Dreams, Moments, Travels
We are on our way to San Francisco, California, for a long weekend. The first part of our drive takes us over a road that becomes all too familiar: Interstate 60. Over Wickenburg past Nothing and on to Kingman, then we cross the Colorado River before driving through Needles, California. Lucky for us, we will drive through Bakersfield in the dark. We make camp in the luxury of a cheap motel in Lost Hills, California. Next morning, we will finish our drive north to Frisco.
In our ongoing curiosity of the available foods here in America, we search far and wide for those items not seen on a day-to-day basis, these Calypso beans are part of that. Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa is where these beans come from, I had originally learned of Seed Savers from a National Public Radio program. Another great source for information has been the Slowfood Ark program. And the beans, well besides being a beautiful bean, when cooked, have a smoky flavor and are about twice as large as when dry.
Desperate for a photo of the day, as I have been on many other occasions, I grasp for something to photograph. Sitting at a red light coming off the freeway, inspiration strikes – it’s the underside of the overpass, perfect. You can see we don’t live in the midwest. There is no rust, no crumbling concrete, no human nests perched between rafters for the homeless, which if you haven’t read lately, stands at 744,000 Americans.
While chatting on the phone an acrid smell finds my olfactory with an immediate sense of alarm throwing me into action, or rather, panic. I looked into the kitchen, only to spy my mother-in-law staring at the oven slack-jawed, black smoke pouring from the top of the door. “WHAT HAPPENED???” “Uh, I don’t know, I was cleaning, pushed the button, maybe another one, it beeped and then, uh, and you were on the phone, I didn’t want to disturb you…”. Well, maybe this alone might not have been a problem, except that the oven was STUFFED with pots and pans. Yeah, I know, you are thinking, well why didn’t you just turn it off? Because, smarty-pants, when the oven is in auto-clean mode, the door locks and there ain’t no opening it – unless you unplug the oven! Oh the stink, oh the thought of having to pay for a new oven, and new pans, and a new pressure cooker – fortunately only the pressure cooker took a dive. And the oven? Well, it finally stopped stinking after a couple of very thorough cleanings.
With the Barrett-Jackson auto auction and the Friedman Billings Ramsey Open (the FBR Open, a.k.a. The Phoenix Open) just around the corner, Scottsdale and Phoenix are sprucing up the grounds of our fair cities. A mad influx of car enthusiasts and beer-drinking baseball cap and polo shirt-wearing doofods (er, duffers) is about to jam our roads, restaurants, and patience. So the crews are out picking up litter, erasing graffiti, killing flies, sharpening cactus needles, and dusting off the sidewalks.
Having found wonderful fresh RAW milk, my mother-in-law and I embark upon making some homemade mozzarella. The milk comes courtesy of the folks over at SaveYourDairy in Queen Creek, Arizona, and while this milk is more expensive than what is now traditional milk, i.e., pasteurized and homogenized, I just feel better about using a natural product that for some 10,000 years was just fine the way it came. We made marinara the day before and will make dough for pasta when the cheese is finished. Cooking this way is quite time-consuming but the satisfaction is irreplaceable.