Alameda and Tejon

In mid-November we went for dim sum at Super Star Asian. This excursion was for the birthday of a friend of a friend. We sat down to the table of four adults and two children (already seated) and were immediately surrounded by carts of buns and dumplings. It was amazingly overwhelming. I was offered lobster, duck, and shrimp in various forms. I was originally a little leery of the prospect of dim sum. I mean, who knows what might be inside of a steamed or fried this or that…and what is shu mai anyway? Though since I like shrimp I knew that I could eat something there and I went without protest. I was pleasantly surprised! Even I, a discerning eater, walked away with a too full stomach. It was actually a pretty fun experience. They did serve the lobster head with the plate of lobster bits (a prawn was added so the big guy wouldn’t get lonely).

Afterwards, we all journeyed to the other end of the block to the Pacific Ocean International Supermarket to check out the offerings and walk off the dim sum. There was a subsection of the market devoted to glassware, kitchen utensils, and miscellaneous other items. The scantily clad plastic doll in the photo below falls into the latter category. It was actually in with some kids toys…so, I guess it’s for kids. All I know is that it’s butt actually jiggled. 

Anyway…they sell a variety of items at the Pacific Ocean market – including unicorn horns! Well, that’s what they look like. Not actually sure what they really are though.

Having arrived back from Portland just two weeks earlier, there were some other items that stood out. I say this because Portland seems to be the land of the gluten-free, vegan everything.  So, to see both canned fried gluten and “big gluten ball” was odd.

We bought some noodles and gummy candy and called it a day. Super Star Asian was pretty tasty and they serve dim sum all day – I recommend it.

Soaked in Beer and Coffee, Drizzled with Salt

It’s Sunday and raining. We’re laying drowsily on Curtis’ couch in NE Portland. We have a few hours before our flight back to Denver and we are pooped.  A few days of walking, eating, drinking, and looking around will do that to a person. Eating and drinking take center stage on any Portland trip – in the three days we visited the damp, northwestern city we had 19 occasions to eat and/or drink.

Friday was the most full food day. It started at Ken’s Artisan Bakery for quiche, cappuccino, and a cinnamon-glazed cinnamon roll.

This fueled our trip up the hill to the Japanese Garden. The winding trail through the park took us through the rose gardens, which were still plentiful with mist-laden roses:

We also encountered Phyllis the banana slug on the path!

I loved the Japanese Garden. We spent over 90 minutes in the wonderful, gentle drizzle strolling quietly through the mossy terrain. Many of the maples and other trees were turning yellow, red, and orange and there were stairs made of stepping stones that descended deeper into the gardens and leaf-strewn paths that took us back out again.

The whole trip was soaked in coffee and beer – Portland does both extremely well. On our way out of the gardens we popped into Coffeehouse Northwest for surprisingly soothing cappuccino that was beautifully made:

This was followed about an hour later by lunch at Bridgeport Brewing and dessert of mini pumpkin whoopie pies and fleur de sel chocolate chip cookies at Two Tarts.

After meandering through the Pearl District and getting totally overwhelmed at Powell’s Books, we spent some quality time at the Hostel reading and napping. Vacation is so fantastic…The napping just prepped us for Friday, part 2.

With dinner reservations at Le Pigeon, a seriously cozy restaurant in the southeastern part of the city, we showered and hurried across the Burnside Bridge. Over candlelight we shared a bottle of Willamette Valley pinot noir and enjoyed Pumpkin Agnolotti with brown butter consommé and parmesan (me) and Lamb Shoulder with yogurt spätzle, sausage, and persimmon saffron chutney (Seth). We didn’t get dessert per se, but super tasty, gourmet chocolates came with the bill.

Burnside Brewing was on the way back, so we stopped in to try the award winning (Great American Beer Fest 2012) Sweet Heat, which is a wheat beer brewed with apricots and Jamaican scotch bonnet peppers. It was just the right amount of heat – worthy of an award in my opinion. Also on our path was Voodoo Donut, home of the maple bacon donut – see below to the far left of the photo:

One last Friday night stop – Rogue Brewing! Just five or so blocks from the hostel, we couldn’t pass it up. I had the mocha porter mixed with their chipotle ale from the tap, which mixes to make a mole beer – such a treat.

We slept very well Friday night.

September 2012 recap

September was all about food – mostly pasta but some baking.

One day near the end of August, Seth came home with a little metal pasta maker and we were inspired to make spaghetti and linguini. It’s surprisingly easy. The pasta maker comes with a basic pasta dough recipe. After the dough is, well, in dough form, you run it through the machine to flatten it to a somewhat thin, oblong sheet of floury eggy goodness.  Then you put it in the cutter side and make either spaghetti or linguini.

Et voila! Add some olive oil with garlic and shallots, some grape tomatoes, chicken and parmesan cheese and you have an amazingly tasty homemade pasta dish!

I bought a ravioli maker to add to our pasta making options. It’s really a ravioli cutter because it’s not as automated as an attachment to the machine but it works just fine.

We filled the little pasta pockets with minced shrimp, garlic, oil, and cheese and they were soooo tasty.

I highly recommend making your own pasta, it’s better than any dried pasta you can buy. You can also make a bunch of fresh pasta in advance and freeze it. We actually thawed some frozen fresh pasta on Sunday and it was just as good as the night we made it.

In addition to pasta, I’ve been trying to make a good lemon-ginger cookie. I tried two recipes this month. One was too lemony (drowned out the ginger), the other had a good lemon-ginger flavor but was a little too buttery…I still ate too many of them, but took no photos.

A friend bought me some new autumn-themed cookie cutters – little bite-sized pumpkins, leaves, acorns and turkeys. So cute! The same day I purchased candy eyes. I couldn’t resist the temptation to make little sugar cookies with eyes.

The spicy pumpkin muffins that I made the same day also became adorned with eyes – at least the mini-muffins.

Fall is the best time of year for food – pumpkin and mushrooms and apples and yum!

Eating Baby Animals

There was a time when I wouldn't eat baby animals but it seems that time is fading into the distance. Last night I ate Greek-style lamb sliders with yogurt-cucumber sauce. These were made on the grill, with fresh-from-the-garden mint, and with feta cheese added to the lamb concoction. They were AMAZING. Here is the before shot:

This is the final product paired with fresh-off-the-cob corn sauteed with butter:

You may be noticing the sauce and thinking, "wait a minute, she doesn't eat sauce on things." You'd be right, generally.  I gave the yogurt-cucumber sauce (which included garlic!) a day in court and, to my surprise, really enjoyed it. It added a creamy, tangy element without stealing the show. The downside is that it made the little slider a bit gooey and hard to hold but it was worth it. 

As a side note the prep was accompanied by New Belgium's Cocao Mole Ale, which I tried fresh off the tap for the first time at the New Belgium brewery on a tour on Friday. I recommend it - spicy, fresh flavor but not overpowering. The meal was paired with New Belgium's Shift pale lager. I think it was too light to stand up to the oniony, minty, garlicky goodness that was dinner.  I'll need to try it again on its own to really be fair and review it. 

So, in the end I went out on a limb and tried things I hadn't tried before and had an amazing meal. There must be some kind of positive influence at work here...

Fat and Connections

I just ate a little chunk of bacon fat. Despite my fat-conscious nature, I’m greatly enjoying the Tuscan white bean soup that I made on Sunday (I’d include the link but it’s from Cooks Illustrated, which is stingy with its recipes).  It involved both chicken broth *and* two slices of bacon. It’s just a little greasy…but delicious and satisfying.

Now to report on the antithesis of delicious and satisfying: I went back to online dating for a few weeks.  It’s ending as quickly as it began.  I had something like eight dates in two weeks and I’m exhausted.  That’s a lot of getting-to-know-you conversations! Most involved me listening to the date going on about his life and showing faint interest in mine – that’s a sure sign of compassion…Another wanted to play trivia competitively when I didn’t and another tried hard to get me drunk and go dancing and two looked almost nothing like their photos.

Then there are the emails. I got one from user name “Ticklefun” that said, “Random question…are you ticklish?” I did not respond.  There are really creative emails like the one I got last week that said simply “Hi  :-)” That gives me so much to respond to. There are the emails from guys who are in from out of town “just looking to hang out” for a night.  We can all read between the lines on that one.

Mostly dating is a lot of no-connection. You know immediately when there is something there and, similarly, you know immediately when there’s nothing there. Happily, during my dating hiatus I am looking into something.

red wine and chocolate cake

I have cycles of will power. This week has been a down cycle. The last three days have been drenched in chocolate. Chocolate cake for dessert Wednesday, thin mint girl scout cookies yesterday and today, and left over cake just now.  I’m squinting through the sugary cake buzz to write this.  The red wine helps.

In addition to these cookies and cakes, the candy dishes around the office are killing me. One woman has a four inch thick dish full of peanut butter M&Ms. She refills it to the brim every few days. My travel patterns through the office have been adjusted to swing by that dish several times a day. I have to go farther than I would normally walk to get to and from my desk and I justify the candy intake telling myself that I’m burning more calories.

The interwebs tells me that “will power” is both self discipline and an Australian racecar driver. The former is “the ability to overcome laziness and procrastination.” If I don’t develop this ability soon I’m going to look like this:

Beef

I’ve started eating  a variety of beef products again.  I’ve always cheated with beef jerky for hiking but have avoided steaks and burgers and so on.

I stopped many years ago during a 5 year vegetarian stint between 1995 and 2000.  After falling off the vegetarian wagon I resumed chicken and turkey consumption but not beef (or pork actually).  Not only had beef products become difficult for my body to process (I did try a steak early on at a fancy company dinner), but I knew that beef is environmentally unsound.  The amount of water and grain that goes into one pound of beef could feed families.  In addition, the waste from factory farms is toxic.

So why resume eating beef you ask?  I’m a pretty particular eater and at some restaurants beef is the only appetizing option.  Case in point – last Thursday night my friend and colleague, Pat, and I tried out the new restaurant Linger, which is a well-designed, hip place that is brilliantly reusing the old Olinger Mortuary building.  Here’s a photo from the back side of the restaurant.

As an aside, there was another beautiful sky as it briefly rained and clouds were moving through the windy evening:

Here’s Pat looking regal while we were waiting for our table:

Anyway, at Linger not only did we get the beef tacos but I got an amazing burger slider with some yellow sauce (not mustard) on a surprisingly tasty bun.  For some reason I look overly happy, but here I am below with said slider:

More beef ingestion: after my Memorial Day backpacking trip we decided to stop at Coney Island.  For the first time in 20 years I got a hot dog!  After two days of backpacking and eating snacks and ramen and so on, the hot dog was truly satisfying.  Here is evidence of my hot dog eating:

Highlands Saturday

Because there was a film festival to attend and a new restaurant to try, the bulk of Saturday was spent in the Highlands neighborhood of Denver. 

I attended two separate film sessions at the Festivus Film Festival.  Both were at the Oriental Theater, which is a cool, old theater that I had never been inside. 

Session 1: 2:00 pm “Doc Double” – two documentaries back to back.  These were supposed to be inspiring documentaries about the triumph of the human spirit and so on.  The first one was about surfing and helping kids on Bali surf and get money for school.  It was mostly surfing.  If you’re not a surfer and/or don’t know anything about surfing, all the surfing shots look the same.  It was chilly in the theater so I wrapped myself in the tee shirt I won and nodded off.

The second documentary was the draw for this session – “Conquest of High Passes.”  Disabled cyclist traveling through the Himalayas and persevering.  It turned out to be a little dour.  The whole thing felt like rainy day wrapped in a wet blanket.  I blame this on the cyclist on which the film focused.  He was alternately talking about what an inspiration he was and talking about how horrible everything was. 

The next session wasn’t until 6:00 pm, meaning there was time to check out the area.  Lots of house-shops (i.e. little local shops in converted houses), art galleries, and coffee shops.  In one gallery/framing shop (metro frame works) there were to shop dogs – Greyhounds! 

They also had some art by artist Chris Vance that appealed to me.  This is just one example:

Since the break between sessions was so long, there was time to shoot over to the 32nd/Lowell area for a stroll.  More cute shops.  I love this octopus mural.

Dinner was at Hops & Pie (specializing in craft brew and artisan pizza).   The pizza was pleasantly tasty but the beer on tap was really special.  Here’s a bit of the draft beer menu:

I had the Oaked Arrogant Bastard (you don’t get that on tap too often!):

After dinner it was back to the film festival for Session 2: Laugh Track Short Films.  These were much more satisfying than session one’s documentaries.   Many of them were witty and at least half had me actually laughing out loud!  “Chump and Clump” was my favorite – two animated dudes and their adventures at a bus stop!

Afterwards was the last stop of the evening – Forest Room 5 – for a final beer.  This is somewhere I don’t get to very often because it’s in the Highlands but it’s an eclectic place that has various sized logs for bar stools and old farming and mining films playing silently behind the bar.  It is always pretty crowded. 

That was my Saturday! 

G’s Blah Year: 2010

January

Not an exciting month.  Yawn.

February

This was the month that winter eating really hit.  My friend Nadine and I spent the better part of a Sunday making cupcakes.  Here’s one of mine:

There were also a couple of weekend days that could basically be considered Denver-Boulder food tours.  Here’s me at Proto’s at the end of one of these tours.

March

Of course, the Academy Awards Show is in March and I went to Lisa’s for our annual champagne-drinking-Oscar-watching event:

I spent a few chilly but fun days in Moab, Utah, with Trisha and Kara.  This is Kara and I on a hike in Arches National Park:

Delicate Arch

It also snowed in Denver.  This isn’t rare but I did get some mediocre photos. This was one I took from the door of my condo building as I headed out for my walk to work:

April

I went to my first roller derby – lots of fun actually!  It is about as violent as you’d think.  One woman had a black eye and lots of them had bruises, but they looked to be having a good time…

I attended my first black tie event – the Downtown Denver Awards.  I posted extensively on my girly anxiety related to what to wear to this event.  I think I did an ok job in the end:

Hiking started in April! 

While descending Bear Peak outside of Boulder, my ankle turned on a rock and I landed in a prickly bush.  Unfortunately, my attempt to break my fall I ended up landing on my thumb.  It was sore for several weeks.  This is my in my blah hiking wear on the trail (my hiking wear is basically this and it will be featured in most hiking shots).

Oh, on and near the summit of this hike, there are always gobs and gobs of ladybugs!  Note the piles of them in the background of this photo.

May

The memorable event in May was going to DC for the WTS International Conference.  This was the first WTS conference I attended.  It was worthwhile but exhausting with social events in the evenings and getting up early each morning.  One of the highlights was a mobile tour to DC’s Union Station where there is a fabulously designed bike station!

Did get a chance to visit Fredericksburg, VA, and Chatham Manor, which is a beautiful garden and old plantation.  It was also the site of late night mischief in my high school years…

There are so many old, huge trees, some of which I think are “historic” and are preserved and kept upright with bolts and wires.  There are even enormous ginkgo trees.

Also got to visit with Jake and Morgan!  Here a photo of those gorgeous children:

June

Hiking season begins in earnest!  First was Cameron and Bross (both done on the same day).

Then there was the West Elk backpacking trip with Lisa.  I have an entire blog post about this trip, but here is photo that isn’t in that post (I think my eyes are closed – typical):

July

July was a fabulous outdoor month.

The trip to Glacier National Park was the most memorable thing I did in July.  This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

In Colorado, there was backpacking into the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness area and climbing of Humboldt.  Colorado in summer is heavenly. 

The view while pumping water:

The ascent with Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle shrouded in clouds behind me:

The summit ridge:

Bonus!  Lots and lots of not-at-all-timid marmots.

Then there was also the ascent of Torreys via the Kelso Ridge – so much fun (really!).  Here’s me on the ascent:

And here’s me on the “knife edge” – I’m actually quite scared here but trying to look tough for the camera.

August

Summer was winding down for me.  Lots of allergy “desensitization” shots had my immune system so worn out I was getting sick a lot.  I did get out with Lisa though – we hiked Devil’s thumb.  The mushrooms and flowers were the most memorable from this hike:

September

Attended both the Fort Collins and the Denver Tour de Fat events.  Tour de Fat is New Belgium Brewing’s festival of bikes, beer, and freaks!  Thousands of people come out on bikes in costume – it’s a good time.

This is me (left) with Amy and April on our way to the Tour de Fat opening parade.

September also is peak time for the changing of the Aspen trees leaves to golden!  Combined a trip to Buena Vista for the Autumn Color run with a leaf-viewing trip.

The annual Rocky Mountain National Park camping trip to listen to the elk rut is a September event.  This year Lisa and her family joined us.  Me and Lisa!

October

New York City baby! Loved NYC.  There is so much to see and watch and experience. 

Loved the subway:

Loved Central Park:

Loved the food – but actually didn’t get many photos of it.

Rail~Volution was in Portland, OR, in October also, but there is a post on that.

November

Not a lot happened in November.  Went to Joyful Journey Hot Springs for Thanksgiving – that was lovely.  No phone, no internet, no TV – just reading, soaking, eating, and napping.

December

A crazy month but nothing to speak of…

Happy New Year!