All Empty

But not for long. Our place rented fast, in two weeks. Whew.

By the Friday before we left our home received some new carpeting, a good cleaning, and some touch up paint. It looks awesome. When it was all done, I told Jamie that I wanted to move back in.

Those last couple of days getting out of the house were crazy. Thankfully we had a lot of help. Thanks Mom and Dad.

And on Friday....

Jamie and I mustered up enough energy to go out just the two of us, which we know may not happen again for a long while. We went to one of favorites in Half Moon Bay - Cafe Gibraltar. I highly recommend this place. The food is good, wine list is reasonable, and overall just a great low key kinda of place. I think it's still a little under the radar, but I could be wrong. We had a great dinner.

encuentro

On Friday evening I met up with Bonnie and Lauren at encuentro in Oakland. It was delightful - the food and the company.

I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Herb and Orange Marinated Olives

Spring Greens Salad
Grapefruit, avocado slices, french radishes and hazelnuts with Champagne Vinegrette toasted hazelnuts and hazelnut oil

Vegan Cheese:
Smoked Pecan / Macadamia Nut / Cashew and Pumpkin Seed

Bruschetta
Avocado, olive oil and cilantro with chile jam and black salt

Bruschetta
Beet and Chevre Goat Cheese

Vegie Pot Pie
Carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, celery, peas and onions in a rich gravy topped with a cheddar cheese biscuit or toasted bread crumbs

Maple mustard glazed tempeh bacon with red cabbage slaw

Carrot Cake

Super Bowl Sunday......and Saturday

We laid low at home this Super Bowl Sunday. Annmarie and I played with her doll house during the first part of the game.

Jamie and Annmarie danced to the Who at half-time. Jamie hearts the Who BTW.

Jamie barbecued some party wings. I made a tortilla soup in the crock pot. And I also made cheesecake bars. Yum!








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And backing up a day.

On Saturday Jamie and I met up with Bonnie at a new vegan Mexican restaurant in the Mission - Gracias Madre. So good. Here is pic of the chiles rellenos that Jamie had for dinner. I forgot my camera, but Jamie got this one with his phone.
And then after dinner we headed over the Roxie movie theater to check out My Movie Girl. A small independent film Bonnie's Mom worked on as Associate Director. Cute flick. I'm glad we were able to go check it out.

I’m not a Vegan…….

I just play one on my blog (sometimes).

I enjoy eating vegetarian and vegan and can appreciate good veggie food. So when my two closest vegan buddies, Bonnie and Lauren (well, Lauren may not technically always eat vegan, she's pretty darn close) asked me if I wanted to try Brassica Supperclub, I enthusiastically told them to count me in!

Brassica Supperclub, “an underground dining experience” is a fairly new concept in dining (for me at least). For more information see their website here.

For a play by play account of our dining experience on Saturday…..read on.

So the day before Saturday Lauren (who kindly made our dinner reservation) received an e-mail containing top secret details for the evening. The e-mail disclosed the secret location, a password phrase we were to give at the door, and a tentative menu. The e-mail also informed us that they do not serve alcohol, but encouraged you to bring your own (BYOB). OK. Sounds interesting. So every time I hear BYOB, I either think of college potlucks or the time Jamie and I visited Martha's Vineyard and we had dinner at The Black Dog. When we got to The Black Dog we learned that they did not serve alcohol, but encouraged to BYOB. Jamie jetted out of the restaurant found the closest place that sold wine, which happened to be a gas station and picked up a bottle of wine. I got a kick out of that. So I'm thinking that this dinner could either turn out to be like a college potluck or a pretty cool dinner.

We arrived at our secret location and were welcomed with a wonderful aroma. We were seated at low tables and given pillows for our bums. This would be my one criticism of the evening, because after 3 hours of sitting on the floor it got to be a bit uncomfortable. I totally get the novelty they were trying to capture by having us sit on the floor and for a quick eat it would have worked for me, but for a 4 - course dinner, my back and legs would have liked a chair.

Now that I got that off my chest, let's talk about the fabulous food. Because that it was.

We started with - Thai Lettuce Cups with Seared Oyster Mushrooms and Grilled Corn, and a Sweet Peanut-Coconut Sauce. To add to your lettuce cups were limes, onions, grilled coconut, peanuts and some other wonderful items. Fantastic. Love me some lettuce cups! It would have taken me forever to prepare something so pretty and to have the patience to delinquently cut everything up.

Next was the soup, a Duo of Tomato Cream Soup and Corn Chowder served in mini-bread bowls. The corn chowder was awesome and I really liked the tomato as well. The bread was a fabulous rosemary bread.

Also, in case you are curious we opted to bring a bottle of Chianti as our choice BYOB beverage (and I'm just trying to see how many times I can use BYOB in a blog post).

Here are the lovely little soups.

To side track a little. I think one of the great things about having a dining experience like this, other than having a wonderful organic healthy meal, is the social interaction that goes along with the evening (I totally took that from Bonnie). But, I truly do look forward to my girl time and appreciate my girl friends. I luv you (wo)man!

Moving on......

As a small intermezzo we were given some wonderful fresh watermelon juice.
And here is the Entree. I labeled everything (click on image to enlarge, please). It's so pretty. This was my first time trying tempeh. It didn't knock my socks off, it was good, but I'm also thinking it may have contributed to some issues I had the next morning. And I'll just leave it at that.Last, but certainly not least was dessert - Almond Genoise Napoleon, with Amaretto Cream & Caramelized Nectarine Filling, and Nougatine, Caramel Sauce, and Nectarine - Cinnamon Granita. Wow! Incredible. Vegan desserts are a hard one to pull off (for me at least). I mean, how can you not use real butter and milk cream. Well, they pulled it off with this one.

Ta-da!

The night ended with a introduction of the chefs. Where we learned more about the food, their backgrounds, and their goals. It was neat evening. Something totally different. Gotta love S.F. I'm happy for the experience.

Go Carefully Airstream Driver

No, we are not buying an airstream, nor are planning on driving one anywhere.

It appears that only a select number of people will actually get the title of this post. As I talked to people about a concert I was going to on Friday night, people had no idea who I was talking about and I was not the only person that experienced this phenomena. The same was true for Bonnie and Jamie. So, let me tell you about a very talented band that goes by the name - Gomez. “They're English” Bonnie would say, but people still didn’t get it. We can give credit to "The Double" for introducing us to Gomez. The Double took Jamie to see them 2 years ago in Austin, and he was sold. Now for the past 2 years he has been playing their music often and saying "honey, we gotta go see them when they come to town".

Let me put it this way, there are not a lot of bands that compel me to go out on a Friday night, at the Fillmore (standing room only), with the band going on stage at 10:00pm. That’s typically my bed time. (However, Jamie thinks the Fillmore is the best place ever). Well, Gomez would be one of those bands for me. The others would include; Coldplay, although I passed up going to their concert, because it was on a Monday night and I have already seen them. Dave Matthews, but unlike my husband, seeing them once a year is enough for me. Sting, he’ll always do it for me. And maybe one or two others.

I’m a little surprised that more people are not familiar with Gomez. Maybe it’s because they have three vocalists in the band and that confuses people. Or people don’t listen to KFOG all day like I do. Or maybe it’s because they haven’t been played on Grey’s Anatomy...oh wait...scratch that last part. But thankfully they haven’t caught onto the masses like the Fray have. Because going to see a band you really like play in your town in a small venue for under $40 is a good thing. While I like the Fray, Gomez is HELLA better.

About the evening. After dinner at Dosa and three glasses of prosecco (who do I think I am?) later, I was armed with a comfy gap tee and running shoes to stand on my feet and watch Gomez. While I didn’t recognize some of their older music, I was able to get my groove on to, Airstream Driver, Girl Shaped Love Drug and Get Myself Arrested. And loved hearing Notice, one of my favorites. The crowd for the most part behaved themselves from where we were standing (which was very close to the stage). I took two breaks to get some air and was exhausted by the end of the evening. I enjoyed the show and thought it was worth sacrificing some sleep.

Fortunately, the next day I took a nap which got me back on track.

Ubuntu - The best veggie food I have ever met!

I told Bonnie - "I wanna go."

Bonnie said - “You will go and you will blog about it."

Therefore, I blog.

On Sunday I headed to wine country to dine at Ubuntu with some very lovely ladies. There was good food, good drinks, great conversation and mucho pictures taken of all the beautiful and delicious veggie and vegan friendly food. And if I do say so myself, the pictures of the food came out pretty damn good. So prepare yourself for a lot of pictures food, I can almost taste it.

Let’s first start out with the menu. The restaurant kindly gave me a copy of the menu. There were only two items on the menu that we didn’t try.

(Please click on images to enlarge)

And a picture of the menu.
Bread and butter.
We started with the 3 bites for 15. Marcona almonds, hummus with wild fennel crackers, and.............
marinated olives. Fantastic!
We also shared a delightful bottle of prosecco.
And now we start with the day's dishes. First to come out was the new crop potato salad, with get this a "virtual" egg. This would be some whipped up magic of cream sauce yummines. When I explained to Jamie that this dish had a virtual egg, he said "like a cadbury egg", well no honey, Ubuntu uses only the best of farm fresh indigents, most of which is grown in their biodynamic garden. There will be no processed foods here.
The next dish to make it's depute was the english peas. There were fresh springs of chocolate mint lightly sprinkled in the peas. Wow! Chocolate mint......incredible, it actually tasted like eating a chocolate mint candy. This was a first for me. Fabulous presentation.
Our third dish was the cool garden green and lemongrass soup. And now let's take a moment of silence and just enjoy the pictures.........
Oh yes........
Honey.......
Must finish every last drop.
Our fourth dish, the onion top fritters.
Next is the sardinian pearl pasta. This one almost made my top three dishes.
Number six was the homemade carrot gnocchetti. Fabulous. Pesto. Amazing. Love it! My fav.
Next is the southern breakfast: slow cooked carnersos egg with grits and goat's milk cheese.
Moving on to number eight and nine were the pizza's. The garden pizza of summer squash and goat's milk ricotta and.......

the strawberry pizza margherita. On a sidebar note, the kitchen was experiencing a back-up, so it took a while for this pizza to come out. The restaurant kindly comped this for us. We didn't mind a bit, as I think the break was much needed. We needed to start preparing for dessert!
We did a trio of desserts, which included, the vanilla bean cheesecake in a jar.

Mini vegan carrot cupcakes. A-MAZ-ING!
And the rhubarb & citrus sherbet float.
Viola!

Wow and I didn't even get paid to write that.

Here are the lovely ladies with this cool sculpture art thing at the restaurant, they looked like mummies.

More of the lovely ladies.
While I was experiencing Ubuntu, Jamie hung out with some friends and took Annmarie swimming. According to Jamie Annmarie had a great time. I forgot to mentioned it was scorcher this weekend, in the 100's in Napa and the east bay. Also, this is what happens when Dad dresses you - backwards shirt, note the tag.
Also, Aunt Bonnie got Annmarie this T-shirt. Don't you love the back? Thanks Bonnie!

Good times girls! Let's do it again!