Tag Archives: summer

What we ate

4 Oct

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We started the week with a hot apartment every morning (thanks SF summer!) and I started every morning with iced coffee. Cool showers and coconut popcicles still didn’t make me want to turn on the oven at night.  After one dinner of cold leftover pizza and a salad in front of our fan, I found a recipe for cold avocado soup, topped with roasted corn and crumbled bacon. Frying bacon in a tank top and no pants wasn’t one of my better decisions this week, but the bacon really made the soup delicious.

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The weather cooled just in time for our blood pressure to go way up on Wednesday night. We had a simple pasta sauce over linguine– in the cuisinart I pulsed slivered almonds, garlic, parsley and sweet 100 tomatoes, and tossed with olive oil, arugula and pasta with a little bit of pecorino romano.

We’re continuing with our goal to eat more seafood, first clams, now whole fish. We started off easy with trout filleted and seasoned with rosemary salt, pepper and lemon.

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The long weekend

4 Sep

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The long weekend has left me exhausted and feeling very behind in what will surely be a very full week. I’ve got a lot of work between now and Thursday evening, and I’m looking forward to having a drink with 250 friends (or soon to be acquaintances)  at StoreFrontLab on Thursday evening. We worked all day on Saturday, but Sunday we threw work to the wind to spend the day in the sun at our neighbor’s backyard BBQ (our nice neighbors who have the glorious night blooming jasmine). I didn’t feel a tiny bit guilty about ignoring work…. Until I went to bed, and spent hours mentally rechecking and over checking my to do list.

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Monday morning we snuck out of the house for a birthday picnic with OYSTERS at the Tomales Bay Oyster Company. We had to leave the picnic early, so a certain someone with self-induced work guilt and a twitching eye could run to the printer’s to pick up proofs, and get her butt back to work Monday night. I don’t know about that twitching eye, but the break(s) from work were well worth the overtime I’m doing now.  This picnic had a particularly impressive spread of salads, meats and wine. A couple we only see once a year brought an amazing addition to the oyster-champagne picnic… clams steamed in a broth of jalapeño, red onion, bacon, white wine, potatoes and probably a few other secret ingredients. I am planning to track this fine couple down again in the next few weeks, and get the full recipe from them. It is my next project, right after this one.

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What we ate

23 Aug

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1. Breakfast: Peach, spinach, mango and flax and coconut water smoothie
2. Breakfast: Eggs on avocado and toast
3. Sunday lunch: Tempura udon at Sakura Sushi

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4. Dinner: Arugula and heirloom tomato salad with radish, kalmata olive and feta
5.  Dinner: Bucatini with tomato and caccio cheese, pepper
6. Dinner: Everything from the fridge, in a salad, with toast.

The weekend

20 Aug

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Over the past few weeks my brain has rarely had time to stray from the next (and the next next) deadline. I know this blog has become a big Skill Exchange dumping ground… I know from emails some of you are wondering if we abandoned our cats and have stopped eating entirely. No, I promise neither has happened, but the time and the inclination to document have both been hard to come by.

Skill Exchange is all-consuming at the moment, that and a few exciting client projects. I’m monitoring ticket sales, answering emails and questions- making plans and more in-depth schedules, planning deliveries, organizing supplies, and oh yeah, planning the launch party.

I think my expectations that ticket sales would be a flash and a breeze were a bit off, because somehow in all this planning, I forgot that the scale of this workshop series is so.much.bigger than all of my other 20 workshops and events, combined. Releasing 13 workshops, and over 300 tickets all at once has been a big undertaking, and the constant trickle or sudden bursts of ticket sales have been exciting and maddening in almost equal measure. I didn’t exactly sign myself up for this aspect of my work, but here I am, getting it done. I am incredibly excited about all of these new workshops, and its hard not to take it personally that some ticket sales are slower than others– but I have to keep reminding myself that this is a huge learning lesson, and good things are happening as a result. I wouldn’t be doing Skill Exchange if I wasn’t learning anything from it, and this project continually challenges me in new ways. I’m tired, but I want to keep learning.

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This weekend we took some breaks from promotions and ticket sales and budget spreadsheets, and headed out to Sea Cliff for an estate sale. The sale itself wasn’t very interesting, but the house was incredible, with narrow stairways in the back of the house, leading from the kitchen down the the basement, and back up to the bedrooms. A wide circular stairway in the front of the house lead up to bedrooms with insane views of the water, and you know, The Golden Gate Bridge.

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We had new friends over this weekend for a casual tapas meal. We tried a new recipe for stone fruit rose sangria, and made our favorite fried artichoke hearts with garlic aioli. We had a big bowl of Eatwell heirloom tomato bruschetta,  garlic shrimp, a cheese plate and big green salad with Spanish almonds. After a good night of laughs and quite a few bottles of wine, I woke up with (a slight headache and…) the realization that I barely thought about Skill Exchange or other deadlines all night. It was a good night.

A break from routine

14 Aug

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We spent the weekend in Lake Tahoe, away from computer screens (‘cept for the odd Instagram here and there) and it was refreshing. After seeing all those bumper stickers, and finally seeing Lake Tahoe in person, I get it. The water is really really blue, and really really clear. Despite what everyone told us, the water didn’t seem that cold and we actually went swimming quite a few times. I think growing up in Washington, with all that glacier water really changes your perspective on cold water, cause guys, it was pretty nice and refreshing up there. Oh, and it was in the 90′s all weekend.

 

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Intern and I did our fair share of swimming and kayaking and napping on the beach. Intern played volleyball, I ate s’mores by the fire pit every night, and we stayed up late and watched the meteor shower on the beach. We even did a little jet-skiing, which made Intern squeal for most of the ride (I was driving) and me laugh like a crazy hyena. I don’t know what it was, but my stomach hurt from laughing. To make up for all that fun, I felt guilty afterwards for participating in such a wasteful and indulgent gas-guzzling activity… even though it was really, really fun.

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I think all the relaxation is just about wiped clean from my system now, since I spent the entire day yesterday from 8:30AM-8:30PM catching up on work. Holy crap, work. I only took a quick break to talk to the mailman after he “accidentally” threw our neighbor’s mail up on the roof, and talk to another neighbor who was looking for his cat… and I picked 1lb of green beans from our neglected garden. After that, it was back to work.

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