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October 30, 2007
Wheelbarrow full of bloody red sunshine
These pomegranates really do have the flavor of a warm fall day, sweet and juicy and just a bit tart. Luckily I managed to bring some of this sunshine home with me to San Francisco, because there is not much here to go around. I came from sunny, hot, dry and smoky Southern California to chilly, damp and gray San Francisco in just over an hour on Sunday. Five of the seven pomegranates I tucked into my baggage made it back intact, the other two having been impaled on something sharp in my bag.
We picked these pomegranates off a tree in my parents' yard. That's the fruit off just one of their two trees, and what you see above isn't even all of it. They will be squeezed with a citrus juicer and made into jelly next weekend.
Pomegranates cost about $2 each in these parts, so that there is a fortune in fruit.
October 27, 2007
Smoking section
I'm visiting my parents in Southern California. They live many miles from all of the fires this time around. (Last time there was a major firestorm down here, many of their friends lost their homes less than a mile away.) But the smoke is pretty oppressive. We don't have the Mars-red sky that I've seen in photos from San Diego County, but we have a thick gray haze, orange-tinged mornings and evenings, and spectacular sunsets and moonrises. And we're not supposed to exert ourselves outdoors.
Given the choice between running outdoors or running on my dad's treadmill in the turpentine-scented tool shed, of course I went outside. I don't seem to have suffered any ill effects. Yet.
October 25, 2007
Entertainment
Me: Will you be OK with me taking the powerbook with me this weekend? (and cutting off your access to the iTunes library?)
Dave: sure, no prob
Dave: I'll survive with the TV, internet, and 1000+ CD collection
Me: lawl
Dave: I'll see how it goes. If that gets old I can always drink some rubbing alcohol or something.
October 24, 2007
Spicy!
I'm back in the canning business. That is, if you can call "making a few jars for fun, expending way more effort designing labels than is appropriate to the quality of the product, and giving them away to friends and family" a "business." And don't even suggest I try to sell my goods, because I know just enough about health department requirements to know that it's not worth the effort for me. And I could never charge enough to make any money. And there are a million other preserve-and-chutney makers out there doing a better job already (and charging $9/jar and getting away with it).
Glad that's cleared up.
I was inspired to make this stuff when my jar of Trader Joe's cranberry chutney ran out. I was making a turkey sandwich. I eat a lot of turkey sandwiches. It made perfect sense.
It's pretty tasty, but we were shocked at how spicy-hot it was when we tasted it straight out of the pot. (After canning, the heat is toned down a little.) We shouldn't have been surprised. The jar of cayenne pepper in my spice cabinet is possessed by the devil.
It's a standard Whole Foods-brand spice jar of ground cayenne, and it looks perfectly innocent. But this thing is OLD. I'd expect cayenne pepper, like any spice, to lose its punch as it ages. But the rust-colored powder in this jar intensifies as every year goes by. One of us purchased it, we're pretty sure, at the Whole Foods in Evanston, Ill., while we were in college. The copyright notice on the label is from 1995. This is some ancient-world pepper dust we're talking about.
I'd guess we have used about 25% of the jar. I'd open it to verify, but just unscrewing the lid makes me sneeze and makes my eyes water. I used some earlier tonight in the sauce for our bourbon-marinated salmon, and two hours later I touched my eye and thought my eyeball might burst into flames. This was after I had washed my hands twice and done the dishes by hand.
When I cook with this pepper, I typically add about a third of the amount of cayenne the recipe calls for. Sometimes that is too much. And I'm not a wimp when it comes to spicy food. Seriously, this jar is hot stuff.
I thought about replacing it with a new jar of cayenne that might not be so potent. But I couldn't find any at either Trader Joe's or at the giant supermarket up the street. Not a single jar, or even an empty space on the shelf where the cayenne might have been. I think it's a supernatural conspiracy. (Either that or I should have been looking under the more generic term, red pepper.)
I suppose I could go back to Whole Paycheck to pick up a new jar, but shopping at WF in the city is a nightmare.
Oh, the bourbon-marinated salmon was pretty good, I'd give it a 6.5 out of 10. The bourbon-fudge brownies I baked were a little weird and dry. No more than a 4.
I'll be away from my kitchen for a few days, so you'll be spared from more bourbon recipes until next week. Probably.
October 22, 2007
'Tis the season for Wild Turkey
Meet my new favorite ice cream flavor. Vanilla bourbon. I looooove food made with bourbon. It all started with bourbon balls before I was even of legal drinking age. I have my friend Jen to thank for that. She deserves full credit for getting me hooked on the balls 14 or 15 years ago.
This is just regular homemade vanilla-bean ice cream with a generous splash of bourbon thrown in to, as they say, kick it up a notch. I kicked it up about eleven more notches by letting it melt into a fragrant puddle next to a slab of warm caramelized pear gingerbread.
Bourbon ball season doesn't technically start until November 1, but I've gotten a wee head start on the Wild Turkey bottle this year. This might become the first part in a series on bourbon-enhanced foods*. That is, if I'm willing to put in the hard work, the sacrifice, of making all those bourbon-laced goodies. The things I do for content you people!
*This originally read "bourbon-enhanced cooking," but that didn't seem quite right. I prefer to drink wine while I cook.
October 20, 2007
Our lights are out
We voluntarily turned off our lights at 8pm for an hour to save energy as part of Lights Out San Francisco. The TV is off. But do computers count as "non-essential lighting"? Hmm.
We're also supposed to install one compact fluorescent bulb in our home. We already have CFLs in our front entryway, garage and garage stairway, and kitchen. The bedrooms, living room and bathroom are off limits to fluorescent light until the quality of CFLs improves. The bulbs we put in the kitchen are the cuttingest-edge, closest-to-incandescent-color-temperature bulbs out there (2700k if you're curious), but they take 90 very long seconds to come to full brightness. Yes, I have timed it. So we never turn them off, which may or may not negate the energy savings of having 14-watt bulbs.
It would be cool to live within view of the Bay or Golden Gate bridges, since they have turned off the decorative lights for this event. Also, non-essential lighting on skyscrapers downtown will be turned off.
Check out Lights Out SF's very cool, practical and non-preachy Top 15 Energy-Saving Tips.
October 18, 2007
Borrowing heavily
In college I was a professional slacker, and I managed to avoid spending much time in the university library for about three and a half years. So it makes sense that it took me close to nine years of living in San Francisco to learn to love our public library.
For years I'd drop into the stately Main Branch downtown from time to time, but these days I visit our local branch at least weekly. I reserve everything online and have it delivered there. I have checked out novels, non-fiction, cookbooks, quilting books and travel guides. I got on the wait list for Harry Potter 7 in the spring and had it in my hands the morning it was released. I've borrowed audiobooks for the 7-hour drive to visit family in Southern California.
But my most recent discovery has been that the library has quite a music collection. I've been borrowing lots of CDs. Unfortunately, most of them are pretty badly damaged. The Bob Dylan 2-CD set I picked up today had only one disc. (And the booklet reeks of cigarette smoke.) I suppose you get what you pay for.
I thought it would be a kick to start a flickr group featuring items we've found inside library books -- you know, the ticket stubs, receipts and other life scraps that people use as bookmarks, and then leave there when they return the book. (Of course, someone has already done it.) So far we have collected a receipt from a car wash, an expense-check stub from a church, and a post-it note listing several anti-depressant drugs.
I was at our local branch today picking up some items I had reserved. Glancing through the new non-fiction, I saw a book Dave had recently checked out and returned. It was one of the featured titles standing up on top of the shelves. He never finished the book, and I could see a tiny hint of a bookmark sticking up from around page 60. Incredulously, I pulled out a boarding-pass stub from a flight Dave took to LA a few weeks ago.
I guess returning a book should be like leaving a hotel room: check thoroughly for personal belongings.
My hand is much better. I took off the huge fiberglass splint because it was seriously getting in the way. I got a smaller splint at a drug store; it provides a little protection to the tender part of my palm. I still haven't decided whether I'm going to ride the century I had planned for Saturday. I'll know if I can put any pressure on it after I do a spin class tonight.
October 15, 2007
Just call me Lefty
That's Dave's new nickname for me. I injured my right, dominant hand while running. Yes, I did it running. Spare me the "you're supposed to run with your feet" remarks, please. Right now I wish I could type with my feet because this damn splint is making it really difficult.
I tripped. I took a header. I do this probably two, three, four times a year. I am a klutz. I landed on my right hand, scraped up my knee. Got up, caught my breath, dusted off and kept running. But the pain in my hand would not go away. By the end of my run, 20 minutes later, it was throbbing. By the time I was showered and dressed, it really hurt like a mofo. My palm is pretty swollen and there's a very tender lump right where I landed.
The X-rays showed no fracture, so they're calling it a sprain, with the possibility of a hairline fracture that just isn't appearing on film. I have this lovely splint to immobilize it, which together with 800mg of Vitamin I has done a lot to dull the pain.
Like an idiot, I agreed to get sushi for dinner. You try to use chopsticks with only two fingers. Lucky for me, the hostess took pity and gave me cheater chopsticks.
I'm not sure how this will affect my biking or swimming in the near future. A lot will depend on how it feels in the next few days. But the hunt-and-peck typing (and accidental hitting of F-keys with the giant lobster claw) and the left-handed mousing are enough to drive me nutty at this point. %$@!#!!!
(Perhaps this is what I get for writing about some form of crashing two posts in a row. Hrrrrmph grumble grumble.)
October 14, 2007
Crashing
We were invited to a private party last night featuring a super-secret musical act. Well, we knew going in who the musical act was, but I don't necessarily want their fans to be googling this here. Let's call them Second Nose Deaf. We weren't technically on the guest list, but a friend of ours extended his invitation to us. So when we walked into this fairly fancy party in the lobby of a nice building in the Financial District, knowing that we probably knew zero people, maybe one other person in attendance, we definitely felt like crashers. Especially since there was catered food, a generously stocked open bar, and a woman with shot-glass ammo belts serving slugs of Patron.
We are not huge fans of this band, even though what I consider to be their one hit has been in heavy rotation on my ipod since I heard it on an Ironman finish line broadcast (geek). But I know that they have, or at least ten years ago had, a pretty big following. And the other folks at the party seemed to be rocking out pretty hard. In an unusual situation, the average age of the crowd was about ten years older than us. It was just a little surreal. We're used to rolling our eyes at the 22-year-old hipsters at shows we go to, and this show was a bunch of slightly older folks in department-store sportswear who clearly knew how to party way better than we do.
Music snob that I am, I admit I was at best mildly bemused at the experience. I mean, this is (was) a pretty big band that probably is used to playing larger venues. They had 13 guitars on stage, huge lighting rigs, smoke machines, the full deal. And yet there were maybe 100 or 150 people in the audience. But they did put on a great show. And I know that there are fans out there who would have killed to see it.
When I was fifteen or so, I remember learning that Jane's Addiction had played an impromptu show in an old warehouse just blocks from my home. I was devastated that I had missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see one of my favorite bands in a venue they would surely never play again. Some kid will probably hear about this show from the chatter on the band's myspace page and be heartbroken that he missed this opportunity. Hey, kid: these crappy cell-phone photos are for you.
October 9, 2007
Tuckus over teakettle
Yup, that's my husband's backside sticking up out of the cloud of dust. I took this photo on Sunday during his first-ever cyclocross race. It was an eventful race for Dave, who rode a borrowed single-speed bike (thanks, Brian!) yet still managed to drop his chain at least three times. And then there was the crashing. Anyway, he's fine, but there was quite a bit of blood to be mopped up after the finish. Not to mention the dirt, rocks, flecks of dried grass and those clingy burr things. Dave's knees and elbows are gradually becoming covered with perma-scars. He's no delicate flower.
To be fair, here are some better photos of Dave looking awesome hopping barriers and riding down what looked in real life like a cliff.
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Our friend Marissa dominated the women's category C race, taking first and donning the series leader's jersey on the podium. This is her first full season in the sport (after several years of triathlon and a few cross races last year on a borrowed bike), and she's kicking serious ass. I'm pretty sure she crashed at some point in her race as well, judging by the blood running down her arm after her race.
It was a long, hot, dusty day of racing and spectating and BBQing and drinking homebrew and eating cupcakes (and I squeezed in an hour-long run on the lovely Bay Trail). After the final awards were handed out, we stuck around to help break down the course. At a running race this would mean taking down the finish line and maybe collecting a few signs. But this entire course (a loop of a couple of miles) was laid out with stakes and tape. We collected and sorted hundreds of stakes, miles of tape, wooden barriers, sandbags, cones and pylons, AND broke down the finish line and gathered signs. It was hard, dirty, fun work among good company (mostly Dave and Marissa's team). We were at the race site from about 7:30am until 5pm. It was a great day.
I was a little sore Monday morning. But not from racing! That doesn't happen very often.
October 6, 2007
Sock the monkey
This is a quilt I made for a friend who's having a baby very soon. She likes sock monkeys. Who doesn't?
But the best part was that, at the baby shower today, this friend's mom gave her an actual sock monkey which she had made herself. The monkey and the quilt are a perfectly matched set!
Here is a closer look at the front. The back is cozy flannel covered with adorable monkey faces.
My sewing machine and I are very tired.
