ValleyDad -- Simon Firth’s posterous

 



November 22, 2009

Enough with the yogurt, Palo Alto (a parochial post)

Will someone do us poor Palo Altans a favor, please, and launch what I see as the city's most-needed startup -- a truly serious ice-cream store?

It's both embarrassing and annoying to those of us who stray occasionally to the North and East that, while other Bay Area cities are blessed by the attentions of an exciting new generation of ice cream entrepreneurs, all we get is yogurt, yogurt, and ever more yogurt.

Yes, Fraiche is great.  I also really like Culture, but as places to get excited about, these joints are junior league.   

Last week I was in Berkeley, home to several outstanding nouveaux creameries.  Take Ici, founded by the former pastry chef at Chez Panisse, where I tried the Persimmon Brandied Current and the Spiced Apple Cider Sherbert but came down in favor of the Creme Fraiche Hazelnut Praline. 

Just down the road is Tara's Organic, where the joke is that every other flavor is basil.  Even if that were actually true (which it almost was last time I visited the excellent Sketch on Berkeley's 4th Street), that would be a whole lot more interesting than the flavors our local yogurt emporia (Pumpkin Spice at Halloween, who'd have thought?!) are able to come up with.  

I'm not even asking for crazy flavors -- I can believe the Valley's not yet ready for Humphrey Slocombe's Mission district Boccalone proscuitto, balsamic caramel or hibiscus beet ice creams.  

But just something as old fashioned and unimprovably awesome as the unrivaled Fairfax Scoop would do.  This place has been doing the small batch, organic ingredient, classic-but-still-interesting flavor combination thing since 2001 and I think people are generally right when they say (as a great many who go there do) that it's simply the best ice cream store in the world.  

I'm not asking for anything new.  We can do better than Fraiche and Culture and even, bless them, Rick's Rather Rich, that's all.  

So VC's, get a lease on University, find a pastry chef, throw money at said chef.  I tell you, it'll be bigger than Google (at least to me and my kids).  

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November 16, 2009

Hipster ties going fast!

California Avenue's Bargain Box charity shop is on a roll. After the fab thirties Erector Set they were selling the other week, the store is now offering a big collection of seemingly unworn vintage men's ties from the 1940's through 1960's. The cellphone pic I snapped does not do them justice. They are vibrant, over the top and utterly cool.

It's too bad they are being sold in Palo Alto, ground zero of tie-less culture. But guys, that means you have a chance to tap your inner Mad Man and get one before they run out!  I got me two.

The ties are a mere ten dollars each. Many are silk and have labels saying "made in San Francisco."  You just can't buy stuff like this new.  

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November 10, 2009

A farm with an ocean view

Such is the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz, home also to the wonderful Life Lab educational center.  

Ada's second grade class got to visit today.  That's the Monterey Bay behind with the Santa Lucia Mountains rising above it.  The kids enjoyed the chickens, the apple juice pressing, the compost-temperature-taking and all-around eating of much produce fresh out of the ground.

I enjoyed the beautiful farm buildings and landscaping.

Plus the fruit trees.  Figs with the last of the year's crop:

Crisp Fuyu persimmons:

Even a huge avocado tree dripping with ripening fruits.

And let's not forget the lichens, including this bright fall beauty:

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November 5, 2009

Vintage Erector set

At the California Ave. Bargain Box charity shop. They say it's complete and want $300 for it. Could be a bargain.

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November 1, 2009

Four shillings short at the Farmer's Market

It's a dilemma for those of us hoping to support local(ish) farmers of fresh, organic produce in the Bay Area: However much cash we bring to our Farmer's Markets, we're commonly left scrapping for pennies before we've purchased our last bunch of arugula or bag of purple heirloom beans.

To remind us how often we're near-bankrupted by this guilt-the-green-liberals borderline extortion racket, the Palo Alto Saturday market last week kindly laid on the excellent celtic duo, Four Shillings Short to serenade us as our wallets rapidly drained.

Generally, I'm resigned to paying $6 a pound for salad mix, $3.50 a pound for peaches or $5 a pop for a tiny cheese. After all, you are getting the freshest, highest-quality Californian produce possible shy of growing it yourself. And farmers usually know how to walk the fine line between asking all they can of an affluent community and thumbing their noses at them. 

At today's Palo Alto Sunday market, though, I felt well and truly thumbed when I encountered my all time outrageous Farmer's Market ask: the $10 pot of jam. This for a mere 6oz of the stuff. I was so stunned, I forgot to snap a picture of the Blue Chair Fruit Co. booth. 

It was perfectly acceptable jam (although a little heavy on the sugar). The lady selling it was a delight. The flavor combinations were interesting -- but when the going rate is under $5 for a 16oz jar, that jam would have to be life-changing, the seller a mermaid (Michael would have insisted we have some), the proceeds entirely donated to the world's poor or the local PTA for me to buy.

Unless we somehow hit Silicon Valley start-up gold, $10 jam will not -- I fear -- be in our future. Still, so long as there's music at the markets, we can always just dance.  

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October 23, 2009

Taking Mark Twain's advice on a trip to the Cliff House

Mark Twain would have been an unbelievable blogger.  Take the essay "Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House," which appeared July 3rd, 1864 in The Golden Era, a mid-19th Century literary weekly published in San Francisco.

Its substance, as such, is meagre: everyone has told Twain the best time to see the newly built Cliff House (it was a year old at that point) is early.  So he leaves at four AM to drive the six miles across town and it's windy, foggy and freezing cold.  He doesn't have fun.  That's it.  

The joy, though, for both Twain and the reader is the extended riff he plays on those bare bones.  I won't summarize, since the whole point of the piece is expression, not content.  Go read it. 

From a modern perspective, what's also striking is that here's a perfect blog entry, turning a mundane excursion into something worth sharing, but written a hundred years before the Internet was even imagined. Its only fault today would be its length, perhaps. But really, you can't -- and shouldn't -- stop a writer like that when he's on such an entertaining roll.  

Following in Twain's footsteps, and taking his advice, I visited the Cliff House last weekend with my extended Bay Area family well after dawn. We arrived just before noon and even then the same chilling fog Twain cursed was only just pulling back from the surf. But as it lifted we saw, in quick succession, whales and dolphins swimming by, and dozens of huge grey pelicans crashing into the sea -- all chasing a massive herring ball by the looks of it. We saw seals, too, likely descendants of the very ones the jaundiced Twain described as "writhing and squirming like exaggerated maggots."

After brunch, we walked over to the site of the old Sutro Baths, which I'd never seen. Michael was delighted, calling it a 'wreck' and desperate to explore.

It wasn't long before the fog pulled in again, though, and back on went the layers of extra-clothing that any local visiting a San Francisco beach instinctively brings along.

Thankfully, the fog just as quickly retreated again.  We walked to the other side of the Cliff House and played on the beach for a while.  A beautiful day.

"If you go to the Cliff House at any time after seven in the morning, you cannot fail to enjoy it," said Mark Twain almost 150 years ago.  It doesn't make for such an entertaining blog entry, of course, but thankfully, he's still right.  

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October 21, 2009

When is a tarantula hunt not a tarantula hunt?

When one of you, in this case the one aged five, doesn't know that's what you're looking for. 

It's about time for the local tarantulas to migrate and I've never seen them doing it, so this weekend I wanted to go over and search for them at Palo Alto's Foothills Park, where my friend Eva had one all but crawl over her foot last fall.  I knew that Michael would refuse to go if I told him that's what we were looking for, but I thought he'd also be really interested if we just 'happened' to come across one.  Plus he has good scary animal finding karma.

So I didn't tell him about the plan, instead describing it as a generic 'explore.'  Fine by him.

We saw plenty of wildlife, including ridiculously tame deer,

and some very large and very dopey lizards.  

There were also beetles, skippers, hawks etc. etc.  But no tarantulas this time, alas.   I need to read up more on where exactly and when to find them.

The highlight for Michael was clambering up the dry creek beds and then creating a camp out of sticks in the meadow.  For me, it was seeing the Coyote Bushes in full flower.  This much-maligned native has a distinctive scent when damp -- one that brings me right back to the coastal foothill chaparral whenever I catch it, which is why I like it so much and why I have one in my yard.   The flowers are important for the native bee population as they bridge a period in which few other natives are in bloom.

I noticed two kinds of Coyote Bushes growing together at Foothills Park, one with white flowers like this and the other exactly the same but with a distinctive yellow tint.  I much prefer the white. 

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October 15, 2009

What's sad about American happiness

is how little related it is to work.  Take this nifty bit of data-crunching, derived from Facebook status updates.   As Noam Cohen notes in his New York Times report on the project, "There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday."  The peaks are all days off work, too: Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4th, Halloween etc..

It's no surprise, certainly.  And a weekend break brings pleasurable novelty even to people with most rewarding careers.  But it's sad to think that the thing that most of us spend the most of our time doing brings us so little relative satisfaction.

It may be that Facebook's Gross National Happiness Index is missing the many deep satisfactions of work and captures only emotional highs that we wouldn't want to experience every day.  But I'm not convinced that's the case.  Instead I think it suggests a problem with our relation to work and why we choose to do the work we do.

Creator of the index, Adam Kramer of the University of Oregon, sums it up nicely:  “If we know money doesn’t buy happiness,” he suggests to Cohen, “why are we optimizing for money?” 

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October 10, 2009

Fall haiku (verse)

The last fig. At the
Very edge of rot. So ripe.
So sweet. Liquid bliss.

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October 8, 2009

A sign o' the times

It's common for me to be involuntarily included in other people's business meetings when I work in Palo Alto's cafes.

Usually, though, the idea under discussion is high-tech related. The meeting I'm sat next to at Caffe del Doge this morning, though, is all about DNA.  Biotech at the Doge: a sign of the times.    

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