PupusaQuest Restaurant Review: Mi Tierra

My rear tire died yesterday, so today I went to get a new one installed. While I was waiting for them to service it, I wandered down the street to get lunch. My destination: Mi Tierra Salvadoran and Mexican Restaurant, 324 South Van Ness Ave, San Francisco.

I had actually eaten off of Mi Tierra's menu before, during a catered lunch at CUAV several years ago. It was good but not particularly memorable. Today, however, I went straight for the pupusas.

I am on a quest to find the perfect Bay Area pupusa. Mi Tierra is the sixth restaurant I've tried, but the first I've reviewed. Previous venues include El Patio, Balompie, Platanos (SF and Berkeley varieties), and Panchita's. [I'll try to revisit these locales and write up reviews in the coming months.] The verdict: there's lots to like, but the overall experience is not as good as Balompie or El Patio.

Mi Tierra is spacious and brightly colored. Spanish telenovelas play on a large-screen TV in the back. I ordered (as is my wont) two loroco pupusas and a Diet Coke. The total bill was $5.60.

First, the good: The pupusas themselves were large and tasty. Mi Tierra uses more loroco than many other places, which gives them extra flavor. And they were not greasy or overcooked.

The problem lay in the accompaniments. I was intrigued by the curtido because it was made with jalapenos and hot chilis. Unfortunately, despite this, the slaw lacks flavor. It also lacked crunch, and some of the cabbage bits looked decidedly old. Likewise, the salsa was thin and runny.

In sum, the pupusas themselves compare favorably with the pupusas at El Patio and Balompie. However, the overall combination of pupusa, curtido, and salsa falls a bit short in terms of flavor and freshness. I'd rank Mi Tierra third in my pupusa rankings:

SF Pupusa Rankings
1. Balompie
2. El Patio
3. Mi Tierra
4. Platanos (Berkeley)
5. Panchita's
6. Platanos (SF)

How to Test a Folk Theory

For all aficionados of the five-second rule, this New York Times piece is fun must-reading:

Prof. Paul L. Dawson and his colleagues at Clemson have now put some numbers on floor-to-food contamination.

Their bacterium of choice was salmonella; the test surfaces were tile, wood flooring and nylon carpet; and the test foods were slices of bread and bologna.

First the researchers measured how long bacteria could survive on the surfaces. They applied salmonella broth in doses of several million bacteria per square centimeter, a number typical of badly contaminated food.

I had thought that most bacteria were sensitive to drying out, but after 24 hours of exposure to the air, thousands of bacteria per square centimeter had survived on the tile and wood, and tens of thousands on the carpet. Hundreds of salmonella were still alive after 28 days.

Professor Dawson and colleagues then placed test food slices onto salmonella-painted surfaces for varying lengths of time, and counted how many live bacteria were transferred to the food.

On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.

In my opinion, the scariest bit in there is the bit about the longevity of salmonella in your carpet. Scary, but perhaps not surprising. So there you have it: another cherished folk theory bites the dust, courtesy of science.

A Mission Statement of Sorts

This scene, from Arrested Development, is one of my favorites:

Michael: Speaking of which, where's your child?
Lindsay and Tobias: [laughing] We don't have a child, Michael! [suddenly serious] Oh.
Lindsay: Did you mean Maeby?
Michael: I did mean Maeby.
Tobias: Well, she’s hardly a child, is she, Michael?!
Lindsay: Yeah, and we know where she is. She’s with her debate club, and they’re on their way to Sacremende for the semifinals.
Narrator: She wasn’t. And a Google search of the word “Sacramende” only came up with this:

I always get a kick out of the idea that Maeby Funke is on her way to Sacremende, not just because it shows up Lindsay and Tobias' terrible parenting skills, but also because of what Sacremende represents: an imagined, untraceable other world where the rest of her life takes place. Nobody in AD is ever really sure where Maeby is. She's constantly ditching school (and getting expelled for it), leaving work at the banana stand early, and living a secret life as a successful film executive. A great deal of her life takes place offscreen--in Sacremende.

This blog is the place where I will make a little bit of my own "offscreen" visible to the world. I'm fortunate to have several trips to distant lands in the coming year, so I'll be making myself scarcer than usual. So Postcards from Sacremende will be just that: updates and dispatches, new things I've found, probably more than a few banal observations and lame pop-culture commentary...from my various travels. This will include comments on restaurants and food, parks and natural adventures, cities and towns, and my research. As the post below suggests, there will probably be some politics thrown in as well, though I'm really going to try to keep it to a minimum. This isn't a political blog, after all; there are plenty of great ones out there already.

So that's what I hope to accomplish with this blog. We'll see how well it goes...

Uploading Images: A Test

Here's an attempt to upload an image to the blog. We'll see if it works.

In honor of yesterday's news about Chevron settling a suit for illegally dealing with Saddam Hussein during the sanctions era, I've chosen this old favorite Get Your War On cartoon (featuring everybody's favorite and most competent former Chevron board member) as the test image. Love ya Condi!

Dispatches from Sacremende

Another voice screaming into the void, another country heard from. Into the great unknown, where a google search returns no results...