Copyright © 2004-2005 Anup Sekhar
This is one of the first Memorial Day weekends in recent years that we have been in town. After Friday's dinner party, we rested on Saturday but decided to at least make a day trip on Sunday. We have a book called Bay Area Backroads and we chose one of the trips from that book. We first went to see one of the oldest (and the largest) Spanish missions in California - Mission San Juan Bautista - about 45 miles south of San Jose. The mission was founded on June 24, 1797. It's very well maintained and thrives purely on donations from visitors. The mission is located right beside the last original piece of the El Camino Real, the highway that once connected all the missions from San Diego to the Bay Area. The infamous San Andreas Fault is right next to it. The church was very nice and within its floors are entombed many previous pastors.
The town of San Juan Bautista is very quaint and has an old Spanish town charm to it. We ate tasty Mexican and Salvadorian food at a restaurant called Felipe's before heading to see the mission.
We then drove to an out of the way ranch called Gizdich Ranch near Watsonville. This family run ranch was founded by Croatian immigrants in the 1930s and is still with same family. They are famous for their apple and berry pies as well as allowing visitors to pick fruits during season. The place was jam packed (pardon the pun). We didn't stay too long but bought a pie made out of a berry called olallieberry (never heard of it before) and some apple juice.
The next and last stop for us was a winery called Bargetto in Soquel, a town just south of Santa Cruz. There was a nice photographic exhibition there as well. We enjoyed tasting some of the fine wines they had and were pleasantly surprised by the taste of two dessert wines made of olallieberries and raspberries. Their dessert wine line is called Chaucer's. We bought a few bottles and headed back. It was a beautiful day to make a day trip.
Over the last 2-3 days, we have seen 3 movies. The first one is a recent release starring Dennis Quaid called In Good Company who is a 50+ executive with Scarlet Johannson as his daughter. Things turn weird when a guy almost half his age (Topher Grace), becomes his new boss after a corporate merger. Moreover the new boss sleeps with Quaid's daughter. I thought it was a decent movie which deserved a better run than it had in the box office. The second movie was Cate Blanchett's oscar nominated performance in Elizabeth, about Queen Elizabeth I. This is one of my favorite movies and I was watching it again. It still resonates well. According to IMDB, there is sequel in the works. The last one was Jackie Chan's classic - The Legend of the Drunken Master in which he again portrays celebrated Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-Hung, the drunken boxing wizard. Usual Chan fare but it was a relief to watch some kick ass stunts of the yesteryear Hong Kong cinema as opposed to the Crouching Tiger style stunts of recent movies.
Yesterday we had 4 of our friends (Ed, Ronda, Jill and Jon) over for dinner reviving our table for six dinners that we used to have frequently a few years ago. The concept is to invite 4 other people to our place for a home cooked dinner and most of the time we chose people who don't know each other well. It's interesting to see what happens when you put people of different backgrounds and interests together. Actor Jon Favreau of Swingers fame has a show with a similar concept on IFC called Dinner for Five but I am qutie sure we started this thing before him. Why 4? Because our dining table has room for only six.
Normally we serve Indian food for these sort of gatherings where Eug cuts and I cook. She also is responsible for laying out the table and I am for cleaning up the next day. Yesterday was no different and I cooked 4 dishes namely a Kerala Shrimp Curry, Beets with Coconut, a Raita like dish called Kachumber and a Muslim Chicken Dish. The Shrimp and the Kachumber were recipes from one of my favorite Indian cookbooks called Savoring the Spice Coast of India by Maya Kaimal. The cuisine in this book is mostly from my home state, Kerala and most of the dishes in that book are delicious. The Beets was kind of an improvised recipe that I came up with myself. The Chicken dish was from Passionate Meals by Ismail Merchant (of the filmmaking duo Merchant-Ivory fame and who tragically died this weekend in London).
The dishes were well received since there was hardly anything left at the end of dinner. We also had some nice Chardonnay from Acacia and a sweet Gewürztraminer from Andrew Rich. It was a nice evening where we ate decent food, had a few drinks and enjoyed good conversation well after midnight.
I recently upgraded the software I use for blogging and it was easier than I thought though it was a tad tedious. I use Six Apart's Movable Type for the blogs on this site. The new version seems to be much better with newer features. I am quite satisfied with this software and love the ability to customize and configure almost anything related to the blog pages.
Some folks have been asking me privately when I am going to retroactively blog about the rest of my South American trip. I hope to do so by the end of this Memorial Day weekend. Stay tuned.
Copyright © 2004-2005 Anup Sekhar