Monkey See, Monkey Do

I love going to the Farmer’s market but today was especially fun for several reasons.  For one thing, the weather was beautiful and sunny.  Also - Bob was with me – a big treat because usually I have to shop alone.  But best of all, I was not at just any Farmer’s Market, I was at the CUESA San Francisco Farmer’s Market at the Ferry Building, my favorite market of all.  The shops at the Ferry Building are really fun to explore, with all my favorite vendors (think: Sur la Table, Acme Bread, Cowgirl Creamery, and stores devoted only to mushrooms, olive oil or “tasty salted pig parts” as their sign proclaims).  And the people watching is great too - this market is full of diverse vendors and lots of interesting people, especially chef-people, from big name restaurants that even if you could get a reservation, you’d have to take a 2^nd mortgage on your house to pay for the meal. 

And that leads me to the topic of cardoons.  Before today, I had no clue what a cardoon was. The name sounds like some kind of ancient Asian sailing ship or a district in Hong Kong.  When we first arrived at the market, I saw a man carrying an armload of long-stemmed greens with silvery foliage.   Later in the day, I saw another guy buying a big cart load of them.  He had boxes of other assorted produce on his cart too, so I figured he was from one of the local restaurants.  I pointed to the foliage and asked him what they were.  “Cardoons,” he stated matter of factly.  “Oh,” I replied, “What do they taste like, and how do you cook them?”  “They taste like a mild artichoke. We like to blanch them first, then sauté them in garlic, butter, and olive oil.”  Yummmm!  I love artichokes. And of course anything in garlic and butter is going to taste good.  How odd that leaves would taste like artichokes, but now that I looked closer at them, the leaves did sort of look like the leaves of artichoke plants. Being the nosy, I mean curious, person that I am, I had to ask, “So what restaurant are you buying for?  I’d like to go there and try them – they sound delicious!”  The guy looked taken aback for a minute and then he said – “Saison”.  Saison!  Saison is only one of the hottest high end restaurants in the City, on par with Napa’s French Laundry, IMHO.  I made some lame joke about not being able to ever get a reservation, and then as soon as he left I immediately bought a bundle of cardoons.  You may be saying “Monkey see, Monkey do!”  but I figured If they are good enough for Saison, then they are good enough for me.

The leafy bundle with celery-like stems are the cardoons

When I got home, I opened my iPad and immediately googled cardoons.  That’s when I learned you eat the stems, not the leaves.  Hmm.  I wish I had known that before – the stems on my bundle were really anemic looking, skinny and limp.  I followed a link and learned that the stems are covered in spines and you should wear gloves while peeling them.  Gloves?  Yikes, this was starting to remind me of my unfortunate experience trying to juice prickly pear fruits, in which I ended up with thousands of miniscule spines in my hands, forearms and stomach (don’t ask). 

I found a pair of kitchen gloves and then set off peeling the stems as described in the article. The web author’s pictures looked lovely, with nicely pared, bright green, firm celery-like stems.  Mine looked like a piece of limp, dried out celery you’d find in the back of your crisper drawer, which you have decided to clean out because it was exuding a foul smell.  Worst of all, my $4.00 armload of cardoons was reduced to about ½ cup of laboriously peeled and chopped stems.  So far, this experiment was not going well.

 

Trying to keep a good attitude, I blanched the stems in salted, boiling water, and then removed them to an ice bath as soon as they were tender.  I tasted one small piece at this point, and I have to say, it was pretty good. They had a very mild, subtle artichoke taste, with a texture like the bottom of the heart, where it meets the stem.  Next, I took a little piece of black truffle butter that I just happened to have on hand (that story is for another blog), and a bit of olive oil, and sautéed the pieces. They cooked down to about 1/3 cup but they did taste really good.  Sorry Bob, I didn’t save you any.  But you wouldn’t have wanted them anyway, given that you don’t like the flavor of truffle and you don’t eat butter.  Final Score: 6/10 – mostly because they were a lot of work for so little reward.  But – I will definitely try them again, this time I'll look for a bundle with some stems that are a little meatier and fresher.  I encourage you to do the same – if you like artichokes, you will certainly like these, and it’s always nice to have another tasty vegetable dish to add your repertoire.

In Celebration of Marriage

That diamond ring is a precious thing,
and we never want to lose it.
It's like the words to a song that we love to sing,
every time we hear the music.
It's like a rainy night in candlelight,
And oh it's so romantic!
We got the whole thing working out so right,
And it's just the way we planned it.

We're in this love together. We got the kind that lasts forever.
And like berries on the vine, it gets sweeter all the time!

--Al Jareau, "We're in This Love Together"

This has been a monumental week for marriage, especially my marriage, which turns 30 years old on July 2, 2013. The song quoted above was played for our first dance, and aside from actually losing my diamond ring (and then finding it a few months later and then losing it again, possibly permanently now :( , we have been blessed to have that kind of marriage and then some.

We met when I was eighteen, and within a few months, I had decided Bob was the one for me. I think it took him a bit longer to come around (he had been engaged previously, and was still reeling from The Breakup). but from my point of view, he was cute and kind, his family was nice, and we had a lot of fun together.  That is one of the great benefits of marrying young --- you don't over think all those things like money, careers, children, what does this mean for our taxes, etc. You just decide you're going to make it work and you assume it's possible to do that. Bob never officially proposed but when I was 20, during my sophomore year in college, we were shopping for china for one of his cousin's weddings and he saw a pattern he liked - Noritake's "Limerick". It was on sale and he suggested we buy 12 place settings on credit and take turns making the monthly payments. Hmmmm. Sounded like a partnership and a commitment to me! I agreed immediately! We bought the china and ended up getting married two years later, about three weeks after we'd made the last payment. I still have every piece, and we use it as often as I can make an excuse to pull it out off the cabinet.

I was a little lost planning the wedding, since my mom had died a couple years before, I was still in college, and my sisters lived far away and were busy with their own lives.  Juggling final exams and wedding invitations, making catering and facilities arrangements, and planning the wedding ceremony all by myself was really hectic. Our wedding date was only two weeks after my graduation, and I needed to also move out of my college apartment, find a new place to live, and move our stuff into that place, all between the date of graduation and the wedding.  Oh and one other thing, neither of us had a job!  That is the benefit of being madly in love-- you just don't stress over little things like that.  Our parents, on the other hand, stressed ALOT.  My dad, brother, and sister tried to convince me to wait, while Bob's dad had a friendly chat with us, which started out with, "Well kids, you know you can't live on love alone."  Really? We seemed to somehow find a way to do just that, scraping by with our little savings account and living off all the thousands of bags of rice our friends had poured into every nook and cranny of our new apartment while we were on our honeymoon. I found remnants of that rice for years!. And boy did that rice look nice served up in our beautiful new china!

Even today I remember each line of our wedding vows, and I am so deeply honored to have married my best friend and a man who takes those words as seriously as I do, promising each other 

To have and to hold
For better or for worse
In good times and bad
In sickness and in health
For richer and for poorer
To love and to cherish
Forsaking all others
Until death do we part.

Love you Bob and sorry it's taken over a year to finish writing this post!

Response from my sister Claire:

On Aug 13, 2014, at 8:11 PM, "minimunchkyn@comcast.net" <minimunchkyn@comcast.net> wrote:

Really liked your marriage post. I celebrate marriage too...even though at times....never mind!

You really are a glutton (gluten!) for punishment planning the wedding so close to your graduation, etc. but I knew you would pull it off.

I think back to your wedding and the Crow Canyon reception once in a while: Rick trying to keep Briana happy during the wedding where the whole wedding party could see him struggling in the cry room, your wedding party laughing at jokes during the wedding, me forgetting my camera in my car at the church and realizing it when we arrived at the reception, Briana sleeping soundly on a blanket in the corner during the reception with a vibrating floor and music off the charts, Jack getting drunk on Gimlets, Aunt Amelia (and Aunt Ann I think) watching Briana while Rick and I danced. And also I remember the get together at Aunt Jackie's house. Oh and also Rick, Briana and I flying up with Dad in his plane. Rick looking white as a ghost whispering to me during a dip during turbulence when the plane dropped..."Is is supposed to do that???"

Fun times!

Claire

The haves and the have nots

I just spent a weekend in Mariposa and couldn't help noticing the differences between the haves and the have nots up here. Mariposa is a small town with only about 2000 residents, and even though the county was originally the largest of California counties in terms of geographic size, population, and income (when it was the center of California's gold mining activity) it is now one of the most sparsely populated and poorest counties of all.

Bob and I are lucky to be one of the "haves", as the PG&E inspector noted when he came up to our property to assess our request for underground power lines."You folks aren't from around here, are you?" he twanged. "You know how I can tell? You have all your teeth." And so it started - I began noticing the haves and the have nots all over town. Tom, the owner of the electrical and well supply store, was definitely a have not - all his lower teeth were gone, until he took a trip one summer to Latvia and got a whole new set for a fraction of the cost of 1-800-DENTIST. The Burger King employees are haves. They know how to read between the lines of the employment solicitation posted on the drive-through window. It reads, "Are You Good Enough To Wear the Crown?" Dental crown, that is. It's not explicitly stated, but they all know what it means. The sign on the front door might as well say "No Shoes, No Teeth, No Service."

I was walking down the main street yesterday after finishing dinner at the local pub when a group of Japanese tourists disembarked a bus returning from Yosemite. Suddenly I noticed a woman unabashedly taking a picture of me. What? Ok, sure, I was covered in red dirt, but that's because I was digging in my garden and I don't have a house to clean up in. And yes, I was wearing boots and hoisting myself into a 2 ton pickup truck, but I needed the boots to make sure I didn't get bit by a snake when walking through the tall grass on our property, and I had to drive Bob's truck because I needed to shuttle him and his friends on their rafting trip down the Tuolomne. Ok, fine. I guess it's conceivable in some stretch of the imagination, that an unschooled foreigner might have mistaken me for a closet redneck. Obviously she didn't notice that I had all my teeth, and they were straight too, and Crest-white-strip enhanced. What is she, blind??? Enduring the humiliation, I quickly opened the car door and jumped in, after picking up the half empty bottle of Bloody Mary mix which rolled off the car seat and into the street. Don't look at me like that! It was left over from a morning break while sea kayaking the day before on Tomales Bay. I didn't have time to clean out the car because after kayaking we went to the beer festival, got home late, and then came straight up to Mariposa at 6 the next morning. And NO! That chew on the dashboard doesn't belong to me! It's Garen's! Whatever. Take your stupid picture. I have better things to do than worry about what some tourist thinks. Like purifying the well. Or cleaning up the mess left on my road by Glen's cows. Or siphoning the septic tank. Or something.

Don't be Afraid of the Dark

It's been a long time since I've posted on this blog, mostly because I've had a hard time feeling inspired about something interesting to write about.  I am up in Mariposa, alone, while Bob and friends are making a spring run down the nearby Tuolomne River.  The river is a class IV and always fun but challenging. As I sit here alone with my dogs, next to my campfire, I am second guessing my decision not to join the trip. I've done the river many times, and this was a good water level (2500 cfs - enough to cover many of  the wrap rocks but not so scary that you'd need an extra dose of blood pressure pills and a vallium for good measure).   But then I think about Clavey Falls and that rock on the left side of the chute that always dislodges your oar right when you need it most, or the salad toss at the end of Ram's Head where Lisa nearly broke her arm, or bridging on Sterns or Bette's swim through Hell's Kitchen, and my little lonely campfire doesn't seem so bad anymore.

Actually, my campfire is pretty nice, as you can see from the picture below.  When making it, I considered all those things they teach the boy scouts - get some tinder, make a little teepee of sticks and stoke the tinder until it ignites the sticks. When it's nice and hot, add additional kindling and some small logs, eventually building up to some nice size logs which will really make a bonfire you can be proud of. But then, I decided that the girl scouts are much more pragmatic, and having been a loyal, cookie-pushing scout for several years, I grabbed a small bag of charcoal and a big bottle of lighter fluid, piled a bunch of logs in the pit and doused the whole thing with liquid dynamite. Voila!  Instant bonfire!  It's a relatively warm night, but the fire serves the purpose of driving away the mosquitos and gnats, especially if you don't mind acting like a piece of trout in a smoker and sitting downwind. 

The dogs are enjoying themselves tonight.  Someone's cow is taunting them from the other side of the fence, and they are responding by growling and barking, but are too lazy to go running after it. (I know how they feel).  Besides, they're having too much fun harassing frogs and lizards which seem to be everywhere this evening (one was even on the toilet seat - good thing I saw it in time.  Would hate to think of the alterntive outcome there).  I even saw a snake today on the road.  I really wanted to run it over once or twice or even three times, but I knew Bob would be disappointed in me so I held back. As it is, he is going to ask me all kinds of questions about what kind of snake it was, which I won't be able to answer, since I didn't crush it to death and then get out of the car to check it out.  Now I'll dream about it making its way up my hill and slithering under the door tonight.  I'm sure with its evil snakish sixth sense, it knows I really wanted to kill it.  I might have to sleep with the shovel tonight, just in case.

Speaking of night time, the sun has just set. It was another gorgeous orange-pink-red sunset which I didn't photograph in time because my ipad was out of batteries and was still charging.  I caught the tail end of it, but the picture doesn't do it justice.  There will be a waning moon tonight, about 3/4 full so star gazing won't get good until the middle of the night. Hopefully I will be sound asleep by then, not huddling under my covers, terrified, (did I mention I was alone?) wishing I really did have a shovel, and Jeff's .45 along with a few large clips of soon-to-be-outlawed ammo, and also for good measure, Blake's bear repellent.  Of course, if someone did try to break in, I can just imagine the chaos. I probably would end up stepping on the shovel, with its handle springing up to hit me in the head, then accidentally shooting the dog, and finishing off by tripping on the now disabled dog and landing on the pepper spray nozzle, taking a full blast to the face. Only to find out it was just the wind blowing over a chair on the porch.  Ok, I think I'll retreat to the little love shack for the night. This sitting around by the blazing fire, very alone, in the dark, with lots of little glowing eyes watching me, is so over. 

End of the sunset, start of a night of terror........

OK, I am psyching myself out here.  I need to stop this talk of intruders and go back outside to shut the garden gate, or else there may be nothing left after those predator-deer attack en masse tonight.  Where are my shoes?  and flashlight?  And scarf (there are a lot of bats and all those urban legends about the bats getting entangled in your hair are running through my head)?  And butcher knife (just in case, you never know when it might come in handy)? And cell phone? Where is my phone?  Should I pre-program 911 in, so I only have to hit one button? I wonder how long it would take the police to get here?!  To find my phone, I'd have to turn on the light in the little chalet I'm hunkered down in.  That would certainly give away my position to the stalkers outside.  Oh what to do, what to do?  OK, here goes -- if I never write another word, hopefully someone will read this post and know what my last minutes were like. 

Phew!  Made it. Didn't even need to brandish the knife. Good thing, because the blade is pretty dull.  What can you expect when you buy knives from Rite Aid?  Shoot!  I just remembered that I forgot to take my antibiotics.  They are out in the car. It's parked soooo far away, almost 30 feet from the door.  Where did I set down that knife?  and the phone?  Another lonely sojourn into the bat-infested blackness.  I hope I don't step on a frog outside the door and slip and land on the knife.  Maybe I should make a pre-call to 911 to let them know where I am, saving time in case I have to actually make an emergency call later on?  Do you suppose they can store that type of information?

OK, made it, but it was close!! Those bats were in attack mode - I am sure of it.  But I watched "Attack of the Giant Hare" last week and learned that furiously waving your knife in the air disrupts the bats' sense of echo location (and also scares away 50 foot leporids).  That is some mighty useful information, after all.  You never know what you can learn from late night TV, Dr. Ruth aside.

If any of you read this tonight, and wish to call me to say what might turn out to be your final goodbye, feel free!  I will have my cell phone fully charged and waiting at my bedside, next to the shovel and knife.  Goodnight, and its been great knowing you!

Come Dine With Me

In the evenings in Scotland, we would relax and watch the tellie. We indulged in two funny local television shows --- “Border Patrol” and “Come Dine with Me”. Both are reality shows; one chronicles the exploits of the Border Police as they apprehend dimwitted perpetrators at the airport customs check. “Come Dine with Me”was my favorite – it plays two or three times a night so we got to enjoy it multiple times. This show pairs up four very incompatible people, who take turns putting on a dinner party for each other over four consecutive nights. Each participant then ranks the others’ event in rude and uncomplimentary terms, and the highest scorer wins a thousand pounds, after having to endure humiliating and awkward dinner conversation with people they don’t particularly like.  

 

On our second day in Moffat, we took a really nice hike up the Mare’s Tail Falls. 

 

Goats on the trail ahead of us

At the lake at the top of the falls

Once we reached the top of the falls and took our share of pictures, Sharon and I hiked back and traveled down the road for a spot of tea and some scones, while Bob and Gordon continued the hike around the Loch and met us when we returned to town. As we sipped our tea at the little roadside stop across from a beautiful lake, we met Annie, a woman a little older than us who had cycled about 10 kilometers down the hill from her village and had also stopped for tea to take the chill off.  Annie explained that she originally came from the part of Scotland above Glasgow that is a peninsula “shaped like a penis”.  I had to laugh. 

Sharon and I returned to town and did a little shopping at Lothlorian – a really cool antique shop full of lots of old china and tea sets.  We each bought a set of “fish knives” which are silver plated knives a little wider than butter knives, with beautiful scrollwork etched into the blade, and a set of matching forks. I also bought some silver teaspoons and later in Ireland, I found a beautiful spode tea cup/saucer to complete my collection.

Arn Magh Fada

Our visit in Moffat (Arn Magh Fada in Scottish Gaelic, meaning The Long Plain) was wonderful, and it was great to have a few days of quiet time with Gordon and Sharon.  I am providing a link to Sharon’s blog, because she does such a good job of describing the serenity of village life in Moffat.  http://thenimh56.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-kissing-gate.html  This particular entry of Sharon's describes the walk we took on our first day in Moffat.

We took a beautiful walk up a boggy hillside to the edge of the woods, stopping at the kissing gate for a brief interlude before rambling down the trail past small streams and lots of beautiful country landscapes.

Sharon says these trees are lucky when planted on your property

 

 

 

And who could forget those helpful signs? This one inspired great confidence after we’d just traversed a big, open pasture.  It’s bad enough to have to worry about charging cows, but landmines??   I wonder if there is much of a market for wooden legs in Scotland?

Then there was this sign, regarding the Dog Fouling (Scotland) Act 2003!  I wonder if there was a companion Dog Fouling (England) and Dog Fouling (Wales) Act as well?  Maybe those signs had different types of dogs on their placard?  Little Yorkies with commensurately smaller smoking piles?

The walk back to town had more beautiful scenery to enjoy.

 

 

 

 

After our walk, we headed into town to visit the weekly Farmer’s market and do some exploring at the graveyard.

 

I especially loved this gravestone.  "His life was spent in relieving the depressed.  Erected by his friend - 1776".   What a wonderful tribute and legacy.     We finished off the day with a visit to one of the local pubs for some Speckled Hen IPA, Guinness, and Carlisle, then a quick clean up and off to a dinner of local specialties – steak pie, pork belly, and for Bob, there was even a vegan vegetable stack, complete with a side of chips and vinegar.  A nice end to a really nice day.

Off and Running in Scotland

 

Today we slept in, then set out for a cup of coffee and a quick walk around Edinburgh in the daylight. 

Bob is happy to have his familiar Starbuck's coffee

 

One of my favorite stops was a visit to the Writer’s Museum where there was an interesting display about Robert Louis Stevenson.  As a child, I loved my RLS book, “A Child’s Garden of Verses”, and there was a small display about this book.  It seems that Stevenson in his later works, the most famous of which was  Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, was struggling with the concept of evil surmounting good in humanity, and many of his works had themes of the triumph of evil over good, which did not earn him many points with the church at the time these things were written. 

Outside the Writer's Museum there are quotes of Scottish authors stamped into the ground.  This one:

And yet, and yet the New Road will Some Day be the Old Road too

Robert Burns:  For Man to Man the World O'er Shall Brothers be for a' that

 

I love the focus on art when civic infrastructure is built.  This cobblestone heart was built into the sidewalk on the Royal Mile.

One of the embelishments on a statue - it was raining outside so the picture is a bit gray but you get the idea.

Edinburgh Castle in the daylight.  Huge and impressive. We were too lazy to take the tour, though. 

One of the many funny pub signs in this country!
 

Adam Smith, founder of capitalism.  I had to have a picture!

 

 We picked up a phone to replace the one we’d lost at Heathrow and then set off to Stirling Castle and the William Wallace (i.e., Braveheart) monument for some sightseeing.  Despite the rain, the countryside was beautiful, and the cool weather made the cup of tea at lunchtime taste even better.  We thoroughly enjoyed a peaceful walk through the woods to the base of the monument and then up a billion spiraling stone stairs to the top of the Wallace Memorial.   

Robert the Bruce looks surprisingly like my friend Dan Ellecamp

William Wallace Monument

 

After visiting Stirling Castle, we noticed the tire damage on our rental car and that pretty much set the course of the rest of our day.  We left Stirling at about 5 PM, drove an hour to Glasgow Airport to pick up another car, and then headed south to our friend’s home in Moffat. 

One thing about the Scottish highway ministry --- they are fixated on safety.  Having had our share of terror trying to drive on the “wrong” side of the road, we could understand this.  There were lighted signs every few miles on the roadway, offering helpful advice:

“Tiredness can kill -- take a break!”  This sign was conveniently stationed just before a roadside stop where you could indulge in a “KFC Welcome Break” – yep, the Colonel is alive and well in Scotland.

“Don’t set your sat/nav while driving” followed by “Don’t talk on your mobile while driving!”  OK, sensible enough.  But I loved the next two -  “Drive Courteously” and “Drive Efficiently”-- What does “Drive Efficiently” mean anyway???

The only sign which was missing, but was sorely needed, was “Look out for foreign drivers – they don’t know what the hell they are doing or where the hell they are going, and they are likely to mow you down on the wrong side of the road with little or no warning!”

One day, when rambling through the countryside with Gordon and Sharon, we left the town of Leadville (yes, that’s right, as in Lead, the toxic mineral- it was an old mining town), and we entered South Lanarkshire, with its town motto of “Thriving on Safe Driving”.  I wonder if they had issues with the driving habits of the lead-intoxicated residents of the neighboring town. which resulted in the extra special need to pay attention to their driving safety?  The next day, another small town boasted “We Pride Ourselves on Roadside Safety” although judging from the condition of this town’s pothole-ridden, very, very narrow and winding roads, I am thinking this was more wishful thinking than statement of fact. 

All the emphasis on automobile safety served its purpose of making us completely paranoid about our driving, and we were happy to arrive at the Corsie’s warm and inviting home on Saturday night, to enjoy a delicious dinner of homemade minestrone soup and fresh bread, along with a very nice bottle of wine. 

Gordon and Sharon greet us when we finally arrive!