Under a Blue Moon

African Violets

I hope you didn’t come here looking for pictures of tapas. I told you something happens when the food comes out. Let it suffice to say they were awesome. Everyone pulled out all the stops and brought amazing tapas to celebrate the sixth day of my birthday month.

Each family member gets to choose the menu for the Sunday dinner that falls closest to the anniversary of their birth. I love nothing more than eating hors d’oeuvres. Like the Cher character in Mermaids. So for my menu I chose tapas. A little bit more robust than run of the mill appetizers.

It generally falls to the women in the family to do the actual cooking. The exception is my brother in law Greg who is a master bbq-er and pretty much does all the cooking from May until November. We may provide a side dish or two but he’s the main event. Anyway – for MY tapas party I asked each family to come with two tapas (except for Kate who made the cake that Nicki wouldn’t let me bake – bad karma, she said).

Here’s what we had – I made chicken meatballs Yakitori because nothing quite says Spanish style tapas like ginger, soy and scallions. I also made baked caprese salad which is basically toasted baguette slices with tomato, fresh mozzarella and basil.

Nicki made a smoked salmon and goat cheese pizza (that I am trying to work into the menu again sometime this week) and polenta squares topped with spareribs (just the meat part, obviously).

Kate made the cakes (lemon yogurt cakes from Ina Garten – out of this world good) and a plate of antipasti.

Trish made some kind of sausage balls that the men were pilfering before she could even get them plated and a decadent mushroom/blue cheese tart.

Claudia, my cousin, made empanadas (she is from Argentina, after all) and slices of fontina with quince jelly.

Sara (and actually Ryan, so I take back the bit about only us women folk doing the cooking) made sauteed prawns and assorted mushrooms that was served on slices of baguette.

I hope I’m not forgetting anything. It was all so good. We also drank Cava in vast quantities.

I think I need to stop eating for a while. A really long while.

Let’s move on, shall we?

I have never, except for one brief period in 1982, been able to get African Violets to bloom. I think I have had one, sometimes more, in my possession as long as I have had a place of my own. And as soon as I bring them into the house any blossoms that might be on them fling them selves off – Pling! Pling! Pling! Off they go. Never to bloom again.

In 1982 my Mother in Law gave me my first African Violet that she had planted in a giant, shallow champagne glass. That little African Violet bloomed it’s little heart out for about six months and then abruptly died. I replaced it, a number of times, only to have it die within weeks.

I never gave up though – I keep buying new ones, all full of promise and blooms and they all just shrivel up.

Then Rick cut down the trellis outside the kitchen window. And he moved the three, most recent, violets onto the window sill. And what do you know? A month later one of them started to bloom. Then the second one did – and now, finally – the third one is starting.

I’m astonished. I had even forgotten what color the blooms were on this batch. I just keep watering and holding my breath, hoping for the best.

Another lovely day

Around here we do a little something I like to call celebrating my birthday month. It’s a fine concept, don’t you think? Why only be special for ONE day.

Yesterday Rick and I spent the day doing whatever I wanted (this, admittedly, isn’t too far off how things usually go around here). And yesterday I wanted to go to a farmer’s market and out to lunch.

There is an association of farmer’s markets in our area and they are at different locations depending on the day of the week. On Saturdays they are located in Auburn, CA. So we drove up mid-morning. Since it is so early in the season I wasn’t expecting much – and there wasn’t. About 20 stands, mostly selling baked goods. But I did get some leeks and new potatoes.

It took us about 20 minutes to go through the market so we decided to walk up the hill to the Placer County courthouse. There is a museum in the bottom floor that is open seven days a week.

I love going into small, local history museums. They are just charming and so earnest. This one had a diorama of the Maidu Indians that were common to the area before the gold rush and all the diseases that introduced to them (we actually have a large granite boulder on our property that has three perfectly round depressions from where Indians had ground their acorns – I’ll take a picture of it some time).

It also has the original woman’s jail under the courthouse stairs.

Charming, no? One of its most notorious inmates was Alma Bell, who was jilted by her fiance so she shot him. She actually only spent about six months here, wiling away the hours needlepointing, until she was acquitted for reasons of temporary insanity (that whole woman scorned thing…).

We strolled around old town Auburn for an hour or so then headed up to Nevada City for lunch at one of my favorite restaurants. They have a back patio, all shaded with arbors and vines and walled in by the neighboring brick buildings. It’s very charming.

I have decided I prefer going out to lunch over dinner. There is something just so decadently leisurely about it.

On our way home we stopped at a nursery and admired all the Japanese Maples and weeping cherry trees.

Tonight the festivities continue with a Tapas and Cava party. I hope to take pictures (something happens when food is put in front of me – I suddenly forget my blogging intentions and just settle in to eat).

What is she up to?

(Disclaimer: If you have an especially soft spot for animals this may not be the post for you).

On Wednesday I came home with the intention I was going to hop into the shower just as soon as I put my purse down. Unfortunately Belle had dispatched a bird in the master bathroom and before I could shower myself I had to defeather the bathroom before any bathing could be done.

I know there are many, many pet owners (keepers? companions? I think owner might be politically incorrect but until she starts buying her own Kitty Chow I’m going with owner) that advocate keeping ones cat totally indoors. There are all sorts of reasonable arguments for it – mostly longevity. But to keep Belle in the house would be to kill her very soul. She is, and always has been, an outdoor cat. I think most cats, given the option, would prefer the call of the wild.

Of course I might be projecting since I can’t even have fake birds in the many bird cages I have around the house – I have to leave the door to the cage open in case they want to be free. I may have been a prisoner in a past life. Or a parakeet.

Anyway – Belle is quite the hunter. However, normally she doesn’t actually kill other creatures. She just brings them in for us. I think this is her attempt to teach us to hunt.

There was the time I walked into my oldest son’s room and found a newborn rat sitting, looking rather bewildered, in a tray on the top of his television. It was so tiny and so still that at first I thought it was fake. Until it moved. I called my son and asked him "why is there a baby rat on your television?" His response? "Just one? There were five when I left." Turns out Belle had found some nest and brought him each rat, one by one. He put them on a tray (what on earth goes through the minds of teenage boys, anyway?) and then left. All five baby rats were eventually accounted for.

About a month or two later she brought in a grown up rat and let it go and it promptly took up residence in the insulation in my range. Every time the oven was turned on a scorched rat would come flying out the bottom, across the unsuspecting cook’s feet, and hightail it under the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen would also be filled with the wondrous odor of cooked rat urine. I couldn’t cook for about four months until we sorted that particular rat episode out.

She has a special fondness for reptiles. If I had a dollar for every lizard I returned to the wild I could hire the feline equivalent of Cesar Milan and my problems would be solved. Since I work from home I take a number of meetings over the phone. I was in a teleconference with a brand new client when Belle comes sneaking in with a snake in her mouth. She deposited it in the living room and meanwhile I am frantically instant messaging my Texan coworker (I figure Texans might know snakes), describing the snake. He assured me it was "probably not poisonous." I talked the snake into crawling into a paper bag so I could release it back into the relative safety of the ivy outside. The very next day she brought it back in. I swear it had to have been the same snake. I had to have a word with it about self-preservation and how it was going to be on it’s own the next time.

Then there was the time I was up late, Rick having gone to bed hours earlier, I was sitting in the dining room on my computer, like I am RIGHT NOW, and I see her skulk by in the kitchen. She has a certain sneaky, low stride when she is bringing in house guests. Then all hell breaks loose when she lets go of a live bat and it is swooping around in frantic circles in the kitchen/eating area. Being the calm, collected person I am I ran screaming down the hallway to Rick (who was probably deep into some lovely REM sleep at this point). The bat flew into our great room (we call it the living room but at 20′ x 30′ great better describes the flying room the bat had) and continued it’s breakneck circles around the room. There is just something about a bat flying near you that makes you want to hit the deck and cover your head.

Rick eventually crawled into the living/great room and opened all the sliding doors and it flew out.

Belle did it again a few weeks later. Fortunately I was down at my Dad’s and missed all the excitement this time. I’m hoping it wasn’t the same bat. Although I’m really beginning to see first hand how natural selection works.

You’ve been duly warned, if you come visit us. Watch out for the cat.

Bread

I am about ready to toss all my cookbooks and just rely on my Ina Garten Barefoot Contessa At Home book. Not really. But I do have to say every single thing I have ever made from the book has turned out splendidly.

This morning I tried my hand at bread baking. I have a bread machine but since they aren’t enjoying the same popularity they did about 10 years ago it’s hard to find much variety in the choices of mixes available. Of course if I had the manual I could bake a loaf from scratch ingredients.

I can’t quite figure out how to use the bread machine when there is anything other than the water, yeast and flour mixture. Ina’s recipe for Honey White Bread calls for salt, sugar, honey, egg yolks and an egg white wash, in addition to the three standard bread machine ingredients.

So I figured I would just do it the old fashioned way. If old fashioned means relying entirely on one’s KitchenAid mixer to do all the kneading.

Look! It’s poofing up! Which is more than I can say about the pizza dough I tried to make last week (note conspicuous absence of any posting about THAT experiment). The reason I have the rising dough sitting on top of an upside down bowl is because my range has heat lamps but the item being kept warm really needs to be up a little higher.

We keep our house on the cool side so it helps the rising process to raise the temperature in the vicinity of the bowl a wee bit.

It was quite weird to feel the dough – it was warm and alive feeling (yeasties doing their work). This particular recipe makes two loaves so I divided the dough into two prepared loaf pans.

Look in the background – that’s my new Russell Hobbs electric tea kettle that Rick gave me for my birthday. My life is now complete. No more microwaving my tea water.

Don’t look in the background at all the other crap on the counter. It’s getting kind of busy looking back there.

The recipe says to cool completely before slicing but in the interest of full blogging disclosure (and the fact it is lunchtime) I decided to throw caution to the wind and slice into it while it was still warm.

Mmm. Nice and dense, but not heavy. Good flavor. Can’t wait to try it toasted.

Lovely, lovely day

I had just the perfect day yesterday. Lovely women, lovely weather, lovely shopping and lovely libations.

The above shot is a wee bit misleading since it was at the end of the day (and the photo itself was taken by my sister Kate, using my camera. She is, and always will be, a much better photographer than I could ever hope to be. She’s an overachiever, what can I say?).

We started the day by piling into two cars and heading up to San Francisco. Destination: Yank Sing.

The ride would have been uneventful, if not for the naked clowns. I was not fast enough with my camera so you’ll have to take my word on it. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Embarcadero Center. I do believe it was a protest, of some sort, about Tibet. Where the naked clowns come in, your guess is as good as mine. You just have to love San Francisco.

Let’s move on, shall we? On to the food. There are two Yank Sing locations and we chose the Rincon Center location (easy parking). As soon as you sit down – within SECONDS, you are offered a dish from one of the many carts of dim sum. This is the way it goes – a woman with a cart loaded with delicacies comes by and you can either accept or pass on whatever dishes she had to offer.

More often than not we accepted. We had the more well know pot stickers, steamed pork buns, Peking duck, roasted green beans along with more esoteric dishes of shrimp dumplings, sea bass roll, chicken/mushroom dumpling, honey prawns with walnuts. And a bunch of other dishes that involved pork that I did not eat (or even register, for documentary purposes). After we could barely move they brought a plate of dessert dim sum with a candle in it so I could blow out my birthday candle.

I didn’t even make a wish because I felt like there wasn’t anything else to possibly wish for.

After lunch we waddled back to our cars and headed to Union Square. There is nothing like a bit of proper shopping to invigorate a person, don’t you think? The beauty of Union Square is there is something for EVERYONE. Even if a man was with us – they would find fun stores to go into. Since there were no men we did a lot of makeup shopping. Happy sigh.

(The scene just a few steps outside of Sephora – also known as Mecca or the Mother Ship, to some of us…..)

After shopping and before retrieving our cars, we headed up top of the Grand Hyatt for a drink and a view. And can you even beat the view? I don’t think so.

Really – I can’t even convey how lovely a day it was. Just all kinds of levels of perfectness. Too bad birthdays only come once a year.

A special day

Yesterday my e-mail was so slow – just the occasional special offer on watches, software and, umm, enhancement products I might be interested in if I was a man with low self-esteem.

I try not to get wrapped up in the stats of this site, or the comments (which I ADORE but try not obsess about) but I was kind of surprised no one commented on my last post. I thought it was kind of funny. Then just before I went to bed I looked at it and realized there WERE comments. Silly how happy that makes me. Turns out all the e-mail notification were going into my spam folder (why the eight billion watch offers never do is a mystery).

I see I’m not the only one with laliophobia.

I am taking the day off of work today and heading up to San Francisco with my sisters, cousins and nieces for dim sum at our favorite restaurant. We are celebrating my arrival on this earth forty-some odd years ago. It’s going to be quite the outing – there are eight or nine of us going. On a weekday no less! I wasn’t the only one that had to ask for time off in order to go (a special thank you to my sister Trish’s coworker – Thank you Linda! I appreciate you covering for her).

My nephew gave me my gift on Sunday, since his Spring break was over and he had to head back to school. He gave me a monogrammed mug and besides the pretty shape of it the best thing is that it doesn’t matter if you are left or right handed. You can see the monogram either way. Usually all you right handed people get the pretty side and us left handed people get to look at the plain backsides.

Have a wonderful April Fool’s Day everyone!

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