Mornings in the Sunset, with Cherry Corn Scones

Goodness, where has the time gone? Has it really been three weeks? Is it really November already? How did that happen?

While I’d love to tell you that I’ve been sleeping for the past three weeks—and I really and truly wish that I had—things have been bopping around here. I still want to toss my computer out the window and go back to bed, but in the meantime life goes on. There was a whirlwind 48-hour quickie of a trip to Seattle (yes, I still love you, Seattle) and a short (too short) visit from an old friend. There were much-neglected work projects to jump back into, phone calls to return, a domineering email inbox to make peace with (the brute, we’re still fighting it out), and suddenly it’s November and practically the holiday season. I thought things would calm down after the festival but life continues to spin faster and faster and sometimes it’s all I can do to just hold on.

So instead, I am going to tell you about mornings in my neighborhood. The best kind of mornings—those rare slow ones.

Early autumn is perhaps the most perfect season in my San Francisco neighborhood, an area called the Sunset District that runs along the south border of Golden Gate Park from Cole Valley out to the ocean. From June through August this neighborhood is socked in with summer fog and a clear day is a rarity. But once summer officially ends, in early September, the weather clears up and San Francisco’s secret summer begins. Suddenly every morning is bright and sunny, the fog is gone, and residents of the Sunset wake to skies so blue it makes us blink in disbelief and delight.

It’s not a bad time to be coming home.

I love the Sunset District—perhaps not the entire district, which encompasses blocks and blocks of single-family homes painted in pale colors stretching all the way out to the beach—but I love my corner of it. I live in a little village of a neighborhood, a string of shops, restaurants and cafes that stretch out along Irving Street, one block south of the towering green cypress trees and botanical gardens of Golden Gate Park. After all, I’ve lived here for seven years.



When I moved into this neighborhood I didn’t know how much I would come to love it. I simply wanted to be along the N-Judah tramline so that I could easily commute to work. My real estate search was conducted along a narrow corridor that followed the N route—Duboce Park, Cole Valley, Inner Sunset. In the end I chose the house I most wanted to live in , it just happened to be in the Inner Sunset.

I didn’t know how much I would love being next door to Golden Gate Park, able to walk down the street with my picnic blanket and book on sunny days. I didn’t know I would love the medical students (from nearby UCSF) who run around the neighborhood in scrubs and clogs and keep things casual. I didn’t know how I would love standing at the intersection of 8th and Irving in the morning, when the clean and sharp breeze blows in from the west and makes me remember there is an ocean out there even though I cannot see it. And in the evenings, the broad sky over the rooftops is painted with a startling array of vivid oranges, pinks, and purples. They don’t call it the Sunset for nothing.



It’s this open and slightly wild feeling that I love about my neighborhood. On the rare occasions when I think about moving to another part of the city I worry that I might feel boxed in by hills and tall buildings, too confined. I’m not a city girl at heart, no matter how much I might enjoy living in one. The Sunset allows me to have the city at easy access, the freedom of a green forest in my backyard, and the wild winds off the Pacific running through my hair.

It also allows me easy access to cherry corn scones.

A few months after I moved to the neighborhood a new bakery opened up, an offshoot of the Berkeley Cheeseboard, a well-known local collective. The Arizmendi Bakeries—of which there are now three—are independently run but they use the same recipes as the Cheeseboard. That means I have Cheese Rolls, Wolverines, Suburban Bread, and Brioche Knots a few mere minutes from my front door. Oh, and Cheeseboard-style pizza (which is, for those of you who have not had the pleasure, seriously addictive).

To be honest, I don’t go to Arizmendi all that often. It could easily turn into a daily indulgence, which wouldn’t turn out well for either my waistline or my wallet. I buy my weekly bread, when I do buy bread, from Della Fattoria (simply the best around, if you ask me), and I reserve Arizmendi for special days when I want to treat myself. Sometimes months pass without a visit. But I can tell you this, when I do go to Arizmendi it’s near impossible for me to walk out without a cherry corn scone.

I tried the other scone varieties when I first began buying baked goods at the Cheeseboard, when I was in college, but once I tried the cherry corn scone there was no going back. This is almost not a scone at all. There's a moist, bright yellow crumb that is crunchy with cormeal. It is slightly sweet and studded with dried cherries, their flavor deep and wine-like. The craggy crust is sprinkled with the lightest dusting of sugar. Think of it as a cross between a scone and cornbread.



Luisa, the Wednesday Chef, wasn’t won over when she tried the recipe. She thought they were too sweet to be split open and spread with jam—and I agree that this would be a misuse of the product. Cherry corn scones don’t split open neatly, the cornmeal makes them crumbly, and adding jam would turn them over-the-top sweet. What they are perfect for is being broken off into pieces and dunked in tea and eaten out of hand, preferably on a bench in Golden Gate Park on a slow sunny morning.



This is what I like to do—when I have the time, which I admittedly don’t have often. On mornings when I don’t feel chained to my computer, when I have a little something to celebrate, or when things feel grim and there’s nothing to celebrate and I need to remind myself that eventually there will be good things again to be excited about again (the festival will come to an end, life will go on, I will survive this). On days like that, I wander down to Arizmendi and buy a scone. Then I continue down 9th Avenue and into the park, where I walk around and eventually find myself always in the same place, the Shakespeare Garden. It is one of my very favorite spots in the city, a orderly corner in what is in many ways a wonderfully wild park.



I’ve been here, sitting on these benches, on days that were good, on days that were heart-shatteringly difficult, and on many days that fell somewhere between those two points. This garden is like an old friend—consistent, comforting, lovely.



And so I break off my little pieces of scone and I dip them in my milky tea and I am grateful for this sunny morning, for the small moments we are able to carve out in our day to enjoy the beauty. The email beast is waiting at home, still needing to be battled, but for this moment I get the chance to breathe, to enjoy the way the sunlight filters through the trees, the scent of freshly cut grass, and the perfection of a scone and tea on a park bench in the sun. It doesn't take much for happiness.



Cheese Board/Arizmendi Cherry Corn Scone recipe

To be honest with you, I've not made this recipe before (if you lived blocks from Arizmendi Bakery you wouldn't either; not to mention, a full batch of these things would be a dangerous challenge to my willpower). The recipe comes from the cookbook The Cheeseboard Collective Works, which includes all the recipes for the amazing baked goods that come out of these wonderful worker owned and operated local businesses. You can bet I'm taking a copy with me to Seattle. I'm still going to be craving these scones, even when I'm far from the Sunset.



PS. to Carroll—thanks for your concern over my absence! (call it a combination of deferred life maintenance, big writing projects, and the fact that I can't stand the sight of my computer right now). Sweet of you to notice, thank you. I hope to get around to answering comments soon.