But I did make us buttermilk buckwheat blueberry pancakes for a rainy Sunday morning treat!

pancake batter

with banana melon smoothies

my pancake-shaping skills could use some work! but they passed the taste test

and for dinner, used that leftover buttermilk (what the heck else are you supposed to use buttermilk for all for before it goes bad?) to make cheddar buttermilk biscuits, served with porkchops and collared greens

cheddar buttermilk biscuits- honestly I think the raw dough was almost even better than the biscuits

Peanut Butter bonanza!

Well, not bonanza, exactly, but I did let him “clean” this empty jar for a bit before I recycled it.

Earl is a peanut butter fiend, and insists we get this ginormous tubs, which always bug me because they take up so much room in the cupboard! It’s pointless to argue the point, however, because he will launch into a math-fueled cost analysis of jar size and… you end up just waving a white flag out of boredom.

Plus, now that we have giant tubs, woofer can go to work with glee, occasionally. I took a TON of shots here, because he was super cute, so feel free to skip this if drooling doggies aren’t your thing!

Do you want this? Do you want it? Are you a good boy?

now, hmm... how am I going to get to all of that?

he carried his prize proudly around

furrowed his brow in concentration

extended his tounge to get that verrrry last bit

carried it around some more

oh happy day to be a doggie!

Thursday night we had our friends Johannes and his wife Christine, as well as our friend Dom over for dinner.

I made vegan mushroom risotto, which came out pretty freaking well.
three types of mushrooms:

shitake, oyster and button

Step 1: saute garlic, shallots, 1/2 red onion with sliced mushrooms

mushrooms, onion, shallots and garlic saute

Step 2: add arborio, stirring constantly for 5 minutes

adding in the risotto rice

Step 3: add in white wine and 8 cups mushroom broth, cup by cup, stirring until each one gets absorbed. probably about 45 minutes. at this point I also added some seasonings: salt and pepper, thyme and two bay leaves

add white wine and mushroom broth

Came out a bit blurry bc of the backlight, but here’s yours truly in my fabulous Etsy-find Juicy Fruit Lola Apron, which embarrassingly enough I was still wearing when the guests arrived!

the chef in her apron

We also had a simple green salad with cranberries, pomegranates and walnuts with a lemon-honey vinagrette, and for dessert this Amazing Vegan Olallieberry Pie!! I was going to make poached pears, but this pie just looked too good at Rainbow Grocery to pass up.

Vegan Olallieberry Pie from Rainbow Grocery

Us non-Vegans enjoyed our pie a la mode with vanilla ice cream

Dom, Johannes, Christina and Earl enjoy their pie! We were all incredibly stuffed

It was so nice to see Dom and Johannes again, and meet Christina! It’s nice to be starting to make some friends who live in the area. Johannes and Christina live about 10 minutes down the road from us- he is doing residency at UCSF and she is in her third year at med school there. Plus it was nice to catch Dom while he was in town, as he splits his time between SF and Truckee.  I was a little nervous about cooking vegan, but I think I can chock this dinner up as a success.

hee hee.

More of these shots to come later today.

Mmm, Peanut Butter

I have so many photos and stories of the past week to share with you guys, however I have been busy… being lazy

Should get them all up tomorrow.  In the meantime, I will have you know I am preparing a vegan dinner party for 7 people at our apartment tonight!  There was a bit of an ethical dilemma there, because only one person attending is vegan (my friend Dom from ski camp), however I decided it would be less rude to cook vegan for all instead of making him a special, separate vegan meal and therefore making him feel like the odd man out.  Or, as he put it “the fly in the ointment” ….?  (fly in the ointment?? wtf!)  haha.  Perhaps an Australian colloquialism (he is Aussie)?

Ze Menu:

• simple greens salad with cranberry, pomegranates and walnuts with honey vinaigrette
• persimmon flowers a la Andrea
• wild mushroom risotto (in mushroom broth and white wine instead of cream)
• poached pears with dark chocolate sauce

I am off to the hippie grocery store to buy ingredients now.  Hopefully they have everything and all goes well tonight!

No more sleeping on a mattress on the floor!

Here is Lucy modeling the new bed.  We need to move the candleholders on the wall to accommodate it, and reposition a couple paintings- projects for this weekend.

Lucy approves

The bed’s a *little* big for the room- it kinda sucks up all the oxygen in the room, but… I don’t know, I love it. We don’t really use the bedroom for much other than spending time in bed anyways. There’s enough room for dog’s kennel, two nightstands, a bureau, my hair stuff/makeup tower, and the bed. That’s it. Oh, and the floor on the side is big enough for me to stretch and do situps and pushups in the morning, so that’s good. What else do you really need in a bedroom?

not tons of room, but it works

Lucy makes an excellent bed model. She’s psyched about the new bed because now it’s too high for Linus to come up whenever he pleases- now it is strictly invite-only for woofer.

new bed!

Winter is rainy season here in San Francisco, and while we’ve been blessed with many absolutely gorgeous days, it has also POURED quite often.  On Sunday I woke up to rainy gloom, and decided it was the perfect kind of day to surprise Earl by treating him to breakfast in bed.

view of the rain from our apartment window

At 7:30 I strapped on the shoes and went for a quick 4-mile recovery jog in Golden Gate Park.  Then when I got back I showered up and got to work.

The Menu

• Baked Eggs served in Herloom Tomatos with Prosciutto and Basil Puree
• Strawberry-Watermelon Smoothies with Ginger Infusion
• Cinnamon-Sugar Toast
• Coffee

Final Product

I found the recipe for the eggs here, and it was fantastic.  Not that hard, either.  I would absolutely recommend it- the tomatos came out sooo juicy and just bursting in flavor- perfectly complimented the eggs.  The entire meal came out stupendously.

Here’s how I made it:

Step 1: dig out the insides of 4 tomatoes, save the “shells,” theses are what you are going to use to house your eggs.  I chopped up the insides and saved them for pasta sauce, which I made for dinner later that night.  Homemade sauce would be the perfect dinner to go with this because you end up with some left over basil puree as well.

scoop out the insides of 4 tomatoes

One thing the recipe for the eggs kept mentioning is that it was important to get all of the “juices” out of the tomatoes. I think that’s because they would mess up the eggs when they were baking. So it has you blot them with paper towels and also drain them upside down while preparing the basil rub.

drying out the tomato shells

Step 2: make the basil puree. add fresh basil, olive oil, salt and pepper. The recipe called for it to be smashed in a mortar and pestle, although I don’t have one so I just used my trusty magic bullet blender, in “chop” mode

basil puree- fresh basil, olive oil, salt and pepper

basil puree- this smelled soooo good

Starting the smoothies: I used half a watermellon in each and then about four strawberries. I also threw in an infusion of fresh chopped ginger and a pinch of sugar which I made in the blender.

smoothie ingredients

step 3: wrap the tomato shells in prosciutto. secure with toothpicks, smear inside with basil puree

tomato wrapped in prosciutto, inside rubbed with basil smash

Good thing I have my trusty prosciutto-taster on hand

what ho? why, prosciutto? but of course, it would be my pleasure to taste it for you!

I find this proscuitto playful. I adore the way the sublime meaty flavors balance the simplicity of the remarkable handling of salt.

It should be added that the tonal suggestions of the proscuitto relationship with the salt bring within the realm of discourse the eloquence of these pieces!

Step 4: pop the tomatoes in the oven for 10 minutes to start them to roast. @350 degrees

bake @350 for 10 minutes to roast tomatoes

While the tomatoes are baking, prepare cinnamon toast. I used a whole-wheat baguette

whole wheat baguette for cinnamon toast

Prosciutto taster also handily doubles as vacuum; a little more lowbrow than snooty prosciutto taster!

Vrroom, vrroom! bring on the four-legged, automatic vacuum

Step 5: After tomatoes have roasted for 10 minutes, break an egg inside each one, return to oven to bake for 8 minutes

break egg inside each tomato, return to oven to bake for 8 minutes

While the eggs were baking, I finished off the toast with cinnamon-sugar mix and butter, and made some coffee.

Since this was breakfast for Earl, I made sure to use his special MATH mug*! (*this mug was the source of a major “fight” between the two of us once- I made the mistake of using it to store pens and pencils in on his desk… the horror! special math mug must be used for serving beverages, ONLY!! Got that, Greene?) A few of the equations on the math mug are: Newton’s acceleration, Fourier Transform (Earl’s favorite equation), laplace, Euler’s Identity, and the harmonic.

special math mug

Close up of the final result of the egg

egg in herloom tomato wrapped in proscuitto

sleepy mathematician gets woken up with kisses in time for breakfast!

Earl gets served breakfast in bed

Here’s mine when I cut into the egg. Notice that I didn’t have a fancy tray and just ate right on the bed (we only have 1 tray!).

dig in!

1 down, 1 to go… Mmm, mmm. Best breakfast I’ve ever made. The smoothies were awesome, too.

filling and scrumptious

Post-breakfast, we had two four legged friends who joined us to snuggle the day away in bed

these two joined us post-breakfast to laze in bed

After breakfast Earl worked on this

Earl searches for the definition of e

and I worked on this. yes, I still try to get the sunday times even though we’re in SF. It’s a habit I just don’t want to give up. Although the CA version of the Sunday Times is NOT as good as the NYC version of the Sunday times. I miss the freaking Real estate section and the City section. Just because I am all the way out here in CA doesn’t mean I don’t want to read those sections, too!

wouldn't be a proper sunday in bed without the NYT!

*sigh*
Best Sunday Ever.

!
<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=1e605a79-9ed0-4f29-9c28-2cb41b00b727" target="_new" title="Corgi Dogsled">Video: Corgi Dogsled</a>

Did you know, corgis have been actually used to pull carriages of children in Wales. I should rig a contraction up to the Radio Flyer and let Linus test that out with my nieces and nephew!

So, you’ve heard all about how we saw(!!) the(!!) otter(!!!!!!) at Rodeo Beach, but I have not yet told you about the trail run.

It was a solid run, and I’m feeling better and better each week at these distances, particularly on the trails.  Here are a couple things over the past two months of trail running that I have come to learn and embrace:

• Trail running is *much* harder than running on roads.  It takes longer, and you go a whole lot slower.
• HILLS.  Holy cow.  These things aren’t even hills.  They’re MOUNTAINS.  Like- you are running up and down mountains the entire 12 miles.  There’s also random stairs thrown in on the trails- sometimes actual staircases, and sometimes haphazard wooden log/trail stairs.  Up and down, up and down.
• Wind.  At least in the Marin Headlands- the wind whips off the pacific like whoa.  There were times on the SCA Trail where I almost felt like I was going to get blown off the mountainside.  Taking out my contacts that evening, they were welded to my eyeballs and made a nice *splooch*ing sound when I pried them out.  Yiegh!
• You WILL get disgusting!  DIRT: learn to love it. Embrace doing loads of laundry.
• If dog is accompanying you on trail run, bring a towel to put on the seat for him on the way home
• Technu: my savior.  Apparently California trails at this time of year have lots of poison oak. This is notable for when you get lost, and have to go off-trail to find your way back to the trail.
• Prepare to be lost.  Accept you will get lost.  Plan that you will be lost.  Bring a map.  Bring a phone.  Bring your a-game, directional-sense-wise, but you will still get lost!  Prepare to eat crow as you sadly disinvoke your prided “Greene’s Never Backtrack” mantra.

Basically, my goal was to do the pink loop of the Pirates Cove race route, a race I am doing in three weeks. Since it’s my first trail race, I thought it would be a good idea to get a “lay of the land” feel. Particularly since I made about THREE critical navigational errors on the run, I think this was a smart decision.

Some photos:
Where the trailhead begins:

Coastal Trail start

The first mile and a half of the trail are up and up and up. Basically, you are running up a mountain. Shortly after beginning, you’re treated to this nice view, which I have cheesily labled for your orientation. Rodeo Beach is where the run begins. The Coastal Trail is the trail I’m running. Buena Vista Park is where we live.

view from the trail

Got passed by this speedster guy. Some stairs on the trail:

stairs on the coastal trail

and then, when you get to the top of that staircase, there are MORE stairs!

half-assed kinda-stairs, these go on for a while

One of the neat features of these pacific coastal areas is that there are lots of WWII defense structures- bunkers and old armaments which were used fight off invasion. Here is one I passed on the trail. There are about 8 of these just on this one loop!  We have also seen them at Grey Whale Cove and McNee Ranch area.

bunker

I saw so many wildflowers on this run!  An unexpected delight, these pop up all over the place.

a few of the many wildflowers

I promptly got lost for the first of three times.  Here, I missed the turn off onto the Wolf Ridge Trail and continued a mile in the wrong direction to Hill 88.

agggghhhhh wrong turn. go LEFT, you idiot!!!

I love this review of Hill 88 from yelp:

Hill 88 is a wild ghost town in the sky, hidden way up high in the Marin Headlands. It’s on Wolf Ridge, between Fort Cronkhite/Rodeo Beach and Tennessee Valley. You can barely see it from below, and it’s nothing like most of the old little rusty lifeless bunker sites. This is a crazy Cold War mega-complex teeming with tons of crows dancing in the whipping wind above huge expanses of the bay and SF. It’s part of the old Nike Missile program, officially SF-88C. Was apparently the radar and control center (aka the IFC, or Integrated Fire Control area) of the Nike Missile launch site that’s further down the hill to the east.
At the top of Hill 88, after coming through the entry gate and guard’s post (this place was only open to secret and top secret military officials when in use) you get a gorgeous view while feeling like you’re in the middle of a post-apocolypse world (think mad max), or in a post-apocolypse, science fiction computer game (half-life) hiding out from assassins. It feels so abandoned but haunted. It’s amazing what still lies unpreserved and raw up in those hills.

Lost on top of Hill 88

As I’m looking for where the trail continued (which it didn’t, because I had missed the turn off a while back), I poked around the abandoned buildings and found some surprisingly cool, if a tad macabre, art:

graffiti at hill 88

this person has talent, but why haul your paint all the way up this giant mountainside to do this? get thee to a city wall and paint a mural where people will actually see it.

I eventually backtracked and found the correct trail. Look how gorgeous it is- and how green the valley is! Simply stunning. It’s cheesy, but these breathtaking views really *do* inspire fleet feet while you are trotting along.

view from the miwok trail

Another pocket of wildflowers tucked into the hillside

wildflowers off of the bobcat trail

Somewhere around this point, I received the otter sighting text message, and stopped taking photos and just sped back to meet Earl with that singular purpose. I did get lost two more times: Once at the Tennessee Valley intersection (it was really not well marked for finding the Marincello Trail!) and another time at the Coastal Trail pickup- I ended up going another mile or two out of my way to Point Bonita. Ugh.
Watch out for frogs on the road back where the Coastal Trail meets Bunker Rd:

watch for frogs!

Oh- and some more lovely wildflowers by the lagoon. I loved this because there are three different types of flowers (and colors!) all in one shot:

wildflowers by the lagoon

Post run, I was happy to see my fan club, who had been patiently waiting at the car.

my fan club patiently waits in the car

We then took Linus to partake in his second-favorite-activity-in-life, which is romping around on the beach! (for the record, his favorite-activity-in-life would be chowing down).

Linus plays chase with some new friends on the beach

I took him for a wade, which he tolerates but is NOT his favorite thing:

why do they always insist on taking me in the water???

Now this is the face of a happy woofer:

post beach run and ocean splash corgi grin

We celebrated OtterSighting 2009 with a great lunch (brunch?) at what is thus-far our favorite cafe, the Velo Rouge.

post-run brunch

“Just kill me now,” I enthusiastically announced to Earl yesterday on our drive back home over the Golden Gate Bridge, “because I have now seen an otter in the wild, and life is just never going to get better than that!”

Yep.  Yesterday afternoon, after my 12-mile run at Rodeo Beach,

WE SAW A RIVER OTTER SWIMMING IN THE LAGOON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I repeat,

I SAW AN OTTER!!

An otter!!  A real live river otter, in the wild!!

Now, that might not be that exciting to some of you, dear readers… but to me… that is like- the apex of my entire life.

I have been smitten with river otters since my days as a high school dweeb, and even decorated my freshman dorm room in college with otter posters and photos.  I’ve been to every aquarium on the eastern seaboard which has river otter exhibits, some multiple times.  In fact, I’ve snuggled with an otter stuffed animal for years (only about four years ago it got too worn out and was replaced with a welsh corgi stuffie).

Most importantly, “seeing river otters in the wild” has been a critical item on my list of Life Goals (see Item #78).  To accomplish this, I had been planning a trip waaaaay up into the upstate NY wilderness to “potentially” see some river otters with this guy, however he repeatedly stressed there were no guarantees we would see any river otters, as they are nocturnal and skittish.  Amusingly enough, here was the email I sent him a few years ago (hee, gmail search function):

Hello,
> I came across your webpage http://www.geocities.com/bobarnebeck/nys.html and
> wanted to let you know I really enjoyed it.
> I am a big river otter fan, I love seeing them in zoos and have been
> collecting otter paraphernalia for years.  I was wondering how to see otters
> in the wild, and where I could go to see some?  It truly is a life-long
> dream
> Also, I was wondering if you had some additional resources to point me in the right direction of
> learning more about otters. > Thank you so much! > Courtney

Well, fortunately because we now live plum across the country making a visit to Wellesley Island, NY a large endeavor, I no longer have to take that trip because, as I’ve zestfully thrice stated:

I HAVE SEEN AN OTTER IN THE WILD!!!

And, I captured some photos   Here is how it happened:

I was well underway of my 12-mile trail run yesterday in the Marin Headlands while Earl sat in the car reading math books and chilling with Linus.  I was about 5 miles out on the pink loop (where Bobcat trail meets Marincello) when I feel my phone vibrate in my camelbak with a text message.  Because E and I had agreed to keep in contact about every hour or so (worried about me getting lost or hurt), I pulled my phone out to check.

“Saw otter in water”

it read.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  My harried response text was something along the lines of “omg!!! otter!!! omgomgomgomgomgOTTER!!!!!!!!AHHHHHHomgotter” and I remember being very pissed that I was just about exactly halfway out and there was no way to get back immediately.  I considered pressing for details, however Earl is staunchly laconic in texts (I think it’s part of the mathematician personality- focused, exacting and to the point, does not like to bothered to write anything lengthy.  I also entertain the theory that it’s tough to use the tiny keyboard with his big fingers )

Because Earl is sitting here next to me in bed as I write this, I have asked him to share with us his first-person otter sighting account:

“Well, I was sitting in the car, which was facing the river.  I had just woken up from a nap.  I kicked Linus off my lap because he had been drooling on my arm, and then I noticed something sticking up out of the water.  I watched it; it submerged I saw a sliding window into the shape of a body as it dove.  I thought “what the fuck is that?” and as I watched, it happened again and again.  Then I got out of the car and walked over to the river to have a closer look.  I saw it was an otter.  It kind of looked like a beaver, but beavers have different tails, and once you got close enough, you could tell it’s clearly an otter.  So right after I realized it was an otter, I texted you.  I was worried you would quit your run and sprint back as quickly as you could go.  I thought about taking a picture of it, but you had the camera in your backpack.

Haha, of COURSE the first thing that crossed my mind once getting that text was dropping my run and huffing back as fast as I could.  I have a lifetime to run, and seeing an otter might just be a once-in-a-lifetime chance.  However, there was no shortcut back!  So, I finished the run in a completely agitated, “OMGOTTEROMG, there is an otter” state, and made it to the car.

When I arrived back, the otter was sadly nowhere to be seen, so had to make do with grilling Earl for details.  We took Linus to play and romp on the beach for about forty five minutes and had a lot of fun.  Lo and behold, as we were grabbing our shoes and heading back to the car, “Courtney!” Earl grabs my arm, “look over there!”  The otter was back!!

And, I saw him!!  I saw him swimming around!  Diving!  Playing!  Being cute!  Being otterly!  Doing otter things!

And, I took pictures of him!  Here they are to share with you!

This is where he was when we first saw him, walking back from the beach

initial otter sighting

Just his head peaking out (not zoomed or cropped)

head peaking out

Barely zoomed

barely zoomed

Looking like and eel, almost

eel? no, otter

Check out those chompers!

you can see his teeth!

Another close up

close up

Diving under

couldn't resist the submarine lingo

And, to document this euphoric encounter I simply had to get a photo on Le Bridge de Otter, despite feeling gross and worn out from my mega run

Le Bridge de Otter

I pestered Earl with my otter excitement prettymuch the entire way home.  “Can you believe we really saw an otter???!”  With dinner, we opened a great bottle of wine and shared many toasts to OtterEncounter 2009!