Skipping Town

Research. Preparation. Nerves. These aren’t the things you’d expect a nice dinner out to include. But the dinner Andrew and I had Saturday night wasn’t just any dinner. It wasn’t just any meal out. It was our long-awaited, struggled-to-get-a-table-for, expectations-through-the-roof dinner at Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse—for all you non-foodies out there—is more or less considered the birthplace of “California cuisine,” as well as the harbinger of the now-ubiquitous practice of eating locally and in-season, frequenting farmer’s markets for the freshest produce, embracing all that is artisan-crafted and lovingly made rather than mass-produced. Founded by foodie doyenne Alice Waters in 1971, Chez Panisse is still located in the bungalow on Shattuck Avenue where it made culinary history—and ultimately underwent a transformation from a cozy local hangout to one of the most famous and lauded restaurants in the world. Its claim to fame? Food that tastes, exquisitely, of exactly what it is. N...

Andrew alerted me to this article today on a site called Trend Central. It discusses the rising popularity of social networking sites for "tweens," which apparently stretches all the way back to six-year-olds, an age I foolishly thought to be firmly in the "kid" category. As usual, kids can create "avatars," "chat" with each other, "rate" each other's thoughts and contributions, and, of course, "buy" things with fake money--which you have to pay REAL money to be able to "redeem." It's a total scam, and an outrageous assault on childhood. It's also, unfortunately, a trend. Rise up, people! It's only a trend if we allow it to be! Until its unprofitable for companies to develop these sites, things are just going to get worse! Rile yourself up by reading the article here: http://www.trendcentral.com/WebApps/App/SnapShots/Article.aspx?ArticleId=7366

Humanity. It’s what was on display yesterday at the Bay to Breakers Race in San Francisco, when 65,000 runners gathered at the Embarcadero for a cross-city trek to the ocean. Andrew and I had expected costumes and craziness (Andrew went prepared with a ridiculous hat, a chicken with its legs hanging down by Andrew’s cheeks). But we had underestimated San Francisco. When I say things like “race” and “runners,” I use the terms loosely; though there were some (more or less) serious runners involved, the truth is that this race is actually more of a parade, an excuse for San Franciscans to devise amazing costumes, indulge their exhibitionist tendencies, and throw tortillas. And devise, indulge, and throw they did. Each costume was better than the last. A crowd of forty or fifty runners decked out in hammer-and-sickle t-shirts as the Cold War Olympic Team… A man wearing full-body, skin-tight green spandex, covering even the eyes… Plenty of Vikings, grass skirts, lingerie, and...

It's over a hundred degrees here....I'm melting....But I just wanted to pass along a piece of desperate, sweltering advice: If you envision making ice-cold fresh-fruit smoothies on a hot afternoon, and read that a frozen banana is the ideal smoothie inclusion, PEEL THE BANANAS before freezing them. Not that I'm speaking from anything that has recently happened to me, or anything, but freezing bananas with the peel on turns everything into scary brown mush.

Here are a few life lessons I’ve learned in my cooking recently that seem worth sharing: 1. Despite the fact that they are the same color, cayenne pepper is not a good substitute when the recipe calls for a decorative dusting of paprika and you happen to be out of that particular spice. 2. If you happen to under-boil an egg, and discover its under-cooked-ness only after slicing it in half, you should not put the halves in a bowl and microwave it. The egg will literally explode and create a mess so enormous that the thought of cleaning it up is cause for mild-to-moderate despair. 3. If you’ve married wisely, your husband will peer over your shoulder at the vile microwave and say, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up.” 4. Despite what your farmer’s market cookbook says, a paste of food-processed lettuce leaves does not make a tasty sandwich spread. In fact, it’s much like eating mouthfuls of grass clippings. 5. No matter how delicious the end result, it’s hard to make a good case for ...

Last night Andrew and I decided to make a Spanish meal consisting of albondigas (meatballs) and alioli (a garlic and olive oil dip). We bought a mortar and pestle specifically with alioli in mind, and we found a recipe in a tapas cookbook Molly and Ian had gotten us for Christmas. The instructions seem simple: crush four cloves of garlic in the mortar, and continue stirring slowly with the pestle as you add one-and-a-half cups of olive oil (!) in drop by drop. It’s a labor-intensive, time-consuming process, but the cookbook chef assured us that eventually, the garlic and olive oil would fuse into a fluffy, rich paste. We stirred. We added and stirred. Yet after thirty minutes of stirring, the crushed garlic and olive oil mixture was still liquidy—the magical, alchemical reaction was, it seemed, not in our future. It was still tasty (we just drizzled it over our albondigas and fingerling potatoes), but definitely not alioli . Andrew suspects our olive oil was to blame, a cheap groce...

Andrew and I have done something that feels, to us, particularly California: we've become members of a wine club. This isn’t a wine-of-the-month club or anything like that; all wineries around here offer clubs, which usually get you twelve or so bottles of wines a year in shipments of two or three or six, and many of the selections are available only to members. A few months ago, we found a winery whose wines we love; and we finally took the plunge and became Priority Release Program members. The first shipment of six bottles arrived yesterday. In the box came a lengthy description of the included wines, with suggestions like “Enjoy now, or cellar for 10-15 years.” We likely will not be cellaring any wines (that’s a new verb for me—I like it), for reasons such as these: we don’t have a cellar, we don’t know enough about wine to confidently know the difference between a new wine and a fifteen-year-old wine, and the thought of trying to transport a wine collection when we inevitabl...

In the past week or two, I’ve come across several articles about a growing phenomenon: the rise of social networking sites for children. By “children,” I don’t mean twelve-year-olds; I mean pre-schoolers. Pre-schoolers! What on earth could a pre-schooler have to social-network about? Or even five- to eight-year-olds? The whole thing makes me feel full of unexplicable rage and horror. I don’t feel I’m overstating things to say I find the idea revolting. I speak, of course, from the perhaps uninformed position of as-yet-childless observer. I speak from a position of having gleaming, idyllic ideas of what I want my future children’s childhoods to be like, a vision that not only does not include social networking sites, but also does not even include a computer. Who wants to spend time staring at a screen, reading horrid, incorrectly punctuated-and-capitalized user-generated content, when one could be outside—planting a garden—bike-riding—drawing with chalk—and reading high-quality childre...

I'd just finished my workout: a circuit of weight-lifting, a series of ab work, and a run on the elliptical. "Here you go, Miss Fitness," the gym employee said, handing over my membership card. Miss Fitness! The gym employee was referring to me. I was stunned. No one, ever in my life, has ever referred to anything related to fitness or athletics in conjunction with ME. Yet here I am, referring to "weights" and "run" and "ab work." Who am I? Miss Fitness, apparently. I suppose I can understand his error. I've been at the gym about four times a week for the past month or so, ever since a little mishap with a Watermelon bridesmaid's dress that I ordered two months ago and then--horror, oh horror--could not fit into when it came in, prompting a frenzied return to David's Bridal and an even more frenzied seeking out of a dress, any dress, that would arrive before Molly's wedding. (Please see previous post for possible sources of t...