Some people have apple pie — for me, peach cobbler is the ultimate comfort dessert. When I was a kid, my parents would send me off to Kansas City for a week every summer to spend time with my Aunt Tommie and Uncle Slick, where I played kickball with the neighborhood kids, caught fireflies in jam jars, and tried to eat as much of Aunt Tommie’s savory home cooking as possible. Especially her peach cobbler, with thick, cinnamon-scented juices and a flaky lattice pie crust.

As I got older, I made the rude discovery that “cobbler” meant different things to different people. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve ordered cobbler and ended up with an oatmeal-coated concoction that looked like something I’d find on the lunch line in boarding school. Another kind has a biscuit-style crust. I like biscuits — just not on my cobbler, please.

I used to think that pie-crust-style cobbler was a black thing, a sort of culinary shibboleth, but then I found out that it’s more like a Southern thing. Alton Brown, a good (white) Southern boy, chronicled the different kinds of cobbler in an episode of “Good Eats,” but of course he came through with a recipe for flaky-crusted peach cobbler, perked up with rhubarb.

For a potluck dinner, I went to the farmers’ market and got a bunch of peaches. Rhubarb was nowhere to be found, but I remembered that I had some crystallized ginger bits back home.

This recipe worked out really well, the crust nice and crisp, the peaches luxuriously silky, plus the piquant note of ginger. You get all the satisfaction of eating pie, without any of the fuss of making one. Because the format of cobbler is informal, making the crust isn’t that intimidating. I accidentally ripped mine in transferring it to the baking dish, and just fit the ripped-off piece into place without bothering to stick it all back together. And just like Aunt Tommie, Alton places little bits of crust dough throughout the filling, to thicken the juices.

Peach-Ginger Cobbler
Adapted from Alton Brown

2 cups (9.5 oz) all-purpose flour
2 TB sugar (1 oz), plus 1 cup
1 tablespoon freshly grated lemon or lime zest
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus 1/4 teaspoon
5 TB chilled butter, plus extra for dish
3 TB shortening or lard, chilled and cut into small pieces
3 TB ice water
2 tablespoons cornstarch or tapioca starch
2 lbs sliced peaches, peeled and sliced into 1/2- to 1-inch pieces
1 TB freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup crystallized ginger, chopped

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Place a piece of aluminum foil on the bottom rack to catch any drippings. Butter a 9 x 9-inch glass baking dish and set aside. Place the flour, 2 TB sugar, zest, and 1 tsp salt into the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to mix. Add the butter and lard or shortening and pulse until the mixture just becomes crumbly. Sprinkle or spritz the mixture with the ice water a little at a time and process just until the dough comes together in a ball. Pat into a disk, then wrap in plastic wrap or put in a plastic zip-top bag and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

In a medium mixing bowl whisk together the 1 cup of sugar, cornstarch, and 1/4 tsp of salt. Stir in the peaches, lemon or lime juice, and ginger bits.

Remove 1/3 of the dough from the bag, pinch into pieces and distribute about half of them in the bottom of the prepared dish. Pour in half the fruit mixture, add the rest of the dough bits and top with the rest of the fruit. With the remaining dough still in the bag, roll it out to a sheet large enough to cover the top of the dish. Transfer to the dish, pressing the dough into the corners. Bake, uncovered, for 60 minutes (90 if you’re using frozen fruit) or until the dough is cooked through and golden brown.

Remove from the oven and allow to stand for 15 to 30 minutes before serving.

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? At egg, a Southern-style restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it depends on what meal you’re there for.

The place is firmly part of the laid-back hipster vibe of the new Williamsburg. Our server wore cutoff jeans and gave the impression that she just happened to find herself there, by coincidence, rather than being on the job. Although it was a weekday morning, and none too early, a few groups of people were apparently enjoying a late breakfast, like us.

I liked the way the restaurant opened onto the street — it looked like a converted garage — but the flies hovering in the entranceway and the mysteriously wet floor reminded me of a hole in the wall in Bangkok.

Julia and I had come because she’d read that egg’s breakfasts, served 7 days a week, were the best in town. I was a little dubious, being prejudiced: I consider the restaurant brunch a socially accepted ripoff. How else can you explain a meal of the cheapest ingredients on earth — milk, flour, eggs, bread — routinely adding up to $20 each?

But my first bite of flaky buttermilk biscuit with Kentucky country ham knocked me out. The dark rose, chewy and intensely flavored ham is only distantly related to those pale, watery things you might find coated in honey at the supermarket. A crumbly slice of snappy Grafton cheddar stood up to it perfectly, and there was an unusual, but welcome, touch of housemade fig jam. On the side were grits, the real stoneground kind that has little nibs from the corn in its creamy mass. I’m not a huge grits fan, but I appreciated them.

Julia demolished the Eggs Rothko, a sort of egg-in-the-hole with brioche from Amy’s Bread. The whole top was covered in melted Grafton cheddar, and the displaced round from the center of the bread was also on the plate, toasted and piled with broiled tomatoes.

Egg also serves lunch and dinner; I read that its fried chicken is outstanding, and its web address, pigandegg.com, inspires some tasty speculation. I also notice the name-dropping on the menu of Carolina Gold rice, which I’d previously only seen in the Lee brothers’ Boiled Peanuts catalog. Now that I’m poking around their website some more, I realize they have their own farm — which catapults this humble place to the realm of the ridiculously ambitious. My hat’s off to you, egg.

egg
135 N. 5th Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 302-5151

On my way to the airport after breakfast, I grabbed a bagel from Bagelsmith, which touted in the window its hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, freshly baked bagels. The place looked too cute to be true, but it wasn’t. My bagel, though it was a little softened from the cream cheese by the time I got around to it somewhere over the Great Plains, had a good, distinct crust with a hint of honey, and a satisfyingly chewy but not too dense interior.

Bagelsmith
189 Bedford Avenue
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(718) 218-7414

When I was in j-school in New York in the late ’90s, I heard about how Red Hook was becoming cool. On the other hand, I got the feeling it was still kind of insular — one of my classmates, a beefy guy who was doing a dual master’s degree with the school of international affairs, reported to the class that no one wanted to talk to him because they were all convinced he was a cop.

I finally got my first look at Red Hook when my friend Aram suggested that I come along to pick up his son from day care. We took the free water taxi, which whisks you from South Street Seaport to IKEA’s waterfront parkland. On a gorgeous day, it feels like a joyride.

At first sight, Red Hook seems starkly industrial — but in a kind of beautiful way that would probably appeal more to an artist than a house-hunter.

After a stop at day care, we all headed to Hope & Anchor, a local diner/pub that I was disappointed has no relation to the famous gastropub in London, but still makes a nice mac ‘n’ cheese, with crunchy bits on top and impressively runny throughout the middle. I also had a Caesar salad with real anchovies.

It’s also very kid-friendly — one of the day-care teachers was at the next table, and Aram said that another waitresses there part-time. The vibe was incredibly friendly, neighborhoody — a world away from Manhattan.

Down the street, Baked doesn’t hesitate to mess with traditional comfort sweets. I have a personal weakness for the chile + chocolate combination, so of course I went for a spicy brownie, and a chocolate chip cookie just to have a normal point of comparison. The cafe is a comfortable place to hang out, but we had a boat to catch.

I had my snack later that evening, in bed as I watched TV in bed. I love the way that the burn of chiles (judiciously used) blooms in your throat like cognac, another fine accompaniment for chocolate. Of course, the perfect drink to put out that fire is milk. And the cookie? By some miracle, five hours after I’d bought it, in an air-conditioned room, the chips were as melty as if the cookie was fresh out of the oven. Good … but a little eerie.

Hope & Anchor
347 Van Brunt Street
Red Hook, Brooklyn
(718) 237-0276

Baked
359 Van Brunt Street
Red Hook, Brooklyn
(718) 222-0345

My friend Julia has traveled around the world, but I was shocked to hear that she never really liked spicy food until she encountered the noodles in China’s Yunnan province. After a few bowls, she was sweating, but hooked. Back in New York, the specialty isn’t easy to find, which is why she was set on taking me to a place she’d read about in New York magazine’s Cheap Eats issue.

We got off the D train at Fort Hamilton Parkway in Sunset Park, a neighborhood I had never even heard of before. It definitely wasn’t one of those that get cited as the new front of gentrification in the outer boroughs. It was a Sunday, and although the station at Coney Island had been bustling, the strip of stores under the elevated train tracks were mostly shuttered, and all quiet. It didn’t look at all like the place to find an oasis of regional Chinese flavor. There was a “dairy restaurant,” where kosher keepers needn’t worry about milk meeting meat; a Polish deli; and here and there, an Orthodox guy trudging along stoically in the heat, swathed in a heavy black overcoat.

And then, just a few blocks over, the neighborhood shifted. There was a boba shop, a Vietnamese restaurant where we stopped for sodas as we tried to regain our appetites for an early lunch, and a bunch of Chinese restaurants. And tucked away just off the main drag, Yunnan Flavour.

I don’t think this photo really conveys how tiny this place is unless I tell you that the entire width of the restaurant is marked by the two windows flanking the door. That’s it. Counter seating runs along the windows and down the left side, but half a dozen seated customers would make it feel pretty crowded.

If you come to Yunnan Flavour Snack, you’re pretty much there for noodles. The questions are, what kind (wheat or rice) and in what soup or sauce. Rice noodles with coconut skin sounded exciting, but it turned out there was no coconut skin that day. A young woman sitting at the side counter chimed in as we wondered about the menu options to recommend the pork stew, so I got that with rice noodles.

The stew turned out to be more like a soup, with a light but intense broth that reminded me of the headily spicy stuff at Dandan’s Guilin Rice Noodle in Monterey Park, minus the medicinal hit of Sichuan peppercorns. Here, the heat came from dollops of chile paste, and the herbal freshness from cilantro. The fat rimming the small pieces of pork was so tender, I didn’t even have to think about chewing it. The bucatini-thick noodles, on the other hand, offered just the right degree of chewiness. This was a fantastic bowl of noodles, and if this shop were just a little bit smaller, I’d have put it in my pocket to bring home to California.
Yunnan Flavour Snack Shop
775A 49th Street
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 633-3090

My friend Aram, a New Yorker through and through (though we grew close during the years he lived in Los Angeles), is adamant that there is no great pizza but New York pizza (nevermind that Italy place), and that in New York, there is no great pizza but Grimaldi’s. Luckily, on the evening that I hung out with him and his wife, Dunia, a couple other friends from L.A. dropped by, intent on getting their N.Y. pizza fix. Grimaldi’s it was.

Aram and Henry went to pick up the pizza by car, and reported that it was a high-security operation. A line snaked around the block, and only one of them — the one who had placed the order — was allowed to enter the premises.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among pizza lovers, that pizza is really at its best on the premises. Being transported across town doesn’t do the ideal crisp crust any favors.

Grimaldi’s pie held up well, trading the fresh-from-the-oven crispness for a nice chew that carried a whiff of the coals. I had been impressed by Di Fara’s basil snippets, but here were whole leaves of basil. And the cheese, unlike Di Fara’s distinctively tangy blend, was pure, milky-sweet mozzarella. A formidable, yet utterly simple, combination.

Grimaldi’s
19 Old Fulton Street (under the Brooklyn Bridge)
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 858-4300

My friend Daveena once recounted to me a marvelous tale of an old man in a faraway land with mystical powers. He made pizzas the like of which could not be found anywhere, near or far, she said. When he passes on, she added darkly, those magical pizzas would be lost forever.

OK, so the faraway land is actually the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Since I live in California, it’s still quite a trek, but visiting friends and staying in Manhattan made it much closer. It might be a long ride on the J train, but once you get out at the Avenue Q stop, you’re less than a block away from pizza paradise. But wait. Does paradise have lines and $2 cans of soda?

Fortunately, DiFara’s wasn’t too busy when my friend Julia and I hit it on Saturday at lunchtime, maybe because of the August lull in New York. It’s a very modest place, except for the awards and articles papering the walls, and tiny — after hovering for a few minutes like hawks, we were able to pounce on seats at half a table, but barely. Two men — one the legendary Domenico De Marco, 70-something, who looks like he could go one making pizzas for another few decades, and a younger assistant — toil unhurriedly behind the narrow tiled counter.

We were able to get our regular slices right away, but the Sicilian would have to wait, the younger guy told me.

Snippets of basil perfumed the plain pizza, and the cheese had a tangy bite — from Romano, said one of the articles on the wall, but a well-informed blogger, and Epicurious, identify it as Grana Padano augmenting the mozzarella. And then there’s lashings of olive oil drenching the slice — not exactly a bad thing, as it’s extra-virgin, but it was practically dissolving the ultra-thin crust below.

In fact, many fans consider Sicilian pizza to be DiFara’s true draw. Our table neighbors got the drool-worthy whole pie shown at top.

This knocked my socks off. I went through a phase in my youth, when we moved from Chicago to suburban New York, of fascination with Sicilian pizza because of the similarity to my name. But the Sicilian pizzas I’ve had, puffy squares of bready crust topped with indifferent cheese and sauce, instantly paled in my memory as I beheld this perfectly imperfect slice and took my first bite, my teeth cutting through strata of cheese and tomato and crust that shifted from satisfyingly chewy to crunchy. This may be the Sicilian pizza to end all Sicilian pizzas. And is it the best pizza in New York?

Wait! There is another…

Di Fara Pizza
1424 Ave. J (at E. 15th St.)
Brooklyn, NY 11230
718-258-1367

Driving between the southern suburbs of San Francisco, where we now live, and our former home of Los Angeles, you must get off the highway and go through the town of Gilroy. This town’s claim to fame can be smelled very clearly: garlic.

So every year, Gilroy holds a garlic festival, a celebration of the “stinking rose” in all its glory. It’s just an hour away from me now, so I thought I’d check it out.

Although a major event, the garlic festival is still a community affair. Cheerful high school volunteers help guide traffic, and I parked in a dirt lot whose sections were marked by handwritten signs. Sales of festival programs, listing the weekend’s events and last year’s winning recipes, benefit a local school.

After buying a $12 ticket, I was all set. On the festival grounds were all kinds of food: Cajun crawfish, calamari, church BBQ (the best kind!), and of course, everything garlic: garlic bread, garlic chicken stir fry, garlic sausage, even garlic ice cream. Too bad it was one of the hottest weekends of the year, and my appetite was wilting like a lettuce leaf in the stifling heat. There was a massive crowd, too — over the 3-day event, planners say, 107,553 people came through. Fortunately the planners had set out plenty of tents for shade, and there were a few that had misters going to help people keep cool.

Since I didn’t feel up to eating much, I thought I could at least see what people were doing with garlic.

Cooking up a firestorm, for one. Whew! I couldn’t stand the heat, so I got out of the kitchen area.

One of the highlights is a cooking competition, with original recipes. I missed the cook-off, which had an appealing “Iron Chef” ring to it (though the mystery ingredient could be no mystery), but the finalists’ dishes were all appealingly displayed.

The lady on the right, Linda Wang of Sunnyvale (practically a neighbor, though we’ve never met), won 2nd place for her garlic corn creme brulee with pan-seared scallops. They looked delicious.

And the first-place winner?

Yes, walnut-garlic tart with garlic-infused creme and chili syrup, by Laurie Benda of Madison, Wisconsin. I had considered it a novelty, but the fact that it won made me incredibly curious: What did it taste like? If only they were giving out samples.

I did, however, get to try garlic ice cream.

No, not there. Why pay $4.50 when ConAgra had a stall where they were giving away samples for free? Everyone else seemed to be thinking the same thing — the line was enormous. But the payoff was a lovely surprise. My garlic ice cream (soft serve) tasted distinctively of garlic, yet was still mild and sweet. It was light, too, and after finishing my kid-size cone I actually felt refreshed. Amazing.

I also picked up a braid of garlic from Christopher Ranch. Apparently these days Gilroy is more of a garlic processing, rather than growing, center, but Christopher Ranch raises its heirloom garlic right in town, and insists that the flavor is fuller than its main competition from China. I haven’t tried it yet, so I can’t say. But locavores should be pleased.

All in all, it was a good day. Lessons for next time: go early, bring a hat and sunscreen, and a hungry partner. And breath mints!

“As long as you’re out here in the East Bay,” said Daveena, at whose place I was staying overnight, “you really have to go to Kopitiam for Hainan chicken rice.”

Hainan is in southern China (remember that plane incident?), but Hainanese chicken rice is part of the local culinary canon in neighboring Singapore, and also apparently pops up in Malaysia and Thailand. Purists value equally the chicken, slow-cooked in hot water that is never allowed to boil, and the rice infused with chicken broth and fat.

I’d tasted the dish with anthropological interest, but not much more, at L.A.’s Savoy Kitchen. (The word is that the Vietnamese Dong Nguyen gives Savoy tough competition.) The plain chicken seemed bland, desperately in need of its dipping sauce — and you know desperation is never appealing.

It certainly didn’t seem worth a 20-minute drive. But after a couple of hours of traipsing through shop after shop in chichi Rockridge reminding myself, “Don’t buy. Don’t buy. Economy! Fiscal goals!” I started to think that settling down to a comfort-food type meal with a book could be quite nice — and cheap, to boot.

So I drove to Lafayette, which in the middle of a weekday on a broad highway proved to take a painless 15 minutes (that 5-minute difference has great psychological weight) and found myself in what seemed like small-town America — rolling hills and strip malls. Not exactly where I would expect to find an authentic Asian dish, but this is California, where small-town and suburban demographics aren’t necessarily what you might expect. In L.A., there are no great Chinese restaurants outside the suburbs.

Kopitiam, a small Singaporean cafe-restaurant in one of these strip malls next to Trader Joe’s, is a contempo-chic place that manages to be attractive to Western sensibilities without making sacrifices in the kitchen. The clientele was mixed, and I noticed several tables of white people confidently ordering chicken rice or other dishes like regulars. A man who I presumed was the owner greeted me like a long-lost relative and hovered over his patrons with tender solicitude.

And the Hainan chicken rice: sublime. It’s tender, juicy and flavorful even without the dipping sauces (although I particularly liked the ginger sauce). No skin, bones or any kind of gristle — just the pure, sweet meat. I read in one of the numerous newspaper articles on the walls that they use organic chicken. The rice was savory, glossed with fat, but not heavy at all. And unlike many comfort-food meals, the modest portion didn’t weigh in my stomach afterward.

If I ever wanted to try this dish at home (which is far more than 20 minutes from Lafayette), I’d start with the recipe on Chubby Hubby’s Singapore-based blog.

Kopitiam Restaurant
3647 Mount Diablo Boulevard
Lafayette
(925) 299-1653

Last weekend I went to my first Giants game at AT&T Park, where the food may be as much of a draw as the game — its concessions were described in a recent NYT article as a leading example of upscale food in ballparks.

Wes, however, was dead set on a Sheboygan brat. He had no idea what that was, but a poker buddy had recommended it, and that weighed far more heavily with him than the NYT’s rave for the crab sandwich.

And it seems that no one goes to AT&T Park without getting the garlic fries. Whenever you tell someone in the Bay Area that you’re going to a Giants game, their response inevitably includes an appreciative mention of the garlic fries.

With all these food options on my mind, I was startled to arrive at the park and realize how new and gorgeous it is. The red-brick building perches right on the edge of the bay. It was a beautiful day, and the water reflected the blue sky, white sails glided across it, and we could see the Bay Bridge in the near distance. Just behind right field, boats were hovering in hopes of catching a home run ball. Our nosebleed seats were perfect for taking it all in.

First at bat was the Sheboygan brat. It was a fine sausage, meaty and spicy, and I was glad of the sauerkraut and cooked onions. It would have been better with mustard, though, and the bun was like a cotton ball. You’ll notice the garlic fries, just behind the brat, come with mints — very wise. I was surprised that these were just okay (though later I read that you should wait till the 3rd inning or so, to be sure you get a fresh, hot batch), then surprised that I had been surprised — after all, how great could garlic fries be? They were basically like what you’d get at one of those Disneyfied mega-brewpubs like Gordon Biersch or BJ’s. Tasty enough, good with wine, but no big deal.

And while of course there’s beer, there is also a selection of vin de Californie.

Still, the scene isn’t all classy — I caught a guy vomiting on one of the ramps.

It took a while for me to recover from the fries and bratwurst, but I was determined to get that crab sandwich. My friends Moupali and Chris, sitting in a different section, tipped me off that the crab stand was near the giant Coke bottle (which is actually a slide for kids — very family friendly, this place is).

The crab sandwich comes from the stall on the right — I hear the chowder from Pier 44 is not bad either. There’s also Caribbean bbq, but that will have to wait for the next game, as will Dippin’ Dots, the ice cream of the future.

I was confused by the signature Crazy Crab’z sandwich and the regular crab sandwich, which sounded the same, but was told by the rather impatient counter lady that the “crazy” sandwich was hot. I guess that explains the $5 markup, although after all that my sandwich wasn’t hot, which was crazy. The crab filling, though, was fresh and sweet, bound with just a little mayo. I set aside the leaden toasted bread and scooped it up.

Next time, I’m heading straight for the crab stand. I think the cold sandwich is a better buy if the bread is good ($10.50 vs. $15, if memory serves), but the hot sandwich could be worth it if you can get one actually hot. If sandwiches are a no-go, there’s also crab salad ($12), although unfortunately it’s adulterated with celery.

The Burmese sure love to mix things up. Seriously, at a Chowhound lunch at Mingalaba, almost every dish we ordered involved tableside mixing. It’s nice for once to have some idea of what ingredients are in an exotic and unfamiliar dish, but what’s with the national passion for blending?

Chowhound poster Moomin once wrote:

“Thoke” is an important syllable to toss about freely when composing a Burmese menu. The word means “mix.” Anything in which a variety of ingredients are mixed can be a “thoke.”

Salad is a thoke. An ice-cream sundae is a thoke. Fried rice, given enough ingredients, could be a thoke. You get the idea.

In Burma there is no specific cultural tradition of a mixed green salad. But, in Burmese American restaurants there is ALWAYS a salad section on the menu. In these cases what is generally being served is a wide selection of thoke.

Fermented tea leaf salad is just this kind of thoke, closer to Indian chaat than anything from an American salad bar. Mingalaba’s version surprised me at first, using ground tea leaves instead of the whole ones I’d had at Golden Triangle in southern California. Pungently sour and funky, it’s not for the faint of heart, but in moderate doses it’s quite tasty.

Young ginger salad, shown at top, is more clean-flavored and refreshing.

I first heard about this place from my friend Daveena, who raved about the palatha (aka, in other parts of the world, paratha or roti). I adore these rich, flaky pancakes and sometimes buy frozen packages of them from the Thai supermarket to pan-cook at home, even though they’re inevitably as thick as a dinner plate.

Mingalaba’s palatha is really wonderful, flaky and tissue-delicate. The bottom sauce is a lovely coconut milk curry, the top is like Indian dal but not very flavorful.

The big surprise was how a shrimp, garlic and chile condiment I’d never heard of could transform ordinary green beans into a thing of deliciousness. Balachaung! The word is like music to my tongue. Long after the green beans were eaten, I was picking crispy bits of fried spice paste off the plate and eating them.

I also really liked the surprisingly soothing mo hing nga, a fish chowder with rice vermicelli …

… and the house noodles with chicken in coconut-curry sauce, enlivened by wisps of kaffir lime leaf.

Mingalaba
1213 Burlingame Avenue
Burlingame
650-343-3228