Another Sunday night

...another weekend chock full of stuff!

Let's start with last weekend:

Friday
-Dinner with R & R at Zachary's. Yum.

Saturday
-Bay-Friendly Gardening seminar on low-water plants. Lotsa good learning.
-Voluntered at the Alameda Country Community Food Bank
-Dinner with S and C at Soi4. Dessert care of TJ's - molten choco cake. More yum.

Sunday
-Raider tailgate (as described in the previous post)
-Party planning and dinner with Dad at Camino. Super yum.
-Experimental clearing of slow drains using vinegar. Sadly, did not work.


Now, on to this weekend:
Friday
-Dinner with Mom to belatedly celebrate her birthday, at Cortez. Amazing small plates. Really delicious.

Saturday
-Composting with Worms class. Dirt! Worms! Fungus!
-Chinese Lesson
-Dinner at Paul K in SF (nice Mediterranean food...delicious beets)
-San Francisco Symphony featuring Joshua Bell on violin. That boy can play.

Sunday
-All day sewing in preparation for Halloween. (check later for photo)
-KB rocks the chores with grocery shopping, garden shopping, laundry en masse, cooking, and mopping. That's my sweetie!

Oh, KB also attend an industry charity dinner, black tie optional. He borrowed a plaid cummerbund & tie set from Dads, and then proceeded to terrorize folks who knew him before he shaved and cut his hair. Totally awesome. I picked up my tipsy sweetie from the St. Francis around 11:30pm, whereupon he presented me with the lovely flower centerpiece (red roses...odd for a charity event but great for a spouse consolation prize) and told me how much he appreciates me. The latter is something he tends to do when tipsy. My friend J rightly pointed out that this is a rather cute trait.

Red-Letter Day!

Went to see the Giants game. Got the sweeeeeeet company seats. w00t!

Yes, that's my view 3 rows back from the field. Close enough to say things the players and umpires could hear! I sat up in the front row for a few innings too.

And then we came home and made cheese from scratch! Like, for real! We bought some cream-top 2% organic milk from TJ's and followed the directions in our Cheesemaking Kit, and less than an hour later, fresh mozarella cheese! How cool is that?

Om nom nom.

La Frida Bonita y otras cosas

Went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the SF MOMA this weekend. I was surprised by how many paintings were included in the exhibit, and frustrated by how many people were also moving through the rooms. It was hard to read the information displays, and hard to get in close - even sometimes see from a distance - the paintings. But what paintings! I know Kahlo mostly for her self-focused imagery, her struggles with pain, her representations of inner anguish. The exhibit showed her earlier portraits (straight-up, 30s modern), her later still lifes (vibrant, beautiful, static) and many candid photographs from her years in SF and Mexico...in addition to the amazing images you already know. There was good biographical information about her marital to-and-fro-ing with Diego Rivera, as well as her sojourns in America. Altogether she painted some very beautiful, symbolic, thoughful pieces. I was surprised by my enthusiasm. And while she herself was beautiful and charismatic, and she was tragically in love with Diego Rivera, a doughy dumpling of a man - what was she thinking???

Afterwards we got the super-bonus of an exhibit of modern Chinese artists - including Yueh MinJun whose works shows hordes of painfully grinning Chinese men (on ostriches, as fields of near-identical statues, sitting around, etc.). They are somehow perfect - identical, falsely friendly/happy, artificial, vaguely off-putting. Ai WeiWei had taken Neolithic clay pots (5000-3000 BCE) and painted over them with garishly-colored paints. Sacrilege! What a waste! Or...an interesting point about history, conservation, consumerism. Sui Jianguo created "The Sleep of Reason" - my new favorite, a statue of sleeping Mao (very unusual, as the link explains), and filled the room around him with waves of colored toy plastic dinosaurs, radiating outwards in dreamlike technicolor trip-out patterns. Way cool.

Afterwards we had dinner on Fillmore street at SPQR, a mixed-up Italian joint. It was good, but I can't tell you why. The desserts were confused (the "panna cotta" was a delicious chocolate mousse with chocolate cake on the bottom), and I think we paid too much. I was fascinated by the clientele; Mom had commented recently that people eating out in the East Bay are somehow different than the people eating out in San Francisco - more casual. Sitting there in SPQR, all I could see were white people, all the women were blond (almost none naturally), all from a very high socio-economic stratum, healthy, wearing very nice clothing, and not necessarily enjoying themselves. I felt pretty ghetto in my shorts and stringy yoga top. The couple to the right of us complained the whole time about the food, and the woman to the left of us spent almost the entire meal nattering away to her absently listening partner. Dad and I barely needed to talk for all the entertainment we had. Yes Mom, diners in San Francisco are different. I'll stick to the East Bay.

Nip Family Reunion Redux

Location: Honolulu, HI

Attendees: legion

Weather: hot and humid

Thursday:
Flight delayed. We arrive at our hotel at 3am PST in an enormous white SUV, the Buick Enclave. Yes, it's a housing unit on wheels.

Friday:
Breakfast on the terrace at the New Otani hotel. It's warm and there are brief rain showers on us, but no one seems to mind. Ah, Hawaii! Dad heads off to
meetings about Popo. I wrestle with a nasty migraine, K and I stroll on the
promenade towards Wakiki. We meet up with Aunt P., Aunt S., Uncle R., Dad, and Popo for lunch.

Evening: Tsukiji Fish Market buffet. The games begin! Cousin S (or rather, her husband M) has made blueberry butter mochi for Dad and Uncle W (the hosts of dinner and both turning 70 this year)...evil evil stuff.

Saturday:
Breakfast: malasadas. YUM.

9:30am ceremony at the graves of Ah-Po and Ah-Gung, my great-grandparents (the parents of Popo). There are mosquitoes, cockroaches, broken pavement...and lots of food and fire to appease our ancestors. We burn paper money (fake), kowtow in generational order, and stand around in the humid Manoa Valley air eating the food - pork, chicken, red bean buns, jai, and some weird gelatinous rice stuff I've never had before and didn't like. Dad shows us the graves of Gung Gung's parents (the Young side), which have "superior" feng shui, i.e. a better view of the ocean. He tells us of the time when he was a boy running through the graveyard and fell about four feet into one of the grave plots. Spooky! Before leaving Manoa we drive up to Gung Gung's memorial garden and spend some time there. It looks well-tended and the lilies are in bloom. We leave a lei on the plaque and take lots of pictures.

We visit Popo again and tell her about the morning's ceremonies, then head off to the Diamond Head Memorial Park where we put some flowers on Gung Gung and Doreen's spot. We drive by the house on Hakaka as well. It looks pretty good, though the driveway and roof are aging, and the garbage cans no longer fit into the nice concrete cubby where they used to live, back in the day. I guess we just have more garbage now!

We drive out to Kaneohe and, after missing the two main turns, make it out to Uncle G and Auntie H's place there to celebrate Uncle G's 80th birthday. (He's not techically my uncle but my Dad's uncle; he is Popo's brother.) Dad heads to the harbor to join the glass-botom boat tour, and K and I alternate helping to set up the tables and napping. I join a flat-bottom boat ride out to Coconut Island, the same one featured in the opening scenes of Gilligan's Island. After I get back to the house, K and I take a brief kayak paddle around the nearby bay. I learn how to husk a coconut (WORK!!!) while others fish without results. The party is great fun. Tons of friends and relatives, a great catered poi supper (rice, tuna poke, lomi salmon, Korean short ribs, kim chee, chicken long rice, lau lau, pineapple, baked taro, and of course poi!), and even some ukelele and hula entertainment from the relatives. There's a cake, more butter mochi (cherry this time) and fruits - long an, lychee, and incredibly delicious mango. We are all seriously stuffed.

Sunday
Breafast: More malasadas. More yum.
The Tinman Triathlon threatens to block our ability to get anywhere on Sunday morning, but thankfully it's mostly over by the time we head out for family photos at the Hawaii State Library. More mosquitoes, and more photos. We take a walking detour to "the Westminster Abbey of the Pacific", Kawaiahao Church and browse around the graveyard. Lots of old Hawaii families and missionaries.

Lunch is at the Mandalay Restaurant, where we have some great dim sum and are treated to a lion dance. This brunch is in honor of my cousin R and his new wife, N. N has been a trooper throughout the weekend with all the relatives and everyone offering their congratulations. After brunch we get chocolate-covered fortune cookies, more cake, and a slideshow from their wedding.

We visit Popo one last time, and while we are there more cousins show up to chat as well. Popo is very bright and active, and even jokes and smiles a bit. It probably helps that she's benefitting from all the good food leftovers!

We make it back to the hotel for some brief beach time (in fact, my only time on the beach - K stays near the air condtioner inside). Dad and I enjoy the sun and splash about, before getting ready for that night's banquet dinner in honor of Auntie T's 80th birthday. More food! More feasting! We all keep our eyes open for the noodle course - usually the last one before dessert. Kyle and I sneak out unobtrusively to catch a cab to the airport, and secretly aren't all that heartbroken to miss dessert - we really don't need the calories!

Yoink Birthday Dinner at Chez Panisse

A half-bottle of Pierre Peters blanc de blanc champagne

Cherry tomato salad with handmade mozzarella, anchovies, and curly endive

A half-bottle of 2005 "village" burgundy

Tagliata di manzo Grilled Cannard Farm Dexter beef with creamed wild greens and vegetable fritto misto

Boysenberry, peach leaf, and apricot bombe glacee

Mint and lemon verbena tisane


Thanks Dad!

Tokyo Food Lineup, cont.

Memory is fading a bit already, but I'll do my best.

Day 4, dinner: Restarant Engaku in Daikanyama, a kaiseki joint run by The Plum Lady. The proprietess knows everything plum, and there's even a book about her plum knowledge. Dinner starts with homemade plum wine, and continues through many beautifully arranged and tasty courses. Sad to say I can barely remember what most of them were, though there was definitely an assortment of seafood and meats, a delicious rice porridge, and traditional frothy tea at the end. The hostess even treated us to some incense listening - apparently serious incense people don't smell it, they listen to it - where tiny slivers of wood were set on a glass plate over a heat source packed in sand. Precious and very delightful-smelling. She even shared records of incense-listening sessions much like wine tastings, where guests took guesses at the sources and similarities of the incense sources. Whew.

Day 5, lunch: we stroll through the Asakusa district, admiring the Golden Turd atop Philippe Stark's Asahi building, and the temple, and the kitch stalls stretching to the horizon. We duck into a tempura restaurant and have truly mediocre tempura. A bust!

Day 5, dinner: Dinner definitely makes up for lunch. After watching a performance at the Tokyo Symphony, our gracious hosts take us up to the Ark Hills Club where we enjoy a parade of beautiful, delicious, and extraordinary sushi. Just awesome. The chef even shares a particular eggplant with us, which can be eaten raw - and tastes delicious. We're all completely stuffed, and wander about the club in a sushi high, admiring the views of Tokyo and the art by Le Corbusier.

Day 6, lunch: After discovering that the neighborhood tempura joint (recommended to us by the hotel staff) is closed, we settle for noodles in Ebisu, 99-something. It's crowded and noisy and Mom doesn't like it much, but I'm happy to have tasty noodles on a rainy day. Plus, the table is fully of funky additives.

Day 6, dinner: We return to the site of previous exploits, the yakitori joint. After a week of glorious feasting, we decide to tone it down and stick (mostly) to vegetables. Wrapped in bacon. Asparagus, tomatoes, and enoki mushrooms. Once again, delicious.

Mom heads back to Shanghai, but I stay on a for a few days of work in the Tokyo office. Sunday night I meet up with a colleague and we enjoy noodles at Ippudo. They're so big they've started a restaurant in NYC. One feature is they provide cloves of garlic and a presser at the table so you can have fresh squashed garlic in your noodles. Serious yum.

Monday night, another colleague and I go to Ninja in Akasaka. This turns out to be a theme park and a very good restaurant - we are led by a ninja through the "dangerous" path to our table, and served by various server ninjas, and entertained by a ninja magician. The food is really good in spite of the kitch factor - foams and flavors put together in an updated fusion mix. The only real miss was the dessert - one of them had a delicious flan on top of what can only be described as "snot noodles". Ew.

Tuesday before getting on the plane, I follow my colleagues to a tempura joint not far away. It's fabulous. While I wouldn't ordinarily consider paying $30 for a set tempura lunch, this is totally worth it. We have 4 different plates of piping hot tempura, plus rice and crunchy vegetables and tea. Finally! Light, melt-in-your mouth tempura that doesn't obscure the taste of the food inside!


Other notes from the trip:
On the way back from dinner one night, we sample the local hole-in-the-wall-yet-very-famous tako yaki - octopus balls. They are puffy, creamy, scorching hot dough balls with a morsel of octopus inside. I can't say I was an instant fan, but they weren't repulsive either.

The money-washing shrine in Kamakura, where you put your yen in a basket and use the shrine's stream to "wash" it. Copious incense fires nearby help you (carefully) dry your damp yen. Money so washed is supposed to return in multiple, so we're advised to spend it wisely.

Mom and D and I hit the town, and check out the Art Deco Teian Art Museum. The exhibit there features export ceramics (not so interesting), but the building itself is a beautiful Art Deco confection, with really lovely details in things like the stairway railings and radiator covers. We also tromp about the garden a bit, deserted due to the rain showers, and smelling slightly of ginko.

We tackle another neighborhood museum, the Meguro Art Museum. It's a small space and no translations are available, and we're the only ones in the Museum. We eventually figure out that the works are by Japanese artists in the style of impressionist painters and have a reasonably good time.

I bought a few pairs of Japanese split-toe socks, with the idea that I like wearing my flip-flops in the house but sometimes it's chilly. They're working out grandly, and I'm wearing them now. Yay, warm feet!

Sumimasen...Om Nom Nom

This trip to Tokyo has been in the planning for something like a year now (or rather, in the discussing...planning only got serious about a month ago) with Mom and her friends. A stated goal of the trip has always been consumption of great quantities of high-quality Japanese food. So far, so good.

Day 1, dinner: We head into the neighborhood (Meguro-ku) for sashimi. As M says, "In Japan, even the worst sushi is better than almost anything you can get outside of Japan." We are each presented with an amuse bouche of a giant snail of some kind. I pass. I opt for the uni instead, which is as delicious as everyone always says it is. Essence of umami in a squishy orange blob.

Day 2, lunch: Noodles in Kamakura, suburb of temples. After a morning of slightly taxing hiking amongst the hills and temples, we duck into a noodle joint on the main drag and everyone has cold soba. Except for me. I need the protein, so opt for an oyaku-don (chicken & egg over rice) instead. Yum. On the way towards the train station after visiting the Big Buddha, we get green tea soft serve ice cream.

Day 2, dinner: An amazing feast at a place called Kamakurayama - ostensibly a "steak restaurant" in the hills above Kamakura, but somehow we manage to have the best sashimi I've ever had (this one's for you, Dad) as an appetizer - consisting mainly of shellfish I would ordinarily never eat but was fantastically, eye-openingly, fresh and delicious. The steak was a beautifully marbled slice of something divine. I'm drooling just thinking about it, and I don't eat much steak anymore.

Day 3, lunch: Roppongi Hills shopping center. We navigate our way through the slightly disorienting complex to a tempura restaurant...only to find that it's closed on Wednesdays. Doh! We navigate our way back into the main area, visually appraise the various restaurants on the food floor, and opt for sashimi. Super-bonus: weird black sweet mochi for dessert, covered in what we guess is peanut powder. Later that afternoon, between visiting the Sky View and the Mori Museum Turner Prize exhibit, we down fruit juice floats.

Day 3, dinner: We head once again into Meguro-ku for yakitori, squeeze into a local 25-seat restaurant, and pig out. We proceed to eat chicken wings, gizzards, livers, and cartilage(!); asparagus wrapped in bacon, tomato wrapped in bacon, potato, eggplant, shitake; pork rolled with shiso, ginko nuts. Yum, yum, and yum. We roll home afterwards.

Day 4, lunch: Shibuya district, Tokyu Honten (department store). We head up to their restaurant floor and once again visually appraise the options. We're planning to get tempura in Asakusa tomorrow, so we pass on the Everything Unagi place and the noodle joint and opt for more sushi. We sit at the bar and point; the chef is very friendly, and even faintly amused by our limited sushi vocabulary. "Is that ikura? Aaaaaaaa."

Tonight we're headed into Daikanyama for another local recommendation by a friend. Gonna have to work up an appetite, or at least work off some guilt at how many calories we're eating!

Food and Wine

Last Saturday we went to the Kermit Lynch annual Oysters and Chablis outdoor food-fest in Berkeley. Dad was, of course, the instigator, so it only seems fair to show his happy sponsorship. From left to right: Champagne (not so great), Chablis (bought a bottle), and Aligote (very tasty). Turns out simple crisp whites go very nicely with salty things like oysters. At least, that's what I think Dad said. K stuck with sausages, and we split an strawberry-rhubarb galette and a salted chocolate cookie. Salted chocolate seems to be the New Hot Taste these days; that's the second restaurant we've been to in the last month with a salt+chocolate pairing.

Some more vacation tidbits:

Fresh housemade ricotta and buffalo mozzzarella in Campania. We had just finished visiting the temples at Paestum in the middle of buffalo mozzarela country. Serious five-star yum. On a slightly worrisome note, in addition to the garbage scandals in Campania (Napoli's "state"), there are concerns that illegal dumping is causing toxic chemicals like dioxin to get into groundwater and soil. Apparently some buffalo mozzarela has tested positive for dioxin, and the DOCG buffalo mozzarella consortium has of course been working to disprove/discredit these rumors. Their sales would plummet! Sadly, corruption is alive and thriving in southern Italy...or do they just hear about it more than we do in the US?

The fish market at Siracusa - much cheaper than Taormina, where we stayed. But we didn't have any way to bring pounds and pounds of shrimp home and cook them, which I'm sure Mom would have done given the chance. One vendor had a bucket of still-alive octopi, somewhat squeam-inducing.

Dear lord, it's almost March!!!

Where has 2008 gone? Yikes!

Last weekend was awesome. Dad hosted his annual Burgundy tasting dinner, and actually invited us to attend! W00t! First time ev4r. There were 18 bottles of wine for 18 people, some 9 different wines (2 champagnes, 2 whites, 5 reds), and a delicious dinner. And great company! Many of the attendees hadn't seen us since our wedding, so it was great to catch up with them and witness their surprise and delight at K's "new" hair- and beardstyles. We arrived at 6:30 and didn't leave until 12:30. Decadence!

Then Sunday was another foodstravaganza: my Aunt E.'s Chinese New Year Party. Gong Shi Fah Zay! (Note that's the Shanghainese version of Gung Hay Fat Choy) She cooked up a storm, and Aunt J. and Mom brought even more to eat. The cousins and mini-cousins were there, and it was a great family gathering. Chinese New Year is the time to eat symbolic foods pertaining to luck, properity, and fertility. So there were lots of eggs, round things, things whose Chinese characters look or sound like money...between the fat and the family, I felt very rich! Super-bonus: my cousin Bob (who, like me, was born in the Year of the Rat - this year!) brought a bag of plush rats to hand out the the mini-cousins. Five fat, furry, buck-toothed, thick-tailed rats from IKEA. It was awesome.

This weekend we had dinner with one of K's colleagues: J and his family. We spent most of the dinner taking about games. Classic video games, new video games, board games. It was a complete geek-out. Lots of fun. K also saved the universe (playing Mass Effect), and I pulled a bazillion weeds out of our front yard. My back and legs muscles are really paying for it, but it makes me happy to have a neat(er) front yard. It was great weather, so there was also a lot of cat-like basking in the sun. With the not so cat-like New Yorker.


A quick Brussels restaurant redux:

Brasserie de la Gare - not too far from work and yummy Belgian food. Great interior decor.

Belga Queen - very chic and with very Belgian food. The bathrooms were unisex with transparent doors...until you turned the lock. I ate foie gras and woodpecker. Yum!

Kokob - the Ethiopian place. Tasty, but not as tasty as Cafe Colucci here in Berkeley. They did have a nice hibiscus, ginger, and something-else aperitif though.

The flight home was delayed at JFK (shock! dismay!) and the nice Delta folks comped us the movies and games. I spent most of the flight riveted by a Popcap game, something to do with flipping links to eliminate them. Damn those electronic crack dealers!

Next trip? Probably back to Brussels in April. Mom's muttering about going to Japan in May but the planning might be complicated.

Brussels Weekend 1

Well, K and I owe some serious holiday updates, but for now here's mine. I'm camped in Brussels for the nonce, and had a very nice weekend.

Friday: stayed up stupidly late watching "The Punisher", featuring John Travolta as the bad guy and some easy-on-the-eyes guy as the Punisher himself. Plus, it was dubbed into Italian. How could I resist?

Saturday: woke up groggy and headachy and hungry at noon. I stumbled across the rainy plaza to Le Pain Quotidien and had a sublime salad of smoked salmon and lentils. Even the group of chatty Flemish folks didn't kill my buzz; the asked what I was eating and I managed to find the right item on the Flemish-language menu. In the afternoon I wandered the streets, eyeing sale displays & antiques, and eventually found a market that sells yogurt. I also gathered up a fair sampling of gourmet chocolate goodies. Saturday evening I failed to find a restaurant with availability and settled for the local bar/cafe. Turns out they've updated their menu since I last had it, and it includes some decent salads and desserts. Huzzah!

Sunday: woke up at a decent hour, chatted with K (he was up late, gaming with buddies), worked out, went back to LPQ, did some work, met a friend at the Museum around the corner to see the Reubens exhibit. Trudy Kohler, these "pink, squishy bodies" are for you! It proved beautiful and educational - apparently Reubens was so successful that later in his career he would sketch out models of large works and hand the execution over to other studios. Outsourcing it, old school! The room with his huge religious works was just gorgeous - he really packs his compositions with action, motion, and detail. Then we went to a local cafe and enjoyed some sinfully rich rasberry meringue tart. Sugar buzz!

I'll probably go back to the cafe tonight for simplicity's sake. Sometime this week I'm determined to check out the Ethiopian restaurant near the Grand Place, as well as a few more Thai restaurants and some classic Belgian joints. Though those are often hard on the arteries...can't take too much of that. I did find a Japanese restaurant, so that's on my list for when I need some comfort food. And the opera house is showing Handel's "Julius Ceasar in Egypt". Dad says if I can catch a performance, I'll have been to an opera house that he hasn't. Ha!

A few takeaways so far:
1. Nearly everyone in Brussels speaks English. I'm giving up on my shitty French for now.
2. A cold, overcast day in Brussels is a good day. At least it's not raining.
3. I need to find healthier things to eat in Brussels. Waffles, fries, beer, shrimp, mussels, and chocolate don't make for balanced nutrition.