Meal #1: Spaghetti Bolognese

Another New Year's resolution: cook more. Or more accurately, just cook at all. My goal is to make one meal a week for Sweetie and myself. I have to somehow justify all the cookware and tools and all the other kitchen stuff that I've been buying or want to buy.

Tonight I started with something easy: Spaghetti Bolognese, a recipe I clipped from Shape magazine. You saute a minced clove of garlic in a saucepan in a teaspoon of olive oil, then add four ounces of ground turkey breast and cook for five minutes until it's browned (I think I should have browned it more - it remained quite pale). You then add a cup of canned diced tomatos, 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, bring to a boil, and then simmer for ten minutes. Serve over spaghetti (I bought the multigrain kind - it wasn't bad).


Eh, it was OK. Not at all like the bolognese that I've gotten at, say, Oliveto, but at least it was maybe not so bad for us. I doubt I'll be making it again. But at least I spent some time in the kitchen and gave Dave a break. And the bar is set pretty low for my next meal!

Hike #2 : Phoenix Lake

Hike #2! We've gone hiking twice this year and it's only January 3!

This was hike #8 in the book, another easy one: Phoenix Lake, Tucker and Bill Williams Trails. It was supposed to be only 3.5 miles but we did a compete loop around the lake which put us at at least 4 miles. We're planning to get in shape for longer hikes this Spring.


Winter hiking is so different from any other season. The much shorter days, the nip in the air, the trails muddy from recent rains. Still, I'm glad to live in a place where we can do this year round. I had never heard of Phoenix Lake before seeing it in this book, and indeed, it seems like a place that mostly Ross locals go. No entrance fee, but a teeny tiny parking lot with barely any street parking allowed. There were a lot of people there - I'm not sure if people are fired up from resolutions, or if that's always the case. And they're so nice! Two men stopped and asked us if we needed help as we consulted the book for directions at trail junctions - one of them a runner who came to a total stop. I coined a new phrase for Dave: Marin Nice!

The trail was wide and open for most of the part around the reservoir, but the Tucker/Williams part of the trail was very woodsy, taking us around super steep ravines and winding creeks. It was great to be out and about outdoors. I'm so out of shape right now but I felt really energized. Yay, 2010 hiking!

Hello, Twenty-Ten!

I love a new year - I love to make resolutions! Like this one:

So, back in 2001 I bought a book called 101 Hikes in the Bay Area. I had just started hiking with OAC, and I thought it would be cool to do all 101 hikes in the book. I knocked off more than a few, both with OAC and on my own with friends. When Sweetie and I met - thank god he likes to hike! - we had a goal of completing the book together. We've done just under twenty hikes from the book - the wedding and all the planning it involved really sidetracked things. We intended to pick up where we left off, but I don't know, 101 suddenly seems like such a daunting number. And since the book was published in 2001, I wondered how much of the information was out of date. So, we picked a new book to get through: Falcon Guide's Best Hikes Near San Francisco. Forty hikes in one year? I think we can totally do it. Yay, a project! It's like my own version of Julie & Julia, only with less butter.


Yesterday we started with hike #18: The Presidio - Lovers' Lane and the Ecology Trail. I have a hard time calling this a hike because of the short distance and also because this is pretty much what I do for exercise (a.k.a. my hour-long hilly walks around my neighborhood), but whatever, it's in the book, so it counts.

Though I'm very familiar with this part of the Presidio due to said walks, Dave hadn't really ventured out here, despite the fact that the Presidio Gates are a ten-minute walk from our apartment. I had been wanting to bring him out there ever since we moved here - over ten months ago now! I didn't want us to move away from here some day and be like "Oh, we never went to the Presidio..." You have to take advantage of these things when they're right in your backyard.

Anyway, it was a lovely little hike on a gray overcast day, complete with - of course! - a kiss on Lovers Lane. A nice way to start the year.