pizza is basically the deep dish pizza from here. Once when he had a party, he had this type of pizza made for the guests. Can a president be wrong? The place was pretty packed but we only had a short wait. There's a small bar area where you can wait for a table. It's a pretty small place. The menu is pretty small as well. We weren't in the mood for meats, so we got the vegetarian pizza. The large pizza is quite sizeable, and we could only eat half. The crust is a crunchy corn meal crust. It is not very doughy or chewy. All the different veggies are thinly sliced and layered with the sauce piled on top. As you can see, there's very little cheese. We both liked this a lot. But this is definitely not your standard slice. So if you want something different, try this out. They also have thin crust pizza, and I read good things about that type as well.

Soho Pizza Slices

After barely eating at Supper, we needed some genuine sustenance before heading out to National Mechanics. So we quickly grabbed some slices at Soho. It's in old city on Market. You see a lot of late night activity here. I think the last time I ate here was super late. They're open til 3:30!R got a couple slices of plain and I went with pepperoni/sausage. They didn't have plain pepperoni or plain sausage. It was a winner. This is perfectly good pizza to fill your belly. The crust is nice and thin and slightly crunchy. The sauce is good. It's nothing extraordinary, but it's a nice fairly cheap slice that you can grab while in this neighborhood. If available, there is nice outdoor seating up front. Just be wary of the very aggressive homeless people.

Soho Pizza
218 Market St
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 625-3955

Franzone's, It's Been Too Long...

I was chatting with a friend and she mentioned that she's been craving pizza every day. I don't know how that's possible, but her saying that made me crave pizza. And in particular, Franzone's. So what did I do? What every red-blooded Franzone's addict would do... I drove the 30 minutes there and back to get myself one. And it was worth all the effort. Franzone's, you've never failed me. And I think it tastes even better the day after once you heat it up again.

Wedding In Media

I had the honor of attending a really fun and lovely wedding in Media over the weekend. I was really happy to join everyone in witnessing G & M become husband and wife. And then we got our dancing on at the reception down the street. The reception was at a country club, and the decorations were really nice and fancy... but the reception was the complete opposite of stuffy.
How stuffy can you be when you serve pizza and wings at your wedding reception? No fancy sit down meals of chicken or steak or pasta being served by bored catering staff here. Instead, you picked your pizza, you picked your wings, and you got your grub on. And you had to eat up, so that you could have the energy to dance the night away. And they had coors light, yuengling, charles shaw wine ( yes, of two buck chuck fame), and coke or sprite. And I loved every minute of it.
The wedding cakes were adorable. Strawberry shortcakes from chinatown. It was one of the most fun weddings I've ever been to. Congrats G & M!

Golden Boy Pizza Slice

J had been talking about this Golden Boy Pizza earlier and how amazing it was. He even showed me pictures of J2 eating in the middle of the night. We didn't mean to go here, but while we were walking around north beach, he realized it was nearby. And so we made our way.

It's thick square pizza baked on focaccia. J wanted to get one with all kinds of vegetables but I nixed that. I wanted pepperoni and he didn't. So we settled on cheese!

It was good, but I didn't see what the hype was about. I think for me, there was too much oregano. The dough is good though. I'll still pick franzone's any day!

Greensboro Airport Dining - Blah

Dear Greensboro Airport.... I hereby dub thee the worst airport food selection, ever. No joke. I can't stand pizza hut. Like at all. But here I am ordering a pan pizza because there's seriously nothing else to eat. As much as I would want to, I can't just eat a bunch of dunkin donuts for dinner. I simply can't. Please do something about this. Thank you!

Huge Slices From Lorenzo's

We were feeling a bit peckish later on memorial day night and decided to take a drive by Lorenzo's and grab a few slices. Man, did this giant pizza hit the spot. It's no frills. There's only cheese pizza. There's no toppings, no accessories, no nothing. But it's so good. Cheap too. There's no scale to this photo, but these slices are ginormous.

Lorenzo & Son Pizza
305 South St
Philadelphia, PA 19147
(215) 627-4110

Pizza Bagels!

I was recently informed that J is a freak about pizza bagels. Like he'd make 8 at a time and eat them all. How crazy. And that he'd be crazy about giant bowls of cereal too. But then that got me thinking about pizza bagels. Then I was talking on the phone with K and she talked about how she just made pizza bagels with her kids. And damn, I had to make pizza bagels! I picked up some frozen bagels and some chicken sausages from Trader Joe's. I already had pizza sauce and cheese left over from when I made the hawaiian pizza.
How can anyone not like pizza bagels? Pizza on top of a crispy on the outside, hot and chewy on the inside bagel. The sausage was a nice touch too. I am so doing this again and again.

Little Mini Pizzas

With leftover ham from thanksgiving and a pineapple that J had gotten from his mom, it seemed fitting to make some hawaiian pizzas. I typically like to get the dough in a bag from trader joe's, but since he didn't have a proper cookie sheet, I decided we should make pita pizzas instead.
Got some sauce from trader joe's and got some whole wheat pitas. I actually would have preferred regular white pitas, but they didn't have any. It was weird. But I got regular wheat ones and mini wheat ones for the occasion. I ended up using the regular sized pitas that night.
They turned out quite nice I have to say. It was so super easy and it'd been such a long time since I'd had hawaiian pizza, I wondered why I'd waited so long.
Later that week, I made some veggie hawaiian pizzas with the mini pitas. I missed the ham, but it was still good. Some of the easiest meals I've made in awhile.

Tulum Small Bites

Another actual town is Tulum, famous for their Mayan Ruins. These old ass ruins are along the Caribbean coast. The water is beyond stunning. If I lived at a place like this, I'd never leave. But somehow, the mayan civilization just kind of collapsed and disappeared. You know how everything in America is hundreds of years old at most? Well yeah, this stuff is thousands of years old. It's another concept entirely.
The main strip in Tulum is along the only real highway, and is strewn with restaurants, shops, drug stores, diving places, and taxis. We wanted a snack so we stopped at this Pane, Pizza, E Fantasia place which looked crowded and popular. Well, it didn't really end up being all that popular, it's just that the place was so teeny tiny and so inefficiently run, that people had to stand in line for an extremely long time before being waited on. This would so not work in the US at all. But that's ok. They only exist in Mexico. This place serves coffee, pizza, paninis, and desserts. There's also free wi-fi, which is kinda awesome.
Since R took the last slice of plain pizza, I was forced to get the other kind, which was a veggie pizza with zucchini and squash. It tasted fine and was super cheap. I wanted apple soda, but they didn't have it, so I hopped on over to a bodega and got myself a lovely bottle of manzana lift. And you know what? It was glorious.

Franzone's Lunch

I met up with some fellow Franzone's lovers to get a pie. Just looking at it makes me hungry. I asked the surly waitress for a cup of extra sauce, and to my surprise, she totally came through! Yes, this pizza is about the thin crispy crust but really, the sweet sauce is definitely what makes it. And having extra sauce to dip the slices into, gah, the best thing ever!Franzone's Pizzeria
200 W Ridge Pike
Conshohocken, PA 19428
610-825-0323

Holy Humongo Pizza

The other night, we were hanging out in Northern Liberties. R hadn't eaten dinner before leaving, so we stopped by a random pizza spot so she could get a slice. 2nd Street Pizza was the lucky winner. And they were home of the biggest pizza slice I'd ever seen in my life (sorry for the sucky cellphone photo). My hand on left, giant pizza slice that had to be sliced in half to be eaten on the right.

Franzone's!

My friend is really quite obsessed with the pizza from Franzone's. It's one of these things that apparently people love or hate. They got it for lunch at work once, and so many people complained about it that it never came back again. I've been hearing about it for months, so I finally got to experience it myself. It's in a random tucked away strip mall in Conshohocken, off of Ridge. It's officially a pizzeria and restaurant and sports bar. There's actually a room with a pool table and a smoking section. They also sell beer, bottled and on tap.

I didn't order the pizza myself, but did try it. It looks CRAZY. First off, it has an extremely thin crust. Then, they put the cheese on first, and it's a special Wisconsin blend of cheese. Finally, they put the sauce on last, and they put it on with a swirl. Crazy, huh? The sauce is also extremely sweet, so it's definitely not for everyone. And because it's applied in a swirl, not every bite of pizza will include sauce. It is an extremely strange thought. But I loved it! I guess I'm one of the people who like it. I like sweet food, so I knew that I would like the sauce. The texture of the pizza, the crust, and the cheese is excellent. It's thin and light and crispy, not crunchy at all. And because it's so thin crusted, it's so easy to eat. And even though there wasn't sauce in every bite, I still enjoyed it. The cheese was special, as I could tell it was different than plain old mozarella. I am a Franzone's convert.

I myself ordred a cheesesteak and cheese fries. The steak was quite good. It came in a much different roll than I expected. I would have to say that I've never had a cheesesteak in this kind of roll, as it has a glossy crust, as if it had an egg wash on it. The grilled onions were sliced extremely thin and they weren't quite cooked enough, but it was still good. It also seemed like they hollowed out the roll a bit so the meaty filling would fit into the roll.

The cheese fries on the other hand were not very good. They were extremely greasy to begin with, and instead of a cheez whiz kind of a cheese, it came with what seemed to be the same Wisconsin blend they use on the pizzas, that they broiled over the fries so that the cheese melted. It didn't work. The cheese was too chewy and stuck to the plate and it was just weird. It would have been much better with fake cheez. Yey on the pizza and the cheesesteak, ney on the cheese fries.

Franzone's
1940 Main Ave
Conshohocken, PA
610-825-0323

Food - the company way

I used to work at a company that gave us free lunch every day. And by free I mean subsidized, so either free or nearly free, depending on how much you decided to eat. It was luxurious. Not because the food was particularly great, but because you never had to worry about packing a lunch, worrying about where to go out for lunch, or wondering if you should take your leftovers into work the next day. The caf was always there, enticing you with their salad bar, sandwich station, entree line, hot grill line, and soups. You could rely on it. Plus it saved you a ton of cash.

In the first few years they basically served typical american cafeteria fare. Towards the latter years, after they changed vendors, the food started getting a bit more interesting. Some days we had sushi or chinese. They even had indian and middle eastern! They were trying to introduce some pseudo-internationalized cuisine onto unsuspecting American suburbanite office drones. And I admired them for it.

My new company feeds us twice a week. On Wednesdays it varies from restaurant or caterer. on Fridays it's pizza from Tony A's. But a few common themes abound through our free lunches - vegetarians and dieters, you're screwed. It's not the healthiest in the world, and always meat-laden. Last summer on Fridays was my favorite day of the week because of Chef Donald. That's right, we had a chef that came in on Fridays that grilled for us. It was unbelievable what that man could do with onions and garlic, his main staple ingredients, and whatever meat they brought in that day. I wish it was summer again, because damn, Chef Donald's meals were the best.

Today was Tony A's as usual. And I always eat the same pizza - Bacon Burger. Bacon Burger pizza you say? It has everything you love - bacon, ground beef, caramelized onions, and hot peppers. How can you go wrong? After all, everything tastes better with bacon. The onions on this pizza.... Man! I don't know what kind of crack they sprinkle on it, but I could eat it straight from a bowl.

I didn't eat the pizza today though. Last Sunday I had decided to make chili. It was a particularly cold day, and on cold days, there's nothing better than pho or chili. I'd had pho on Saturday (more on that later), so I decided to make chili. I made a giant vat of it and ate the last bits of it today. Mmm, mmm, good.