Restaurant Reviews
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X is for eXtra
Last week we celebrated the fact that Maya got a promotion at work with an eXtra special meal, dinner at a local vegan restaurant that she loves, Millennium, in Oakland. She’s mostly vegetarian (pescetarian really, though she doesn’t eat fish very often), and has a vegan friend, and they sometimes go here for a special occasion. It’s expensive, but really good. On weekends, meals at Millennium are a Prix Fixe four course meal, including the amuse bouche. You pick from the full menu, an appetizer, entree, and dessert. As Ted doesn’t eat sugar, he had two appetizers instead. I’ll give you pictures and menu descriptions where I can, though the…
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Dinners Last Week
When it comes to cooking dinners, I am not a big planner. Since I work from home, I generally go to the store every day. The connection there, if you’re looking for one, is that I like getting out of the house and seeing people. I pretend I’m European, though I can’t walk to the shops, and we don’t have the lovely variety that we found in France (cheese shop, wine shop, produce shop, bread shop, etc.) Suzanne often posts her plans for meals for the upcoming week, which I enjoy because sometimes it gives me ideas. Here, instead, is the meals I cooked last week. Maybe you’ll see something…
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Homer
Homer is a beautiful town of about 5,500 people approximately 220 miles southwest of Anchorage. Back when we lived in Fairbanks, my brother Richard and I spent a year at a hippy private school, when he was in 3rd grade and I was in 1st. I am not convinced that we learned much in the way of the 3 Rs, but we did a lot of fun projects, like building igloos and making applesauce. Most of the school went to Homer, 3rd graders through 12th graders. It was a very small school, I don’t know how many kids went. Not a lot. The older kids looked after the younger kids,…
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Anchored down in Anchorage
We spent two full days in Anchorage, and mostly took it easy. We started our first day by going to the airport to pick up our rental car. That normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but the service we received was so gracious, I feel it warrants mentioning. The clerk at the National car rental counter was having trouble with our rental, it was coming out about $400 more than we were quoted, so he called his supervisor in to help him fix it. She was able to override the system, and tried to figure out how to get it to charge us the quoted price, but somehow it came out…
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Asmara Ethiopian Food
The picture above is not mine, I grabbed it from Trip Advisor. Today, Maya went out with a friend, and Ted and I went into Oakland. We had no big plans, but I wanted to go to a gourmet grocery store to get some fancy Italian chocolates for Christmas gifts, as well as a couple of birthday cards. After buying the chocolates, we wandered up the street to a local independent book store, where Ted bought a book for a gift, and I bought the birthday cards. Then we started walking around, looking to see if we might find something for a late lunch. We didn’t have any luck, nothing…
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Onion Soup in France
This sad, sad picture is of our dinner one evening in Cannes. We had had a lovely lunch (I think this was the day we took the boat to Saint Tropez and had a big lunch, so we weren’t terribly hungry), so we thought we would a light dinner. Carey had been wanting French Onion soup, so when I saw ‘Soupe a l’oignon’ on a menu, we decided to give it a try. I don’t think it’s that big of a thing in the South of France, and we hadn’t seen it on any menus yet. This was the soup we received…the broth was not the dark, rich broth, the…
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Pictures of the Day – Fruit in Mougins
We absolutely fell in love with the local boulangerie in Mougins. We began our days by walking down our little hill and getting a baguette, croissant, or pastry for breakfast. The quality was AMAZING, and the staff were wonderful. Above is breakfast one day, amazing croissant, amazing fruit, amazing French butter and locally produced jam. The tea is British, I brought my tea bags from home, which I buy from the local Indian shops and are imported from England. The ashtray is useless, but I left it in the picture because it seemed very French to me. Due to COVID, there was often a line in front of the store.…
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My Trip to Washington D.C., Day 3
Saturday my BFF Rosemary, who lives in Pennsylvania, down near the Delaware border, drove down to D.C. to spend the day with us. We started out at the National Portrait Gallery, and ended up getting separated from the rest of my family there. It was OK with everyone that we did so…Rosemary and I wanted to go slowly and read the blurbs about all of the Presidents, and my sister wanted to take her kids to the Air and Space Museum, which I didn’t care about. So they ended up seeing more pictures than we did, but we went more slowly at our own pace. It was interesting to us…
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My Trip to Washington D.C., Day 2
As if it weren’t emotional enough to honor my dad at the Grant Writers’ Association conference, we also honored my step-mom’s first husband, Bruce, who died early in the Vietnam War. She was married while in college, and he left soon after their wedding to go to Vietnam, so they did not have a lot of time together. They did spend some time in Hawaii once when he was on leave. His death broke her heart and changed her life. She left college and travelled in Europe for awhile, and when she came home, discovered she could not bear to live in California anymore, there were too many memories. So…
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My Trip to Washington D.C., Day 1, Part 2
After spending the morning at the Grant Writers’ Association Conference, we walked over to the National Mall and went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It was amazing and overwhelming and so emotional. We only had the fortitude to visit the History section, and at that point were worn out and ready to head home for the day, which is too bad in a way because I think the Culture section would have been well worth seeing as well. The museum is part of the Smithsonian, which means that it is free, and I think a person could spend a month or two in D.C. and…
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Belotti Ristorante
My lovely sister-in-law is visiting California from Alaska, and I got to spend Friday with her. We started out with lunch at one of my very favorite restaurants, Belotti Ristorante. I first heard about this restaurant on a local TV show, Check Please, Bay Area, and as I am a huge fan of pasta, I was intrigued. Ted, Maya, and I went for a late lunch there back in March, and I loved it. They loved it too, but they don’t love pasta as much as I do. Kathy, happily, LOVES Italy. She has been to Italy a few times, most recently she went for a month (alone even, so…
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Hog Island Oyster Co – Napa
Ted and I decided to take advantage of the lovely weather here, and drive up to Napa today. The catalyst for this drive was that next Sunday is Easter, and we will be having Easter Brunch with his family. Last year, we had delicious Eggs Benedict with crab cakes in place of Canadian bacon, and it was a hit, so we decided that would be on the menu again. There is a small chain of bakeries in Napa County, Model Bakery, that has amazing English muffins, so we drove up to buy some, and while there, we had lunch at a neighboring restaurant, the Hog Island Oyster Company. They are…
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Our Time in France – Part 2
Our first day of touring France, aka, not driving 8 hours from Paris to the West Coast of Brittany, Ted’s friend Jean-Marc took us to visit the medieval town of Locronan. As with any village or town in the area, there is a lovely church, St. Ronan. St. Ronan was an Irish pilgrim whose relics were housed for a time in the church. Most of the street signs in Brittany are in two languages, French and Breton. There is a movement to bring back the Breton language, and there are quite a few immersion schools for children to learn Breton. Surprisingly, this was illegal until somewhat recently. Anyway, we drove…
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Parada New Peru
Several years ago, the parking lot for our local BART station was converted (at least partially) into a couple of large buildings, with real estate for shops, parking, and restaurants on the first floors, and apartments up above. This change pretty much coincided with the crash of our economy, and likely for that reason, much of the retail space remains empty. There is a Starbucks, of course. There is a ‘brow bar’, a ballet studio for the toddler set, an insurance agent’s office, and a place to take your dog for training and play. About a year and a half ago, we noticed that one of the store fronts was…
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
One of the benefits of membership to our local PBS station is that they sometimes have a ‘free member day’ at local museums. Several years ago, that took us to the SF MOMA to see a Picasso exhibit, and Maya and I spent a lovely day in San Francisco together. This time the ‘free member day’ was for the de Young Museum, one of two fine art museums in San Francisco. They have several exhibits, but the current Special Exhibit is a collection of paintings from the Mauritshuis in Holland, which is a museum that is being expanded and is under renovation until mid-2014. While they’re tearing up the place,…
