Irene

From Hopalong's mom in Williamsburg, VA on Tuesday, August 30th:

I have new respect for Abe Lincoln so often pictured in his log cabin reading by a single flickering candle. Our trinity this Irene were the flashlights from Baleen and Hopalong's wedding, a gas grill, and a good book on the iPad. Grizzly would add a chain saw with a good sharp blade to that group.

Power is finally back (on Tuesday) and the good news is that the refrig is totally empty except for a few bottles of beer. The freezer too. Both are cloroxed and cleaned and sparkling. It feels great to throw away almost every single food or drink item with the excuse that I am doing the right thing. Remember the kafirr lime leaves that Margarine used in his Thai soup three years ago? Purged. Ever useful, they are creating a nice kitchen aroma simmering in a pot of lemon water. Helps balance the rotten refrig smell.

There seem to be some major water problems in New Jersey so Griz wants to travel asap. Next door, the Beach house has fearless tree climbers up and cutting with a big log moving vehicle taking up most of the cul de sac. Southall Road must have had 8 huge hardwood trees fall directly across the road. Four or five crews are cleaning up every few miles along the road. Back to work, but I wanted to say we are so lucky to only have a little damage and to live in modern times. 

The Friday night calm before the storm

108 after Irene: better than expected and better than Isabel

Protein

Rahm Emanuel is up at 5, having exercised, showered and shaved before most of his colleagues and adversaries awake, while I, last night just before 1am, moved my alarm back two hours. It's because Chicago has more problems than I do, I'll say, that he works so hard, but what it really means is that I still don't have any jerseys.

Tail between my legs, and feeling glum from having slept in, I swam at lunch today in the Bay, my first noontime workout in over four years, maybe much longer as I can't remember the last one, mainly to bring back the goggles from my locker so I can spy some fish in the warm Aegean in ten days time.

Tonight's dinner, too, prompted a little effort, more than opening cans of soup and packaged rice, as Baleen's back on her feet again. The NYT had plenty of good stuff about in season tomatoes, but Baleen's been hankering for protein after a few cautious days so it's skillet steak and chard, minus the feta, courtesy of midweek meals from the Food Network.

Kissing Ducks

Just came back from Shanghai where I spent most of my time in a conference room on the 32nd floor of an office building on Huaihai West.  The view from the conference room gave a nice overview of Shanghai with a pile of construction in one direction, some run down stucco apartment buildings with brightly lit signs for the knick knack stores on the bottom floor in another and, to the east, the gorgeous tree-lined streets and Haussmann-style mansions of the Luwan district (known in the tourists guides as the French Concession because the territory was handed over to the French in 1849 by the Duotai of Shanghai).  

My favorite part of China is the food, not just the roast duck and Shanghai dumplings (that are really from Wuhan), but the kind of stuff that I haven't seen in America.  I have a great reputation among my Chinese co-workers for eating absolutely anything they put my way and I take pride in it!  On previous trips that's meant congealed duck's blood, cow intestines, duck gizzard, pig's throat and live river eel.

This time my co-workers brought me to Sichuan Citizen which features delights from the Sichuan Province which is known for food so spicy that it leaves your tongue feeling like you have been "kissed by the beaks of 1,000 ducks" (the english translation).  Here's our lunch.

Frog in Spicy Broth (when I asked for bowls to share they all laughed and said don't drink the "soup")

Probably the spiciest thing I have ever eaten; a chile soaked white fish

Ma Po Tofu-  even better than Mission Chinese!

Chile Fried Green Beans-  seriously delicious.

Just a few of my co-workers with our spread.

xo,  Baleen

No Findik

In 2002, four good friends, water polo players and Californians, tending tall, but with a foot separating top to bottom, went west on one of those round the world tickets and kept going west for half a year until they got back to California. All four disliked shirts and two were deathly allergic to peanuts so they learned how to say, "No peanuts," in about twenty languages while the three not talking pantomimed death by grabbing their necks with both hands and falling to the ground. They had to be sure.

Baleen and I won't go to those lengths, but on Monday night, the 12th of September, I'll hover over every dish and ask, "Findik?" Were Baleen to have any hazelnuts, it wouldn't be as bad as it would have been for the topless two, but it's still bad and there's just nothing exciting about foreign country bad. But that won't keep us from the place I'm talking about which I can't tell you about because I'd like to keep it a secret from Baleen, an occasional visitor to these pages. Know that it's on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, that the owner has resisted opening anything for decades in the more touristy spots because then, "I wouldn't be able to walk to them," and that first bites make eighty year old women cry remembering their Anatolian childhood.

I stayed dry on tonight's first bite of mango and coconut rice salad not, I'd argue, because it wasn't any good, but because I didn't grow up in the tropics. It's my last meal before Baleen returns, and the last night to enjoy the only two things she doesn't, dill, from last night's couscous, and tonight, red peppers.

Yotam 2, Hopalong 0

Hey Yotam!

Istanbul awaits. I'm reading all I can about the place I've never been, except maybe in my mother's womb, as quick as I can. The normal method, a little high and a little low, is making me low so far as there's no Kurt Wallender or Commissario Brunetti to show me Istanbul, at least not from somebody who writes in a language I can read. Barbara Nadel tries in Arabesk, but it's not giving me enough deets on what we'll see to trump my annoyance that it doesn't do what a detective novel should, like give you any alibi for the most obvious suspect introduced in the first chapter and mentioned throughout. I'm skipping pages in my rush to find the highs, I hope, from Mr Pamuk.

Also, the New Yorker archives, reaching back a long time, but not nearly as long as the city itself, mind you, to 1934 and sour HL Mencken who carefully called it Istanbul, not Constantinople, and found the tomato red and mosque blue Oriental rugs just as ugly in shop windows as on American floors, along with a piece from 1989 including a little Attaturk history, and a recent one, 2010, on cheap eats by Elif Batuman, who deserves another chance despite writing what I'm sure was a great proposal to David Remnick ("I can be the Bill Buford of Turkish soccer clubs"), but not a great article.

All of which requires sustenance, tonight, in the form of hearty, hearty herbs, courtesy of Yotam Ottolenghi, the Jersulam born London chef who Baleen knew about years ago when she lived and worked in that city, but didn't know she should know about him until I got his cookbook. Maybe I'll cook it for you when you get back, Baleen, or maybe we'll go to one of the Ottolenghi locations together one day.

Before: Hopalong vs Herb Recognition Recollection

During: Hopalong vs Yotam

After: Hopalong vs Fatigue

I Do

Marriage civilizes men. There’s a whole body of research showing how it turns them away from dangerous, anti-social and self-centered activities and toward the needs of a family. Prime Minister David Cameron calls it responsibility, and indirectly cited it as reason for Britain’s riots, and it’s why George W sanctioned the use of federal funds to promote marriage, especially in poor communities.  

When Baleen’s on a work trip, as she is now, and I become a bachelor again, I feel this difference. I don’t take the risks I once did. It’s a shift, one that I recognize as I make the safer selection, and one that produces occasional nostalgia, or some softer form of the same word. For this nostalgia isn’t regret, not even close, and it doesn’t include any desire to return to how things were, but rather a memory of what once was. It’s the Ostalgie that keeps Ossie in Berlin’s crosswalk lights without ever wishing for a return to socialism.

For me, it means whole milk from Straus Family Creamery with the cream top instead of raw milk from Rainbow Grocery, and burritos from Papalote full of potatoes, carrots and avocado, not carne asada. Enormous, enormous sacrifices on my part, but joyful ones.

Coldest Winter I Ever...

As the rest of the US cools down, and Virginia rattles and rolls, San Francisco’s just warming up. It hit 80 today. Cold weather used to be my domain, I’d cite my fair complexion and northern European ancestry for why I preferred to play sports in conditions that sent all parents but mine to their car, but today taught me otherwise. I flew up the hill. Nevermind that I was fifth to the top, or that I still don’t have any digital jerseys, I was 36 seconds faster than last week. I expect a midnight visit from the UCI.  

That’s a 7% improvement over last week, but it’s much more when you think that I will never, ever beat 7 minutes up Hawk Hill. So if that’s the ceiling, then it’s a 49% improvement over last week. Then again, not all seconds are created equally, as clipping those seconds near 8 minutes is a whole lot easier than those near 7 minutes so it’s somewhere between 7% and 49%. Which is still a lot.  

To earn those extra seconds, I’ve analyzed the last 24 hours, Bob Bradley style*, and have a few theories for my improved performance, each of which I’ll test with a control group over the next few weeks, to see if it was the plate full of bald pasta last night, the dropped Clif Bar with a few bites left, or, lo and behold, the sunshine. Maybe I’m a lizard after all.

Typical San Francisco dawn in the Presidio...

...not so typical San Francisco morning on top of Hawk Hill.

*Bob Bradley, to Jesse Marsch in the fall of 1995, “You had a better than normal game today, Jesse. Ask yourself, ‘What did I have for breakfast this morning? Did I walk to class or bike? Where did I sleep last night’?”

No Firearms

When Baleen and I landed in Austin on Friday night, an airport jumbotron said Saturday’s high would be 105 with a low of 77. We asked my brother and sister2B when it would be 77. From 4 to 4.10am, they said. If my brother and s2B could have made it rain, or lowered the temperature by 20 degrees, they would have because they did everything possible to ensure Baleen’s first real trip to Texas was a memorable one. Which is all the more considerate considering Baleen and I were in Texas to celebrate their engagement, not to be doted on from beginning to end. Thanks, Margarine. Thanks, Big Emma.

The weekend was full of things, like racing down the Comal River at 1mph and cooling off in Barton Springs after a run along Lady Bird Lake, but what we really did was eat. It started early on Saturday morning at Tacodeli, the carrot at the end of the stick for Shrimp Jr, where we found out why she gets up at 6am to run outdoors in a Texas summer (free Tacodeli breakfast tacos)…

…and how Austin veterans like s2B’s big brother Ben assemble theirs...

...shortly followed by lunch...

...with a few Shiner Bocks...

...and some dessert queso.

Baleen and I can't wait to return in November, even if we won't have any time for queso.  

Drouth

Baleen and I are off to Austin where I’m mentally and physically unprepared for what’s to come. Mentally, because my audience of four hasn’t provided any reading recommendations, not even movies or CliffNotes, and physically, because it’s too hot to fish. Austin and parts of the south are in the midst of a heatwave and drought, the absolute worst Texas drought on record, that’s nearly frightful enough to turn a man to science fiction to find out what happens when arable land becomes arid.

The way we’ll deal with temperatures twice those in San Francisco is to submerge ourselves in the Comal River, at least what’s left of it, and wear next to no clothing, certainly not socks and shoes with laces, lest Baleen and I look like two German anthropologists dropped deep in the Amazon losing a gallon of sweat a day while the locals we’ve come to study are as dry as a Texas summer.

But we’ll need more than that to get by. There’s family style barbeque at Salt Lick with our new, growing relations, and Clive Bar on Rainey Street, where if the Shiner Bocks don't do it, there’s Lady Bird Lake just a short walk away.

Summer Soup

Thursday morning was Tuesday morning this week with the early morning club ride, but the results were the same, third up the hill and nipped at the line at the sprint. I can't even tell Baleen, yes, I beat Vitaly as he wasn’t there this morning. That’s four weeks with the Garmin and four weeks without a jersey. Another few weeks of this and things may have to change, weight loss and shaved legs, maybe one at a time to ease into it, first the right, then, if still no jersey, the left.

Today's view from the top

What I can do is keep the one dish dinners rolling. Tonight it’s lemon parsley soup with eggs. Baleen’s been nibbling on hunks of cheese like a mouse so we’ll find out if it’s dairy that she’s craving or calcium. If it’s calcium, then I’ll have all 12 squares of the Trader Joe’s milk chocolate to myself; if it’s dairy, then I’ll gladly offer her two or three squares. Maybe four if she asks about Vitaly.  

Lemony Parsley Eggy Soup

Adios SdB

Another one's trading Patagonia jackets and wrinkle free shirts for the A downtown and credit cards left open at bars. SdB lasted longer than any one expected, but in the end, shorter than we all wanted. We're practiced at saying goodbye as he's done this twice before, back in college when he said he was taking off a year, and then again when he said he wasn't coming back until we were almost done, so there's hope we'll be in the same place again somewhere down the line.

Partial comfort comes from knowing he'll be in the same time zone as his girlfriend, his brother, his sister and his parents, though not in the same state as a one of them, while real comfort comes from knowing he's not going back to school or moving into Senorita Salcedo's extra bedroom in Oakland.

Take care of him, New York, his shoulder, his hips and that hairline, too.

SdB in SF: 2008 to 2011

The 5 Es

Oh, the humdrum midweek meal of varying goals: economy, efficiency, expediency, entertainment, and, occasionally, enjoyment. In that balance of power, I tend toward the first few while Baleen never ever forgets the last one. To even have half a sense of what that's like I'd have to permanent marker, "Optimal food taste," on the back of both my hands to think of it every seven seconds as I type. It's not that I wouldn't rather have a great bite than a good one, it's just too many steps on a midweek night to make that great bite.

But when I come home from work to a meal that Baleen's had time to prepare, I see the difference between her cooking and mine. It's not just that the food looks a whole lot prettier from beginning to end...

...it's that she's thought of what the final product will become before it's a final product, and thinks about what would make it better. That's one chess move too many for me.

On Monday night I returned from a barbell day (calls to London in the morning, Sydney at night) to a dinner of salmon, asparagus and wild rice. Which could of come straight from Runner's World or Eating Right with that I know it's good for me because it's good but not great taste, except for those few little twists that made it great. First, a little lemon over the asparagus. Then, displaying an impressive penchant for economy with ingredients that creep from one dish to the next, a Paula Deen lemon cream sauce with 2x as much chicken broth as cream. Just another humdrum midweek meal.

Royal Jelly

Baleen and I spent a warm, San Francisco Sunday morning at Mr. and Mrs. Combover’s loft in a transitional SOMA neighborhood. Blood relatives might remember this as the loft that Baleen and I housesat for a week two Decembers ago where she learned that transitional, in this case, means walking to the bus in the pre-dawn darkness, and turning a corner to find a boot in her face, Karate Kid style, followed by two sharp jabs to the chest. When she finally turned around after just barely escaping contact, she saw the homeless black belt bent over a sidewalk tree, furiously digging out the dirt. Daylight dangers persist, but in a new form: Mr. Combover’s 20,000 rooftop bees.

Mr Combover, the Steve Irwin of domestic beekeeping, has dug deep into this niche audience of apiarists who, before the internet, used to collect in the hallways of suburban Holiday Inns once a year or mail each other photocopied pages of collected wisdom, and done what niche audiences don't really do: made it approachable. He fascinated us for an hour with tidbits from a few months on the job. Highlights include: his bees don’t sleep, they work work work for six straight weeks, then die dead; they can fly at speeds up to 20mph and find flowers to pollinate up to two miles from the hive so if you live in the Marina, you haven’t seen his bees, but for all you Pac Heights residents, don’t peel those bananas; bees can’t talk, but they can dance, which they do on the beehive dancefloor which is where one bee tells another by shaking it’s stinger this way or that, “check out the flowers over that way, sister,”; Chinese and Indian men might soon come a calling as the colony is at least 90% female; but most important of all, royal jelly, and a little bit of luck, turns normal bees into queen bees, Cleopatra to thousands and thousands of drones and workers.

So I’m searching for the equivalent concoction that will turn Baleen from just any old 200 ton mammal into the Queen of the Ocean. There’s lots of experimenting to come with plants and animals, cooked and uncooked, as solids or liquids, to be drunk or chewed, but nothing swallowed with a plugged nose, for royalty might require sacrifice, but taste just isn’t on that list. Not for Baleen at least.

Penne ala vodka or royal jelly?

Carrot and celery juice? Or royal jelly?

363

Sunday’s a big day. Paper or clocks. It’s the first one so I’m certain to remember it. It’s also on the inside of my wedding ring so you’d think I’d be golden for the rest of my days, but that depends. Nature or nurture. If it’s the former, then I’m in trouble. Grizzly, my dad, drives a car from the 90s, with legacy features from then, like a big engine built on believing gas would never breach $2 a gallon, and the height of mid-priced technology, a key code door. My mom, who picked the code, as it would be a car they’d share, chose their anniversary. I know their anniversary. My mom knows their anniversary. My brother knows their anniversary. My sister, too. But Grizzly’s something like 60% over the last five years. He probably even typed in the date those mornings he forgot.

So I need to come up with some foolproof system. Like telling my mom to remind me three weeks before. We’ll be going to Coi on Saturday night. I've never been, but from what I hear, I highly recommend you try it. I just don’t recommend you pay for it. What I recommend is, fall in love with a girl from Boston. Make sure she’s best friends with a girl who’s engaged to a big time chef in Boston. Get married. Have the bride to be and the chef give you a very generous gift certificate to Coi. Arrive hungry. Get the tasting menu for the first and maybe only time in your life. Enjoy. Unbutton top button. Drive home.

Happy Anniversary, Baleen. Next year, too, and the year after that. And all the ones to come. Phew. I’m covered. xo

Market Volatility

Oh, the soft pressure of an audience of four. Had tonight been a few years ago or even ten days ago, then tonight's dinner would have been a burrito on the way home or bald pasta with butter. But that expectant audience wakes up in more eastern time zones hoping for a story and stories require content greater than boiled water. So while I still can, here's a little more, dinner ala Madrid, cooked from whole foods and eaten very late, alone, as Baleen is working even later than I am.

9.03 pm

9.18pm

9.34pm

  

The Republic of Texas

Any reading recommendations for Austin, Texas? I'll cast the net a little wider. How about Texas? A tall order, I know, as it's like asking, any reading recommendations for a place as large as Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal and Denmark? I better get to know the place as: 1) almost half my family lives there now; 2) I'll be going there at least twice in the next few months, first for my brother and sister2b's engagement party two weekends from now, the second for their wedding in November; and, 3) because the man who has a 17% chance of becoming our president in 2012 carries a laser guided pistol while jogging in case he sees snakes.

Baleen's only been to Texas once, five hours in Dallas for a dinner with two brokers where she was the only one at the table not wearing cowboy boots and where she was called ma'am for the first time in her life, so I'm excited to show her a true Texan experience. At least a true, modern Texas experience which might include a trip to the first ever Whole Foods, floating down a river with beers in koozies, filling our bellies with barbeque, swimming in Barton Springs, one of Budget Travel's top 10 public pools in the world, and maybe even stopping by Mellow Johnny's, the Austin bike store owned by Lance Armstrong.

But I don't know what to read. Lonesome Dove got my sister through a long Swedish winter, and when my sister and I visited my brother in law school at UT, I pretended I'd read it too, when I'd only seen the movie. When I went to Houston for work, and hung around for the weekend to stay with my brother, Issac's Storm prepared me for the one hour drive to Galveston where we raced rickshaws down the boardwalk in the rain. But there's nothing on the list this time. Any ideas?

Vitaly, Vitaly

My cycling club awards digital jerseys for winning certain segments of group rides. There’s no bias here, Garmin bike computers and satellites get involved and record your times between two points. When you get home and upload the data onto some software like Strava that stores and analyzes your ride, and over which riders like me and my clubmates obsess, the fastest riders over the relevant segments get the digital jersey. There aren’t any bouquets or podium girls, but there’s pride. Lots of it. A few months ago Baleen looked over my shoulder while I was on the club website and asked why I didn’t have any of those jersey thingies. I said it was because I didn’t have a Garmin. She looked at that day’s jersey winners and asked, So you beat Vitaly up Hawk Hill? Yes, I said. So you’d have a jersey if you had a Garmin? Yes, I said. Lo and behold, on the morning of 7/19/11, I open my birthday present from Baleen to find a Garmin. So you can get the jerseys you deserve, she said as she hugged me.

Now where I’m most likely to win a jersey, and the jerseys I most want to win, are on Tuesday morning. There’s Hawk Hill and the Presidio sprint. That first Tuesday morning with the bike computer, Baleen couldn’t wait til she got home. Did you beat Vitaly, she asked as she called from her commute. Yes, I said. So you got a jersey, she yelled. No, I said. Somebody else beat Vitaly, she asked. And me, I said. Grrrrr, she said. The next Tuesday she at least waited until she got home, did you beat Vitaly? Yes, I said. So you got a jersey? No, I said. Somebody else beat Vitaly, she asked. And me, I said. What about the sprint, she asked. Nope, I broke too early and faded at the line, I said. So you still don’t have any jerseys even though I got you the Garmin, she asked. That’s correct, I said. Grrrrrr.

View from the top of Hawk Hill on a mid-summer morning looking down to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco behind. 

This morning I followed a strong rider up the hill and hung on longer than I thought I could, which left me without a jersey, but a little pride. On the Presidio sprint, things were looking good. Last week’s winner broke too early. I could see this quite clearly three riders back in the line-up and knew that if I stayed with the two in front of me to the last fifty yards I could slingshot in front of them to the line. Which is what I did, and with twenty yards left I was well in front of them and knew they couldn’t catch me. But somebody else, somebody I hadn’t seen, must have been thinking at fifty yards, if I can just stay with these three riders, I can slingshot in front of them to the line. Because with five yards left, just as I was thinking of how I’d tell Baleen, somebody passed me on the left, and all I could think was, Baleen’s not going to like this.

Northern New Mexico

There's a pace to see northern New Mexico. It's somewhere between seventy-five in a rented minivan and the just above walking pace on the back of two burros, which is how Willa Cather thinks you should see it.  She chose the notable period of the mid-1800s when New Mexico became American and then told a story where nothing notable happened, just two priests covering the red earth on Contento and Angelica. Kit Carson makes a few cameos and you read a little closer when he does, but Cather uses him the same way she does sand storms or the Sangre de Cristo mountains, as part of the main character that is New Mexico. And if you're going to do that, and tell me what the naked blue Sandia mountains look like when you're high on a ridge over the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, then I'll choose a paint brush over a pen. Or even the words of somebody who holds one. Because when I think of New Mexico and my first time there, it's the big blue skies I'll remember and my excitement as I think, tomorrow I'll be in Albuquerque or tomorrow, Ojo Caliente and the day after that, Taos.

Bobcat Bite, on the old road to Las Vegas (NM) from Santa Fe, where the green chile cheeseburgers are on the menu, but the blue sky still astounds.

Hiking outside Ojo Caliente...

....where Baleen was always looking down for snakes and jumped when she she saw this cheetah...

...and where we had fried green chiles for dinner, making it 3 for 3 with the green chiles.

On the road to Taos...

...where we listened as the current Father at San Francisco de Asis told us how brutal the local Indians were to each other...

...and found out what Georgia O'Keefe meant when she wrote to Alfred Stieglitz upon seeing Taos for the first time, "This really isn't like anything you ever saw - and no one who tells you about it gives any idea of it."

Mesas and Dry Creek Beds

If you live in San Francisco long enough, you forget that the big one's on its way. You also forget that the weather can vary by a hundred degrees over the seasons or that it can rain in summer. Today's first day in New Mexico gave us things we just couldn't get in SF, like green chiles with every meal, 90 degree heat, and a hot springs resort under $150. But mostly it gave us this.

America First

It sounds xenophobic or dangerously patriotic or the title of some new Toby Keith song, but it's not, it's just a little marketing about our great, big country, not promoting our modest tax rate or our ability to get along, but it's beauty, natural and enhanced. At least that's what Ken Burns told me, I think, in America's Best Idea. It's what the railroads said when they told the Easterners and the residents of Cincinnati and St. Louis not to take that Grand Tour of Europe, but to see America First. It probably worked because Ken's film was full of sharp looking men and women in suits and dresses in our great outdoors and because I told Baleen right then and there that they were right, we lived in one big, great place that we needed to know better. She rolled her eyes and said, every 3-day weekend for the next 20 years we'll load the station wagon and the bug spray and fill Waffle House jukeboxes with quarters and see this country of ours. Let's go to Greece and Turkey now, America second. I kind of agreed, but held out hope and kept at it by getting her to wear a flag pin now and then and drink Budweiser on the 4th of July, but there's no need for any of that over the next four days, it's America first. 

We're off early for a weekend wedding in Albuquerque (it's taken me 3 months of emailing friends and family ab the trip to put U as the 4th letter instead of E) with two nights a few hours north, first in Ojo Caliente with their mineral springs and a second night in The Historic Taos Inn. Hot bananas. I'm even taking the Southwest drink coupons that I got years ago and have survived three moves as I'll finally be on a flight where I want to use them. Baleen's volunteered to drive the rental all four days you see, and with the $13/day second driver fee we'll save from the car rental agency, I think we'll plow the proceeds into green chiles. Though mom's gone behind my back and told Baleen I need to get her some turquoise jewelry, and not to let any turquoise we get in New Mexico to keep us from gold in Greece. Turquoise in New Mexico I'm fine with, but gold in Greece? It's a commodity, mom, purchased in a strong currency from a man with earnings in a weak currency. America first.

Simplicity

When you live in California, and your bike route to work passes a farmer’s market, improvements don't always improve. Sourdough from Acme Bread in the Ferry Building, fresh eggs from the vendor at the market, heirloom tomatoes for $3 a pound a few stalls down, and sharp cheddar from the corner shop, which looks like any old corner shop except it isn’t because it’s San Francisco.

 Even simpler for Baleen. No egg.

When you’re preparing for a flight that will take you from one good place to another, but with someplace not as good in between, prepare. That means pasta with fresh herbs, tomatoes and greens, prepared Mark Bittman style, which is 3 or 4x the recommended greens and shrink the starchy pasta. Just don’t tell Nonna.