winter carrots

I pulled these from the ground a couple of days before it started snowing again, on my mother's birthday--it would have been her ninty-seventh. It made me think again how she wasn't interested in gardening, which I believe she associated with loss and failure and sadness, and she put it behind her, with the other parts of her childhood that she didn't want to remember. She appreciated a good homegrown tomato though, if she didn't have to grow it herself.
I didn't do anything to these except clean, chop, and steam. They tasted like the ultimate essence of carrots, sweet and sharp and intense.

Menu for Hope

I haven't been blogging for a while, but participating in the Menu for Hope gave me the incentive to start again. I'm donating a dozen vintage cookbooks, dating from the '20s to the '80s-- Prize #UC 19. They make good reading--there are some excellent forgotten recipes (and some very strange ones: Frozen Cheddar Cheese Dessert, anyone?). It's also a nice way to look at the history of food preparation, food fads, and even the place of women in the home, since a lot of small cookbooks were put out as new appliances came out. The manufacturers wanted the American homemaker to want an exciting new GE refrigerator or a Hotpoint stove, and they put together recipes to entice her with a vision of her ideal future (see photo above, lower right corner).

If you don't know about Menu for Hope, check out Chez Pim--Pim is the begetter and gracious overseer of this enterprise to do some good in the world, now in its 4th year. Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen is handling things for the central U.S.--take a look at her post, with a listing of other prizes that have been donated by midwesterners. A full list of all prizes is at Chez Pim, here.

OLS10: tardy!

How could I be late for the last One Local Summer post? I had some very good reasons (the main one being the excitement of a visit from one grandson), but as I tell my students: I don't want to hear your excuses. (My reasoning being that I don't want to have to decide if someone's grandmother really died; and anyway, I always give extensions.)

But here, late, is my last OLS meal:

OLS 10 Menu

Pasta with Sauteed Vegetables

(local noodles, peppers and onions from the market, kale and herbs from the garden)

Mixed Tomatoes with Honey and Olive Oil (garden tomatoes, market honey, nonlocal olive oil)

Cucumber Salad (D's father's cucumbers with my herbs, a little local vinegar)

Chocolate Ice Cream (from Honey Hut, our favorite local ice cream maker since the '70s)

This was a meal notable for its simplicity and ease: vegetables chopped and sauteed to a sputter, then thrown together with the pasta, or mixed with their oil or vinegar baths. My favorite part of it is also my #1 favorite salad of the summer, which I've eaten several dozen times, at both lunch and dinner--the tomato salad. I never thought before this year to add honey to tomatoes, and I'm not sure why I did the first time, except that I was feeling experimental. But the fact is that honey and olive oil (sometimes with a squeeze of lemon or lime, sometimes not) is ambrosial. Here's a loose recipe.

Ambrosial Tomato Salad

Several mixed tomatoes--whatever you have in your garden or market basket

A good olive oil; I used about a teaspoon per cup of tomatoes

A squeeze or 2 of honey

A pinch or 2 of salt, to taste

Whatever herbs need pruning in the garden: I've used dill, basil, mint, cilantro, and sometimes a combination, depending on the day. My favorite combination was mint and opal basil.

Chop the tomatoes; if you're using cherry tomatoes in the mix, cut them in half so that they absorb the flavors. Sprinkle with salt and let sit while you gather your herbs (the salt draws out the tomato juices, which in this case, you don't want to discard, but savor). Add olive oil and honey and the chopped or torn herbs. Eat immediately, preferably outside on a day of the perfect temperature (for me that would be a nonhumid 82).

OLS 9: the last of the deer

A quickie post this week, because I'm working on my syllabus at the last minute (as always). Don't I tell my students not to do this? Why don't I listen to myself??
We had the last of the deer D got the last time he went hunting--a little amazing, since there seemed to be so much of it at first. We had to reorganize the freezer so it would all fit, and even then, we gave away parcels to D's father and anyone else who expressed an interest in venison.
We thought we'd eaten the last of it in July, but there was one more package hidden in the bottom drawer which I found when I was checking to see if there was anymore ice cream (there wasn't, darn it).
End of August Menu
Deer burgers with crispy bacon (courtesy of the Sausage Shoppe)
A salad of zucchini and cherry tomatoes (farmers market and garden, respectively), with a nonlocal vinaigrette
Corn from the market that's next to the multiplex theater (a nice double feature: a movie and a dozen ears of corn)
No photo of the burgers because they came out looking fuzzy and sinister.

OLS 8: pizza!

Last night we had pizza, in celebration of being able to comfortably turn on the oven. Not only was it comfortable, it was welcome--I think it got down in the high 40s last night.
The pizza crust was half of a batch I made a few weeks ago and froze--it's from a recipe I got from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's book on local eating, and it's very good--crispy, chewily toothsome. Plus, it's online!
The sauce was a local affair, mainly, as were the mushrooms and cheese (farmers' market, both); the pepperoni was not. The salad--totally local, and in fact, totally garden (mine), except for the olive oil and vinegar dressing.
One of the best things about this sauce was how it made the house smell--tomato-y and rich and spicy--as if someone Italian lived here, someone Italian who was a brilliant cook.
Heavenly Roasted Tomato Pizza Sauce
several tomatoes; as many as you want to get rid of, if you're trying to use them up. I used 6 medium to large tomatoes, Brandywine and Beefsteak
2 cloves garlic
a double handful of fresh basil
a small handful of fresh oregano
several sprigs of fresh thyme
salt
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
Because I was using very juicy tomatoes, I chopped them, put them in a colander over a bowl, salted them a bit, and let them sit there for a while so they'd lose some liquid. Then I spread them out on a cookie sheet which I lined with foil (to make clean up easier). I chopped the herbs and the garlic and distributed them more or less evenly, then drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (I'd guess 2-3 tablespoons each).
I roasted them in a 325 oven for about an hour--but the time would definitely depend on how juicy your tomatoes are, so you have to keep an eye on it. I was waiting for the point where the juices were on the verging of burning (another reason to use the foil). When that happened, I took them out and put the tomatoes and remaining juices in the food processor to mix them up a little. What I got was a nice, thickened, heavenly smelling (and tasting) sauce somewhere between tomato sauce and paste in thickness--perfect for spreading on pizza. I used about half on a 9x13 pizza and froze the rest for a future dinner.
A very pleasing dinner for a summer day that feels a little bit like fall.

Julia Child Birthday Event

I'm late for this, but I had to do it anyway. Last year Lisa at Champaign Taste invited bloggers to post about Julia, and inspired by this, I made mayonnaise for the first time. (It was easy; did you know that Julia says it's OK to do it in the blender?)

This year I made Nicoise Salad. Here is Julia's recipe. I followed it as to ingredients, but altered quantities freely, on the grounds of availability and personal taste (less tuna, more tomato). It was one of the best I've had, probably because so many of the vegetables were fresh, just picked from the garden--the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the beans, the basil I put in the vinaigrette, the shallots.

When I was thinking about Julia and what to make, I tried to remember when and what I first knew about her. I couldn't pin it down, but an early Julia connection was her appearance in Desperately Seeking Susan, an '80s Madonna movie. Rosanna Arquette is a frustrated, ignored wife of a swimming pool salesman--can I be remembering that correctly? Her husband comes home and wants to know what his girls have been up to--he means Rosanna and Julia, who is cooking on the television in their kitchen, as Rosanna tries to keep up with her furious whisking. The idea of it was that Rosanna didn't have a life or any friends, so she had to look to Julia for companionship (I guess)--and of course, she goes out and meets Madonna and has adventures (does she become a stripper?) and finds love, etc.

But that scene also had this cozy friendly feeling--Julia cooking on the tv, and Rosanna in her own kitchen, that I liked. When I came across Julia again, I wanted to get in on that (without having to meet Madonna, etc.) and our culinary relationship was born.

This Nicoise Salad was also good in the way that something can be when you make one serving, just for yourself, on the spur of the moment. I read the word "Nicoise" (which is a lovely word), I let the ingredients drift through my mind--olives, tomatoes, beans. I found myself going to the refrigerator as if in a dream, and dreaming, brought it all together: lunch!

OLS 7: food as medicine

The gardens (mine and D's father's) are producing beans, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, kale (pictured), radishes, tomatoes and pears--so there has been a lot of local eating going on this week.

But the best local meal was made for me by D when I was sick--a medicinal soup made from chicken broth (from our last farmers market chicken), various garden vegetables and herbs, and a lot of garlic and cayenne pepper. It was a soup that made your eyes water a little and your nose run (wait--it was already running!), and it made me feel as if I might be on the road to recovery.

No pictures. As D said, just eat it for once, why don't you? so I did.

OLS 6: the garden in a salad bowl

This week's One Local Summer meal: another omelet and a salad. But to call it a salad is to reduce it, to flatten it out. There should be another word for a salad like this that doesn't put it into the same category as a bowl of iceberg lettuce with a few carrot shavings and a stiffly crimped slice of cucumber.

Salad Gathered from the Garden

a handful of cherry tomatoes (I used Sweet 100s and the volunteer yellow pear tomatoes from last year)

a handful of grean beans

the kernels off 1 ear of corn (leftover from last night's dinner)

a handful of basil (I used purple)

2-3 stalks of lemon thyme

a few fronds of dill, and another few of chives

sea salt

olive oil

cider vinegar

I steamed the green beans a little, until they were cooked a bit but still crisp. Then sliced the corn off the cob, cut the cherry tomatoes in half, and tore the herbs by hand--mixed altogether in the yellow bowl I inherited from my mother. A sprinkle of sea salt, a glug-glug of oil and a glug of vinegar, a few tosses, and it was ready. I didn't measure the oil or vinegar, but it was probably about 3 tbs of oil and 2 of vinegar. Everything local except for the last 3 ingredients, and from the garden except for the corn, which was from the local bins at Giant Eagle. Yes, Giant Eagle Supermarkets have gone local, in a small way, which I like to think I've contributed to by constantly annoying them with questions about local products. I buy some of it every time I go, so as to encourage their efforts.

The omelet was excellent, too (Amish eggs and potatoes and onions from the farmers market) but it failed to keep its integrity when folded over and so couldn't make it as a cover girl (cover omelet?).

The best thing about this meal was the 10 minutes I spent in the garden with my basket (oh yes, I have a basket!), gathering up what looked ripe and imagining the salad into being--a bit of this, a pinch of that. The essence of local.

eating local in NYC

A report from the Alternate Parker:

I went to that restaurant, Borough Food and Drink, [12 E. 22 St.; near Broadway] and it was great. They say everything on the menu is "sourced" from the 5 boroughs, which means only that they use the best ethnic butchers, not that they make burgers from local cows. I had rigatoni with sausage and peas, and I can't remember the last time I had fresh peas that were not overcooked. MMMmmmm.

And lots of local beers from Long Island and upstate. The beer I drank at Borough was called War of 1812, and it was from Saratoga. I think it was an amber beer. I'd have it again. Tonight, if possible.

New York wines I would leave alone. And did.

I shared a memorable dinner with the AP in NYC, which was decidedly not local. I think I was there for the MLA conference (big English and mod. language professors thingie), and D was along for the fun of being in New York. The AP took us to a French restaurant--nothing fancy, but with amazing food of an old-fashioned sort. I only remember the salad, which was mixed greens with a simple vinaigrette, and goat cheese--a salad the like of which I'd never had before (this was in the '80s). One of those taste memories that reminds you what goodness there is in simple, well prepared ingredients.
The AP's capable hands, working on a probaby nonlocal wine last summer.

OLS5: a summer feast

I was amazed to realize that it's the 5th week already. I feel as if I've had my head down in the garden, trying to get the last of those pesky weeds that are light green and viciously twining, and when I looked up, summer was half gone. At least One Local Summer is half gone, for I believe our term of officially local eating is ten weeks.
But let's say the summer is half full, shall we? The garden supports me on this: we have radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, some cayenne peppers, a plentitude of beans, a fair crop of basil and other herbs. And D's father's garden is spilling over with cucumbers, carrots, and the promise of peppers and pears.
Yesterday's dinner brought together our 2 gardens, and with the help of the farmers market, we feasted.
Summer Feast
Chicken stew (chicken, mushrooms, and onions from the market, chicken broth from our last market chicken to make a little gravy, and various garden herbs, plus a small Early Girl for color)
Noodles (bought at the Bergman Farm Market in Marblehead, abt 60 miles away, on a June trip to the beach)
Green beans (ours) and carrots (D's father), steamed with dill flower heads.
It was very good, although the picture is a little murky. Chicken stew is a very brown dish, isn't it? I should have put the beans in the foreground, I guess.

OLS4: the reinvention of bean salad

What to have for dinner when you've been working on the house and yard all day long? when one of you has been scraping the east wall of the house and trying to get the gutter to work better? and the other has been weeding and watering and tying up the branches cut from the black walnut tree?

The Eat-Local Dinner for Exhausted Diners (neither of whom wants to be chef)
Local raw-milk cheddar and goats cheese from the farmers market
Sourdough bread from local bakery (the Stone Oven) slathered with butter from Hartzler's Dairy
A bean salad, all ingredients except dressing from the garden
I never liked bean salad when it showed up on the table, often at family reunions (since my mother didn't make it), or on cafeteria lines. The one I was used to was known as 3-Bean Salad, was made with canned beans, sometimes with a sort of sweet and sour dressing. I avoided it whenever possible.
This bean salad is very different, made with green beans (actually green and purple), and a dressing that's a simple vinaigrette.

One-Bean Salad
A double handful of beans--green or purple (the purple ones go green when cooked, sadly)
2 tomatoes--I used one Early Girl and one Lemon Boy
About a 1/2 cup of mixed fresh herbs: I used basil and dill
1/4 cup olive oil
3 tbs cider vinegar
1 tsp honey (from the farmers market)
2 pinches salt, or to taste
Simmer the beans until just done. Slice the tomatoes, mix with beans and chopped herbs. Mix the last 4 ingredients well and pour over vegetables. We ate this barely warm for dinner, and it was amazing. But the refrigerated leftovers weren't bad the next day, either.

seasonal lunch

My 1st husband's parents lived next door to us. His stepfather planted tomatoes and cucumbers every year--the 1st person I knew who planted vegetables. He didn't have what I thought of as a garden--his plants were in a row along the back of the house, like the dahlias or rosebushes in other yards, a strip along the edge of the lawn. Every summer, he grew them, and every summer when they started to produce, he'd make himself a bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, which he called Cuke Salad, for lunch, every day, as long as they lasted.
I never thought to ask him about this--I just thought of it as one of his peculiarities. We never had a conversation about this, or about much of anything--he was friendly, but not communicative. So I don't know why he was so intent on these plants. I wonder now if they were a part of his past that he was preserving--maybe, like a lot of people his age he had a farm in his background. Maybe he'd grown tomatoes or cucumbers when he was young, or his parents did. Maybe that salad was a remnant of some greater summer harvest that disappeared when he went to work in a factory.
I don't know any of those things, but I do know now why he took such pleasure in it--there is nothing so wonderful as going out in your yard and picking some lunch, which once you are in the kitchen flies together in a simple, satisfying dish that tastes of summer, or of the past.
Cuke Salad
1 or 2 cucumbers, seeded and peeled
1 large tomato chopped, or a handful of cherry tomatoes
3 tbs olive oil
2 tbs cider vinegar
a pinch of sugar
a pinch of salt
a few grinds of black pepper
Combine all ingredients and refrigerate until serving. It tastes better if it sits for an hour, even better the next day. I sometimes jazz it up with whatever herb I've picked in the garden--it's good with basil or dill or chives, probably some others, too.

seasonal breakfast

This is one of the best breakfasts I've ever had: canteloupe, cut up and sprinkled with a pinch of salt; a dollop of Greek yogurt; a handful of mint from the garden, chopped; a couple of squeezes of honey.
I love summer.

OLS3

A quickie post on our local meal this week: an omelet made from eggs bought from an Amish farmer at the market, market onions and raw milk cheddar, plus garden chives; and a potato salad, made from market and garden ingredients entirely (potato, cucumber, radishes, 1 cherry tomato, mustard flowers, tarragon, purple basil), except for the olive oil and cider vinegar dressing. Only the salad is pictured because the omelet fell apart and had to be removed from the pan in pieces--it was very good though.

And here's a picture of the tomato we ate for lunch, dividing it fairly between the 2 of us and eating it in solitary splendor, with only a sprinkling of kosher salt: the first of the Early Girls.

OLS: week 2

I went to the farmers market today and brought home a whole chicken, onions, green beans, 2 hydroponic tomatoes, blueberries, corn, and 2 chocolate chip cookies. I did wonder about the corn--surely too early? But the farmers market has a policy that no one can sell anything they haven't grown or raised or made. Just where was it from? I should have asked, but I guess I decided to believe that it was from southern Ohio, because I knew how happy D would be to have corn for dinner.
Dinner was part of the chicken, braised with one of the onions and some oregano and thyme from the garden, plus one of the tomatoes and the corn. All in all, really good. I am still wondering about the corn. Could it have been local? can corn be grown in a greenhouse? It was a little undersized.
Check out the regional roundups at One Local Summer.

local eating

This isn't the 1st time we've eaten a local or mostly local dinner, but it's the 1st of the One Local Summer dinners (cleverly instituted by Pocket Farm, for the 2nd year), and a good one, too.

Le Menu

Deer burgers (courtesy of D, from SE Ohio)

topped with raw milk cheddar and sauteed onions (both from the farmers mkt)

on locally made bread

Salad of several lettuces and greens (from my and D's father's gardens)

Strawberry ice cream (made by me from the u-pick strawberries and Hartzler's milk; so I guess it's really ice milk)

Everything excellent. The salad had, besides lettuce, tiny carrots thinned from the garden (not even as thick as a pencil), dill, mustard flowers, and mustard leaves. The ice cream was the star-- luridly pink--who needs food coloring when you have strawberries?--and intensely flavored. I sort of threw it together, so no recipe, but I plan to do some more experimenting.

The failure of the dinner: the hamburger buns, which raised half-heartedly, but then fell in the oven, so that they looked like large cookies. Actually, they didn't taste bad, and if I'd called them flatbread, they might have passed. But they were certainly not buns.

I've been reading Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, which is a history of the restaurant as well as of the woman--I like to think that Alice wouldn't have disdained our dinner, showing off our terroir as it did. (Maybe she'd have had some advice about those flattened buns.)

back from the novel: One Local Summer

All this time, I've been revising, and then polishing, and then dithering, and so on. But I'm done with it for a while now, so I'm ready to turn to food. Or rather to writing about it, since I've certainly eaten plenty since May, and cooked some, too.

Liz at Pocket Farm has brought One Local Summer to us for a 2nd year, and I'm planning to localize our food as much as possible, between our garden and D's father's garden and the farmers market.

Above, some of the strawberries D's father and I picked last weekend. He's 87, but he picked more than I did. Also, he didn't complain about how his back was hurting afterward. The woman in the next row and I agreed that picking your food should be mandated as part of serious diets: work your food off before you eat it.

I thought I was going to make jam, but I froze some and we've just been eating the rest, on ice cream, on cereal, on cottage cheese and yogurt, and by themselves. Maybe next time, if my back will stand it (I did complain).

writing, not cooking

D is top chef again--I'm in the throes of revision, the 3rd revision, cutting ruthlessly (it's easier to be ruthless the 3rd time around, I find--more distance).

But here is what happened yesterday--see picture above--a transformer, or something, blew up on the telephone pole by our driveway. Blew up with a loud crack, fell off, and burned merrily. And this is food-related, why? Because it happened when I was making lunch, in between Chapter 3, At Lily's House, and Chapter 4, Moonville. Happily, I had saved before we lost power. (I don't even want to think about the alternative.)

The fire department came in record time, the electric company, too. Amazingly, it was all fixed within an hour. If I was a poet, I'd write a panegyric to Cleveland Public Power--they not only fixed it with dispatch, they swept the burned and broken pieces up before they left.

Lunch: leftover rice, mustard leaves and basil from the garden, half an onion chopped, small cubes of smoked Mozzarella, olive oil, cider vinegar, sea salt--warmed slightly and tossed.

home-rolled crackers

D and I have decided that we want to reform our snacking behavior--not by stopping, for heaven's sake, but by buying or making healthier choices. Popcorn popped in olive oil: we've been doing that for a while (tastes fine). Ice cream: only the best, and only once in a while (sometimes a while is shorter than other times). Nuts: good fats!
But we both love crackers, and the crackers we love are transfatty. It's true that Ritz has come out with healthier crackers, but they're not the same, and if the crackers we eat aren't going to be the same, we decided they should be extremely not-the-same.
"We should make our own crackers," we said to each other all winter long, but like many self-improvement projects, it didn't happen. But the last time one of us said it--D--I had just read Heidi's post on crackers, which sounded good, and very doable.
D made the 1st batch, using Heidi's recipe for Spicy Polenta Cheese Crackers (which she got from Patricia Wells's book, Vegetable Harvest), changing the fat, and substituting brown rice flour for polenta, because of a dearth of the latter and just having bought the former (and using less, because we hadn't used brown rice flour before).
Spicy Brown Rice Cheese Crackers
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
3/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 1/2 tbs olive oil (substituted for butter)
Preheat oven to 375. Combine 1st six ingredients (Heidi used a food processor, D used a wooden spoon and one of those piecrust making things that have wire loops). Add the oil and mix further, much like you do for piecrust. Knead for a few seconds on a floured surface and let it rest for 15 minutes (although D forget this last part).
Roll it out as thin as you can--Heidi says to 1/16th of an inch--ours weren't that thin. Cut into rounds or strips or squares, put on ungreased baking sheet, bake for 12-15 minutes (our oven is hot, so we baked them for just over 10 minutes).
They just spicy enough, faintly cheesy, good with wine and cheese. They weren't crisp, except at the edges where they were thinner, so we're thinking next time we'll have to roll them out as thin as Heidi recommends. But they were very good, and they kept well for 4 days (which is as long as they lasted). Most important they were easy enough to adopt as a regular snack habit.
I made a 2nd batch substituting a different kind of cheese and teff flour which were not as successful--tasted great but were more like thin biscuits. But we're looking forward to more experiments.

odd restaurant behavior

Yesterday I went to Sergio's, a Brazilian-ish restaurant in University Circle, with a friend. This isn't a restaurant review, but I will say that we both had the Carioca Burger, with 2 sauces (one a kind of salsa, the other intensely green and pesto-like), and crispy fries which came with an amazing spiced ketchup for dipping. And we shared pistachio gelato for dessert, fighting politely over the crunchy nuts. Everything was very good (I guess that was a review, a mini one anyway).

But the odd thing that happened at the next table is still on my mind. We were seated on a banquette with several small tables spaced out along its length, and 2 women were at the next 2-table. I can't describe them (and probably shouldn't) because I didn't want to inspect them--it's hard to observe someone minutely and covertly who is only an arm's length away from you. With good restaurant etiquette, you are supposed, usually, to pretend that they are invisible, and that you can't hear their conversation.

But in fact, although I observe this convention of invisibility, I always eavesdrop if I can (I consider it my duty as a writer), and in the interstices of my own interesting conversation with Plan B (writing, MFAs, our bookish childhoods, etc.) I heard snips and bits of the talk at the next table--nothing startling, just 2 friends out for lunch.

But at one point, I heard one say to the other "isn't this good?" and I glanced over to see what they were talking about, for in restaurants, don't we all want to know what they're eating at the other tables? don't we all feel that we might have missed the best thing on the menu?

So I slid my eyes sideways: they were eating biscotti, and I began to lose interest, since I don't like biscotti (too hard, often flavorless). But then I remembered that there was no biscotti on the dessert menu (we had just looked at it). And when I looked back, I noticed that they seemed to have taken it out of a bag.

Our pistachio gelato arrived just then, and under the cover of our waiter's setting it on the table (marvelously pale green, in a martini glasses, the 2 spoons with their handles pointing in opposite directions, ready to be grasped by our opposing right hands), I saw that yes, it was a bag, partially hidden under a napkin. I could see but not read the printing on the bag, a small transparent bakery sort of a bag. They were eating at one of the best restaurants in town and had brought in their own food!

I wanted so much to say to Plan B--look at what they're doing! But our tables were so close (I could have broken off a piece of the biscotti without even straightening my arm all the way), that I refrained. And then I forgot about it in the flurry of our departure, both away to our respective offices.

But how odd. And why? Sergio's has other magnificent desserts besides gelato--their coconut cake is amazing, for instance. And isn't this a variety of high incivility? I've been in places (Arabica coffee houses) that have signs prohibiting people from bringing in and eating their own food, but I guess Sergio's didn't think they'd have to go this far.