People Totally Suck Sometimes

Wednesday night we saw a Fox13 news van in the Buddhist Temple parking lot next door and being the nosy neighbors we are, wandered out to see what the heck was going on.

We found out the next day in the paper. The Temple was robbed on Tuesday afternoon by two white males and they broke into Master Kim's room and took his visa, , drivers license, green card, $400, and made a mess out of everything.

Because Master Kim is a Buddhist Monk, he can laugh about it and forgive. He is confused by the fact that two nice looking "white" (his words) young men who bowed to him when they approached him and asked to learn more about Buddhism could misrepresent themselves in such a way.

It disturbs me that I was home, probably watching Oprah while the burglary thing was taking place and I didn't see a damned thing. So much for being a nosy neighbor.

I left my heart in San Francisco

Along with a fair amount of money. Sorry I have not posted in a while, I had written a huge post about my trip and stupid frickin' blogger ate it.

Here it goes again, this time in smaller chunks. I really loved staying in Japantown. It's centrally located and close enough to a bunch of things one can walk to. On the day after we arrived, Jeff worked the wine event which left me to do WHATEVER I WANTED.

Our hotel anchors one end of a mall that has a ton of restaurants and shops so the first stop of my day alone was to the Kinokuniya Bookstore. I have been drooling over the beauty of japanese craft books being snatched up by crafters over the years so I was in heaven when I saw this store. I picked up two books, one on moss and one on papier-mache:


I kept meaning to go back and get more, but I ran out of time and luggage space. Next stop was the Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift store where I picked up some cool notebooks and some pens I read about in a WIRED magazine:
The pens are apparently hot among school girls because they have itty-bitty tips and come in a million colors. I am a pen freak so as soon as I saw these I grabbed a ton of them.

Next was a stop at Ichiban Kan. "Carefully selected best-selling goods from Japan--from kitchen utensils, packaged dry foods, stationery items and toys starting at $1 per item. Patterned after Japan's popular 100-Yen shops." (from the sfjapantown site) This place was super-cool and I thought I had died and gone to Tupperware heaven when I walked down the storage container aisle. This place had every single conceivable size and configuration of plastic food storage containers for A DOLLAR. If I would have had more room in my luggage I would have loaded up. Right now one of those little round jobbies is holding roasted garlic cloves from a head I had roasted and wrapped in a chunk of foil doomed to be hidden behind the milk and forgotten until a fridge clean out. I don't know how many times I have thrown away roasted garlic because I was afraid to open a wad of foil lurking in the depths of the refrigerator. The bottom two containers are segmented like little frozen tv dinners (love it!).

It doesn't take a lot to make me happy.

I also picked up some popsicle molds which won't be used for popsicles, but I will save that for another post. (Hint: did anyone see Colin Cowie on Oprah with his couture ice cubes? Did I just give myself away?)

The rest of the day was spent walking along Filmore and going into places like Paper-Source and Kiehls and my final stop was the Lush on Union where I loaded up. I had never experience the glory that is Lush and I really wanted to know what all of the fuss was about and if it was deserved. It is. It's made me want to try making these again. I made a bunch of bath stuff for Christmas one year when making bath bombs was the hip thing to do but haven't done much lately in that department.

More on my trip in another post. It's good to be back!

Fondid

Saturday we had some friends over for some Fondue. This is the second time in a few weeks we have done fondue because, well.....hello? Melted cheese?

I received the fondue pot as a Christmas present and it's a Rachael Ray (*yarf*) fondue pot. It's a really good pot, despite the spokeswoman attached to it. I highly, highly, highly, recommend getting one of these babies as it's SO GOOD and SO EASY, especially if you are entertaining. I had been saving this Domino magazine recipe just for such an occasion.

We put our own little twist on it, however. Jeff spotted a snippet in a magazine about a restaurant in New York called Dylan Prime that serves fondue as an appetizer. According to the magazine, it's a gruyère, gorgonzola and white cheddar fondue served with beef tips, sour dough bread, and what looked like slices of granny smith apples (it was a tiny picture).

So...here is my recipe, sort of a blending of the two:

• ½ lb. white cheddar
  
• ½ lb. gruyère
• ½ lb. gorgonzola (buy a tub of the crumbled stuff)
  
• 2 tbsp. cornstarch
  
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 cup dry white wine
• 1 tbsp. kirsch or brandy
• 1 tbsp. lemon juice
• pinch ground black pepper

Grate the cheeses into a medium-size bowl and toss together with the cornstarch. Cut garlic clove in half and rub cut sides over the bottom of a saucepan; discard. Pour wine, kirsch and lemon juice into saucepan, and bring to a gentle simmer on the stove. Add large handfuls of cheese, one at a time, and stir until melted. Repeat until you've added all the cheese and the fondue is smooth. Add black pepper to pan; stir. Pour mixture into a fondue pot. Light the fondue burner and place the pot on top at a low heat—just enough to keep the cheese warm and liquid.

Served with:

• smoked sausage of your choice, cut into rounds and broiled until heated through and slightly brown and crispy
• cubes of sourdough bread
• slices of granny smith apples
• roasted baby or fingerling potatoes
• roasted mushrooms
• baked tofu cut into cubes (we had vegetarians over)
  
• cherry tomatoes

I roasted the potatoes by themselves the sausage by itself, and the tofu cubes and mushrooms together and just kept everything warm. I have two ovens so this was easier for me. I tired finding those fancy baby vegetables, but as it's pre-spring my grocery store didn't have anything that cosmopolitan. I bet rounds of roasted zucchini would be good, and I was going to roast whole cloves of garlic but I forgot. I make chocolate pudding for dessert and I am already dreaming about other cheese combinations to try.

** Thanks to Annie for the word "yarf". I had to steal that one from you.

Ribbit

One of my favorite things about where we live are the frogs. I love to hear the frogs croaking at night and in the morning. Here is a little fella we spotted a couple of weeks ago hiding out in the base of the cherry tree:

I saw this guy this morning:

It feels like spring today.

Lack of Lulu

Recently Megan from NotMartha posted tips and suggestions for hanging the Ikea Lack shelf. We have had a Lack shelf gathering dust in a spare bedroom ever since we bought our house. We just didn't have the space or place for it until recently. I suffer from couch-induced idiotness and cannot seem to buy a couch that works, so we used to have one of two couches up against our living room window which was the favorite lounging spot for the cat. Cat in a window? Of course. We got rid of this couch which left poor, poor, forlorn Lulu with no means to window gaze until Jeffery (not me) took pity on her and moved one of our dining room chairs to accommodate her need to spy on the neighbors:

I couldn't handle this at all. It was just too tacky for me. Wanting to appease both women in his life, Jeffery had the inspired idea to hang the Lack shelf under the window so the cat could lounge in affordable style and I could have my chair back:

I whipped up a custom cushion and our princess seems to approve. It's a little shallower than the chair so she has rolled off of it a few times much to my amusement.

Retail Therapy

Jeff and I are going to San Francisco next month for the Rhone Rangers tasting event. Jeff has to work it and I am just tagging along for fun. We are going to stay a few extra days to enjoy the city. We will be staying at a hotel in Japantown so if anyone has some tips of cool things to see/do in that general vicinity please let me know. One thing for sure I know we are doing is going to the Ferry Building Market. We are going to be doing a lot of walking and I decided to splash-out and get some new clothes. Sometimes I feel like an oddity among women as I don't really buy clothes all of that often, even though I devour fashion magazines. I feel like they are so expensive.....and I keep thinking I am going to make my own..... and then I don't.....so I end up with nothing. It's a vicious cycle. I got a bonus at work recently (yee-haw!) so in addition to paying off some debt, I did a little shopping:

I wanted comfy yet stylish walking shoes, and flats are all rage about these days (which I am sooo happy about) so I got some PF Flyers:
And some fancier flats from Steve Madden:
I found this online first at Old Navy and went to my local branch to see if they had it there and I was a little dismayed at first to find nothing but pastel camisoles and those horrid knee short-slacks looking things (yuck). But luckily this was hiding in the back sale section:

And finally, I got these capris in black from J.Crew. I love the pants at J. Crew because they come in petite and I have always had good luck with their fit.


As you can tell I am channeling my inner Audrey Hepburn. Speaking of which, I went to the Gap as well to try on their "Audrey Hepburn Cropped Pant" but they didn't have any in petite, and they were alarmingly low-rise. I also tried on these jeans, but they again, were too long, too low-rise, and the pockets were weird. Oh well!

P.S. I also got some long sleeve tees from J Crew in blue, chocolate and green. (Gasp! Yes Mom! Something other than black!)