Black birds (not “wild parrots of Telegraph Hill” although this *is* their tree if you believe what the politicos would have you to believe).
Where are the parrots? Ou sont les parrots?
May 7, 2008
May 1, 2008
Grapes 2.0
Yay, me! I just caught up on eighty back posts at grapes 2.0, dating back to before we left for Jordan/Egypt in March.
bloglines lets me know just how far behind I get on the umpty ump RSS feeds I’ve stashed away here.
So, I go away for a while or don’t hang out on the computer for a while and before you know it, a blog I track has EIGHTY POSTS I haven’t read yet with more added each day.
Fine. Caught up on grapes2.0.
Next up Sara Zarr’s blog: 116 posts behind on that one. …
April 28, 2008
I miss sunsets
We face east toward Oakland and Berkeley and get sunshiney wakeups in the morning, but our location means the sun sets behind the hill directly behind us so we never see sunsets unless we’re out and about.
I was talking with a nabe the other day who told me he takes the stairs to Pioneer Park (AKA Coit Tower to most) to watch the sun set. Sounds like a plan.
We were out and about yesterday …
April 24, 2008
Home again, home again, and wilted spinach salad and garlic bread for dinner
We got back from our flying visit to Obama country late Tuesday.
(One of the reasons we visit Obama country. …)Weather when we landed was spitting. (Oh, please give us more rain before the dry summer months kick in.)
We caught the Super Shuttle in from the airport. His nibs had signed and paid online (cheaper that way) before we left home. There were two other guys in the van before us and we wondered where we’d be taken on our way home. Super Shuttle is a fantastic random way to see parts of the City that we don’t usually see.
Both guys — turned out — lived in the Sunset, just a few blocks from each other. One was like at 26th and Noriega, the other at 27th and Judah, maybe?
After dropping the second guy off, the driver drove like a bat outta hell to get from the Sunset to Telegraph Hill, through the park, up Park Presidio to 101 to Lombard then over on Larkin and up Union, down Montgomery.
Home again, home again. Drop the bags on the floor. Pick up the mail that’s sitting where it fell after the mail carrier stuffed it through the door slot.
By now it was past 7:30p and our usual behavior would’ve been to walk down to Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store and order a large carafe of cheap red wine and two orders of canneloni. Soul soothing food for tired people. Ymmm. But there was this drizz, see? and I was tired and … I can make dinner quicker than we could walk the four blocks down to Mario’s and wait for our order. Not to mention I didn’t feel like walking uphill home after dinner.
Dinner Tues
Preheat oven to 375dF or so. Set the rice cooker cooking rice. Fish from the freezer, thawed in the microwave. Place on aluminum foil. Sprinkle with mixed herbs. Squeeze half lemon on top. Wrap up and put in oven for 15min. (~$3)
Prep broccoli and put in microwave for 3min. (~$0.50)
Hmmm. Hmmm. Start sorting through mail. 15min up. Check fish. Put back in for another five minutes. Check broccoli. Zap for another minute.
Cost: maybe $4 for the two of us. ($0.50 for broccoli. $0.20 for rice, maybe? $0.20 for lemon. $3 for fish. … Cheaper than Mario’s, that’s for sure.)
Dinner Wedn
Last night I just wanted something simple. Still lagging from the trip. His nibs had stopped off in Chinatown on his way back from his doctor’s appointment and stocked up on fresh veggies and fruit. What sounded good?
Hardboil two eggs. Well, three eggs, really. Save one for an egg salad sandwich Thursday or Friday. Peel and chop two eggs.
[How to boil an egg. Place egg in small pot. Cover with cold water. Place pot on burner. When water boils, turn off heat, put lid on pot and wait ten minutes. After ten minutes, pour hot water from pot and cool egg(s) by filling pot with cold water.]
Rinse bag of spinach from Chinatown. Shake dry. Put in large heat-proof bowl. Cost: $0.50
Toss chopped egg on top. Cost: $0.40 +/- for two eggs.
Take about 1/3 lb bacon and cut into small bits. Fry. Cost: ~$0.70 (bacon 4lbs/$8 @ Costco)
While waiting for bacon to crisp, slice a chunk of sour batard in half, butter, sprinkle with garlic herb sprinkle, put back together, butterside<->butterside, wrap in aluminum foil and heat in 400dF oven. Cost: ~$0.60
Take fried bacon bits out of frying pan and toss onto spinach in bowl. Pour off all but 3T of bacon fat. (Save remainder of bacon fat in refrigerator dish with bacon fat already saved there for another day. …)
Add 2T olive oil to bacon fat in frypan. Heat. Add 1/2 onion, chopped. Brown. Add ~ 3T balsamic vinegar and scrape up bits from bottom of frypan. Cost olive oil/onion/vinegar ~ $0.50
When hot through, pour onion/vinegar/fat over spinach/egg/bacon and toss. Serve with garlic bread.
Cost for tasty, nutritious (well, except for the bacon and bacon fat) dinner for two: $3, if that.
Home again, home again. Let’s take a boat to Bermuda. Let’s grab a plane to Saint Paul. Let’s take a kayak to Quincy or Nyack. Let’s get away from it all.
But it’s oh. so. nice. to come home.
April 16, 2008
This Is How We Lost to the White Man
‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’
Article in the May Atlantic about Bill Cosby’s activism and his path from I Spy and the Huxtables to his Pound Cake speech and on.
The Web article includes a link to a vid interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote the article. Both the article and the Coates interview are time well-spent.
Link: The Pound Cake Speech – Bill Cosby, speaking 17 May 2004 in Washington, DC, at the NAACP’s 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education (text and audio)
April 14, 2008
View from the Hill
In today’s Chron … a view from the Hill
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2008/04/13/PKMADONNA.DTL
The text was influenced by the mystery I’m allegedly working on. (Nothing about people with telescopes and/or wheelchairs. Honest!)
Update: Updated link to Madonna strip. Previous link was 404.
April 13, 2008
Dinner last night – give me that old time sauce and sole
Simple really.
We buy fish at Costco in big cheaper-by-the-pound lots and then divvy it up into 1/2lb. bags for the freezer.
Cost of fish ~$3.
1C of dry white wine. (Doesn’t need to be the pricey stuff, but at least make it something you’d drink out of a glass without spewing. Peter Vella Chardonnay out of the box we stash in the hall closet for just such uses.)
Chopped onion. I used maybe half an onion. (onion $0.39/lb in Chinatown)
Add wine and onion to saute pan and heat to boiling. Add fish. Cook until fish flakes easily with a fork. Take fish out of pan and put in a glass baking dish.
While the fish is cooking. Melt a cube [1/2C] of butter in a measuring cup in the microwave. Butter melted? Fish done and removed to baking dish? Good.
Boil down the wine and onion until reduced to about 1/3C. Add the hot wine/onion reduction to the melted butter in the measuring cup.
Separate two egg yolks.
(We used the egg whites in the scrambled eggs this morning. …)
Put two egg yolks in blender and whirl. You see where we’re going right? While the yolks are whirling, pour the wine/onion/melted-butter mix into the blender and whirl until it all thickens up. Call this a Hollandaise variant if you must.
Pour the sauce over the fish that’s in the baking dish. Sprinkle with a bit of shredded Parmesan cheese. On top of that, sprinkle a dusting of paprika.
Put under a broiler until the sauce browns lightly.
Served with rice and asparagus, which happens to be 99c/pound in Chinatown and local, not shipped in from Chile or some such place. We had about half a pound between us.
Total cost something like $4, maybe $4.50 for the two of us.
Delish. Hard on the arteries, but delish.
Views from the Hill
No picture. Didn’t think of it while everything was happening.
BIG CLOUD OF BLACK BLACK SMOKE coming up from the other side of Treasure Island. We popped the cover off the telescope lens and spotted a yacht adrift, flames billowing above it, being pushed south by the tides. The boat drifted behind the Admin building and then came into sight again. Looked like probably an engine fire. That end of the boat was engulfed in flames. Engine fire? Fiberglass boat? The smoke was immense.
One of the fireboats headed off from Pier 22 1/2 to deal with the blaze. Coast Guard and other boats were keeping clear after rescuing the folks on board the boat. The fireboat eventually arrived (They’re not the fastest boats on the Bay.) and started dousing the blaze. Eventually the yacht sank beneath the waves.
Not a sunny Saturday for the people on the yacht, but at least they got out with their skins intact.
Update:Chron story
April 4, 2008
Cookbooks as Anthropology and the art of cooking
comment on the cookbooks post:
Mainly, though, I don’t use cookbooks for meals any more. Everything we eat seems to be variations on about ten themes. Gordon Ramsay always advises his victims on Kitchen Nightmares to simplify, and it’s good advice.
Of course cookbooks are not only, or sometimes hardly at all, for cooking. From the pure book POV I love David, and Claudia Roden. I have a fat tome of classic techniques in Italian cooking by Antonio Bugialli, which is only for thumbing through.
We pretty much stopped cooking from cookbooks when the youngsters were in the house. No time for browsing through cookbooks when you are working and raising, and it’s disappointing to spend time prepping something that’s downed in ten minutes and appreciated just as much as if you’d made them their favorite meatloaf. We had dishes we knew they liked that we varied in one way or another but yeah, ten themes is probably accurate for our cooking repertoire then too.
I like cookbooks, whether I’m cooking from them or not. I sit and read them and I’m in another world, a world with cuttlefish on the table or an endless number of cabbage recipes, or no eggs-milk-butter. You can tell a lot about how people live by looking at the cookbooks written for them.
A friend once asked, “But really. How many cookbooks do you need?” What can I answer to something like that?
Cookbooks aren’t just something for checking out a recipe for mu-shu pork or Char Siu Bao or gingersnaps. No, when I need a recipe, it’s usually not a specific cookbook I head for. I pull out five cookbooks and find five recipes and mix them up, or I go to the Web and do something similar with Google.
Cookbooks are for dreaming over, for sitting curled up in a chair with a breeze coming in off the Bay with a pad of sticky notes, marking pages with possibilities for future dishes or snacks or desserts.
Dinner the other night (and last night as leftovers) was a variant on shrimp à la king, made without recipes. Simple, ready?
Olive oil. A small red onion. Garlic.
Bell pepper strips from Trader Joe’s, mélange à trois green/yellow/red: frozen. (16oz bag)
Medium-sized shrimp from Trader Joe’s: cleaned, cooked, frozen. (16oz? bag)
Butter. Flour. Heavy whipping cream.
Parmesan cheese. Pale dry sherry.
Olive oil in pan. Heat. Add garlic and sliced onion. Cook until browned. Add red-yellow-green pepper strips. Cook some more. Add shrimp and stir until shrimp is hot. Set aside.
Butter in pan. Add flour for roux. Add cream for Béchamel sauce. Toss in shredded Parmesan cheese and sherry and then fiddle with cream and cheese/sherry until you have a nice thick not-too-cheesy sauce. Grind of pepper. Stir sherry sauce into shrimp/pepper medley. Serve with rice.
Total cost ~ $10, if that. From that we had two dinners, or four meals. It was delicious.
Would I have known to toss those things together if I hadn’t already made seafood enchiladas =and= chicken with the sherry Parmesan sauce? Would I have tossed the melange à trois peppers with the shrimps if there hadn’t been a shrimp à la king in my past? I don’t know. I think, like many things, it’s easier to cook without recipes, once you have enough time booked using someone’s tried and true directions.
Natural cooks do not spring from Zeus’ brow.
Oh, how I love cookbooks.
Update: “So, what are you planning for dinner?”
“I dunno. Haven’t decided yet. Have any preferences?”
“I’d like meatloaf.”
Meatloaf for dinner tonight — “Cottage Cheese Meat Loaf,” to be exact.