Taco!Taco!

Hope the weekend has treated everyone well! My first weekend in San Francisco has been a successful and productive one (more on the productivity later this week).

This morning marked the return of the savory oat bowl for breakfast. I made a pretty decent sized bowl of oats with some egg, spinach and arugula, chili garlic paste and feta cheese. Not exactly a photo-worthy bswl, but it did taste ok (I should have grabbed a box of MSF sausage patties). I stared at my TJs Soy Chorizo that I've been dying to experiment with and seriously considered opening it up for just a little bit of spicy goodness.

Laziness won and I went sans fake meat all together.

I'm seriously glad I ate that big bowl of oats because it fueled me for the WHOLE day. Jeebus. I did a few errands downtown and hoofed it up a hill a bunch of blocks to check out an apartment. Saw it, thought it was cute and big enough, and boom...secured my place in line. Hopefully I'll have good news by the end of this week!

To celebrate, I went over to Crissy Field with Selin and a couple of her friends for a quick run. The running path isn't very long, but I managed to do a little more than a loop that totaled 3.25 miles. Rocked it in a smidge under 30 minutes and I'm content :)

Running on the path near Crissy Field is sort of like running on the Mall, but with wind and water nearby. Of course I had difficulty keeping my balance on the gravel path and my achilles started to bother me, so when I turned around, I took the long way along the paved bike path. MUCH better.

For dinner, we headed to Tacolicious in the Marina. What do you think they specialize in?? hehe. I've been hearing lots of good things from Selin and I've smelled the delicious tacos before, so I was really excited to finally sample some of their goodies. We sat down with a carafe of some pretty potent sangria de la casa (wine, apricot brandy, oj, spicy apple salsa), which I had to nurse since it was so strong.

The spicy apple salsa was actually little chunks of apple and pepper in the bottom of our glasses - really good at the end once they soaked up the sangria. The spice paired with the sweet was a pleasant surprise!

Then came the food! We split some made-to-order guacamole

Rich, creamy, minimal chunks of onion, lots of cilantro...delish. I generally like my guac with a little lime juice and jalapeno, but this was pretty tasty. Just the right size too!

Next up was a ceviche of line caught mahi-mahi (manzano chiles, red onion, cilantro). They were served on tostadas with some avocado chunks.

I liked the combination of the crunchy tostada, creamy avocado and tangy mahi-mahi, but I thought it could use more flavor. Most ceviches I've had have a very strong citrus taste. This was VERY mild. A little difficult to split between 3 people, but we made it work...it just wasn't an attractive presentation hehe.

Snacky number 3 were fried sweet plantains (rancho gordo heirloom beans, cumin crema)

Ok, I had really high hopes for the plantains. For some reason, I imagined they would be crispy fried, almost like tostones. They were not. They were nice and sweet, though. Sprinkled with a little salt too. I thought they tasted great on their own, but they would be ideal as a dessert and not as an appetizer. The beans and crema were just eh. Nothing special and honestly, I don't think they added to the dish.

Now to the important stuff - TACOS!

I decided to be adventurous and tried the Taco of the Week, which happened to be one with a grilled cactus paddle, oaxaca cheese, and serrano chile salsa.

O hi, adventurous Sunday dinner. Cactus paddle?! Turns out it's not as exciting as I thought it would be. It tasted pretty much like any grilled green vegetable (I compared it to a grilled green pepper, but after Googling, I found out it's best described as similar to green beans with a slight acidity). I thought my taco tasted like a quesadilla on a corn tortilla.

They gave us a trio of sauces (yellow to green: hot, medium, mild)

Which I promptly doused on my taco because I love spicy sauces. Cute bowls and spoons yah?

I got about 3/4 through my second taco, the guajillo braised short rib, when I realized I hadn't taken a picture of it. Oops.

It was pretty messy and full o meat. It oozed that red grease that always spews from red meat. Yummy, but I didn't need to see that. Especially after the lack of healthy foods in my life. The other ladies ordered the fried local rock cod taco (cabbage, tangy crema) and I was eyeing it like no one's business. The colors alone were enough to make me drool!

K. I'm out. Bedtime and first full week of work begins tomorrow! Nitey!