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Connected to Garlic City Café [May. 15th, 2012|10:13 pm]
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Garlic City mural


Meanwhile, back in California, we collected our hired car and went exploring: a gentle trip to start with, just as far as Gilroy.

Gilroy is the Garlic Capital of the World: it says so, right there on the wall, and there are allium-themed motifs on much of the street furniture. It wasn't Gilroy's fault that we had turned up in April, when the garlic is entirely inactive, in the slack time between tidying up from one garlic festival and starting to prepare for the next, when there is not so much as a haze of green in the garlic fields. It's still an attractive little town with some splendid old buildings ('old' in this context might mean 1905 - everything's relative), some pretty little houses, a fine variety of murals and a Carnegie library. By the time we'd had enough of these low-key delights, we were ready for lunch and the Garlic City café was calling.

Lunch began with the most wonderful garlic soup, a perfect balance of creamy and savoury with a distinct but not overpowering tang of garlic, We followed this with sandwiches, garlic chickrn for me, calamari steak for [info]durham_rambler on the grouns that he'd never heard of calamari steak, and this was his chance to find out what it was. (The answer wasn't obvious from eating it, though further reseach indicates that it's just the body of the squid cut into steaks rather than into rings). Ever more intrepid, he followed this with the garlic ice cream. I had a spoonful to taste: it was exactly as advertised, a very good creamy ice cream inexplicably flavoured with garlic. Our friendly and efficient server was Karla with a K. At the table behind us, a group of Italians were discussing the dishes their mothers used to cook, and their attempts to replicate them.

The road out of town up into the hills brought us among the vines to Sarah's Vineyard, and we stopped for the first wine tasting of the trip. The five wines we tasted were the Clos de la Madonne (a Rhône-style white, marsanne/roussanne/viognier blend, well-chilled which accentuated the freshness but tempered the richness of the viognier and marsanne. Since I don't like the rather gluey quality of much marsanne, I enjoyed this, but it seemed a waste of viognier), a chardonnay, a pinot noir with a distinct flavour of cloves, the Clos de la Madonne red and a merlot. I enjoyed everything we tasted, not to mention the conversation, but we were disconcerted by the prices - and happy with the local style of paying for the tasting and therefore feeling no obligation to buy.

Then on into the hills, meaning - and completely faiing - to pick up Skyline Boulevard: you are in a maze of twisty mountain roads, all the same..., differentiated by a clearing full of fruit trees here, a pool of forget-mr-nots there. There were some magnificent trees, not all of them redwoods, and some striking houses, but mostly we concluded for the first but not the last time, that we fifn't know the way to San Jose - despite which, we did eventually make it back to Sunnyvale in time to dine en famille at Thai Basil.
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Ocular update. [May. 14th, 2012|12:39 pm]
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I had my cataract operation this morning, and it seems to have gone well - witness, I am home and doing a little light typing.

The weirdest thing about the whole experience -

Well, no, the weirdest thing was lying there staring into the bright light and seeing the dome of clear stuff (presumably not glass) that the nice surgeon was about to insert into my eye. That'd be hard to outweird. But:

The second weirdest thing was that some sort of music was playing in the operating theatre (I don't think it was radio, there weren't spoken bits in between the tracks) and the first thing I heard was an easy-listening rendition of Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

We are now in the period of seeing how it goes: regular eye drops, don't rub your eye, can't see through my glasses with my left eye (can't see without glasses with my right eye), don't go swimming and don't rub your eye.

I'll keep you posted.
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Coming of age [May. 9th, 2012|09:45 pm]
When it comes to significant birthdays, mine is the lost generation. Those older than us came of age on their twenty-first birthdays, gained the right to vote, received shiny birthday cards with 'key to the door' motifs (I have had a front-door key since I was eight, but that is not the point). Those younger than us were adult at eighteen. But all of them could point to a birthday, a particular point in their own lives at which they officially became grown-ups.

My cohort came of age en masse on the first of January 1970, when the age of majority in England and Wales changed from age 21 to age 18. No personal celebration, just a legislative change.

This is ancient history, of course, but it's in my mind because forty-odd years on, I've been caught in the same trap. Once upon a time, the retirement age for women was 60, and for men 65. This was clearly unfair, and since on this occasion it was men who got the worse deal, something had to be done. Which is why we are now in a ten-year period of adjustment, during which the age at which women qualify for retirement benefits is gradually sliding upwards until it meets that of men.

Once again, women older than me retired on their 60th birthday; those younger will retire on their 65th. Anf my cohort retires on a date between the two, deduced by some arcane calculation on the basis of our date of birth.

I should probably put 'retires' in inverted commas of some kind, since when you retire, and what it means to retire, is not as simple as this makes it sound. Nonetheless, last Sunday I qualified for my pension, and today I went to the council office and claimed my bus pass.
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Outside, over there [May. 8th, 2012|07:02 pm]
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When he was only 39, and touring the UK to promote the publication here of Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak had a heart attack. He might have died then, but he was rushed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, and his life was saved (and that's why the QE Gateshead makes a cameo appearance in the skyline of the Night Kitchen).

By that measure, everything he has done since is a bonus. What's more, his health has long been poor. It shouldn't be a surprise that he has died, that there will be no more books (one posthumous publication, and that's it). No surprise, perhaps, but a real sense of loss.

On the first morning of our recent trip, I spent a happy half hour in the bookshop opposite our hotel in Chicago, and came out with a Sendak that was completely new to me (Bumble-Ardy, as it happens); on the last afternoon, in a thrift shop in Alum Rock, I pounced on a copy of I Saw Esau, his version of a collection of rhymes from the collection of Iona and Peter Opie. The last poem in that book is End of Term, and its last verse:
Np more things to bring us sorrow
Cos we won't be here tomorrow.
Alas, no.
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Elective affinities [May. 7th, 2012|10:24 pm]
Among the goodies I scored in [info]desperance's grand clearing out sale was a sourdough starter: a jar of sinister, nondescript beige, not exactly liquid, not exactly solid, and a sheet of instructions for the care of same.

It didn't do much. It lurked in its jar, and we peered at it, and it peered back. "What does it want?", asked [info]durham_rambler, who has seen Third Rock from the Sun. I fed it, following the instructions to the best of my ability (with hindsight, I think I know where I ernt wrong, but I won't interrupt the flow of the narrative to go into that now). Nothing happened. it didn't bubble away merrily, it didn't do anything much, and eventually I abandoned it and went off to California.

Where I confessed to [info]desperance that I am a bad mother, and that my shoggoth had failed to thrive. He was surprisingly encouraging: restart it, he said, and it will revive. You'll be surprised, he said - with such conviction that I believed him utterly. I came home, I mixed up a new batch of flour and water, I prepared to seed it with a spoonful of the original starter. And it was only at this point that I realised my starter was not only inactive, it had grown green fur.

I didn't want to stop now; and besides, I had this bowl of flour and water. So I cheated. I took down the Tassajara Bread Book (which was in my mind, since I'd been reading about Tassajara in a foodie magazine I'd picked up in Santa Cruz; the monastery isn't far from there, relatively speaking) and followed its instructions for making a sourdough starter: mix yeast, honey, flour and water and leave for five days, stirring from time to time. This started fizzing almost at once, and kept it up for three or four days, becoming pleasingly elastic to stir.

By the fifth day it had pretty much stopped, and I was afraid I had waited too long. But I referred to my instruction sheet, and followed the recipe for Chaz'z Sourdough Bread - followed it, I admit, at a respectful distance, because it demands that you return to your loaf at half hour intervals for most of a day, and I kept forgetting. Despite which, my lump of dough gradually came to life, and began to swell in a most promising manner. I removed enough dough to make some bread rolls to accompany dinner, put the rest into a little loaf tin with 'LOAF' embossed on the side which I had removed from [info]desperance's house while we were there to retrieve his baking trays, let it rise again and put it in the oven with the roast.

So there is no material connection between my sourdough loaf and the sourdough starter that Chaz gave me: but it was prepared with his encouragement, and a cross between his instructions and those of a book written in the region where he is now living, and baked in his loaf tin. It isn't, of course, as good as Chaz'z Sourdough Bread - it isn't as distinctly sour as I'd like - but the texture is as good as any bread I've ever baked, which is more than satisfactory for a first attempt.

And there's a jar of starter just going off the boil, beginning to clamour for attention.
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Things I learned this week [May. 5th, 2012|10:35 pm]
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On Wednesday we went to the Lit & Phil to hear Andy Croft read from his new book, 1948, last week's Paperback of the Week in the Guardian. Andy's a lively reader of his own work, and if I hadn't already been looking forward to reading the book (I enjoyed The Ghost Writer, Andy's previous verse novel), the reading would have convinced me. But the highlight of the evening for me was Andy's introduction to the Pushkin sonnet, the form in which the book is written, and why you have to be mad to write it. From this I learned that the Pushkin sonnet has a ridiculously intricate rhyme scheme, and that the feminine rhymes fall in the wrong place.

On Thursday, with a briefly visiting [info]nineweaving, we watched the BBC's evening of Shakespeare-related programming. I understand that the second programme, throughout which I was only intermittently awake, was sensible and intelligent and had some new things to say. But Shakespeare in Italy, in which Francesco da Mosto (of whom I have only heard because he sat next to D. on a vaporetto) explained that Shakespeare was obviously familiar with Italy, must have been there during the seven 'missing' years in his biography, and may even have been Sicilian, since Crollalanza is a Sicilian name. Francesco twinkled and charmed, the Nine-entity heckled and snorted, and a good time was had from all. And from this I learned that that there is no programme idea so flimsy that it cannot be sold to the BBC if it involves a man driving around in a little red sports car.
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Journeys end in fancy eating [Apr. 28th, 2012|11:11 pm]
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The flight from LA to London was as good as an eight-hour overnight flight in economy can be. There was no queue at passport control, and D. collected us from Heathrow and drove us to King's Cross, which was more than kind of him. Since we had neither queued for hours to have our passports verified, nor spent hours dragging our luggage across London during a tube strike, we had plenty of time before our train, so we lunched at the Gilbert Scott restaurant in the St Pancras Hotel, as an end-of-holiday treat.

We were just too late for the (comparatively) cheap lunch menu, which was unfortunate not just because it cost more but because the pricing policy is that everything is extra, which is presumably supposed to gibe you the illusion that things cost less than they do, but has the opposite effect of putting me on my guard anf=d making me feel they cost more. To the prices on the menu you have to add a cover charge (this strikes me as both petty and old-fashioned, but there it is: an extra £2 per head) and service. If you want vegetables with your main course, that's extra too - you have to order a side dish. On the other hand, there was a cute little amuse-bouche, a miniature white china barrel of vivid green soup (leek and wild garlic), and my main course, a puff patry tart of artichoke pieces laid on artichoke purée was very good. Dessert was pleasant but less successful. I forget how it was described, but the words pear, walnut, ice cream, sandwich and caramel appeared - the dish was a disc of ice-cream sandwiched between two biscuits, with a smear of satisfactorily intense pear purée and served with a little jug of molten toffee. The biscuits were more shortbead than walnut, and didn't offer enough contrast to the ice cream; and the sauce didn't feel integral to the dish. Service was charming young people in crisp white shirt sleeves, bustling about and hitting a good balance between formality and friendliness - but we had to remind them we had ordered wine (we'd ordered a half bottle, because it was the only sauvignon blanc in the lower reaches of the list - Pascal Jolivet's 'Attitude', details hidden on their irritating website, lots of green vegetable freshness - and if they'd brought it more promptly we might have been tempted to order the other half, so perhaps it's as well they didn't) and each time our water glasses needed filling. Worth it, on balance, when you throw in a glimpse of the renovated building - another time I might reverse the emphasis and try to book the tour of the building which includes afternoon tea.

The train carried us north through well-watered greenery, fields decorated with pools of gleaming water and rivers in spate. We're not in California any more.

I even managed to do a little work that evening, which is just as well, because we had an outing ooked for the following morning: a trip to Hexham, where Claudia Roden was speaking at the book festival, about her new book on the food of Spain. The first cookery books I bought were by Elizabeth David: but the book whose influence is most evident in the way I cook is Claudia Roden's book of Middle Eastern food. My first copy was passed on by my mother, and I wore it out; its replacement, the revised edition, is showing signs of strain. I love Claudia Roden's Italian book; and after our trip last autumn, I'd love to know more about Spain. So although it made no sense to commit to an event so close on our return home, I wasn't going to miss it.

Claudia Roden


I'm so glad we went. She's an interesting and a likable speaker - the format was 'in conversation', which can mean anything, but the questions were intelligent and served to nudge a fluent speaker forward along her own lines. She talked about how much of her research involves asking people for recipes - which many of them clearly regard as a cue to tell her their entire life story - so I wondered whether she speaks Spanish, and was pleased when the question came up. And even more delighted at the answer, which is that one of her grandmothers was a speaker of the language she refers to as medieval Judaeo-Spanish and which I know as Ladino. She described being in Santiago de Compostela, and being offered a cake made of oranges and almonds which she recognised as a Sephardic Passover cake (it's one I cook from her recipe, especially if I need a gluten-free cake). Her hosts were thrilled at this connection, and insisted she appear on television to explain it: &quoy;But I don't speak Spanish!"

Food geekery and language geekery, what more could I want? Of course I bought the book ([info]durham_rambler took the picture).
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LA is a great big *@!%*# [Apr. 25th, 2012|11:13 pm]
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Our homeward itinerary is: get up at 6 o' clock, breakfast, return car to Hertz at San Jose airport, fly Air Alaska to LA, arriving 10.49 am. That's where we are now. Onward flight to Heathrow is with Air New Zealand at 16.45, so no rush.

Do we know the way to San Jose? Up to a point. Repeated attempts have established that we can fairly reliably find the airport, but we get lost when we try anything more ambitious. I'd assumed from the song that San Jose was a small town far from LA, somewhere where a wannabe movie star might dream of returning if only they could scrape together the fare. And it's true that when the song was written, it wasn't yet the capital of Silicon Valley: it's now the tenth largest city in the entire USA, as well as the third oldest in California. But it wouldn't be had to find from LA - just head for san Francisco, and stop short. Anyway...

I thought we would have time in hand (coffee!) at San Jose, but by the time the queue had snaked through security, our spare hour had vanished, and it was time to board. The flight on Air Alaska's comparatively small plane went smoothly - I had time to read the inflight magazine's recomendation of the Palouse region, with its picturesque waterfalls and famous Lentil Festival. We would even have arrived slightly early, had we not had to wait 20 minutes for a gate to be free. From the captain's comments, I infer he felt that American Airlines had pinched his parking spot, but I think it's just that Los Angeles Airort hates me (and it's mutual).

When our gate was finally clear, we had another delay while they found some steps to let us out of the plane. Then something triggered the alarm on the door of the terminal building, and we had to wait again until they decided to let us in, the alarm whistling in our ears all the while. There is no visible signage to direct you from domestic arrivals to international departures, and the staff member at the desk began by telling us that 'Air New Zealand doen't fly from here' which wasn't helpful. The car rental shuttle buses passed in shoals while we stood waiting for our bus, and when it came, it didn't stop (there was another one just behind). At Terminal 2 there is a very uninviting lobby, with a small Starbucks and a newsstand, and again no signage - but a queue for the lift, which we joined, on the basis that wherever we wanted to be, it wasn't here.

Maybe airside is better, but we are still barred from that promised land: we can't go through security until we are checked in, and we can't check in until Air New Zealand open their desk (about half an hour from now). So we are back down in the lobby, where Starbucks have provided coffee (which improved my temper somewhat) but no internet (which didn't).

Oh, and although there is a locking mechanism on the cubicle doors in the ladies', I haven't yet made it work.

Later: After another 45 minutes in various queues, airside is better, but not much. I'm posting this courtesy of leaky wi-fi from the Air France executive lounge.

Not my favourite airport.
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Rules [Apr. 25th, 2012|02:40 am]
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The rule of the house is: It's not a cat toy, it's a fetish. That's what [info]klwilliams said as she rescued another small decorative item from Mac; "That's a rule of the house," said [info]desperance. So it must be.

The rule of the road is: Speed enforced by aircraft. The signs on Highway 101 say so; we never saw it happening, though (I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed).
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20° south of Holy Island (and 120° west) [Apr. 22nd, 2012|07:03 am]
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- that's what [info]durham_rambler told me when I asked him how far south we are. Anyway, it's as far south as we will go on this trip, at Cayucos on the Central Coast, south and west of Paso Robles. Our original plan had been to take a couple of excursions from Sunnyvale, down to the coast and north to the wine country of Napa or Sonoma; then we talked to [info]klwilliams's brother and his partner, who gave us such a glowing account of Paso Robles and its wines that we decided to make a single longer trip south. They also recommended the Paso Robles Inn, but we had left it too late to find a room in Paso Robles itself, and we have ended up in the much less elegant - and less pricey - Beachwalker Inn (warning: site plays music) on the coast at Cayucos, where they have upgraded us to a suite (ie we have a kitchen corner) and we are very comfortable. We had a ocean view when we arrived, but today the coast has vanished into the fog.

It was fine when we arrived yesterday, and we had time to explore downtown - that is, to walk the length of the town along Ocean Avenue, checking all the eating places (plus a detour out to the end of the pier) before deciding on Hoppe's, where we had a very enjoyable meal, and were out in time to see the last of the sunset fading over the pier, and back across the little creek where the noise of the frogs was deafening.

Had we been staying in Paso Robles, I suppose we'd have spend the day lurching from one wine tasting to another, staying within the town so we could do the whole thing on foot. As it was, we had to drive into town, which meant more work and less drinking for [info]durham_rambler; I hope he thinks it was worth it. I enjoyed the scenic drive and the different selection of wineries to visit, and think we gained on the deal.

In the vines


Almost as soon as we turned off the coast road into the hills, we were driving in sunlight, through avocado groves. Our first stop was at the Wild Horse Winery, where we stepped out of the car into blazing heat. Fortunately the tasting room was cool, and we wre greeted with a glass of refreshing sangiovese rosé (named after the lama whose name I have forgotten but whose job is to mingle with the sheep and protect them from coyotes).

Then on into Paso Robles, where there was a small market in the park. I managed to buy a rather strange bonnet - I hadn't brought a hat with me, and have been looking for one - and [info]durham_rambler bought some almonds from the producer.

We lunched at Artisan, which was delightful, and very swish. We both chose 'small plate' options: I had the cheese, and [info]durham_rambler the charcuterie, with a side salad each. This brought me a large rectangular plate, bearing a tiny skillet of Lamb Chopper (thank you, Google. I wouldn't have identified it as sheep's milk, I'd have compared it to cheddar) melted over a sweet fig preserve, a wedge of Mt. Tam, a camembert-style cheese, pleasantly creamy and just a little bland, and the Central Coast Creamery's Big Rock Blue, a characterful blue served with caramelised walnuts. With these I drank a 'flight' of white wines - I could get fond of this practice of serving small glasses of a group of themed wines - Silver Horse Albariño, Clavo Vermentino "Voluptuous&qut; (which was) and the star of the bunch, the Hearst Ranch's "Three Sisters Cuvée" (a marsanne/ grenache blanc/ roussanne blend, and the second Rhône-style white I've tasted on this trip which has made me reconsider my dislike of marsanne. Better draw a veil over the desserts...

We completed our tour of downtown Paso Robles, which didn't take very long, then hit the road again. We had come into town from the south and east, and we looped round to leave to the north and west, along Peachy Canyon road. Another winding road, dotted with wineries, bordered with vines and orchards, and at the end of it Limerock Orchards, where they make perfectly acceptable wines and absolutely delicious toasted walnut oil and walnut butter. Old Creek Road brought us through green rolling hills, startled us with views of a beautiful lake (Whale Rock Reservoir, apparently) at the end of which we could see a white bar of mist into which we descended at Highway 1.

Undaunted, we ended our excursion with a walk on the beach in the fog. Tomorrow we go north again, back to Sunnyvale.
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