. SF Open Studios 2009

October 24th & 25th, 11am-6pm
185 Clara Street (btwn 4th & 5th, Folsom & Harrison)

. Michela and Brent got married

The wedding was most spectacular. Unfortunately I did not manage to video any of the spectacle due to an abundance of jolly good wine. After two glasses, this is what happened to Nif's high school friend, Miya -



We were at the best table (table 15) with a bunch of fancy musician types. Laurie and Bill and Jayne & Greg the Kiwis. Greg (or Grig as he prefers to be known) reminded me a bit of Mark Gatiss from the League of Gentlemen, although I never told him that.

Bill and Greg had an arm wrestling competition - Bill lost, and so -



Should I stop uploading these movies in HD? Are they taking to long to buffer? Let me know.

. The Streets of San Francisco - Valencia at Liberty Street

. Tomales Bay

. Least Favourite Beer of the Week

The Telegraph Brewing Company describe their Reserve Wheat Ale as "Not for the faint of heart." Fortunately they also note that it is "Available in extremely limited quantities," which hopefully means I won't have to drink another one. Yuck. It's like a really nice Wheat Beer that someone mixed with the sourest lemons they could find, shook it all up, and put in our fridge. I think it's supposed to be refreshing or some such nonsense. It's just nasty.

I thoroughly do not recommend this beer to you while you cook Peppered Mushroom and Cheezly Pie with roasted rosemary onion potatoes and a green salad on a Saturday afternoon while Nif is out at trapeze class and your friends have all gone to bed because of that annoying eight hour time difference and your other friends are down at Delores Park with four thousand other people merrily burning their collectively exposed regions and you can't find your sun block because it's not in the bathroom and it's not in the car and it's not in your bag (it's in your coat pocket) and in situations like this, cooking pie is what you do best.

But not with this beer.

. a pie

I made a pie. It's what I do best.

. Favourite Beer of the Week

Sam Smiths Imperial Stout was originally brewed (ten miles from where I grew up) for the fancy Russians of the Czarist courts. It was apparently made high in alcohol so that it would survive the trip to Russia, although I can't help thinking that might be a load of old crap like the claim that IPA's were high in hops and alcohol to survive the trip to India. I've been fooled by these beer historians before.

Trust no one, is my advice to you.

And get 'em in.

I recommend drinking this beer around 5 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon while cooking Black-Eyed Pea Fritters with Spiced Coconut Sauce and Turmeric Basmati Rice.

However, I do not recommend cooking black-eyed peas for Nif. They creep her out. Something about their eyes. If you have a cupboard full of black-eyed peas and don't feel like eating them all yourself then try mixing them with other foods of a similar nature (such as cannellini beans). And then blend them in the blender until their eyes are all mashed into pulp. That seems to do the trick.

The coconut sauce had star anise in it. I had never cooked with star anise before. It is very pretty.

Oh, and the beer is jolly nice too.

. All Grown Up

Our minions have flourished and number well over 100. Fear us. You have no choice but to take one of our strapping seedlings into your home. The San Francisco Indian Summer is nigh, and you'll have nothing to soak up that sun. Please don't pretend you have a/c. How many would you like? Baker's dozen? Baker's 50?

. Summertide Undertakings

. A Decade Ago...

A decade ago today we bought our first car and stuck my head in the trunk. My hair was still quite large, but the trunk was larger.

Ten years later, things are not so large.

. Favourite Beer of the Week

I am not a religious man. And I suspect neither is the geezer on the label of this bottle of Brother David's Double Abbey Style Ale. He is wearing a habit, and appears to be a monk, but he looks like the kind of monk you'd run into in the middle of Resident Evil 4 whose head would split in two and dirty great tentacles would come out and slap you about before you shot him to death with your magnum.

On Sunday we walked down to the Mission for a reason I have forgotten, and it was all closed off to traffic and people we're dancing in the streets as they do in California, on roller skates . We had some lunch at Herbivore, and when we left the dancing was over and the traffic had returned and I tried to buy a hat but it's hard when your ears are as big as mine, and then we walked home and had a bit of a sit down and a Brother David's Double Abbey Style Ale, which was recommended to Nif by some guy at Rainbow Grocery (the best grocery store in San Francisco for dirty hippy vegetarians) so she bought it and put it in the fridge and now it is in my fat belly.

It is a jolly nice beer. It looks and tastes a bit like a Chimay. Maybe a bit less carbonated, which is good because I don't like a lot of carbonation in my beer as it makes me burp, which isn't nice for anyone.

It is made at Anderson Valley in Boonville, which is a small "unincorporated community" in Mendocino that has its own language - "Boontling", and is apparently the setting for the novel "Vineland" by Thomas Pynchon, which I tried to read twice in my 20s, and failed both times, due to it being a bit shit, despite what they tell you on the back of the book.

And it is 9% alc/vol which is the kind of alc/vol I like on a Sunday evening when I am trying very very hard to not think about going back to work on Monday.

Now let us pray.

. Caipirissima Croquet

Last Saturday we went to Sebastopol and came second in the Bailey Brent Birthday Croquet tournament.

In HD!

. Favourite Beer of the Week

Sam Smith's India Ale is not the best IPA I have ever tasted. No sir. It's okay, just not great. It's rather bitter and not much else. It achieves the status of favourite beer of the week purely by the fact that it was drunk on our back deck on a Friday night after a healthy romp around Mt. Davidson.

Maybe it's nicer in Yorkshire before they stick it in a bottle and ship it over here. I know I was.

Or maybe my tastebuds have been ruined by brash and gaudy American IPAs with their in-your-face over-the-top hops. Who knows? Who cares? It's Friday!

. Project Germination

Our new minions...
Sugar Plum, Brandywine, Orange Blossom, & Genovese tomatoes

. Sparks

We met 11 years ago today.
They have fireworks here every year to celebrate.

. Favourite Beer of the Week

Sam Smiths Brewery Pale Ale is nice pint of olde worlde Bitter. Perfect for washing away that annoying sense of ennui you get from another work-week of creeping failure.
Yum!

For maximum effect follow swiftly with a glass of 12 year old Balvenie and season 3 of the Mighty Boosh.

. A Decade Ago...

This week's "A Decade ago..." is actually "A Decade and five months ago..." when we were visited by my old old friends James and Amy and their then young children Joe and Lily.
And some hummus.


Here you can see my hair is so big it blocks out the sun.

. Pimp My eco-Ride

This is our friend Mike.
And he'd like to win a bike.

Please Vote Him Up
(he's near the bottom of the page...)

. Wayang with Sasha

. Half Life is Over Now...

And I meet full face on dark mornings the bestial visor, bent in by the blows of what happened to happen.

But at least birthday drinks at Nihon was fun. Thank you to everyone who came. Very special thank you to everyone who paid for my whiskeys.

Cheers!

 

. Favourite Beer of the Week

On Saturday night we were going to a dance performance at Dance Mission and we were meeting Diane first for drinks and food and Nif said where shall we go? And I said why don't we go to that place that used to be Radio Valencia at 23rd and Valencia because that's close to Dance Mission and so we went there and it was only 6 o'clock so we got a great table in the corner by the window and we had some eggplant antipasti thing and a mushroom pizza with vegan cheese, and wine and beer. Nif had the wine, I had the beer. Diane showed up later, because she had to hike and stuff.

First I had a Maudite, and then I had a Hitachino Espresso Stout, which tasted of coffee and chocolate, like a beer-mocha. Sounds disgusting I know, but it was actually rather nice, especially after the pizza, as a kind of dessert. I thought at the time that it would be a good beer to share with someone else who likes beer, but then when I was half way through it I was quite happy that Nif and Diane do not like beer at all and I had it all to myself.
Beretta (the place we were in) also serve Hitachino Espresso Stout in an icecream float. Not sure how I feel about that.

. A Decade Ago...

Welcome to an exciting new feature of the mothkettle blog called "A Decade Ago..." In it I will be reminiscing about the olden days and talking about how old I am. Now I've written that down it sounds even more exciting than when it was just in my head.

Shall we begin?

A decade ago this month, on the week of my 30th birthday, we went for a walk through Muir Woods with our friends Oliver and Victoria.

Here we can be seen struggling to keep up with new technology called the "self timer".


And here we can be seen having an invisible light saber battle.


A couple of years later I was back in Muir woods walking the coastal trail with my friend Joe, and we were asked by a middle-aged couple going in the opposite direction if we knew where the bar was. We said no we didn't know where the bar was, and after they were gone we laughed about how silly you would have to be to think that there was a bar in the middle of Muir Woods.

Turns out there is a bar in the middle of Muir Woods. So on the week of my 40th birthday we went to find it with our friends Bryce and Jenny. Here is a video documenting that historic occasion.

. mum in california

Last month my mum came to visit us. Here are some things she did.

. Favourite Beer of the Week

Ginger beer for ginger beardies.

This is one of those Kiuchi Hitachino nest beers (like this one and this one). This one is the "Real Ginger Brew" and it has ginger in it, and tastes a bit gingery. Very good on a Sunday when you're in the middle of an awfully long recipe like Mushroom Wellington with Madeira Sauce and it's 4 o'clock and the guests aren't arriving til 6:30 and it's too soon to get into the wine but you need a little something. But then afterwards you start to get tired and your wife has to finish the recipe and now it's 5:30 and you're at the computer and thinking of having a shower when you really should be helping in the kitchen and you have totally forgotten to make the mashed potatoes.

Oh dear.

. Birthday H0

Model railways are built to various scales. 0 scale (zero scale) is 1:43. So something 43 inches tall in the real world (a small child for example) becomes something 1 inch tall in model railway world. H0 (half zero scale) is 1:87. So your small child would be only 1/2 inch tall. Does that make sense? Do you honestly give a crap?

For my birthday I received this rather fabulous H0 scale Water Tower, pimped out by our splendid friend Michael Shaub. To see photos of its creation, click this.

. Forty

To celebrate my 40th birthday we are going for drinks at this place on Friday (5th of June):

http://www.dajanigroup.net/establishments/nihon-whisky-lounge/

Please join us if you have nothing better to do and enjoy spending time with old people.

Drinks and bar foods are half price before 7:30pm.

. Pending

You know who you are.

. You Are Beautiful

Random cell phone pictures while we're out & about...

. Levitation