Doggy Bag: Today's Odds and Ends

Street map: At Grub Street, local street food agregator Matt Cohen offers a user guide to both Saturday's looming street food festival on Folsom and next weekend's Eat Real in Oakland. His tips go something like this: seek out unusual stuff, go pioneering from vendors you've never heard of, have pity on restaurant chefs trying to flaunt their street cred the way a soccer mom might flaunt a new tramp stamp (okay, we kind of added that harsh spin ourselves -- Cohen's much, much nicer to chefs like Jamie Lauren), and stay loaded. All shrewd advice.

Kitchen philosophe: At Bay Area Bites, read new SFoodie contributor Andrew Simmons' pithy take on Julie & Julia. A taste: Following a recipe is like having a conversation with convention across time and, maybe, depending on how crazy you are, the person who devised it. Like aspics, recipes can be shaky propositions; they're not infallible. For a variety of reasons, they don't always work the way they're supposed to; they require the flexibility, improvisation, and intuition only continued evolution through personal experience can provide. Think we heard Rachael Ray say something like that once.