1952

Baleen made a piping hot dinner while I was in the living room putting together the electronics. Had she been in an apron, and our TV been 13 inches instead of 47" then it could have been 1952. Were that the case the scorecard would read, Baleen 1, Hopalong 0 because I couldn't make the DVD I'd bought from Best Buy display any color while Baleen made the best damn dinner of anybody in the Mission suburbs last night.

Thankfully, it's 2011, and when the DVD didn't show the stack full of library DVDs like I wanted it to, I just signed up for Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video, both of which are embedded on our TV.

So a Friday night that could have been a disaster, and once would have been a long night out, turned into a wonderful night in. A glass of chocolate milk and Steve Martin turning back the clock with Parenthood, his preview of the roller coaster to come.

Noe Valley Sunrises

Baleen's best hours are in the morning. She falls asleep around 9pm after 45 minutes of Glee or Parenthood watched on Hulu Plus. She watches it from bed on her laptop because the day's worn her out and because I've failed so far in my Man Duties of figuring out how to get Hulu to stream onto our massive flat screen TV.

That's a task for this weekend, for sure, with hopefully a Friday night movie to conclude the long week, which would be our first media of any kind on that monstrosity. But even still, I think we'll get up early on Saturday morning and walk the hills of Noe Valley like we have the last few days.  

Baleen will be chatty as she is in the morning, having slept nine hours and maybe a little more, and I might be just a wee bit tired from reading alone in the living room. We'll probably see an abundance of little girls and wonder where the boys are. If Whole Foods is open, we'll stock up on Schwarzbrot, which is Baleen's latest pre-walk breakfast, followed immediately after by a bowl of bran flakes with blueberry cereal.

...Strikes Again

We're two for two. Not just with Mario's Chicken Thighs and Green Olives, but with walks up the hill in the morning. Two mornings in a row Baleen's headed up Sanchez to 24th, Poppy in tow, then down 24th to Castro where we head up the hill, Baleen again insisiting that we walk down the steeper side of Castro and then right back up it. It's good for Poppy, we say, and also Poppy's mom, as are the Chicken Thighs and Green Olives.

If we can get a little more out of those Chicken Thighs, we can more out of Mario, too. We'll go back to the summer of 2004, back before I had any spandex, back to when Baleen was spending her last summer in Venice Beach and Team Kamvar ran the Mountain View campus. One of those summer mornings I got a text from Abigail's mom, Drive down here. Mario Batali signing books and making lunch. That pre-tweet tweet was all it took to get me in my car, shift from first to fifth and head down to Mountain View.

There, I stood in the long line with all the rest of the Googlers, and Abigail's mom. Somebody with an ear peice got to each of us in the line when we were about twenty people from Mario and asked us to spell our names on a notecard which would then be handed to Mario to sign. That morning, when I got the text in my cubicle in the city, surrounded by racks of clothes and computer screens, it felt like the most unique thing in the world. But down in Mountain View, surrounded by people already used to notables in their hallways, and not just the Valley Wag kind, it didn't feel so unique. And with just twenty people in front of me to think of something to creative to say to Mario or something creative for him to write down, I failed, thinking only that I shouldn't give him my known name. So in my orange cookbook they gave me I have a signature in orange ink from a man in orange clogs and orange hair that reads, "Dear Gabriel! Molto Mario!"   

Super Mario...

It's a two for one special tonight. We had one of Baleen's favorites, Chicken Thighs with Mint & Green Olives from happy Mario Batali. I made enough to cover tomorrow night when I just might get home from soccer at 8.30 to find Baleen deep deep deep into REM sleep.

The chicken thighs is a favorite, not only in this household but in Mario's restaurant, too. He says in the recipe's intro that whenever it's on the menu he knows what the staff's late night meal will be and that they'll be happy. It's a favorite of Baleen's because it's damn tasty, it's a favorite of mine because it's hearty and rightly priced with those chicken thighs, and it's a favorite of Wood Duck's who first introduced me to the recipe years ago.

One day, I may take Baleen to Babbo where we'll see if they've got it on the menu, then not order it because it's something I can approximate, I'll tell Baleen, while I'll scan the menu for Mint Love Letters, the only dish without pomegranants that's made Abigail's mom swoon, at least that I've heard of.

The Apple and the Tree

The in-laws were in town this weekend and I now know for certain, as if I hadn’t before, what makes Baleen Baleen, at least when it comes to knocking back krill. We're reading from different menus. While I see a selection of good choices with a wide range of prices whose outcome varies from “That was really good,” to “That was okay,” she sees a multiple choice test with an incredibly wide range of outcomes varying from, “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh to,” to “Owwwwwww, I should have gotten the scallops with the citrus watermelon [followed by a momentary pout],” where she, and sometimes the waiter, have the ability to influence that outcome by poring over the menu like it’s a stock chart from the future. I’d seen it dozens of times before this weekend, but since those first few times I hadn't paid it much mind, mostly because Baleen's been ordering the two entrees she wants and I get the one she likes less, as long as it doesn't have an abundance of onions. But when I saw her deliberation rivaled and even trumped by her dad’s, I saw its origination.

What it meant for me, as Jamie and Ashley pored over the menu talking about each and every item, and then how certain items would taste when paired with others, was that I ate like a king this weekend. Not only because the selections were clearly good enough for me to recognize the difference, but because the deliberation and debate made me all the hungrier. 

And though Jamie and Lorna are back home in Pennsylvania now, and Ashley and I are walking off the excesses of Fish, Mission Chinese, Nombe, Pacific Catch, and baby octopus stew in a spicy tomato sauce brought home from La Ciccia, they haven't left us like they found us. There's the extra pound or two, of course, but also Ollie, the four foot giraffe, waiting for March when Poppy comes which'll bring back Jamie and Lorna and the return of our courtly banquets. 

Frogger on the Bosphorus

Outside of eating, there are two things you can't help but do in Istanbul. And it's not step foot inside the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sofia, neither of which we did, nor is it buy a rug. It's not see Besiktas play or visit Istanbul Modern or the Istanbul Archaeology Museums or weigh yourself on the Galata Bridge for 20c by the entrepreneuer sitting in front of a scale.

What you must do is like the Turkish flag. It's everywhere, the crescent moon and star. There aren't versions, stars and bars, or any other regional flags to compete with, at least that we saw, and it's ubiquity, along with it's simplistic design makes it all the more visible.

The other thing you absolutely must do is ferry across the Bosphorus. It's more than just saying you took the boat from Europe to Asia, it's the city subway, the best way to get from one place to another, except it floats. It runs pretty much on time, and it goes just about anywhere you want to go for 2 Turkish Lira, a dollar thirty. We took it at least three times a day and got to the point, on the very last day, where we didn't have to ask the crew each time we boarded, Kadikoy? We just followed the crowd like we were getting off work, too.

Huzun

"Istanbul is a melancholy city," started the New Yorker's 1989 article on Istanbul while Orhan Pamuk spent a whole chapter explaining Istanbul's huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy, as if talking about it throughout the book wasn't enough. Well, that's all in the past or in parts or seasons we didn't see as the city's got a skip in it's step again.

Editorials boast about the 8.8% GDP growth in Q2, second only to China, they said, and their leadership and stability in an uncertain region. Subtly mentioned is their mostly peaceable Muslim population, something like 98%, while a little louder they tell the UN to recognize Palestine. This isn't the return of the Empire, by any means, just something to keep your chin up, especially as the EU dithers about Turkey's membership, and, in return, Turkey dithers about the EU.

And though Pamuk devotes plenty of words to the simits and lokantas of the neighborhoods he visits (though it appears he and his friends smoke more often than eat), and that same New Yorker journalist from 1989 said just a paragraph later that he "ate very well in animated restaurants", it was with the food that Baleen and I found the most life in Istanbul. But that's probably becuase that's where we were looking the hardest.

What Greek Goats Make

Our Greek meals fell into two categories: those we paid somebody to prepare and those we prepared ourselves. On Santorini, it was feta and fish every night. On Ios, it would have been four nights of pasta were W and I alone as that's four nights of cheap, caloric starch that we could have carried on the goat trail. But when we got to the grocery store in Ios Town, Baleen made a beeline for the lemons to go on the chicken that she wanted to serve with rice and fresh tomatoes. So we hired a speedboat to take us and the food from Town to Klima. Which, in addition to tasty dinners, meant that W & I got to have Mythos with our meals, the Most Famous Hellenic Beer in the World, which, as a financial commentator pointed out at the beginning of the Greek crisis, before contagion became a common term, is a little like saying, The Most Famous Beer in Maryland.

Post-mortem of a Greek red snapper

Grilled

Opened

Helplessly consumed (with a little lemon)

The girls cooking: breaded chicken flavored with real things I forget, like butter, lemon and garlic

The boys cooking: pasta

This work...

...turns into a morning of this.

What gets W through cold Novembers in Klima: fried potatoes

A treat after hiking the goat trail: somebody else preparing fresh food

Klima

Klima's indescribable. I tried. I told Baleen that it's the most unique and peaceful place I've been while leaving out the part about it being the kind of place that ghost stories come from, that as you lay there in the kind of pitch black that only comes to someplace without any electricity in sight, your mind wonders, imagining the bells from the goats looking for uneaten greens are really the distressing trebles of goats fleeing a crazed murderer.

It makes you get up in the middle of the night to close the bedroom door which makes you feel a little better, but then as you lie there listening to the sound of the faint goat bells and the gusting wind coming through the open door to the stone patio, Baleen says, "I guess they could get in through the patio," and you're not sure if she's talking about the goats or the crazy murderer.

But then the sun comes up and Klima time returns, which is a light breakfast of eggs and tomatoes with instant coffee, a leisurely swim, lunch, a nap during high heat, a long swim, and a sunset dinner. If you're Greek, and this lasted not a week but a whole month, you could almost forget that you owe Germany 100 billion Euros, or even if you remembered, it wouldn't seem like so much.

View from the beach: Baleen and I stayed in the middle house, W & Cait the top right

Our morning commute: 108 paces to the beach

The mid-afternoon nap

No electricity, but the all important well

View of Klima from the hike out

Goats wondering what we're doing on their trail

Caldera

This week is all about the immediate weeks past in Cyclades, the fancy way of saying Santorini and Ios, and Istanbul. We'll go chronologically, beginning in Santorini, boat about 20 miles north by northwest to Ios, then east to Istanbul.

Our Santorini visit was foretold 3,602 years ago when the island's volcano exploded, collapsing upon itself and forming that thing so deep that W's afraid to swim in it, the caldera, which is a little like arroyo or alluvium, one of those geological words you don't know unless you live near one. Arrive on the island without an iPhone or doing much pre-research, like we hadn't, and it's like starting a movie right in the middle.

"Our restaurant overlooks the caldera...the sunset from the ridge above the caldera," is what one hears everywhere on Santorini. Yet it only takes one night to figure out what the caldera is and why half of Europe pays a lot of Euros for hotel rooms with views of it.

W explaining what the island looked like and what the Minoans ate 3,603 years ago

Fira, home of our hotel without a caldera view

Our restaurant with a caldera view

Nothing to do with a caldera

Oia