It's That Time of Year: Wedding Fair Season

I found this in my secondary e-mail account:

Here's your Complimentary Ticket to the Bridal Event of the Year!

We'd like you to be our guest at the Modern Luxury Weddings Bridal Event at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Sunday, January 10th. It's an unforgettable afternoon filled with decadent hors d'oeuvres and gourmet tastings from renowned chefs, champagne and martini bars, the glamour of the Vera Wang and Monique Lhuiller High Fashion Runway Show and over 80 magnificent exhibits filling the ballrooms of San Francisco's only Five-Star, Five Diamond hotel...

Um...can I still go?

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!

What Do You Do All Day, Kitty?

Wool blanket on top of laundry basket + hissing radiator = kitty's found a new happy place.

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!

What I Just Read: Farm City

I'm always so sad when I get to the end of a book that I've been enjoying. I slow down my pace of reading the final few pages, not wanting the book to end. It's been a while since I read a book like that, but tonight I got to experience that again as I finished Farm City by Novella Carpenter. As I said in my Facebook update, who knew that a book about squatter backyard farming in the Oakland ghetto could be so interesting? (I almost called it engaging, bit I'm not sure if it's correct to describe a book as engaging?)

Anyway, lately I seem to be reading books written by Bay Area people (last week I finished Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon), or books having to to with food (like Cleaved by Julie Powell). I liked the Chabon book, but I did not really enjoy Cleaved. I think that as a happy newlywed, I just can't relate to the story of a woman who has an extramarital affair and stays with her husband, who knows about it and starts having affairs himself. The parts about her apprenticing at a butcher shop in upstate NY were OK - there are some interesting and likeable characters at the shop - but my eyes did glaze over as she went on and on and on and on about meat and butchery. Even the latter part of the book where she travels was not that interesting. I found myself feeling the same disdain for the author that I felt when I read Eat, Pray, Love. And she was so likeable in Julie and Julia! Somehow I don't think they're going to make a movie starring Amy Adams out of this.

So back to Farm City: it does make me look at the semi-accessible backyard of our building in a new way. But shoot, I've always had a black thumb...maybe I'll have to settle for encouraging Dave to start up his window herb garden again.

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.

The Most Dangerous Wedding Gift Ever

Do you know what these things are?


It's a creme brulee torch, a mortar and pestle, and a lemon reamer. AKA, our wedding gift from our friend G, given to us with the instructions that we not use them on each other in disagreements. Thanks, G!

(Side note: last Easter I came across a site where people tortured Marshmallow Peeps in a myriad of ways. Now, unlike many people, I am a fan of the Peep, but this trio of gifts could really be put to interesting uses in that little endeavor come next Spring).

We also got a surprise gift: a bundt cake pan and a box of double chocolate bundt cake mix. Now I can make a bundt cake and have something to put in my cake stand!
BONUS GIFT: more packing materials for Kitty!