Wow...MORE food news. (I am a creature of appetite these days, I guess!) I once again attended the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday. (See my original post about it last year, or their website.) Leslie and I were the veterans from last year, with S., Noah, and Julia accompanying us this time. It's definitely something you only need to do once annually -- the memories of crowds, heat, and costliness ultimately fade, but the memory of that delicious stench pervading every possible type of food imaginable lingers on. We tried their garlic combo sampler (shrimp scampi, sauteed mushrooms, pasta, and chicken sausage sandwich, all with a healthy dose of garlic as their top ingredient), deep fried rattlesnake on a stick (yeah, you heard me correctly -- and that was among the other choices, which included gator tail, frog legs, crawdads and kangaroo!! They sure lived up to that creole swamp hodge podge you'd expect from a cajun booth), garlic ice cream, garlic jelly beans, and an assortment of (non-garlic) fruit smoothies, frozen lemonade,  and shave ice to keep us cool. The biggest hit was by far the dish that Leslie and I honed in on -- beer battered garlic french fries topped with Dungeness Crab shreds and homemade aioli. To die for. I wish I had some right now.

The day before that was also a lovely day -- there were two farewell parties for friends leaving the bay area at the end of the summer. One was a pool party at Laura's house in Lafayette -- she has a great little ranch house with a pool and hot tub. They even broke out a slip & slide! And they have a sweet rotti-dobi mix (basically looks like a slightly stocky doberman or a slightly slimmer rottweiler) named Baily who ran around and made sure nobody threw anything without her permission. And in true Laura fashion there was oodles of food -- hotdogs, chicken, hamburgers, fritos with all different dips, a veggie platter, a HUGE sugary cake, beer, pina coladas, margaritas, snapple, water, even a pinata stuffed with candy! Then that night there was an "aloha" party for another friend -- people came all decked out in their hawaiian and caribbean finest. It was fun to dance with no cover charge for once. :)

This should be another busy week -- landmark class tonight, conference call on Wednesday, possibly going to a movie tomorrow, always running around with friends, and then this weekend a whole crew of us drives down to our beloved beach house (again)!! VERY EXCITED!

By the way -- S. and I saw Catwoman last night. Definitely a rent-it-on-video-if-at-all movie.  Trust me.

Today at the local cafe the woman behind the register called me "sweetie." I know that lots of people see this tendency as patronizing or too familiar and thus get annoyed, but this never fails to make me feel good. Especially since I see this woman all the time, though we've never acknowledged each other in any way and it would come as a shock to me if she recognized me. I also realize that I went in at a time when they weren't busy, and I have my hair in braids, which a lot of people seem to respond to on me, and I happen to be wearing a bright yellow over-sized man's dress shirt that I bought at the Salvation Army a couple years ago. Perhaps I looked like a "sweetie." For whatever reason, it made me happy.

The blog has been infrequently updated mostly because my life has been on full blast. It seems like every weeknight and all weekend I have a commitment of some sort -- the weekly landmark seminar, the landmark group leaders conference call, movie/game night with my friends, dinner here, gym there, happy hours, parties, barbecues, clubs, events...plus with S. in  my life, friends see me less and thus schedule more...and to think that nearly two months ago I had the energy to do maybe a quarter of this and was usually resentful or disengaged when I did do anything.

Yesterday I watched a mourning dove fluff up and call out its single woeful call while the tree branch it was on bobbed like a swimming pony in the San Francisco wind.

Darned if I know whether or not I'm the dove, the branch, or the figurative swimming pony, but I identified with the whole scene!   

Hmmmm, another post about food: Leslie and I found a GREAT new restaurant called Espetus Churrascaria. It's an all you can eat (but classy) brazilian barbecue with a prix fix of about $29 a plate -- but when I say all you can eat, I mean MEAT. MEAT MEAT MEAT. YUM. In the back they have a side-dish bar set up with salad and cous cous and beets (chowed on those, great beets) and potato salad and stuff. Basically different kinds of salads. You fill up on that and go back to your table, which is when the fun begins. Servers come by with enormous skewers on which is a type of meat, which you can try or decline. Leslie and I tried roast beef, beef ribs, chicken, the chef's special sirloin, and the house favorite, TOP SIRLOIN. (We declined the lamb and the chicken hearts, and I think they ran out of the sausage, though I saw they had some when we arrived.) The top sirloin was the tip top kaleidiscope of delicious. Seriously. It was cut SO thin, it was SO smooth and moist, their signature flavor is smokey, when I first put it on my tongue I was so enamored of how good it was that I didn't want to CHEW! (And I didn't, until Leslie made fun of me.) Amazing. And they come by a lot. They actually have a little sign wheel on the table that says "YES PLEASE" or "NO THANK YOU" so that you can designate when you need time to consume and digest. They also served us fried bananas (which I, of course, couldn't eat, but Leslie reports that they're awesome) and grilled pineapple, which was mouth watering.

After that display of culinary prowess, I HAD to try dessert. I selected the marscapone & ricotta cheesecake with raspberry sauce. Amazing. Simply amazing. The smoothness of the marscapone and the lumpiness of the ricotta play so well off each other -- not to mention the flavor combination -- that the cheesecake was both smooth and dense at the same time, without being too much of either. YUM.

Visitors be forewarned: all visits will now include a trip to Espetus. ;)

Last night I fired up the ol' fondue pot for a little shindig with 3 of my friends. SO MUCH FUN. The fondue was a gruyere/emmentaler mix with some fume blanc, a teeny bit of garlic, and lemon juice -- soOoOoOoOo good -- with ciabatta cubes, red, orange and yellow bell pepper slices, carrot slices, granny apple slices, broccoli, cauliflower and mushroom heads, pan fried garlic and artichoke sausages slices, and honey wheat pretzel rods for dunking. DELICIOUS. I was pretty proud of the spread. When we sated ourselves on savory, I threw some semi-sweet chocolate, half and half, and a little triple sec into a double boiler and made chocolate dessert fondue with marble pound cake, marshmallows, strawberries, bing cherries, and my favorite of the night, raspberries for dunking.

I am one fat and happy and accomplished-feeling girl this morning!! Mom & Steve, thanks again for the fondue pot for Christmas. And anyone who wants to try it, come and visit soon -- I'd be happy to do it again, any time.

I had a great 4th o' July weekend.
For starters, my CEO gave me 2 tickets to the Friday Giants v. A's game at Pac Bell, so naturally, I brought Steve. It was a lively game with another home run by Barry Bonds (I believe it was #680) and the Giants won. At the end of it was a fireworks display set to big band tunes -- pretty dazzling.
The next day we went back up to Bruins Lair for a less-than-24-hour stay. Mostly because the owners had a grill with two legs broken off and asked Steve if he would weld it back together in time for their big Sunday dinner. Being the nice guy and star-welder that he is, he agreed; and since he had to work on Saturday and Monday (don't ask) I knew it would be a brief jaunt and decided to go with him. As it turned out, his mig-welder blew a circuit almost immediately, and he had to do some innovative solutions involving L-shaped brackets, nuts and bolts. Everyone's vote was that it was a pretty ingenious solution. ;0)
As opposed to the 15 or so people of last weekend, there were 225 up there. The campground is spaced out enough that the impact wasn't horribly noticeable -- though there was a lot of noise at night, DJing through most of the day, lots of people in the pond -- but not nearly as bad as I had anticipated. I got some quiet time when I woke up at the crack of dawn Sunday morning -- I sat by the pond and listened to all the bird calls and watched the sun come up over the pine trees. And Steve and I mostly stuck to ourselves anyway. So it was worth it, and now that the summer celebration has come and gone, Bruins Lair weekends go back to being small groups who come up and relax in exchange for some light work. We're looking forward to going back. :)
On the way home, we stopped at Steve's art space to drop off the welder, and in doing so drove through Bayview, one of the poorest neighborhoods in SF. It was pretty scary in that it was the 4th, and people were setting off fireworks in the streets -- indeed, we had to drive around a clump of kids mid-street at one point -- so there were fireworks going off all around us with loud reports and sudden flashes. It is perhaps the closest I'll ever come to even the suggestion of a war zone (with any luck, anyway), and I was glad to drop off his stuff and go.
I spent most of yesterday sleeping and doing some much needed lazing about. When Steve got done with work, we ordered Chinese and watched Futurama on DVD. All in all, a restful and companionable weekend. Hope yours was enjoyable too!