Mission Mission

Reasons to love rosemary:

1. It smells amazing
2. It tastes great
3. It grows all over the Mission so you never have to buy it
4. Picking it makes you feel like you are getting back to the land in a pioneery sort of way/ winning at Oregon Trail. Pick rosemary when your oxen are drying off after fording the river!

Personally I prefer to borrow rosemary from the Friends School on Valencia between 14th and Duboce, but if you go for a short walk, you should be able to find tons of ample-sized bushes at a theater near you.

Blend some culled rosemary with a few other ingredients and you have a gorgeous pesto that would give Bi-Rite a run for their money.

Ingredients:

• ½ cup firmly packed rosemary (1 handful 4-6” sprigs)
• ½ cup walnuts (traditional pesto uses pine nuts but those are expensive!)
• 1 cup firmly packed basil
• Juice of 1 lemon (about ¼ cup)
• ¼ cup olive oil
• ¼ cup water
• Salt to taste

Blend ingredients in your blender! Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, as my friend Liz from New Zealand says. It will only take a second, and then you’ll have a sauce that will fancify anything from pizza to salad to burritos, and is equally good on vegan and omnivorous dishes.

Okay, now let’s all promise that our future-tense selves will plant rosemary bushes in front of our houses to karmically absolve our present-tense selves. Pinky-swear?

One of the best parts about living in the Mission is the avocado supply. They are plentiful, cheap, and available at all the markets that occupy almost every corner of our fair neighborhood. Have you ever met anyone who was like, “Guacamole? No way, José.” I haven’t, and if I did, I wouldn’t want to be friends with them.

Much as I love avos, I’d never thought to put them into a dessert until I met Laura Miller at a raw, vegan desserts class at Pot & Pantry on 18th & Guerrero this weekend. She is rad, she’s a babe, and she runs Sidesaddle Kitchen, whose motto is “Raw. Vegan. Not Gross.” She also taught me how to turn avocados into chocolate pudding, and now I want to be her BFF (I promise I’m not trying to creep on you, Laura, despite my previous comment about how you’re a babe).

The crazy thing is that you can’t taste the avocado. Try giving it to your friends and not telling them what’s in it until after they are all like, man, this is awesome! Then you can be like, yeah, and it’s vegan and made out of avocado!

If you have a food processor, or a blender and a rubber spatula, you can make this in like 10 minutes! If you don’t have a food processor and you want one, look around at Goodwill and Craigslist. My mother-in-law got mine at a yard sale for $10 (Thanks, Sharon). It’s from like 1978 and it purrs like a kitten.

Laura’s teaching another class this weekend, and this one is about breakfast. We all want to be the kind of person who eats breakfast, right? She’ll make it totally fun and she’ll feed you. GO!

Here’s Laura’s chocolate pudding recipe. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

2 large avocados (I used 3 small)
½ cup agave or maple syrup
½ cup cocoa powder
3 Tbsp. coconut oil
1 tsp. balsamic
½ tsp. nama shoyu (or soy sauce)
¼ tsp. salt

Directions:

Blend all ingredients in a food processor. Enjoy as is, or freeze overnight for an icy snack.

[This is the debut of our new veganism correspondent, Caroline. She's good fun and writes a blog called OVOO (One Vegan, One Omnivore) about how she's a vegan and her husband Reese is an omnivore but they love each other anyway.]

As my first contribution to Mission Mission, I bring you this review of a new neighborhood eatery! Announcements of its imminent approach were made here in the past, but I thought I’d go check it out for all y’all.

Tacolicious is not a taqueria, of course, but it is a restaurant that serves fancyish California-style Mexican food. My ol’ man and I got there on Friday evning around 6:30 and were told by the cute hostess that there was a half-hour wait, and we could wait at the attached tequila bar, Mosto. NBD.

Drinks at Mosto:

The bar was packed—yes, with people who look like they work for and shop exclusively at Banana Republic—but the bartenders were nice and let us hang out by their station. They didn’t even make us move when they went in and out of the bar—they ducked under it. Just for contrast, see if you can picture the bartenders at Zeitgeist doing this. (I can’t either. Not that I don’t love the surly barkeeps at ZG.)

I had a glass of red wine on tap, while the man went with a michelada.

Micheladas are rad, and since Mosto makes theirs with tomato juice (not Clamato—gross!), Tecate, Tapatio, lime juice, and this weird Latin wheat gluten sauce (not Worstershire), they are totally vegan (yay!).

Guess what they charged for the above-described concoction. Guess.

$9.

The drinks on the Tacolicious menu are cheaper, so if paying $13 for a glass of wine (yep) or $9 for a michelada annoys you, stick with the $3 Tecates while you’re waiting and then upgrade at dinner.

Dinner at Tacolicious:

Our waitress was nice and was knowledgeable about which menu items were vegan and which weren’t. This was reassuring, since I’m often in the position of needing to ask taquerias to hold the butter on my veggie burrito. (I’m looking at you, Buen Sabor!) We started with chips (okay), salsa (minty!) and guac (fluffy!). They had a $3.95 vegan taco on the menu—butternut squash with swiss chard and onions—so I got that. I also had a side of Rancho Gordo beans, which I love. With the tacos, we got 3 more kinds of salsa to try: mild, medium, and spicy. The medium, chipotle-based one was my favorite; it had that smoky taste that we vegans go crazy for.

The main problem with the food: Not. Enough. Salt. And there were no salt shakers on the table. Why? why? (And no Tapatio orCholula, btw.)

The verdict?

Go if you want Mexican-esque food and are entertaining a valentine or fancy visitor, like a well-off aunt, especially if he/ she lives in the Marina or Orange County or something. What you lose in street cred by patronizing this establishment you can regain by discussing the inconsistencies in the perspective of the admittedly-pretty mural of the park.

Don’t go if you love salt or are a taqueria purist.

See you next week!