Favorite Quote

This is what my eighth-grader wrote on one of his high school applications that asked for a favorite quote:
"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
French pilot/explorer/author

It's one of the most famous quotes from The Little Prince, which I'm pretty sure he's never read. So I went and asked him how he found it. He had read about Saint-Exupéry in a book about real-life harrowing adventures, and the pilot part caught his attention (since he's really into aviation). So he Googled Saint-Exupéry and found out more about him, and found the quote.

Reading this, and his application essay, I found out a bit more of what goes on inside his head. There's a lot going on in there, and I only know a smaller and smaller piece of it. And I get the feeling that's just how he likes it. Maybe that's one of the reasons he chose this quote.

New Year

We spent New Year's Eve on our friends' farm up in Yolo County (I love how the dried sunflowers above look like street lights). I love walking around the farm, even on a cold, misty day with the dense tule fog pressing against the earth. Usually there are wide open vistas 360 degrees around the farm, but this time the fog made it feel closed in and isolated. I am always struck by the large scale on their farm. There is so much space. This year, while I was tending my 4x8 raised bed, they were cultivating a kitchen garden that is twice the size of the footprint of our house. In addition to their garden they planted apricots and plum trees, pomegranate and currant bushes, and berry vines. Not to mention the habitat restoration they are doing with the Cache Creek Conservancy.
Most of their garden is fallow now, like mine, although they have herbs and broccoli rabe and chard. When I look at their garden, mine seems insignificant, and I begin to feel ashamed of the measliness of my successes in my 32 sq. feet. Then my friend casually mentioned that they planted leeks but they might have planted them too early and may need to replant them. The whole leek portion was about twice as large as my whole raised bed. It made me remember that in any garden, one crop not making it isn't a big deal. That's just how gardens go sometimes.
Even more than the scale of the farm garden, my friend's attitude inspires me anew. New year, new garden. There are some things I want to try. If they don't work out, I'll try something else.
For our New Year's feast we had cheeses from Iowa, homemade chorizo sausage from the farm, olives and a little bacalao. Then we had oysters that we bought unshucked from Hog Island Oyster Farm at the Ferry Building. That was just the appetizers. At 6 pm we had pasta with a pork "sugo", a rich, tomato-y sauce. At 8 pm we had brined pork crown roast, freshly harvested broccoli rabe, and salad. At 9 pm, farm-raised pumpkin pie. The bonfire commenced at 11 pm (it took a half an hour to get it going because it was so damp and cold outside). Champagne at midnight.

Gathering tumbleweeds for the bonfire.
Remains of the bonfire, Jan. 1.

Best Banana Bread Ever

"What's that smell?" my husband sniffed while sitting in the back seat on our ride home from Stinson Beach. He was sitting in the back seat because my 16-year-old son was driving, and I was sitting in the front because I get carsick on the curvy road. Highway One between Stinson and Tam Junction is not exactly a beginning driver's ideal road; in fact, it is unforgiving, with cars and a rock wall on one side and a cliff on the other. Our son did well, however, driving at 25 mph or under the whole way, pulling over only 3 or 4 times to let other drivers pass.
The smell was the three ripe bananas I made sure to bring home with us from our vacation. I had brought them with us and since no one had eaten them, I had plans for them: this banana bread.
I read about it more than a month ago at Muffin Top. Somehow all our bananas kept getting eaten before I could make it. Finally yesterday I made it, and it turned out looking exactly how it looks in Muffin Top's photos. Apparently it is modeled after Bakesale Betty's banana bread. All I can say is, it is every bit as good as Muffin Top says it is, maybe even more so. It is very moist and banana-y and has a wonderful crumbly sugar-cinnamon topping. We inhaled it. There was none left by midday the next day. Go out and buy some extra bananas so you can make it. You can find the recipe over at Muffin Top.

Many Birds Sighted

We were out at Stinson Beach for a few days with family and I did a lot of bird-watching. My mom is my fellow bird-watcher (she calls herself "obsessed"). She has a serious harness-contraption for her binoculars, which puts less strain on your neck. I have a little bit of binocular envy since hers are a lot better than mine.
The oddest birds we saw were vultures sitting on the ground and in trees, lots of them, sometimes up to ten at a time. The smallest bird we saw was a Bewick's Wren, in a bush. In the water we saw many wigeons, mallards, scaups, buffleheads, goldeneyes, and surf scoters. I saw a northern shoveler, and she saw a northern pintail and a green-winged teal. On the beach we saw marbled godwits, willets, curlews, and whimbrels. She saw avocets and I saw a killdeer and a semipalmated plover.
I think my sister thinks we're weird. She took a lot of beautiful photos of the winter beach scene (all the beach photos on this page are by her). I like how she captured that silvery look of the beach in December.

There was also swimming (in the swimming pool), driving-practice, tennis, poker-playing, reading, talking, and a lot of cooking and eating.

Christmas Cookies

The other day I was at my friend Beth's house and she was showing off some beautiful Christmas cookies she had made at a class on how to make the best Christmas cookies. That inspired me to make my first batch of Christmas cookies this year. Beth was telling me some tips the pastry chef had passed on, like having the ingredients at room temperature when you mix the dough, refrigerating the dough to stiffen it before rolling it out, and rolling out the dough between two sheets of parchment paper, instead of sprinkling extra flour, to avoid sticking. I already do the first two, so I decided to try the last tip, except with waxed paper, since I had lots of it.
Even though the dough was still quite cold from the fridge when I rolled it out, it warmed up quickly and became very sticky and fragile. I couldn't remove the cookies from the waxed paper without them tearing, so I put the whole sheet in the freezer to firm them up. For the next portion of dough I did sprinkle a tiny bit of flour on the waxed paper--like 1/4 tsp.--and then shook off the excess, just to help the sticking. By the time these were cut out, they too were sticking so I put them in the freezer and pulled out the first sheet. By then these were nice and hard, and peeled off the waxed paper easily. So I made all the cookies this way: putting the sheet with the cookies stamped but not removed from the surrounding dough in the freezer while I rolled out the next batch. It took longer and kind of gave me a head ache.
But...the results were dramatic. The cookie edges were nice and sharp (from being in the freezer) and the cookies did not expand much or get puffy. They turned out crisper and more delicate in texture than usual. They seemed to take slightly less time to bake, but had that lovely golden brown edge and bottom. I think all those trips to the freezer may be what makes such a big difference--as well as not using flour to roll them out.
I went all out and iced and sugared them (normally I just toss some colored sugar on them before I put them in the oven). Then I ate two. This is just a regular old sugar cookie recipe from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham. I'm sure the recipe on the back of the Gold Medal flour would be fine, too, since it's with butter. It's all about the butter.

Cool Bird Sighting of the Week!

I found a site where I can download photos of birds: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Digital Library. This photo of a hermit thrush is by Dave Menke and it's in the public domain.

I saw a hermit thrush eating ivy berries on our back wall today. I got the binoculars out so I really got a great look at his black spotted breast, white eye ring and rusty tail and rump. He was looking frantically around as he gobbled the still-green berries, poor thing. Just in the last few days we have noticed the robins gathering, I suppose standing watch over the berries as they ripen since I haven't actually seen the robins eat any. A crowd of blackbirds gathered on the telephone wire, too, and there was a tense stand-off but no air fights.

Here is the best I've been able to do so far with the yellow-rumped warbler and his mate eating the white berries outside my kitchen window (which is all steamed up in this photos). This is his mate, who seems to be a bit less guarded (or hungrier?).

Big Day at the Founders' Cup

I admit I was resentful about it: a soccer tournament, in Morgan Hill, Saturday AND Sunday, two weeks before Christmas, after their season was already over? But we went along with it. We had to leave the house at 7:30 am this morning, and weather was predicted to be in the 30s. We got there an hour early and stood around sleepily until it was time for them to play. The Scorpions (my younger son's soccer team) played their game, and they played really really well, even missing three key players. And they won! Yes, it was very very cold, but I wore my down jacket. We had a 3-1/2 hour break until the second game, so my husband and I and our son had a delicious, peaceful and restorative lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, then we hit the premium outlets in Gilroy and bought pants, shoes, belts, and some secret items. We saw quite a few people we recognized from the soccer complex at the outlets. Back to the fields for the second game, which the Scorps also played really really well. They worked really hard, had some brilliant plays, took chances, got knocked down, and knocked some other players down. They won again! It was very exciting. Even though they still have one more game to play on Sunday, this means they go on to the quarter finals, next weekend. Oh.

Youth soccer is insane, my husband and I decided long ago. Mostly because of the parents. And yet there are some endearing things about it, like the kids, and even, sometimes, the parents. At a tournament like this (not a select or elite level, but strictly recreational, class 4) the families are not just from one ethnicity or one socio-economic group. There are teams from all over Northern California. We played Hayward and Napa, and tomorrow is Manteca. A parent from Modesto gave us some tips on what our players should and shouldn't have for lunch. At the end of our second game, one of the Napa parents came over to ask who were the parents of player #17. I hesitated a moment (was she going to complain his flying elbows?), but it turned out she was grateful that he paused on the field to check on her son, who was down. She appreciated his concern. Player #17's parents weren't there, but we made sure the compliment got passed on.