I haven't forgotten the bees

The linden trees are blooming and a-buzz with bees. Linden is my favorite scent, I think, but I only get to enjoy it once a year, for two weeks at most. I walk Sophie at night with my nose up in the air, taking deep whiffs.

The bees also enjoy grape blossoms. The neighbors have a fence covered with grapes, and it almost sounds like a swarm over there with so many pollinators going to town.
And I do mean pollinators. Look at those pollen pantaloons!

Since seeing that first bee tree, and then having a swarm move into the silver maple in front of my house, I've been keeping my eyes open for more bee trees. This one is in the same block as the first, at the other end. The hole is up near the top of the photo. (Click on the picture to see it larger.) I'll probably be able to spot more of them next spring, before the trees get too leafed out. If there are three hives within two blocks, my guess is that there are a lot around here.

Silly kitchen gadget No. 11

Not really a gadget, but how many times would you use this? You can't even repurpose it from sundae fixings to, say, salsas.

I can recommend the book to the left of it, though. It's David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop."

I've used it to make strawberry balsamic frozen yoghurt and other cold treats.

Skip the goofy ceramics and get the book instead.

Market day

The t-shirt reads: "Lock up your daughters."
But perhaps "Lock up your chocolate" would be more appropriate.

Got a nice haul at the market today:
Broccoli rabe, radishes, asparagus, apricots and asiago basil bread.

I had some bananas going bad, so I did a quick blog-google and found a quick and easy recipe from Little ByRD. I added a shaved square of semi-sweet baker's chocolate.
Turned out great! I've had three pieces. Would've been four, but a cow-orker came by seeking snacks.

You've gotta have art

A bit of self-indulgence yesterday with a visit to the salon for a pedicure. Gardening in sandals is hell on nail polish. On the way to the salon (for you Denverites, it's Fifth Avenue Nails in Cherry Creek. On Third Avenue, natch. They do the best pedicures) we had to pass through the Cherry Creek Arts Festival.

We stopped to say high to our friend Diane Harty, who makes the best garden and garden-party accessories around: Hats!
She uses braided straw and the hats are truly works of art. If I weren't so lazy I'd take a photo of the one I have for this post. Maybe later.

I'm not a big fan of art festivals; I feel overwhelmed too quickly. Lots of great paintings, photos, sculptures, jewelry, ceramics and furniture, but it's too much to process, and usually it's hot and crowded. You can't back up to look at a piece because you'll bump into someone behind you, and several other someones will push in front of you and block your view. One of them will probably be pushing a stroller. It's a good spot for people-watching, though. It might've been interesting to spend some time just photographing the fashions à la The Sartorialist. Like this fellow all in blue, who obligingly posed for me.

We had to backtrack to find Jimmy Descant's booth. I've posted on his rocket sculptures before. He did an entire series for the Rocket Apartments in Denver.
Formerly a New Orleans resident, he lost most of his materials in Katrina. Now he lives in Salida, Colorado, where it's a lot dryer. So much so, he said, that he's having to spray down one DC-bound sculpture every few days to see which parts might rust. (It will be a large outdoor piece, with a water heater as a body.)

But there are a lot of good materials here, he said, so that's an upside, too.

After an hour of seeing just one small corner of the festival, we'd had enough. We did make one more art stop, but I'll post about that later.

A night at the races

Vacuum cleaner races, that is.

Followed by "fireworks."
Hope your Fourth was fun, too!

Weed feed: sauteed purslane with bacon

Whoever came up with that "death and taxes" saying forgot to include weeds. Like battleship sailors who start painting at the bow, work their way to the stern, then start all over again, I could weed from one end of my yard to the other, but I would never be done.
But as I mentioned earlier, my bumper crop of purslane, at least, can be treated as just that, a crop. Inspired by doggybloggy's helpful video, I did some weeding today with the salad spinner handy.

Prepping the purslane is time-consuming and fussy. But hey, it's free food, so just go with it. You need to wash it, wash it, and wash it some more. It's a prostrate plant and you've pulled it out by the roots, so there's a lot of dirt there.

Then you need to strip it, grasping the thick stem and pulling off the leaves. The little stems and branches are OK to leave in, but the thick main stem and roots are bitter. Here's what I ended up with, leaves and small stems on the right, big stems and roots on the left. Note the bindweed that tried to sneak in. Damn stuff is insidious.
Then I washed it some more in a big bowl of water, turning it around and around to make sure I'd gotten out all the stray bits of grass and small roots (which are pink, thus easy to spot).

Finally, it was ready to cook. I cut up some slices of bacon and cooked those first, then added the purslane with a generous squeeze of lemon juice and sauteed it over medium heat for about 15 minutes, until it was thoroughly soft and tasted done.

I served it over bowtie pasta.
It tasted green, with a little tang, and it tasted like bacon. It tasted good. I'm not sure it really worked with the pasta; I'm thinking maybe polenta would be better, or as a side dish with mashed potatoes.

The huge amount I prepared worked out to two or three servings. I found out at the last minute that the fireworks party I was going to was a potluck, so I didn't eat much. I saved the rest for dinner tomorrow.

What did I take to the potluck? The only portable food I had handy: Cokes and a bag of Pirate's Booty.

I love a parade

When you can't be there in person, a Parade Cam is the next best thing!
This was a fairly low-budget setup, so no sound and a choppy picture, but I got to see the fun from two angles.
Lots of electric and hybrid cars featured this year, groups of folks in matching t-shirts carrying signs, dogwalkers, pickups promoting businesses, and an assortment of floats, including one from the USS Hornet.
Even nicer, I managed to catch a wave from my friends. Hi guys!
Happy Fourth of July to everyone out there, wherever you may be.

Oh, and one more ...

Angel Island still life:

Angel Island souvenirs

In the middle of San Francisco Bay there's a quiet retreat: Angel Island State Park. The Ellis Island of the West, it was the place where thousands of immigrants, mostly Chinese, were quarantined and processed for admission to Gold Mountain, or sent back home. It also was a naval base, with several batteries of guns placed around it to guard the bay.
You can see the island of Alameda on the lower right, separated from Oakland by a narrow estuary. The Bay Bridge runs from Oakland to SF, and you can see the Golden Gate Bridge, a thin line on the left at the mouth of the bay. The Richmond bridge is to the north.

Ferries run daily to the island from San Francisco, carrying both tourists and commuters on their way to Tiburon and Sausalito. Many people bring bikes to the island or rent them (or Segways!) there. There's a nice road that runs all the way around, about five miles' worth. If I were a jogger living in SF, I'd probably go there once in a while for a pleasant change of scenery.
The kids brought their backpacks with a few toys and books and quietly amused themselves on the trip over, while their mom and dad were fully laden with backpacks and a baby buggy holding tent, bottled water, food and a clever cooler box (cardboard, filled with ice in trash bags and frozen bottles, that could be tossed in the campground bin the next day). The campsites have grills, picnic tables with a lockable food cabinet, trash bins, outdoor water spigots and a pit toilet (reasonably clean as outhouses go, but exceedingly stinky).

We considered asking for spare change when the open-sided tour buses passed us on the road.

The campsite was about two miles from the ferry, mostly uphill. Easy for me, coming from high altitude! The oxygen-rich air meant I wasn't even winded on the climbs. The kids had a meltdown or two on the way but made it without completely falling apart.

From the campsite we had a great view of the Richmond bridge and all the bay traffic. This photo was an accident, but it makes me laugh. ("Honey, I was taking a picture!" "Oops, sorry!")
I didn't take a huge amount of photos (need a bigger memory card!) but a few nice pictures of the trees and scenery are nice souvenirs.

Here's San Francisco and Alcatraz, marred somewhat by a dirty lens, alas.

And some trees:
Despite our proximity to civilization, the only night sounds were foghorns and ship horns and some wind. Oh, and some raccoons that came snuffling around after dark.
If you have a chance, you should try camping there yourself. It's not expensive; you'll just need to plan ahead if you want to go on the weekend, since the sites get booked up fast. Try it!

What I'm reading:"The Produce Bible" by Leanne Kitchen"High and Dry" by Robert Nold"Amarcord: Marcella Remembers" by Marcella Hazan

First, two new additions to my reference library. One is a longtime covet, "The Produce Bible" by Leanne Kitchen (career natural or nom de plume?), which is a paperback but still quite hefty. It's full of great info on all kinds of vegetables, how to choose and store them, plus recipes.

The second is brand-new: "High and Dry: Gardening with Cold-Hardy Dryland Plants" by Robert Nold. I've "known" Bob and his wife, Cindy, for years through a local gardening listserv. Bob would maybe object to my saying he knows everything there is to know about gardening in the high desert (which essentially Denver is), but he knows a hell of a lot more than 99 percent of the gardeners around, and he shares his knowledge in this encyclopedic volume.

Cindy is a fantabulous photographer and watercolor illustrator, and she provided the artwork for the book.

I recently had a chance to visit their wonderful garden, 18 years in the making, and they generously offered me a few plants for my own garden. (I've been meaning to post about them one of these days.) Their garden is very similar to what I aspire to create in my own yard. Bob just start a blog, too: High and Dry.

I'm looking forward to putting these books to use in my kitchen and garden!

And then there's this. Someone who knows I like foodie memoirs slipped me an advance copy of "Amarcord: Marcella Remembers" by Marcella Hazan. The subtitle is "The Remarkable Life Story of a Woman Who Started Out Teaching Science in a Small Town in Italy, but Ended Up Teaching America How to Cook Italian." Which is wordy and (I think) superfluous, but does convey the accidental nature of her fame as a cook and cookbook author.

I'm about a third of the way through and really enjoying it. She has an interesting history of a very early childhood in Egypt, then formative years (including during WWII) in a small town in Italy, then marriage to an American (with roots in that town), a move to America, then back to Italy ... that's where I am now in her story.

Until she married, she had never cooked anything but pig mash! But she has strong memories of all the delicious country foods of her childhood, which helped inform her cooking once she got married and started to learn.

Aside from the food, her story is interesting in itself, and she tells it well. I presume she had someone working with her on the book, as she did not learn English until she was in her 20s. Or if she wrote herself, her English is as flawless as her cooking. Her story flows easily and her voice comes through in the writing.

The book is due out in October. If you like memoirs, good stories and food, this is one to watch out for.

Dinner at Sweet Fingers, San Leandro, Calif.

When I was in San Francisco last week, the Sergeant wanted to check out a Jamaican place in San Leandro that he'd read about in the East Bay Express: Sweet Fingers. (East Bay Express is similar in format and content to Denver's Westword; it's part of the same chain.) On a Saturday night, it's a quick drive from Alameda, and there is plenty of street parking nearby.

The place is unprepossessing outside, and inside it's your basic bar/restaurant setup, bar along one side and a couple rows of tables on the other. Don't sit at the two-top closest to the door; the door chime on the wall there will drive you crazy. We moved farther down.
You might be greeted by Blondie, who is just about the friendliest waitress you could ever hope to meet. Seriously, every other word out of her mouth was "honey" or "sweetie" or "love," said with a big, genuine grin. As you can see from the pictures, she's very enthusiastic and energetic!

We started with an order of fried plantains. You get some with your meal, but I wanted a bunch because I like them very much. We also ordered the homemade ginger beer, which will knock your socks off. Very good!

For entrees, I had the coconut shrimp, which was luscious and coconutty, with some fresh thyme sprigs on top. The Sergeant ordered the curried goat. Both came with beans and rice.
Both were filling and very tasty. The Sergeant ate all of his goat. I ate most of the plantains, so I had to bring home some leftovers. I wish I'd saved room for the navy bean pie, but we'll try that on another visit.

As we were finishing our meal, a band set up on a small stage in the corner. (One speaker snafu during the sound check nearly blew our eardrums out.) Thursdays are poetry night, Fridays feature a DJ and dancing, and Saturdays are for Blade's Band, a trio of guitar, bass, drums and guest singers (essentially open mic). The entertainment starts at 9, so if you want to check it out, plan your dinnertime accordingly. We only heard a couple of songs (one being more hiphop than reggae, with a guest singer doing the lyrics), so I couldn't attest to the quality, but it looked like they were having a good time.

If you want to try some good Jamaican food in the Bay Area, check it out!

Sweet Fingers
464 E 14th Street
San Leandro, CA 94577
510-553-9869

Cat found!

What is it? No. 14

Click on the photo to see the answer!