Breakfast with Alice at Plow, San Francisco

This supposed recipe blog has been quite thin on recipes lately, a fact of which I'm well aware. It distresses me not to have a new recipe to share each week (it's that same sinking, smelly, guilty feeling I get when procrastinating dissertation work...), but August has been a month spent mostly not in the kitchen but on the road. In the latter half of August, one of my good friends moved to Pittsburgh, and while I'm super sad to see her and her husband go (they were the unofficial desserts for breakfast taste-testers and dessert consumers, so applications are now being accepted for that position! -- please inquire within ;P), I helped drive their car across country on one last road trip romp. ...more on that in the future. Then, this past weekend was spent at a college friend's wedding in San Diego and eating my way with friends through Los Angeles's Koreatown (mmmmmm...late night tofu and delicious kimchee). Time not on the road these past few weeks have been spent with friends--new and old--visiting from out of town, which offers me an opportunity to see and explore my own city with fresh eyes!

^ Alice, clicking away

Before I left for SoCal, the amazingly talented Alice Gao popped into town and miraculously had room in her schedule to squeeze in a breakfast in San Francisco with me. :D I lobbied especially for breakfast because I wanted to see Alice in action making those amazing instagram photos of morning foods that always have me drooling and green with envy. To kill two birds with one stone, I suggested Plow, which I've been hankering to go to ever since blog reader Alanna suggested it a few weeks back when I posted about trying to find good brunch places in SF proper. You guys never lead me wrong! Plow was delicious--especially the savory dish we ordered, with perfectly seasoned scramble, buttery toast to heap the eggs on, and these crispy, savory, herby potatoes that can really define a good brunch experience. (The French toast, on the other hand, left a bit to be desired.) Oh, and the space itself was gorgeous, of course, with bright diffuse light (courtesy of foggy San Francisco summers) glowing through the windows lining one wall of the restaurant.

Hopefully with the onset of September, things will get back to normal again--or, as close to normal as this life ever is! In case you missed it, I did do a new post for sated magazine's blog about in-season melons and chocolate with an extraordinarily simple recipe from the first issue of the magazine: check it out here!

(iPhone point of view after the break || Alice's instagram photo here)