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.