It was the second day of rain for the winter yesterday so we got on the bus with several other soggy fans heading to friends houses with pots of chilli and packs of beer. We discovered our friend lived very close to Matching Half so I was allowed to stop for a coffee to ready myself!

The house was full of shouting lads all in their football colors, wives and girl friends at the fringes, some in there shouting, one looking after some kids. There was beer, there were homemade chicken wings (apparently the deep fryer was purchased just for game day) and there were some seriously delicious hamburgers. Our friend has previously owned restaurants and enjoys food and cooking so no wonder his burgers were so delicious. The Mister was wedged on the couch between some boisterous lads and no-one used a knife and fork … that was rather interesting for him! I flitted between chatting with girls and leaning in the kitchen watching the burgers. I only got my knitting out to show someone who was interested to see it otherwise I had enough new people to meet and survived the 3 hours quite well! I didn’t ask what was going on. I didn’t ask if the game was nearly over.

I gave it to her this morning. She opened it and grabbed it and said something like “Holy crap, I’m I’m speechless, I thought if I was lucky I might get something by next winter. I love it. Holy crap. Best. Monday. Ever.” I was happy! And so was she – it was put on straight away!

And didn’t take it off for the rest of the day

Might be similar to silver beet but the leaves are much thicker. Wholefoods had a big pile of ‘healthy greens’ with this being listed at the top so we wanted to take a closer look – they had a recipe tied onto them so that made it easier, a rice, ham and collard greens concoction.  We looked up collard greens on Wikipedia (thankfully we were cooking them on the day before Wikipedia went down to protest SOPA … hopefully by the time you’re reading this it will still be there) for some more info about them after I said they smelled a bit like cabbage when I started cutting them and apparently ‘cabbage plant’ is a common term and indeed the leaves are very healthy – vitamin C, fiber etc.

So we followed the recipe to chop them up and put them in a pot with rice, ham and chicken stock.

Simmered away for 25 mins and ta daaaa – a hearty, risotto-type dish, tasted quite meaty and the greens didn’t have an overwhelming flavor, hard to explain but cauliflowerish. Not bad, but not sure if we’d have it again. Plus our gas elements are incredibly frustrating and don’t quite go low enough that everything didn’t boil dry and stick to the bottom of the pot.

I was fixated on keeping the place aired – I left The Mister to do the cooking but wasn’t so keen on the ‘huge pot of boiling oil’ but the recipe he had only need 1cm of oil so there wasn’t much splattering and nothing caught fire! I hurried some creamed spinach together and it was a delicious meal!

So quite an interesting little street!

Here’s the holes in the wall Centro and Little Skillet.

The coffee was great – nice Blue Bottle flavor but perhaps lacking the balls and glossiness of the actual Blue Bottle outlets. We sat on a loading dock across the road and had our coffee in the sun.

Stopped at Darwin and got a mozzarella and basil baguette to share for lunch. Made fresh in front of us – man it was good!

Centro, 330 Ritch Street, San Francisco, @centro330