my sandbox

So, this past weekend I went to my folks’ house for the 4th. We were going to go to Newport overnight on the sailboat (not on the aforementioned party boat) but we got rained out.

We ended up grillin’ out at the boatyard (steaks, pot-tate-toes, corn on the cob) and then going out on someone else’s motorboat to watch the fireworks off the North Kingstown town beach. Which was also nice, ‘cept for the part where I had too much wine, and felt poorly the next day.

Previous weekend, I went to see my friends Jessica and Jeff, who live in Our Fair City, Cambridge, MA. Jessica is currently pregnant, which I was able to capture on film but which photos I am not allowed to share with the general populace, which is a shame, cause she’s a good-lookin’ pregnant woman. We made french toast, then went canoeing on the Charles (upstream of Boston a ways), then went to this guy’s 60th birthday party, then the next day went to Dim Sum. Everyone always raves about Dim Sum, which is somewhat baffling to me as all we were able to get out of the experience were a bunch of mysteriously dense dumpling like items stuffed with equally mysterious fillings. There was this thing that was kinda like bread wrapped in noodles, which I quite liked, but other than that, not much goin’ on. Jessica and I did concede that perhaps it would have helped to go with someone who knew what they were doing.

Weekend before that, I went to see Ken and Kim down on the Maryland Shore. They live near Chincoteague and Assoteague, which are those island with the wild ponies. Here’s one now:

Apparently their bellies become bloated and round because they ingest so much salt as they graze. I imagine they must be used to it, but it sounds uncomfortable. Ken and Kim and I also went bird banding, and had ice cream, and seafood (my belly became bloated and round, and uncomfortable), and went to the zoo, where I took around a gazillion pictures of a peacock. Oh, all right, here’s a couple of them:

That about catches you up with my weekend doings, for now. On the horizon, I have a trip to Philly and some visitors from Arlington, MA, which is good, cause it seems that not much goes on around here of a weekend.

I just want to say up front that this post will contain no photos.  However, it will contain a map, just to keep things lively.

I’m in Rhode Island now:  got in Tues. night.  The flight was fine, if by “fine” you mean being packed into a tiny seat trying to pretend that the dozens of people around you don’t actually exist, having all the moisture sucked out of your body by a ruthlessly efficient ventilation system, and subsisting for a total travel time of ten hours on two packets of mini-pretzels when really you don’t even like pretzels in the first place, but it’s all they’ll give you, the cheap bastards; if that’s fine to you then yes, the flight was fine.  It was uneventful.  It achieved its purpose.

So now I’m at my parents’ house, which is in an older neighborhood, on a lake.   And I just want to take this opportunity to mention that, unbeknownst to many, there’s more to Rhode Island than the fact that it’s small.  It’s a fine place, all green, with birds, and blue skies, and all that.  It’s been awhile since I’ve been in RI at this time of year, so it’s kind of nice to be reminded of what a swell place it is in the late spring/early summer. 

My mom and I went wine tasting yesterday.  Yes, Rhode Island even sports a few vineyards.  We visited two.  The first was, well, lame.  The climate and short growing season here really only lends itself to a few varietals, mostly whites, but this vineyard tried to make it all - they had like 30 or 40 wines available for tasting, and four out of the five we tasted were not very good.  Seemed like they were just trying to fleece the tourists rather than make a quality product. 

The second winery, Greenvale Vineyards, was excellent (although their website has annoying harp music when you first enter it, so consider yourself fore-warned!).  The tasting room was tucked away in an old converted stable within sight of the Sakonnet River- very picturesque.  They focus primarily on whites, and had six wines for tasting, all of which were good.  They also have twin elderly springer spaniels, Sarah and Danielle.  Sarah came and slept on our feet while we tasted.  Here’s a map of where it is:  note that it’s on the same island as Newport (Aquidneck Island). 



View Larger Map


My folks are over there by the Arcadia Management Area, so we drove across Narragansett Bay on the Jamestown and Newport Bridges. It used to be that whenever I came back to RI from out west the landscape would look totally foreign to me and it would take some time for me to readjust to eastern topography and vegetation. I’ve been back and forth enough times now so that’s mostly worn off, but crossing the Narragansett Bay yesterday it struck me that it looked all weird and unfamiliar, and I realized that now the predominant “crossing the bay” image in my brain is crossing SF Bay on the Golden Gate Bridge. Narragansett Bay is smaller, and the shores are lined with trees rather than cliffs and/or city.

Anyhoo. Today’s plans include a little hike/walk around a birding area, an early evening showing of Indiana Jones, and dinner at a ribs place.

I got to use my mortar and pestle tonight, which is another Christmas present from my parents. Most of my cool stuff comes from them (except my gun and my dolphin skull).

The model I have looks like this:

Image comes from here; it’s from AMCO Houseworks.

I used it to grind about 2 tbsp. of toasted cumin seeds, this evening, for a lentil soup that I made. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but today I found for the first time that my grinding became more effective if I just swirled the pestle around in the mortar, applying constant pressure to the contents, rather than using a repeated grinding motion where I push down in the bottom of the mortar with the pestle (if that made any sense).

This year I think I’m going to angle for a mandoline for my new kitchen toy - I yearn to be able to slice things wafairr-theen!

(If you don’t mind my channeling Harry Potter for a moment.)

Travis has kindly alerted us to the existence of a Google Recipe Search. So handy!

Check it out here.

It’s just Victor and me for Thanksgiving this year (unless anyone wants to come out and join us) and I’m thinking of making a Thanksgiving-themed small-plate extravaganza. I haven’t run this by Victor yet so we’ll see if he embraces the idea or clings stubbornly to the old ways. Here’s what I’m thinking of so far, in approximate order of serving:

Stilton Tart Bites w/ Cranberry Dipping Sauce

Butternut Squash Gnocchi with Swiss Chard

Sweet Potato Chips with Turkey Leg Confit and Cranberry-Black Pepper Chutney

Champagne-Rosemary Sorbet

Mini-Mashed Potato Pancake Sandwiches with Sour Cream and Bacon

Individual Turkey + Mushroom Stuffing Bread Puddings

Haricot Vert and Red Onion Salad with Pistou

Small Pear and Almond Cakes with Muscat Syrup and Mascarpone Cream

I think most of your standard Thanksgiving elements are present in some form, except for pumpkin, of which I’ve never been a huge fan (and I’ve got butternut in there, so the squash family is represented).  Some of the recipes are either straight from epicurious.com or slightly adapted versions of recipes found there; others are from my brain.

I was also thinking of tinkering with this menu and including a soup amuse bouche:  maybe take away the gnocchi and have some sort of squash puree with star anise or cardamom or something, served in a shot glass or a little tea cup.

Anyhoo.  What do y’all think?

So way back when (maybe 3 weeks ago?), Victor and I went on a little wine-tasting jaunt, and I’m just now getting around to blogging about it.

Here’s our route:

Stop 1: Cline winery. The whole field trip was instigated by the fact that we belong to the Cline wine club, and we had just moved in the past 3-4 months, and our quarterly wine shipment was about to get sent out, and they didn’t have our right address. So we decided we might as well go up there and straighten it out and, you know, drink some wine. Cline has a separate little room for club members where you can taste whichever wine you want, rather than the schlock they have out for the sweaty masses (their schlock is actually very good, and I’m sure the masses are perfectly lovely. But it’s not every day that I get to be exclusive, so I’m playing it up). The reason we’re members of Cline is because their wine is really freakin’ good, so we were happy to sample several of their selections while there, and picked up our wine shipment in the meanwhile. They emphasize Zinfandels, but I particularly favor their Small-Berry Mourvedre, which is fruity, chocolatey, and tobaccoey, all in one. Like bundling a cigar and a chocolate bar together with a fruit rollup, and smoking it. Not that I’d do such a thing.

Stop 2 was Taft Street Winery. This has been a favorite of ours in the past, but on this visit we realized that the reason why it was a favorite was because of the Guy, and the Guy was gone. The Guy used to pour whatever captured his fancy, and tell you all about whatever it was, how it was grown on the rocky slopes so you could taste the mineral, yadda yadda. He was super chatty, and he picked out the good stuff to pour and he wanted to teach you about wine more than he wanted to monitor how much wine you were getting. This is probably why he’s been replaced by a robot. The robot only poured what’s on the tasting menu, which wasn’t very good, and she used the little pour spouts that measure a stingy little pour, and she didn’t say anything interesting. She just said what she’d been programmed to say, like “This would go great with grilled meats.” Which is pretty much what it says on the back of the bottle.

Saddened by stop 2, we moved on to stop 3. We like the wines at stop 3, but they’re kind of expensive so we just go there recreationally, and pay our $5 tasting fee without purchasing anything. Stop 3 is Sunce winery, and they have a Bocce ball court. The first time we went there, with Victor’s brother and his friend Susan G*****, we played Bocce, and they had just had a special event there so there was leftover food, so we ate some of the leftover food and finished off the wine in the bottles that had been left out for the event. So that was fun. The wine was still good, but there were no freebies, and playing bocce by our lonesomes under an overcast sky seemed uninviting, so we just tasted and went on our way.

Stop 4 is actually a restaurant. It’s Sooze’s wine bar and cafe and it’s in Petaluma, where we used to live. It’s one of our favorites: maybe 6 or 8 tables and a small bar, really intimate. Sooze’s is cool because they have half-price glasses of wine from 4-6, their wine list is well-chosen (I’ve not had a wine there that I haven’t liked), and the food is really good. We started with some oysters and something steely and white that I can’t remember the name of (I knew I should have written this post earlier). We had a bowl of olives, then I had the seared scallops with a pea-roasted garlic puree, that were just out of this world. I can’t remember what Victor had. Victor, what did you have? Anyway, for dessert we both got the molten chocolate cake, and I got a dessert wine recommended by the waiter, a Zinfandel that didn’t quite stand up to the dessert, so that was a little disappointing. They used to have this excellent Rosenblum “Rosie Rabbit” dessert wine that was excellent, like, I don’t know, sucking on rubies or something (maybe a more useful description would be, an intense berry jam flavor nicely balanced with a hint of acid), but it’s apparently gone.

Then we walked around a bit in the ol’ Luma, and Victor drove home, cause he wasn’t all drunk like me. Sometimes, Californ-I-A is aaallllright.

Last Saturday Victor and I went on a hike on nearby Sweeney Ridge. We were ostensibly going to look for burrowing owls. Bob and Rodney, our erstwhile co-workers, are coordinating a statewide burrowing owl survey and asked us to check out this area, which apparently had burrowing owls historically.

We didn’t see any burrowing owls. It was foggy, and windy, and everything’s grown up with coyote brush- there’s no habitat. But we did find plenty of berries. The blackberries are just starting to be ripe, here, and the thimbleberries are in full swing.

I think thimbleberries have a really unique flavor, and given the fact that they’re pretty ubiquitous in these parts I’m somewhat surprised that I don’t see them around more in local cuisine, you know, “pork tenderloin with thimbleberry-port reduction”, that sort of thing. We didn’t eat the sage: that’s just an inedible garnish.

Here in Pacifica, the hottest month is the month of September, during which the average high is 71 degrees.

This means that it’s a comfortable temperature for drinking port in the evening all the year round. Huzzah!

The microplane grater. So smooth! So efficient! So nice to use! Using a microplane grater is like eating cotton candy, only without the part where you throw up on the Scrambler afterward.

I do not have permission to use this image, which comes from here. If my use of this image makes you feel mad or even the slightest bit litigious, let me know and I’ll remove it.

Since we’ve moved to Pacifica, Victor and I have started taking BART into the city and wandering, semi-aimlessly, around various neighborhoods. Last weekend we checked out the Castro. Yesterday we explored the area around the Civic Center.

Got off at the Civic Center stop and headed up Market for a little while. The stretch of Market right by the BART stop is pretty ghetto, but after a few blocks we got into an interesting bit. We stopped in at a travel bookstore and bought a Lonely Planet guide to British Columbia, since we’re planning a road trip to Vancouver Island in August. Spun around once we realized we were about to overlap with our stroll around the Castro last week, and stopped in the Zuni Cafe for a bit of liquid refreshment. I had a Manhattan, made with Maker’s Mark. I had never tried a Manhattan with Maker’s before and found it quite good- the Maker’s complements the cherry flavor in the vermouth nicely. Victor had Grey Goose with grapefruit juice, on the suggestion of the bartender when Victor asked for “something refreshing with Grey Goose”. I think he was hoping for something a little more creative, but he said he enjoyed his drink nonetheless.

As we were sipping our beverages, we noticed a commotion at the other end of the bar, and like good bar patrons we flocked to the scene of the excitement. There was a fire on the 5th floor of the building next door, which was undergoing renovation. It looked like one of the plywood forms had caught fire somehow. It was a pretty small fire, but tricky to get to. Four firetrucks pulled up and we left as the firemen were assessing the situation.

Continuing on our journey, we turned up Franklin, more non-descript ghetto stuff, then down Hayes, which has apparently burgeoned into a little enclave of trendy stores and restaurants within the past fifteen years or so. It’s right near the symphony and the opera house, which probably accounts for much of its popularity: as we wandered past the Hayes Street Grill we saw a line of symphony-dressed folks waiting for tables. The bar/restaurant Absinthe and the restaurant/bakery Citizen Cake are in this neighborhood too. We thought to pick up some treats at Citizen Cake, but we were both hungry enough that the thought of something sugary wasn’t appealing.  We then flirted with the idea of stopping in Absinthe and ordering a couple of small plates and a couple of glasses of wine, but realized that this would undoubtedly result in us dropping fifty bucks or so on a small snack, and decided to just go hungry for another hour or so instead.

We turned onto Grove St. to walk by City Hall, the UN Plaza, and all those big, grand, landmarky buildings around that area.  We briefly stopped in the SF Public Library, but didn’t really look around much: it seemed to be closing when we got there at around 6pm. So, back to the BART station and Pacifica.

I eat this a couple of times a week. Fry an egg (I like a yolk that’s a bit runny but mostly gelatinous), heat up half a can of black beans. Once your egg is done, warm a corn tortilla in the same skillet. Tortilla goes on bottom, then beans, then egg, top with halved cherry tomatoes, avocado, salsa, small dollop o’ sour cream. If I’ve got it, I’ll chop up some cilantro on top too.

So good!