I left my heart in San Francisco, part one

John Murdoch MacIver, stevedore
born Stornaway, Lewis, Scotland, 1833
died San Francisco, California 1902

I keep thinking I’ve been in Oregon long enough (almost 20 years) that I don’t care about California any more. But then we spend a weekend in the Bay Area and suddenly I’m looking at real estate ads and trying to figure out how to dupe our mortgage lender into letting us borrow enough for one of those Berkeley brown-shingles. My ancestors arrived in San Francisco in 1863 and I’m afraid it’s in my blood. I’ll find a way to get back, someday.

Saturday was reserved for my 32nd (don’t ask) high school reunion, in the form of a picnic at Heather Farms Park in Walnut Creek. Sadly, the alma mater is no more (a mere pothole in the road to excellence - Del Valle's demise is on page 41), so these get-togethers are a kind of traveling show. I must say that high school was not a whole heck of a lot of fun, and it required no small amount of intestinal fortitude to take my overweight and wrinkly self on this potential death march down memory lane. Surprisingly, the mean girls and beastly boys got a whole lot better during those 32 years. And as for the ones I remembered fondly from school, well, I’ll just offer the sentiment that some things never change. I’m glad I went to the picnic.

Sunday was a beautiful bright day spent in the company of our son Kosta and his charming friend Stephanie. Stephanie deserves the good sport award for dedicating an entire day to an excursion with Kosta’s embarrassing parents and 12 year old sister. It seems she is something of a daredevil as well: a day with us is certain to involve the ingestion of strange substances, so with her long list of serious food allergies Stephanie made sure to bring along her epi-pen. We are happy she survived to tell the tale – and didn’t even need the antidote.

After picking up the kids at Kingman Hall in Berkeley we proceeded in search of a dim sum breakfast. Our favorite spot in Oakland, Peony, has a wide variety of delicate vegetable and steamed seafood offerings, but its 11:00 am opening time (and terrible service) would have made too late a start for our plans. So we thought we’d go another standby, Legendary Palace, which starts serving at 9; the dim sum there is heavier with more of an emphasis on pork, eggs, and fried dishes. Once on the freeway, however, we decided to head straight to Chinatown in SF for a visit to Y-Ben House. Not for the faint of heart, Y-Ben House. But we like it anyway. Read Daniel B’s review on Yelp – he describes it well.

Y-Ben seats everyone at large round tables, so if you have a party of fewer than eight you will probably be sharing. The hostess will ask you if that’s OK, but I wouldn’t recommend saying no if you ever want to sit down. Anyway, sharing can be part of the fun. The man and his young son who were already at the table were gone before Andreas returned from parking the car and were replaced by a middle-aged couple. We observed the wife carefully wiping her and her husband’s plate and chopsticks with a tea-moistened napkin – I will remember that for next time, I think. Our party started to select items from the carts, and the wife was soon engaged in improving Kosta’s chopstick technique. Alekka and Stephanie were also found wanting in the table manners department (I’m sure I was, too, but apparently my elder status exempted me from the lesson).

Andreas finally arrived after parking half a mile away, and in short time an older man was seated between him and the other couple. The new arrival was wearing earbuds (I wish I knew what was on his iPod) and as soon as he sat down started to shout “Toe-jam” (or so I thought) until a bemused waiter brought tea. The other couple looked slightly alarmed at the outburst (although I expect they at least knew what our neighbor was saying); the rest of us assumed the frozen smiles of Caucasians in an Awkward Situation. However our gentleman turned out to be harmless, and friendly to boot. It soon became apparent that the man was, if not a friend of the proprietors, at least a regular customer; he started explaining the restaurant hierarchy to Andreas (“boss… half-boss…. big boss… boss’s wife…”). After we got all that straight, he set about mapping our group’s familial relationships. Who knows, maybe the guy is a structural anthropologist. He thought Kosta and Stephanie made a nice couple, with Alekka as their daughter (I have to agree there is something similar about all three of them around the eyebrows). Andreas set him straight about who we all were (in a loud hand-waving talking-to-foreigners way, but then between the earbuds and the clanking dim sum carts maybe shouting wasn’t uncalled for). Our friend demanded to know from the youngsters when they were getting married. Yikes. Again, thank goodness Stephanie’s a good sport.

Dim sum at Y-Ben starts at 7 am and goes until 3 pm. The food is maybe a little simpler than some places, and occasionally the hot dishes aren’t as hot as you would like (look for steaming carts). But it’s an adventure and you can’t beat the price – even with the always mysteriously overpriced Chinese broccoli, our bill was $37.50 including tax for our party of five. I'll be practicing with the chopsticks for next time.

I am droning on… the rest of the day will be another post.

Legendary Place, 708 Franklin St., Oakland
Peony, 388 9th St. Suite 288, Oakland
Y-Ben House, 835 Pacific, San Francisco

Lotus petal, anyone?

I don’t have a good excuse for my extended absence from the blogosphere. It started with two weeks in LA, where I bravely soldiered on with my borrowed laptop until – well - there is just something about Los Angeles. I find that getting anything accomplished there is, to borrow a phrase from Nik’s most recent (antipodean) stage director, like marching through treacle. It doesn’t help that so few of my husband’s relatives are engaged in regular employment, and that those who are tend to keep irregular schedules. Lots of coffee drinking, crossword puzzles, wandering the neighborhood on missions to drop by cousin so-and-so or Thea something’s house to pick a basket of lemons or to drop off some figs; a schedule of general time-wasting punctuated by leisurely meals at strangely late hours. It’s hard to be productive during a sojourn in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. I did manage to plan a few posts, but it would be best not to bore you with outlines. Maybe I’ll still get around to writing some of them up. I do promise a complete report on my immersion into kollyva-making with Aunt Koula, though, since that was one of the main reasons for the trip south.

Since LA, I’ve been to Nevada City, where I kept Mom company at home for a couple of days while my sister trained for a new job. Then back to Medford for the invasion of the twenty-somethings: our boys Kosta and Dimitri were up from California along with five of their closest friends to watch youngest brother Nik perform as Fleance in Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Macbeth. Lots of food and wine happened that weekend, including an all-day stint in the kitchen preparing a family favorite - lamb osso buco with risotto Milanese – for the twelve of us. Then there was a church retreat, a couple of dinner parties, and finally a last-ditch (and successful) attempt at squeezing out the last little bit of summer with a weekend in San Francisco. Lots of cooking, lots of eating, just not a lot of writing.

So here’s a little something I need to get off my chest. For the past five years, the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship has held a weekend retreat at Camp Latgawa in the Rogue National Forest. One of the great attractions for our congregation is the tasty home-cooked camp fare served in the dining hall. Latgawa’s hosts, Greg and Eva, are a young couple who bake their own bread and use fresh local ingredients wherever they can. This year the meals were yummy as always, but we were disappointed to discover after we arrived that the Forest Service had suspended all burning due to extreme fire hazard. No campfire! Unitarians love to sing around a campfire – without Unitarians, “Kumbaya” would have died a natural death before 1980 – but we are resourceful, so this year the singalong took place around a camp lantern.



A camp lantern, however, was not going cut it in the s’mores department. (I hope I don’t have to explain what a s’more is, but just in case my readers come from another planet: a s’more is a sticky sweet camp treat, purportedly invented by Girl Scouts, involving a toasted marshmallow and a square of Hershey’s chocolate sandwiched between the two halves of a graham cracker.)

So… it came to be revealed that some of our members were along on the trip just for the s’mores, and that the retreat experience would be completely worthless without said s'mores (these are adults we are talking about here, by the way). I can sympathize maybe a little bit – there is something special about a perfectly toasted marshmallow when camping. But the way I see it, no campfire, no s’mores; that’s life. My husband, however, is ever obliging to a lady in distress, and got the bright idea of making s’mores in the kitchen's convection oven. Eek! I had to leave the room and join the lantern singers at that point. There are some things that just have to be done a certain way, and to my way of thinking you cannot make a proper s’more in the oven. It ain’t right.

All who participated in this horrifying crime against nature had good things to say. In fact, they had the nerve to suggest that s’mores were EVEN BETTER this way. Then they told me about S'more Kits. They told me about microwave s’mores ("in a fraction of the time and without the mess.") One person even said she'd been known make a whole batch at night at home in the oven and eat them cold for breakfast. I find this alarming in the extreme. To me it is evidence of a strange trend toward out-of-context consumption. Call me old-fashioned, but I say cotton candy has to come from a carnival or county fair. Retsina only tastes good in a Greek café, outside. And a s’more has not earned its credentials unless the marshmallow has actually spent time at the end of a stick, in or above a burning pile of wood. Sheesh. What is this world coming to? I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture. But here’s a video my daughter Alekka (age 12) made in her animation class this summer.