Been a while

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. It’s been so long that wordpress up and changed the mgmt interface on me.

What have I been doing? Lots of frittering of time that adds up to nothing. Work kept me busy. Trip - planning (summer: Japan and East Coast road trip) kept me excited (it’s also a big time suck!) And there were lots of ‘tiny moments’ I would have shared on this blog had I not been so inert.

Thai fruit: Bought some fresh mangosteens in Chinatown for $9 a lb. They were OK, except they were pre-bagged, and so you got some bad ones with the good. Marcella gave me three bananas off her tree: they taste just like kluay nam wah, which I really miss about Thailand. “I had to climb up the tree and wrap the bananas in a towel over the winter,” she said.

Garden: We had peas, are eating artichokes (and some ants), and put in the summer crop: tomatoes, squash, beans, basil, eggplant. The kale and chard are still there.

Farmer’s market: The stone fruits: cherry, apricots and first peachs have arrived.

Vanity and shoes: I bought a really cool looking pair of shoes: pointy toed, high heeled in olive and cinnabar, on sale. Now I have to break them in (the heel chafes), and get used to walking in high heels. (I’ve always been in flats for comfort). So after dinner, I actually go fo a walk around the block in the new shoes to break them in. I don’t think they’ll ever be as comfortable as I had hoped when I bought them. Trying them on in the shoe store doesn’t really give you enough of a test-drive.

I’ve figured out my feet hurt when the toes are squeezed into pointy-ish toed high heeled shoes: which is this new pair, and another pair of nice black shoes I bought and wore once to a wedding. My step-mom used to give me grief about wearing sneakers all the time, “your feet will become flat and wide.” Part of me now wishes I had worn pointy high heels a little more when I was younger to build up the stamina/practice. Because nowadays, I like looking at cool high heeled shoes, but I can’t realy wear/buy 90% of the shoes I’m attracted to, because I wouldn’t be able to walk in them. Hence, most of my shoes are flat . . . and distinctively funky.

Vanity and hair: I got a haircut recently. I think finally, after how many years, it’s worked out that my hairstylist gives me a style/cut that I like and works for me. The irony is: he’ll blow dry and style my hair a certain way after the haircut. But that’s the last time my hair will look that ‘groomed’, until my next visit to him. Because in my real life, I wash and go and my hair will do its own little thing and it looks completely different. So I wonder: does my hairstylist know that my hair will end up looking how it does on its own, which is completely different from how it looks when I walk away from his shop? Or would he be surprised to see how it turns out? Or he probably doesn’t even worry about it.

It could be me on the bike, part 2

There’s a couple of other points I wanted to add to my previous post. Rather than retrofit-edit the original post, I’m doing a ‘part 2′ here.

The two cyclists who were killed were racing cyclists, training with teams, one an Olympic hopeful. Usually I bag on racing cyclists: relatively obnoxious, they wear loud jerseys, buy overpriced bikes equipment, and don’t really obey the rules of the road, which reflects badly on all other utilitarian and casual cyclists. But I realised: two cyclists were killed on the road. It didn’t really matter what ‘type’ of cyclists they were: it could have just as easily been a weekend recreational rider, or someone biking on an errand that got hit. That’s why we all felt such a sense of solidarity.

Last posting: I talked a lot about asking motorists to make an effort to make it safer for cyclists. Cyclists also have a role in their own safety.

1) Obey the rules of the road. Be predictable. Signal to let drivers to know your intentions. Being a ‘polite’ rule-abiding cyclist will gain us all more respect. Take a street skills biking course (usually free. 4 hours of time well spent.)

2) Make yourself as visible as possible.
Anything and everything bright, lighted and reflective will increase your chances of being seen and noticed by drivers, who will then usually make a conscious effort to drive around you more safely. I frankly hate the fact that flourescent yellow-green jackets are so expensive, because the market for them is relatively small, and the sources are few. I wish more manufacturers and retailers sold them, so they could be cheaper and more widely used. Because they are effective.

But even if you can’t/won’t spring for a FYG jacket, there’s probably other items in your existing wardrobe you could wear while biking. Loud, bright colors for T-shirts, helmets, pants and shoes for daytime visibility (One reason why I wear a lot of ORANGE.) At night light-coloured jackets or even an XXL white T-shirt turned inside out over you helps other people see you in the dark. This is helpful advice even for pedestrians at night. For all the people who buy black or dark coloured jackets, because they’re more fashion-neutral to match their clothes or they don’t get dirty as easily: pah! Isn’t safety more important?
Clip on head and tail lights that run on batteries are helpful. (For pedestrians, a small flashlight.) Lights aren’t so much to enable you to see things as for others to be able to see you.

3) Bicyclists should assume the worst case scenario that motorists can’t see them, and ride defensively. Yield to cars, let them pass, rather than proceeding, thinking they’re going to stop for you. Especially when you see a motorist talking on their cell-phone. They’re functionally blind.

(Talking about cell-phones: I’m quite anal. I don’t answer my cell-phone when I’m driving. I’ll pull over to park and then call back. I also don’t answer cell-phones in places like the library. And I will tel my friends who call me when they’re driving that I’m going to hang up. Hands-free I will let slide, but it’s really not a good thing.)

A lot of my friends say “I’d bike more, but it’s so unsafe”. They totally buy into the save gas, more exercise, ‘green’ aspects. But safety conerns override all that. They have legitimate fears of the traffic, being hit by cars, etc. All I can say is “Take a street skills class; it’ll help you ride defensively and give you more confidence.” Which sounds a bit weak. I don’t know what I can really say to convince them that biking is not unsafe, and help them get over their fears and pre-conceived notions. There’s risks in biking, but then there’s risks in everything else, driving, riding a bus, walking, etc. It’s just a matter of how you manage the risk to minimize the chance of anything happening to you. You shouldn’t let fear from stopping you do things you’d like to do.

If more people biked, the greater numbers of cyclists could command more respect and awareness from others who drive, and gain more recognition in terms of providing better roads and paths for us to bike on, etc. Slow but steady change. You don’t have to bike all the time, but every trip you make by bike adds up and can make a difference.

Slow down, it could be me on the bike

We went on the memorial ride yesterday in memory of the two cyclists who were killed and one who was injured when a freak incident/accident of a sheriff on patrol duty drove across the double yellow line on Stevens Canyon Rd into the wrong direction, one week ago.

It was a quiet, subdued ride. There was no sense of blame, which is common in bike-car incidents. Only a sense of “share the road”, we’re all here together, let’s respect each other, cyclists and motorists. Each and all of us should drive safely, on two wheels or four. There’s bad cyclists and bad motorists to be sure. But bicyclists are more vulnerable, without a shell of steel or fiberglass and mass. As motorists, please do look out for cyclists. Treat them as equals on the road (bicyclists are supposed to obey the rules of the road,) so don’t do things you wouldn’t do to other cars.

For instance, sometimes on my bike, I stop at a 4-way stop sign, after another car has arrived at the cross street. The car should go first, but he stays, waving me to go first. If I was driving a car, he’d have no problem going first. While I appreciate his kindness, I have to educate him and yell at him “You go first!”

But bottom line for motorists is . . . s . . l . . o . . w . . d . . o . . w . . n. It takes you five minutes to drive to the store, which takes me 15 minutes to bike the same distance. If you slow down a little, it only takes you perhaps an extra minute or so, still much less than my 15-minutes-on-bike. By slowing down, you will improve the overall safety for everyone, you and me. By slowing down you can see others better; be more aware of the pedestrians, bicyclists, elderly, the young; have more time to react, and god forbid if you hit something or someone, the damage is a little less because you’re hitting them at a lower speed.

The other thing is to pay attention to the road and what’s going on there; and or minimize distractions while you are driving. When you are driving, your priority should be to focus on the road. No cell phone, no fiddling with the radio, and try not to talk too much with other passengers. Feel free to break off the conversation, i.e. when you’re about to merge or change lanes. Safety is more important than temporary rudeness.

If you find yourself in the wrong position, i.e. stuck in the right lane when you were supposed to turn left: Don’t cut people off, inconvenience other traffic, or engage in sudden moves/risky driving behaviour just to make it to your original route, which is dangerous and rude. Just go with the flow of traffic, stay in the right lane and go further to detour to turn around within acceptable driving behaviour. It takes a bit longer, but again, it’s safer for everyone. And besides, if you get there an extra minute later, so what? You were driving a car; if you had to make the trip by bike, foot or transit, it would have still taken much longer.

Quotables 1

” Walking back from Leicester Square to Maureen’s hostel, I decided to take a different route and got lost. I still do this on a regular basis.” - Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet

Taking a different route, whether or not you get lost is a good thing. You find all sorts of things that way. That’s how we stumbled onto the warehouse district in LA. It’s really an interesting neighborhood to walk through, something like a souk, a bazaar, a Sunday market. On Saturday night, we drove around San Jose/Campbell/Cupertino on city streets, trying to look for a restaurant, and noticed all these new businesses and restaurants to try in the future. We’d have never seen them from the freeway or expressway.

“But I saw no borders on Earth’s face/ On my solitary walk in space.” - lyric from “Space Walk’ by Pat Wynne (it’s about an astronaut)
One of those radio serendipity things: While driving, I heard this song called “Boiling Frog” on KPFA, and looked up the singer, Pat Wynne, who’s a local SF singer/songwriter; and sent her a check for this new CD she was releasing. The songs are folk, with a message, kind of like hippie/pro-labour songs. It’s pretty neat, and it’s cool to support local musicians.

How to Make Friends and Oppress People

I just checked out this book from the library. The primary title is misleading, you’d think it was penned by some jacka– CEO on how to claw your way up to the top, secure yourself $20 million salary bonus package while earning acclaim from shareholders for cost-cutting measures by laying off 1,000 employees (average per annum income $35K plus a Thanksgiving Butterball). . .

Instead it was the secondary title “Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer” which is what made me pick it up. (In the UK, it was published orginally as “The Lost Art of Travel”)It’s satire, but with lots of quotes from actual travel books written by dead white men in the late 19th/early 20th centuries (no, they wrote while they were alive.) It’s even got those Victorian looking black and white engraved drawings So far, it’s pretty entertaining. And I learnt some historical trivia too: “Taking personal staff [i.e.a valet or lady's maid] is slightly more problematical these days, as cut-price tickets for servants no longer seem to be the railway policy.”

Overated dumplings and hot dogs

We ’snuck’ down to LA over the long weekend to see all the sights we never get to see, or eat at the places we never get to go to, because usually when we’re in LA, we’re there for some family function that revolves around Chinese food and relatives ad nauseum, and there’s not enough time.

High on the list were: Fogo de Chao, Din Tai Feng and Pink’s.

Din Tai Feng in Arcadia commands legions of fans with its hour-long waits for what is supposed to be superlative siao long bao and other steamed dumplings. It wasn’t bad, but it was so pedestrian. After all the hype, we felt so let down. (This was our only Chinese meal on this trip to LA!)

Pink’s: apparently it’s a late night institution that is very old (meaning it’s a little younger than my grandmother) and sells hot dogs to lines with 45 minute waits, in which you never know what celebrity you might spot. I had a chili dog. It was flabby. Maybe I’m just too spoiled by Top Dog in Berkeley.

Fogo de Chao: All you can eat Brazilian grilled meat place. We didn’t high hopes for it (it’s listed in airline magazines, which I always think of as being for suckas!) But it was really good, and the service was excellent, even to two woefully underdressed souls as ourselves. Even if you were a vegetarian, the salad bar was quite impressive, although even a $50 salad bar meal might seem a bit of stretch. The best cut is really their house specialty, the picanha. I think I’ll stick to that next time. This being in the US, they don’t seem to serve the organ meats that I expect they do in Brazil; I look forward to checking that out at some point. For desert, they feature papaya in a couple of deserts, including a fruit salad, which the Thai in me liked.

A couple of things that struck me as very “we’re in LA; we’re not in the Bay Area anymore”

- Seeing the little strip notices taped on doors for filiming, (like a permit) They’re 4.25 X 11.

- Temp agencies with signs advertising acting/filming gigs.

- People get so much more dressed up, and are so much more image conscious, i.e. when they go out to dine. Joe and I go eat even at the higher end places in jeans and fleece jackets in the Bay Area, and we blend in. In LA, well all I can say is it makes people watching interesting for checking out their fashion style. Even the men.

-Valet parking: Here we almost never go for valet parking. In LA, in spite of the impression that it’s so car-centric, parking is very hard to find. It’s just easier for people to go for valet parking.

I think now I understand what is the LA vibe.

We took a 6-hour urban hike through the wholesale district, downtown, Chinatown, Olvera Street, Union Station (you can get married it the courtyard garden! how cool would that be for transportation planners who want to tie the knot!), Little Tokyo, and checked the inside of the Disney Hall (the shiny curvy concert hall: I wonder what the accoustics are like, must go to a concert there some day). The LA Central Library is quite fantastic. It’s got old parts, and they expanded it by indooring the exterior, much like the way the old SF Main Library was converted to the Asian Art Museum. It’s a hidden gem.

Ate a late breakfast at the Original Pantry. The best thing there was not what we ate, but what the guy next to us at the counter had: cole slaw and soup (beef vegetable barley that day).

Narrowing down the field from 28

So my sorry a– has been up since 4 AM, hustling to complete a draft due for work. (Did I mention we’re cancelling Valentine’s day dinner tonight because we both have %$^$ deadlines to make) . . . but I had to take a break because the 2008 SFIAAFF just launched its schedule.

So of course I had to read through the whole schedule of films. There’s 28 films/programs I want to see, at first cut. I got to figure out how to fit them in.

There’s going to be a ‘Sing-along Colma the Musical‘!!!! I am so stoked! I am so there already!! (Joe just kinda rolled his eyes when I told him. “Are you going to go in costume?”)

See ya there in March!

“Persuasion” redone: Why did they bother?

After watching Amazing Race on Sunday night, I caught the 2008 PBS version of ‘Persuasion’, part of their much vaunted ” Masterpiece Theatre - Complete Jane Austen” series. It was pretty butchered, abbreviated and twisted. I don’t know why they didn’t simply just show the excellent 1995 BBC version with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds instead of going to the trouble of a redo. (After all, they’re planning to show the A&E version of P&P with Colin Firth?)

Trivia: In both versions of ‘Persuasion’, it seems like they shot the Anne & Lady Russell chatting scene, and the concert scene in the same Bath locations, the Pump Room and Assembly Room respectively.

I’m quite thrilled with the three teams left on AR competing for the grand prize. Well, I would have swopped out the Goths for TK and Rachel, but at least Jen and Nate got eliminated. She was getting on my nerves.

Silver lining in mortgage/credit meltdown

We’ve had our junk mail reduced considerably: no more unsolicited offers from Fly-By-Night Home Loan Co. or XYZ Mortgages Inc to refinance or take out home equity loans. No more having to open the envelops and feed it through the shredder. It’s nice to have less of that to deal with.

Baking Season/Winter Cleaning in the pantry

This past holiday season, we were very motivated to clear out the pantry. In part to see what canned foods that were close to expiration date we could donate to food banks. In part to finally chuck out vintage ingredients that had been sitting in there untouched . . . which would remain untouched.

Some things we did consume ourselves, like a can of smoked albacore tuna. I think it was part of a ‘Christmas hamper’ we got ages ago. Canned crab and asparagus turned into Truc’s signature soup; but we actually went out and bought quail eggs at farmers’ market and made our own chicken stock. But you know what? Her version, with all canned ingredients, tastes much better. We also ate an expired box of Kraft Mac and Cheese dinner, and made a lasagna.

Do things expire if they have no expiration dates?

Then there were also a lot of ingredients we were trying to use up . . .

We had a lot of dried jujubes, which are called red dates in Chinese. It’s from Joe’s parents’ tree. The only time I use them is to make Chinese chicken soup, where you toss in a few dried jujubes for sweetness, and few goji berries. But I usually forget. So I was barely making a dent in the stockpile of jujubes.

Since the holiday baking season was approaching, I decided to look for a recipe that could use up these jujubes. I found several for date pinwheels in the standard American cookbooks I had. But they invoked a rather low ratio of fruit to dough. I’m trying to use up jujubes!
Then I found a recipe for ‘cucidati’ a Sicilian fig cookie in a free Italian cookbook I got, which was a crescent shaped cookie filled with chopped figs, like a fig Newton. I figured I could substitute jujubes for figs. And I also had some of Marcella’s orange marmalade; which I also needed to make a dent into our jam supplies from her. Walnuts and raisins we always have on hand. The only thing I had to go out to buy was gulp . . . vegetable shortening. I’m not experienced enough a baker to figure out how to adjust by using butter instead.

The tricky thing was there were no photos or illustrations of exactly how to fold the dough into shape. So I experimented with the shapes; they all ended up looking funky. They tasted OK, maybe a little bit overdone/almost burnt on the bottom. Joe didn’t like them, but everyone else did. Later I went online a found a few recipes for cucidati, but none of the photos were very clear. One suggested using a floured glass as a cookie cutter to cut the dough into circles and fold over into a half moon. I think I will try that next time. I’m just really thrilled to have found a decent recipe that will allow me use up all those home-grown jujubes.

“Do you want some flour?” Marcella asked me. Her husband had bought a 50 lb sack at Costco. And as much as she bakes, she barely goes through a 5 lb bag in one holiday season. I took some to help her out, and started making pancakes for breakfast.

I made two batches of apricot almond shortbread bars, also as holiday gifts. And then idiot I was, I had forgotten where I had put the half-remaining bag of sliced almonds. I thought Joe had snacked through them. So I went to buy another bag, opened it and then found the original bag.

My office was having a mini-holiday potluck. I decided to make Mexican chocolate brownies (with the Ibarra tablets I had on hand). But I forgot: I had made them once and they came out very dry. This batch came out just as dry. Good thing I had made them two nights before the potluck. We just polished them off with vanilla ice-cream.

The night before the potluck: Since I had a lot of flour and sliced almonds on hand, I pored through the cookbooks again and found a recipe for almond quick bread. I made it and brought it in, but I have to admit it’s not very good. Maybe I overbeat the dough, but it’s rather dense and dry. Also I finally figured out I don’t like the taste of quick bread, which is based on oil, not butter. Joe won’t touch it at all. I have a-half loaf left. Maybe I’ll just make some fruit compote with the dried jujubes, to eat with the almond quickbread, to finish it off and not waste.

So you might have figured out by now that I’m a rather weird baker/cook. I don’t look at a recipe and go out to buy ingredients for making it. Rather in reverse, I look at what ingredients I have that I’m trying to use up, and then look for recipes that will use those ingredients!

So it came to be that for Christmas, I received (a) a regular panetone and (b) and a double tin of Swedish ginger snaps from my sister- and mother-in-law respectively. This on top of 4 mooncake tins of home baked cookies they had made for us. Well, they knew I liked those things, and I am rather difficult to shop for. I wish I had gotten a mini-panetone instead, and a single tin of gingersnaps (but I don’t think they sell those commonly, the double tin is more widely available.)

I ate one slice of panetone, and made half of the rest into bread pudding when I invited Chris over for brunch. She said it was tasty but made her sleepy. I did put some rum in it, but the alcohol was baked away. The other half panetone is in the freezer. I hope someone invites us to a potluck or something soon, so I can make it into another bread pudding.

For both Thanksgiving and Christmas I had made Joe’s mom’s cheesecake, with graham cracker crust. It is really tasty, but in personally beating 1 . . 2 . . 3 . . 4, count’em 4 bricks of Philly cream cheese, I felt rather icked out and consuming so much artificial ingredients, I decided I wanted to try make a cheesecake with real food ingredients, like ricotta cheese cheesecake. Also I could use up a goodly amount of the gingersnaps to make the crust, in lieu of graham crackers (which I’d have to go out an buy). I’ve always wanted to try making a gingersnap crust anyway, since I like gingersnaps.

I burnt the crust a little. The ricotta cheese filling was a bit heavy: maybe I didn’t beat it enough, or maybe I’ll try reducing the amount of cheese next time. It just so happened that Kathy and Norman had invited us to NYE dinner, so I brought it as desert. The consensus was that it was OK. (Actually the first batch of Mexican chocolate brownies I had made, that were too dry, I had also brought to a potluck at Kathy’s.) I’m not sure she’ll let me bring desert again: I feel like I’ve struck out twice!