holy pie plates, batman!

The cat gets to go in and out whenever she wants. You're supposed to open the door when she waits there.

 This is from making dough (for pie) lesson of the week. Can you guess who made the Batman?

found downtown

 The bus drops me off at the Embarcadero, and when I have time, I like to walk the rest of the way into Powell. Embarcadero is pretty much the financial district, and there's more excitement at the commercial district at Powell. It's not a bad walk because there's plenty of public spaces and art pieces that keep things visaully interesting, aside from the suit monkeys - but let's face it, business casual in San Francisco would be anyone else's definition of casual.

Berkeley hills

Hats off to Berkeley Hills real estate. Even though it's all on incredibly unstable land and looks like it could all go rolling down at any minute, it sure makes for interesting tresspassing treks.

Our first destination was Indian Rock. And, my genius thinking, figured we still had time, a beautiful day, and the general direction of the Rose Gardens was 'that' way. My midwestern logic has only ever assumed grids. There are no grids. Never underestimate the power of winding roads to throw everything off course. We found it eventually. We tresspassed hiked into someone's backyard a waterfall. We cardboarded down the concrete slide and mingled with the people the slide is actually supposed to be ridden by.
 We also saw/heard chickens and the jasmine. Oh, olfactory bliss, the jasmine.

in the heights

I arrived at 7am to wait in a line that was going to open at 10am. So B and I got a time slot for 4pm. But they did provide entertainment. There waws a street artist creating this as the line snaked around him.

We had some time to kill, but because they just gave people wristbands at the beginning, we didn't have to be in line the whole time. B and I got to zipline across the Embarcadero for free. It was a Canadian tourism company that was doing this. Per usual, the gloomy day got sunnier. Nothing but blue skies.

swanky library

This is the public library in Milpitas, CA. It's a suburb in the whereabouts of nowhere. Okay. Not quite nowhere because the BART does almost reach there. But clearly, they have enough money. This library is amazing! The lighting was gorgeous.

 There's a new modern part, and an older classic style part. There's lots of empty space, which could be utilized by a lot more books. But seeing as how libraries are jumping on the techno-bandwagon (much to my chagrin), computers are climbing up the priority pyramid.

More with kitchen chemistry

Experimenting with popovers. Half of these are with all-purpose flour, and the other half are made from a batter with 1/2 whole wheat flour, 1/2 all-purpose flour.



This is dulce de leche. Notice how it's drippy because patience is simply a virtue not everyone is endowed with.

My homework

I'm taking this class about the chemistry of cooking. Our first assignment was to make pizza on a regular baking pan:
and compare it to a pizza on a pizza stone (terra cotta tile):
Both were tasty, but the crusts were texturally different.
lesson learned: pizza stone pizza > baking pan pizza