Café Conversations

I'm taking an online photography course, a really fun one called "Slice of Life." It was recommended by Tea of Tea and Cookies last Christmas, so treated myself to the six-week course that began in February. It's very supportive and easygoing, everyone leaves encouraging comments when we post pictures to the Flickr site, and I'm learning a lot.

I am finding that several years of food photography has sharpened my eye for framing and taught me a bit about my camera, but still I'm learning from this course, all very interesting.

One of the basic lessons is to look for the light - where it comes from and its quality - as evidenced in this mosaic. Light is everything in photography. I'm also learning computer-related things, even though they are not strictly a part of the lessons - how to post pictures to Flickr, how to edit photos using editing tools, and how to make mosaics. So, I made this one using Picasa, something else I learned this week, editing some of the photos before making them into the collage.

I took this series of snapshots at Della Fattoria in Petaluma, where friend Bonnie, cousin Jan and I rested and feasted after a morning of taking bird pictures at a nearby refuge. The food was, as always, fresh, locally sourced and beautifully prepared. While I was eating, I was taking surreptitious pictures of the conversations going on around us. They made a fun collage of the experience.

Another bonus of the course is the chance to see hundreds and hundreds of other people's photos and how they interpret the six weeks of lessons. We get two lessons per week, so there are lots of pictures to examine, analyze and comment upon. All this for a mere $99.00 and a time commitment.

The instructor is Darrah Parker, a charming young Seattleite who has her own photography business. The students sign on from all over the world. It's startling to see pictures of winter in other countries when it's coming on for spring here; the mix of cultures is clear in the photographs as well. So, too, is the mixture of cultures right here in the US.

Slice of Life is a very personal photographic journey, teaching us the technical lessons through appreciation of our own lives and surroundings. I have enjoyed learning about the technical aspects but also beginning to see and appreciate my own world more clearly. It would be a great birthday gift for a pal, or even for yourself. It's like a café conversation with a friend - engaging, interesting and satisfying.

Japanese Art

Ever since I lived in Japan as a teenager, I have loved Japanese art. Its refinement, its sensitivity to nature, its exquisite craftsmanship all stop me in my tracks to stare, open-mouthed in appreciation. I took a short course in sumi-e painting when I lived in Japan and, although I was never any good at it, it gave me a more in-depth appreciation for the work I saw others making.

Japanese food is an art form, too, albeit a temporary one. At its best, it is refined, sensitive to nature and beautifully crafted, just like the other arts of Japan. I remember going to a banquet in Japan and being served, as one of about a dozen courses, a whole Dungeness crab on a platter. It was exquisite, all bright orange on a bed of seaweed, but I stared at it in social trepidation, thinking "Jeez, how are we going to eat that with chop sticks?" My Japanese dinner companions showed me that the shell had been sliced and so cunningly reassembled that it looked whole but was actually in perfect pieces for picking up daintily with chopsticks. We had little language in common but we all enjoyed the delicate perfection of that beautiful crab.

My Dad was less appreciative of Japanese food than my Mom and I were; in a Japanese restaurant, he always ordered tempura, saying with a twinkle that the rest of the menu was "bait." Mom and I just ignored him and scarfed down our sashimi.

Last week, some of the women on our little alley treated our friend Doreen to a sushi lunch in Berkeley. My expectation was for pretty good food, but presentation with those little plastic, serrated leaves and perhaps sectioned black faux lacquer boxes with red insides. You know the kind I mean. I was pleasantly surprised by the thoughtful decor and the attractive place settings. When this plate was served to one of my companions, I knew we were in for a treat.

We each ordered and ate separate things, and I won't go in to detail about each dish, but suffice it to say that even the usually-humble miso soup drew appreciative ooohs and the edamame was spectacular. I love edamame in any form, but when it comes cooked to bright green perfection with golden garlic, cilantro and other delicious mysteries, it is something very special.

Then this white plate showed up. I can unequivocally state that this is the best sushi I have ever tasted. Everything was fresh and beautifully prepared, with lovely little touches like flowers made of ginger and tiny tobiko that popped crisply between the teeth. The presentation of each dish was as beautiful as this one, a feast for the eye as well as the tongue. We all sat around taking bites from each others' dishes and nodding with mouths full and eyes rolling.

If you like sushi, and even if you think you don't, go try Sushi29 on Solano in Berkeley. The food is a work of art.

Heating Things Up

On a recent trip to Mississippi to visit his Mom, Jim Sartain bought this box of potentially hellish instant pork rinds and brought it back to share. He doled out some to different pals, including several packages in the original box for me.

Okay, is this where I admit I had never tasted a pork rind before in my life? Never mind a hot n' (sic) spicy one. Never mind a microwaved one. I'm all for new culinary adventures but I admit to a certain skepticism at the outset.

Here's the deal: you take out one of the little clear plastic packages; redistribute evenly in the bag the future rinds, which look and feel like pieces of hard plastic about 1/2" square and dusted with deeply suspicious, reddish-brown spices; place the bag in the microwave oven; blast on full whack for about 4-5 minutes; remove carefully, as the bag is now hot as a firecracker; the rinds have puffed up to roughly 20x their original size; cut open the bag and eat.

Some kind of wacky miracle has happened in that few minutes. The rinds are now as puffed as a down jacket and crisp, full of porky bubbles, as light as a feather. They are a tiny bit greasy, but not unpleasantly so. And they are SPICY! For me, on the threshold of hell, but then we all know I'm a spice wimp. Still, they were so good that I kept eating them and, oddly, savoring the burn. This must be how masochists feel on a good day. It seems a contradiction but, à chacun son gout, n'est-ce pas?

Whatever. I enjoyed the heck out of these little blasts from the Deep South. How Deep South is it? Well, to hear tell, when asked for a breakfast English muffin in a restaurant down there, the response was "We don't have foreign foods."

They may not know about English muffins yet, but they surely do know their pork rinds and I, for one, am happy to heat things up here in sunny California.

Blog Crush

I can't recall how I stumbled upon "A Cup of Jo," my latest blog crush, but I'm enjoying it very much. Jo is a young, thirty-something woman who lives in NYC with a handsome huz and a sweet baby boy. Now, if you could draw a polar opposite to me in every way except gender, it would probably be Jo.

Jo is young, slender, lively, fashion conscious, interested in "The Bachelor" series on TV, has a son, lives happily in a huge city, and hardly cooks at all. Still, I get a kick out of reading about peeptoe wedges and dark chocolate ice cream on her blog even though I wouldn't be found dead in the former and I found the latter to be 'way too intense. Jo has a way of making killing your feet and your waistline sound like fun.

Jo is on a mission to learn how to cook a few "classics" like mac and cheese and scrambled eggs. Isn't that cute? She posted recently about making a breakfast sandwich, one of my favorite foods, so I decided to try her way and see if I liked it.

Now, recognize that she started with a slice of American cheese, that ghastly bright orange kind that comes individually wrapped in plastic. Like peeptoe wedges, that's something that is simply never going to happen in my house. But, otherwise, it seemed like a nice, simple way to turn an egg and a piece of cheese into breakfast. So, I made one myself, subbing in a slice of Swiss and some nutty wheatberry toast. I also added a slice of Canadian bacon for flavor; I briefly sauteéd it in the pan to warm it, then removed it to the waiting toast before pouring in the egg, placing the cheese on top, cooking briefly, and folding it into an eggy envelope.

The result was divinely oozy and unctuous, tender egg and warm cheese counterpointed by the light smoke of the bacon and the crunch of the toast. Even while I was wolfing it down, I was thinking of tweaks to this basic recipe, herbs to add and different cheeses, mentally making lots of different breakfasts.

So, Jo and I live on opposite coasts, have different lives, and don't share much in the way of preferences, but I find her to be a delight. Go see if you agree.

Pork Pépin

I have talked about Jacques Pépin's book, "Essential Pépin" so often that you are going to think I'm getting kickbacks from the author.

Nothing could be further from the truth; I worship the great man from afar and the numbers who read my blog are vanishingly small; no publicist has come around with tempting offers.

So you know my praise is genuine, untainted by filthy lucre. And it is praise, indeed. This time, we were having pork tenderloin for dinner and I had cut it into medallions to brown and serve - the quickest and best use of a pork tenderloin in my view.

For one thing, you can cut as many or as few as you need. My Beloved and I are not dieting, exactly, but we are trying to watch portion sizes, our besetting sin. So, instead of serving three or four as I might easily have done before, I cut a modest two each. I also like that each piece is nicely caramelized in the cooking. I had the idea to consult with Chef Pépin and dinner was on.

Jacques calls this recipe "Pork Loin Tournedos with Cream and Calvados." I didn't have pork loin or Calvados, but I did have pork tenderloin and Armagnac - close enough! I also didn't have prunes, so I subbed in raisins.

This is one of those recipes where you brown the meat in a pan, remove it to a warm oven to continue cooking, then deglaze and make a sauce right in the same pan, so no flavor is lost. I added sliced shallots to the pan juices and sautéed briefly while the meat rested in the oven, then deglazed with the Armagnac. The recipe for the sauce calls for heavy cream but I usually sub in half and half, since we don't normally have heavy cream in the house. After cooking the sauce to reduce it a bit, I added the raisins, a small handful and, when the pork emerged beautifully cooked to pale pink perfection, I added the collected juices to the sauce, stirred them in and poured it over the tenderloins.

This is a meal at which My Beloved eats with silent, devoted intention - the food is gone in a twinkling. Then, he looks up, blue eyes misty with pleasure and says, "Oh, that was good."

An Embarrassment Of Richness

Chocolate. Who doesn't like chocolate? I have heard of some sad individuals who are allergic to the stuff, and they have my deepest sympathy. Chocolate is a major food group for most Americans. I'm more of a coffee fan, myself; heavy duty chocolate can give me a headache.

But when I read on the blog "A Cup of Jo" about rich, smooth chocolate ice cream I can make without an ice cream freezer, I do sit up and read it again.

The recipe is so simple that most ingredients I had already at home. After reading the recipe, I made a dash to the store for the rest of the supplies and set to work.

What emerged the next day, after giving it time to freeze hard, was the richest, most decadent, most amazing chocolate ice cream I have ever tasted. In fact, it was a little too rich and decadent, if you can believe such a thing.

The bowl you are looking at is about two inches across and that spoon is a demitasse spoon. It was still too much ice cream. My Beloved called it "cold brownies." He has a way with words; it is the chocolatest chocolate ice cream in the world, bar none.

So if you've got a world-class chocolate yen on, I can recommend this ice cream. Otherwise, Häagen-Dazs will suffice.

Carousels

I'm inordinately fond of carousels and I have reached the age where I am no longer self conscious about riding on them, as I was in my thirties and forties. I'm so glad I got over that silly restriction, as there is little in this world so much pure fun as the bounding rush of a carousel ride. I don't even need to take a child to make me legit.

In fact, I think carousels are wasted on the smallest children. They often seem afraid of all that height, noise and motion, sometimes clinging to their mothers and actually crying, the little wimps. Once they have ridden, however, and nothing bad has happened to them, they seem to seize the fun and will beg for ride after ride, shouting and waving to their parents with one hand while clinging to the brass pole with the other. Sadly, they now provide seat belts on the plunging horses for children under a certain age; I can only shake my head at that development. Who ever heard of anyone getting hurt on a merry-go-round?

Choosing your horse is important; its soul must match your own. While the previous riders are circling, I closely examine all the horses to find just the right one. Sometimes I'm in the mood for the wildly charging ones; other times, a collected and gentle one will do. Dapple grays, colorful pintos, dashing blacks, golden palominos - so many jewel-like choices! I never sit in the swan boats, as lovely as some of them are, and I don't choose to ride the other animals, if the carousel has lions or giraffes. It must be a steed; only a steed will do.

The best merry-go-rounds have painted ceilings as well as lights, mirrors and painted outsides. The one in Rochester, New York is the best I have ever seen for painted ceilings - it is a marvel. And the best carousels still have a brass ring dispenser, like the one at the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk. They have to buy tens of thousands of new rings each year, as most people keep them as souvenirs rather than trying to throw them into the clown's mouth to get a free ride. My Beloved caught the brass ring last time we rode that one together.

The music must come from a band organ, one that oompahs as well as tinkles a happy tune. A silent carousel would be like a silent bird, too sad to contemplate. Just hearing that music brings a smile and draws me in to take another ride.

Next time you see one of these whirling delights, pay your very small admission charge and channel your inner child. Mounting a carousel horse will take years off your years and, whether you catch the brass ring or not, you'll be transported to another, simpler time where the lights are glowing, the music is playing, the horses are surging, and life is sweet.

Confession

I was raised Catholic in the bad old days, so confession is deeply ingrained in my psyche. I'm not a Catholic any longer but I still find that acknowledging my shortcomings out loud helps me to recognize and, sometimes, to start fixing them. It's like an apology, only to yourself, with a sincere wish to do better in the future.

There is one weakness, however, that I have no intention of overcoming. I confess that I love Diet Coke™. It's not that I'm on a perpetual diet; it's that I like the taste better than regular Coke.

I like it very cold. It's best when the cola has been refrigerated and then poured into a glass so full of ice that there's barely room for the bubbles. At home, I pour them just as I like but in restaurants it's hard to convince the servers that I mean LOTS of ice.

There is nothing on earth so delicious as a Diet Coke with Indian-style curry. Don't ask me why but those flavors love each other - it's hard for me to consider one without the other.

I have thought about giving up Diet Coke for Lent (another Catholic practice that I haven't quite discarded yet) but each time I think about it, I hastily decide there must be something else - anything else! - that I could do to build my character and strengthen my resolve. This year, I have decided to read only Improving Literature during Lent. I can give up potboilers for Lent but forty days without a Diet Coke is simply unthinkable.

I drank this particular Diet Coke on Mardi Gras, the day before Lent begins, and did my annual battle with my sybaritic self before confessing that next year would be a better year in which to give it up.

Proverbial

You can lead a horse to water - and if he's thirsty, he will wrinkle his nose delicately as he lowers his head to drink.

Spotted outside the Mission Santa Barbara on our recent trip down there. Cora was momentarily awestruck by the horses, but then hurled bellicose challenges at them. Happily, the horses couldn't have cared less.

I like the California missions, despite their sometimes decrepit state and despite their despotic history of enslaving the native peoples, for their simplicity and their beautiful gardens. I hope to see them all before I go to heaven.

At Mission San Luis Obispo once, we witnessed a bride arriving in a horse-drawn carriage, her wayward veil lighted by the sun and rising on a warm wind. There is a sweet little park in front of that mission with a stream that runs through town and a delightful statue of a bear on which children love to clamber.

At Mission Santa Ynez, we witnessed the First Communion class emerging from the church, the girls as decorous as miniature brides and the boys dressed in purest white with scarlet sashes. Their mothers must have had a time keeping them clean until after church. The party afterward in the lovely garden was wonderful - we eavesdropped on mostly Hispanic families taking group pictures to mark the day. We even took a few for them, so their whole families could be in the photo.

It doesn't belong on a food blog at all, except for the horse cookie I fed to the patient bay with the rider aboard; the rider had baked horse cookies that morning and shared some with me. The bay was gentle and mannerly, his whiskers tickling my palm as he lipped his treat; my hand came away a little moist from his breath and smelling horsey the way it always did when I owned my own sweet mare.

All these thoughts and memories came while the chestnut drank his fill from the fountain.

Leap Year

My geezer birthday was an extended week of fun, thanks in large part to My Beloved, who gathered my friends into three big surprises.

The first was a pizza lunch at Rosso where seven friends surprised me with silly gifts and funny cards to usher me into geezerhood. We shared their swoon-worthy Dungeness crab pizza. Even the staff at Rosso all signed a birthday card for me and our waiter showered me, literally, with hard candies in lieu of a birthday cake!

The second was lunch at Homeroom where my pals from my years at Hastings College of the Law met us for mac and cheese and more silly gifts and funny cards. Because most of them are attorneys, you'd expect a tad more decorum, but a big part of the reason I love these folks is that they aren't at all typical. They teased me unmercifully when I ordered the "Trailer Mac," mac and cheese with hot dogs cut up in it and topped with potato chips. Irene's dish, however, mac and cheese with just a hint of jalapeño, was even better. And their homemade Oreo cookies... we had to take them home as we were too full to finish even one.

The third was opening our hotel room door in Santa Barbara, where My Beloved took me the following weekend to continue the celebration, to find my Fairy Godson and his mother Wendy, my oldest and dearest friend on Earth, standing there. Wendy lives in Michigan, so you know how very complete was my surprise. I just hugged her and wept for joy.

We had a splendid weekend together, visiting the Santa Barbara mission, the wonderfully decorated Court House, the delightful carousel (yes, they allow geezers to ride as well as children), the endless beach, the East Beach Grill (a must on a sunny morning), and a day trip to Ojai.

I had heard about the Ojai Valley from an art student many years ago when I worked at the San Francisco Art Institute. He extolled the beauties of the valley and the quaintness of the town in such glowing terms that I made a mental note to get there some day. Now, I can check that one off my bucket list. I might even go again.

Ojai is, indeed, very quaint and delightful, not only the main shopping street, which clearly caters to the weekend getaway, but also the shaded streets and pretty parks where water splashes into a fountain in which dogs are allowed to wade and where men form a drum circle that sends lively reverberations throughout the town. On a mission to find an elusive yarn shop, we instead found some little girls selling lemonade and cookies. That should give you a feel for life in Ojai.

What has all this to do with Leap Year? It's my understanding that on Leap Years, women can ask the men of their dreams to marry them. I'm going ask My Beloved to remarry me. Anyone who makes such a fine birthday celebration is a keeper.