Monday, August 31, 2009

I've got all the beatles records, B*?%$!

Had a visitor for part of the weekend. I really like entertaining and now I have word that the sofa bed is comfortable. So come on over!

Took a walk around my hood with the camera....




Saturday, August 22, 2009

Street Food Festival is a Bust

So I kept hearing about this great street food festival that was happening literally a couple blocks from my house, and thus was forced to go out and review. O.k. maybe I'm just a curmudgeon that doesn't like crowds, but I do not see the point in standing in line for 30 minutes for something you can get any day of the week. The prices didn't seem to be any cheaper than the normal fare, not when you take into account that all the portions were sized accordingly (meaning smaller than what you'd get in the restaurant). Not to mention that there was no street food at this festival. Just a bunch of high end restaurants with the same boring booth as the next place. You couldn't even walk through to see what was available.The only saving grace was that Bi-Rite had a booth serving Sam's Sundays and there was no line there. How ironic that the place you expect to stand in line on any regular day, is the place at which you can be served immediately during an over-attended event. By the way, a Sam's Sunday is chocolate ice cream drizzled with olive oil and sea salt and let me tell you it is amazing.

So I went home and made floor cushions.

What was fun this week was we had our company picnic. The food was half provided by ClimateWorks and half potluck. I made several items: hummus (because I feel at this point it is required of me at a picnic), spicy cabbage, and berry bread pudding. That last item was for the sustainable bake-off, which in the end they just decided we all won. I actually put some effort into my sustainability points -- I picked the berries on Bernal Hill and I walked to the grocery store. Not to mention there was no waste involved in my pudding except for the egg carton (I buy my dry goods in bulk and my milk comes in glass bottles that I return to the store. Anyway, people seemed to like it, but there was too much food at the picnic and now I have too much food in my fridge. Bread pudding is an especially hard leftover for me as I like it warm and I don't own a microwave (and it seems a bit wasteful to turn the oven on just to reheat a pudding).As I mentioned before, I was terribly domestic today. I made two floor cushions -- more like floor ottomans really as they are square and tall. Twenty pounds of organic cotton, by the way, doesn't quite fill two 17X17 floor cushions. I also finally hung my curtains. You know what this means, right? Yep, I'm really moved in now. I had to extend one set of curtains for my longer windows, but that is the bonus to making your own curtains, you can revise the style to suit your needs.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Pie Ranch

So this weekend a few of my coworkers and I went down to Pie Ranch to volunteer.
Yes, this is the ranch that supplies the produce for my fabulous pie shop. Every third Saturday of the month they have a volunteer day. Unfortunately, they had too many volunteers this Saturday -- they didn't really know what to do with us. So we spent most of the day walking around the farm.We did get to collect a few eggs.

And we watched them milk Adelaide, their cow. She has a bit of a fly problem right now. She also has a staph infection.

After we did our "volunteer bit" there was a fabulous potluck and then a barn dance. The barn was a bit too crowed to really dance, but we gave it our best shot.

Enjoy some shots of the farm!