Know This Place
Monday Potlucks, a Street Encyclopedia, Kale Salad, and Outside Lands
For 4th of July, we rented a car and drove up to wine country to spend the long weekend with family. We did lots of cooking and swimming, and I was delighted that everyone enjoyed my kale and tofu salad. In fact, my niece requested I make it again for her 10th birthday. I can’t imagine wanting salad for my 10th birthday.
Monday Potluck
Our first night back in SF, we hosted our monthly Monday Potluck, which is exactly as it sounds. These potlucks are a throwback to the weekly Monday potlucks I helped put on every week for three years. An entire community sprung up out of those weekly potlucks, with friendships and romances spinning out and plenty of gatherings beyond the weekly one.
I took this success for granted. Having since made several attempts to build communities in multiple cities—to varying levels of success—I’ve learned that it takes effort and intention. Specifically, there are several factors that I now understand made those potlucks successful:
They were consistent, so guests could build a habit around socializing on Monday evenings, and even develop routines around it.
The oddity of hosting a social gathering on a Monday made it memorable.
At each potluck, we would plan the next one. That meant there was always a potluck planned, so any time you met someone in the days between you had something to invite them to. A low friction way to hang out again.
Since it was on a Monday, no one was hosting a competing event at the same time. Few scheduling conflicts.
If you’re looking to build a community or even a small friend group, I recommend the recurring format. You can alternate hosts if the idea of that much cleanup intimidates you. And don’t be afraid to ask guests to wash dishes–many people have told me they appreciate the social break and feel more at ease having contributed.
Know This Place
I’ve been fascinated by map-based interfaces for some time. A full-screen map is an immersive way to connect digital information to the real world. I enjoy exploring Google Maps, and I often wonder about what it’s missing.
To that end, while living in New Orleans, I created a map of live music. It was mesmerizing to see the city come to life with glowing dots, which exploded in number on Friday and Saturday evenings. I added construction permits to the map as well, simply because it was easy data to retrieve.
NOLA.Today, as the project is called, has been on the back burner for some time. Yet it continues to get more traffic than any of my other projects. All of this is from search engines–people searching for divey music venues or residential addresses. It’s often the only search result for a particular address that isn’t a real estate directory like Zillow.
KnowThis.Place, an encyclopedia of every address in San Francisco, is my latest project. It’s an opportunity to build on my learnings from NOLA.Today and incorporate a novel approach to content management that’s been circling in my head. I’ll write more about that last part in another update.
For now, I’m interested in any ideas you have for sourcing address-level history. So far, the site pulls in most of its information from DataSF.
I’m also open to feedback on the address page design. I’m aiming to simply and efficiently communicate the available data, in stark contrast to the realty sites with which I’m competing in search ranking. These tend to fill their pages with fluff and repeat the same data in different formats.
The next step (beyond the ongoing work of researching addresses) is to incorporate maps. I envision the homepage being a full-bleed interactive map and each address page having a simple static map. There’s also opportunity for maps on the neighborhood and street index pages, though I’m not yet set on the direction for those.
Kale Salad
That kale salad my niece liked so much has several aspects that make it delicious and filling. First, I use Lacinato kale—aka “dino,” short for dinosaur—and instead of massaging it I cut it into fine ribbons. Second, I add my popular convection baked tofu and just a sprinkle of quinoa. And third, I use an unusual and surprisingly satisfying salad dressing recipe:
A generous ¼ cup of nutritional yeast, which you can find in any health food store or organic grocer like Whole Foods. One of my local bodegas even has it.
Two tablespoons each of: Olive oil, rice wine vinegar, and tamari
If it’s too liquidy, add more nutritional yeast. If it’s too thick, add cold water.
You can swap the liquid ingredients with any oil, vinegar, and soy sauce-like condiment. And you can easily scale up or down the recipe by keeping the 3:1:1:1 ratio. “A generous ¼ cup” is about 6 tablespoons in this case.
Half of this dressing is nutritional yeast, which is astonishingly healthy. And the dressing is only 1/6th oil, which is really low for a salad dressing.
Looking ahead: August
I’m looking forward to three days of Outside Lands. The artists I’m most excited about are Djo, Wet Leg, Sports, Malcolm Todd, Not for Radio, Lucy Dacus, The Temper Trap, Billie Marten, Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Empire Of The Sun, The XX, and The Strokes.
We’re hosting our third monthly potluck, as the group continues to grow and evolve. This month’s theme is Art Show. Since my raised bed is teeming with zucchini, I plan to make zucchini noodles, or as I prefer to call them, zoodles, with tofu cooked in a peanut sauce. I figure with some red bell peppers and carrots mixed it, the dish will be colorful enough to be considered art.
Looking at the calendar, August 20 and 21 are Cole Valley and Castro night markets, respectively. I always make sure to support the local businesses during these car-free moments. Business owners tend to underestimate foot traffic and overestimate the percent of customers that arrive by private vehicle. The ongoing success of these night markets helps to counterbalance that misconception.
Shout out
Thanks to my friend Philip Thomas for inspiring me to send this newsletter.