I AM NOT SO FOND OF CHANGE

We got back to Sammy Cruz just in time to dump the suitcase contents into the washer and then back into the suitcases before departing for a three day conference (for Tama & her subaltern, Masina…) deep, dead center in the bowels of beautiful downtown San Francisco… 4^th and Market, a complex, over-crowded jumble of bus lanes, street repair closures and crazed drivers all overlaid with a one way grid and no left turn signs. I stayed with friends in the outer Richmond, above Golden Gate park so my hardest task was deciphering out how to get to the very small handful of streets that will actually let you across Market Street.  Since the conference attendees were wined and dined on Monday, I was off the hook for finding a restaurant until Tuesday.  Since we were in San Francisco there wasn’t much room for debate. Roosevelt’s Tamale Parlor… my favorite since 1976.

When I mentioned this intent to my friends, you can imagine my abject horror when they announced that “…it had recently changed hands.”  Well my fears were palliated some but far from quelled completely when they said that the food was actually better than ever.  Steeling myself I gathered up the gals and off we went to face this new demon.

It looked the same as we drove by looking for a parking spot.  The interior changes were slight but a little uncomfortable-ish.  They had crowded in a few more tables and the homey, framed newspaper articles and bull fight posters had been replaced by (very nice) expensively framed large, vintage Tamale Parlor calendar pages.  But, then, at some point they had taken out the bug zapper lights that lined the walls above the tables in the 70’s and I survived that…

Our waiter came by with menus and a wine list… What? A fucking wine list?

The menu was still good, even though they had dropped a few of the more obscure favorites like crepas con huitlacoche, and so we ordered. When the food arrived it was truly delicious. I mean GOOD… just no longer really authentic.

I chatted up our waiter/owner, complimented him on the food and learned that he had hoped to re-open serving his specialty, Italian/California fusion food. Apparently the neighborhood suggested this might be a mistake and so he ratcheted up the ingredients  to local and organic food sources but kept Maria in charge of the stove as she has been for more than a few decades.

Like all neighborhoods in the urban landscape, 24^th Street is changing, getting more gentrified and losing something tangible but hard to pin down. Like I said, the food was great but like the customers and the restaurant itself it lacks a fine degree of authenticity that is steeped into the walls of a place that has been around since 1919. You can maybe capture the look, but not the feeling… and that’s what I loved about the old Roosevelt’s Tamale Parlor.

And don’t even get me started on the greedy corporate bastards who yanked the 16 foot long Maxfield Parrish painting from the backbar of the Pied Piper Bar in the Palace Hotel on Market Street and sent it to be auctioned off in New York.

Man I hate being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21^st Century…

SITTIN' RIGHT UNDER THE X IN TEXAS

And off we went to Austin (the other Texas…) to gather for the April 7th wedding of the eldest child.  Travel was complicated only because we chose to hop and skip about some in order to connect along the way with middle child who was traveling by air for the first time alone with her five month old kinder.  But all went reasonably smoothly, we all landed safely in Texas, snagged our rental car and car seat and, before you know it we were rolling down the Texas macadam, headed for our lovely south Austin rental house.

Since there were five of us out-o-towners, it was much more fun and cheaper by far to rent a house than sign up for a string of motel rooms for nearly a week. Cute little bungalow in the middle of South Austin, all vintage 50’s décor and a cold six-pack of Lone star in the fridge.

Beautiful weather, beautiful bride and a beautiful wedding, but you know me… I’m here to talk about the food & drink…

Travel being what it was we arrived very late at night and hungry. Hey, look, right down the block is a late night taqueria with a drive-thru.  We bought a whole bag full, took ‘em home, scarfed ‘em down and hit the pillows.

Up at a reasonable hour the next morning began the age old “where do you wanna eat breakfast?” debate.  Our local faction handed out a couple of favorites and we settled on The Magnolia Café where they serve, among many other things, breakfast all day.  Gingerbread pancakes, Migas and breakfast tacos with eggs, cheese, black beans and thick, diced chunks of smoked bacon. We dined outside with birds and dogs and children scurrying underfoot and felt like we were back in Costa Rica.

Since we ate late, as it were, we just nibbled on bits and pieces until dinner time when we headed off to Green Mesquite BBQ, an old time favorite in south of the river Austin.  By now we had added the last of the out-of-town contingent – the youngest child and his girl friend so we all sat out on the patio, ordered big plates of all kinds of BBQ and beers by the pitcher.  Sausages, brisket, ribs, pulled pork, chicken, a multiplicity of sides, piles of spongy, white bread and more pitchers of beer.  Well, we wound up staying for three hours, a band started playing texas swing and we ordered more beer. As we were handing our car keys over to the designated drivers someone mentioned having the munchies… well, as it happens, right across the parking lot from the BBQ joint was a P Terry’s, a long time local burger drive-in.  Cash was pooled and a team was sent off to acquire a sack-o-burgers and some fries to carry back to the house.  Although several members of the dinner party had pooh-poohed the burger run, they were soon hovering around whining that there were none left because those of us with a penchant for such delicacies and hoovered them all up without hesitation.

Saturday was the wedding rehearsal and its associated rehearsal diner.  We had paid a caterer to bring in Mexican food for 20 and I guess they were covering their bases in case the 20 people were all a football team of giants… everything came in 9 x 13 pans – one each of barbacoa, beans, rice, pico-de-gallo, chicken tamales, pork tamales, vegetarian tamales, onion & jalapeno topping, a double pan of al pastor, a double pan of fresh tortillas, a pillowcase-sized bag of chips, a gallon of really good salsa and a 2 gallon bucket of that strange, semi-runny nacho cheese stuff.  We did our best, ate like troopers and washed it all down with more Lone Star, but it was a losing battle. Since we had a house and a fridge we took the mountain of leftovers back to our place… which meant homemade huevos rancheros for breakfast.

Sunday was the wedding and the reception.  More Lone Star and the food was all about texas BBQ.  Baked beans, gumbo, rice, cole slaw, sausage, brisket, chicken, pulled pork and ribs with the ubiquitous white bread for sopping and chin wiping. I hear that there were three different wedding cakes but I only had room for a small bite off someone else’s plate…

Monday morning was just feeding off scraps from the fridge… and lunch was Japanese food for a bit of a switch-up for the old taste buds… Kirin instead of Lone Star and shrimp instead of ribs.

We went light on dinner so we would fit in our plane seats the next day… another patio evening at a bar called Gourmand’s Pub.  Sandwiches and soup in bread bowls and a nice selection of local beers.

We did not eat again until we were safely out of Texas…

CHRISTMAS BY THE SALT, SALT SEA...

Well, as you may well know by now, Tama got what she wanted for Christmas with the arrival of the golden grandchild... come all the way from Ideeho on the iron horse.

Since we were hosting inlanders here by the seaside we opted for an oceanic food theme for our holiday repast. A late afternoon visit to our neighborhood fishmonger yesterday got us the raw ingredients and this afternoon we "got to it" in earnest.

The four of us Talia & Rich and we'uns did some serious and nearly terminal damage to the following...

We came damn close to all being members of the clean plate club with just enough left over to make a nice seafood gumbo to go with tomorrow night's boneless country pork ribs in a chocolate BBQ sauce...

 We stuffed ourselves silly on the bounty of the sea and the bottled hint-o-heaven from Russian River Brewing Co. while the wee one slept near by.

Good food, good times and family close to hand... pretty much a tried and true formula for a Merrie Christmas.

AUTUMN IN VERMONTA CRUZ

Here ya go. This is as close to winter as we seem to get here along the bay.  The sky gets a wee bit darkish and one of the neighborhood trees gets all yellowy-orangey in it's leafy bits. Okay, there you go, it is officially the first day of winter. 

Once, a year or so ago, there was talk of local snow but that was a bunch of hooey in the end, and we were watching the news last night with the weather guy jabbering on about the mid-west being in the clutches of the massive winter storm.  they were showing footage of a freeway in Nebraska with about 6 inches of snow sticking to the ground and in the background you could hear the Anchorman chipping in saying, "boy, they are really getting a lot of snow..." 

we're dreaming of a wet, dark green Christmas...

TWINKIE, TWINKIE, LITTLE STAR...

Well, a year has slickered by and, mostly through personal neglect, our live-inna-bucket Christmas tree is still alive and well.  Longer of limb and taller beyond it’s bigger bucket, it needed only a quick pinch or three to remove the odd brown bits and a quick if somewhat weighty lift from the deck to the living room.

As I stated last year, I have concerns about a live tree casting me, willy-nilly, into that pit filled with a writhing bevy of suck ass white liberals.  I dedicated some time to my powers to circumvent this fate and finally found a happy solution.

It has been my habit for most of my adult life to decorate my tree with a changing theme each year… western, Cajun, fruit & veg, Mexican and the like.  This year, to distance myself from the Whole Foods crowd, I settled on a tribute to junk food.

Off to the stores in search of ornaments I was both pleased and surprised to discover glass baubles shaped like hot dogs, bottles of whiskey, cupcakes, popsicles, mugs of beer, ice cream cones, hamburgers and a big banana split.

Okay, enough of a cash outlay for this project. To fill in the rest of the tree I turned once more to my old friend Photoshop, Prince of the Dark Arts.  Faster than you could say Hostess ten times, I had created a nice selection of teeny Spam cans, miniature Velveeta cheese boxes, orders of fries and scaled down boxes of movie popcorn.

A quick swivel from art table to sewing machine and I had a lovely garland of small breakfast sausages.  

Start with a string of red chili pepper lights, add the decorations and some nice rubber doughnut chew toys, drape your sausages and top the whole affair with a memorial Twinkie star and you are ready for the fat man to make an appearance.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good bite…

HE'S BACK JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

So my friends Lovely and Michelle tend to go “whole hog” on the Christmas decorations, and while there the other day I was casting about for something to read while in the bathroom. Luckily there was a lovely little, holiday themed thrift store tome from the classic series of Jokes for the John.  It offered the usual bits about greatest hits of the holidays, factoids about popular gifts, the origins of the Christmas card… and an odd little gem about the Catalan region of Spain.

And I mean to tell you that the operative word here is odd.

So odd that I researched its authenticity and then decided to pass it along here in it’s curious entirety…

In Catalonia, Spain, a region along the country’s border with France, it’s tradition to display a Nativity scene at Christmas. And like most Nativity scenes around the world, the ones in Catalonia include figurines of the standard Christmas story characters: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Three Wise Men, some shepherds, a few sheep and cows. But unlike other Nativity scenes, those in Catalonia feature one more character -  El Caganer.

Whoa…who?

You know, El Caganer… a shepherd with his pants around his ankles, taking a dump. He shows up most places year round and is usually found squatting behind a bush or bale of hay, wearing the traditional red Catalan hat and smoking a pipe. But ever since the late 17^th century the region’s Christmas Nativity scenes have always included El Caganer, which translates literally to “the great defecator”.

It’s unclear exactly how the tradition started, but the Catalan people have always been a mostly agricultural society, and defecation was a symbol of fertility and good crops.  Therefore the most commonly heard explanation is that El Caganer is there to bring fertile soil, good crop yields along with good luck and prosperity to people who “invite” him into their homes.

Originally made of clay, today’s El Caganer is usually made of plastic, and comes in a variety of characters beyond the traditional monk or shepherd – famous soccer players, a police officer, actors, rock stars, Santa Claus or political figures like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the U.S. President George W. Bush.

In December 2010, a 19-foot tall defecating giant at the Maremagnum Shopping Centre in Barcelona, Spain snagged the Guinness World Record for Largest Caganer.

Wanna learn more? Google him or go to caganer.com and buy yourself one.

And if that ain’t weird enough, the region’s children have their own special Yule log called the “Caga Tio” or “pooping log”. It seems that for two weeks before Christmas this loaf-sized wooden log, sporting a painted face and red hat, sits on a table in the family home and every day the children and adults “feed” him by offering food and wine.

Then on Christmas Day the children move the log to the fireplace hearth and cover it with a blanket. The children then hide while their parents put wrapped presents, candy and other treats under the cloth. The finale comes when the children return and beat the log with sticks and pull out the presents while chanting:

Poop log! Poop log!

Poop candy for Christmas!

If you don’t, we will whack you again!

And with that, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year…

THE BETTER GUITAR

Don’t you just hate feeling like a complete dolt? You know, where you go listen to live music on a whim and two songs in you find yourself wondering, “How in the hell did I not even know about this person? Have I been living under a large stone for the past decade?”

Such was the case last Wednesday night when the lovely Tama and I motored up to Felton to a music bar called Don Quixote’s. I had seen an ad in the Weekly about a woman named Muriel Anderson and I was intrigued mostly because it said she plays the harp guitar.  If you are unfamiliar with this instrument then close your eyes and imagine a regular old steel string six string guitar. Got it? Good. Now imagine that someone has nailed a dulcimer to the top of it and strung that with bass guitar strings… no doubt simpler to envision than to play.  The one she played (her traveling one…) had a total of eleven strings, but some run to a couple dozen or more.  It was popular in the United States during the first decade of the 20^th Century and all the big names made them for a while.

Not only is she a stellar guitar player (in 1989 she was the first woman to win the National Fingerpicking Guitar Championship…) with digits like greased lightning, she is all over the place stylistically.  I figure she must have paid more for her guitar than I did for mine because hers came with a whole lot more notes inside just dyin’ to get out.

She opened with some space age stuff she wrote and moved directly into a Greek food inspired instrumental in 13/8 time. A traditional piece for the koto, adapted to the guitar for her upcoming Japan tour and a piece she "co-wrote" with Beethoven. Then it was off to Ireland and then a lullaby from the CD she wrote and recorded as a present to a good friend’s newborn.  Her grandfather was a saxophone player in John Phillip Sousa’s band so, of course, she had to play Sousa’s Liberty Bell March. Then a tasty mélange of flamenco tunes on a spanish guitar, a passel of fiddle tunes, the 1906 hit Nola, several nice pieces she learned sitting around Chet Atkins kitchen and a medley of high speed banjo tunes that she adapted for guitar in tribute to her friend and neighbor the late Earl Scruggs.  Toss in some Beatles, Don McLean and Dire Straits and, by golly, you got yourself and evening’s entertainment.

I had never even heard of Muriel Anderson before, but you can bet I won’t forget her any time soon…