Have You Been Wanting to Do This For Years Too?

I'm talking about taking a spontaneous day off of work, all by yourself, and doing something--anything--that you've been wanting to do for years.

I did it.  In Golden Gate Park.  With absolutely no prior planning. In fact, when I left home in the morning, I didn't even know that I was going to do what I did.

But I did it.  And it was appropriately organic.

First, I dropped my kid off at Summer Art Camp at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park.  It was an unusually glorious day because it was already warm and sunny in JUNE in SAN FRANCISCO.  Everyone knows this is rare.  It doesn't bode well for July or August...we all know what's coming.

You probably know that the Japanese Tea Garden is right next door to the deYoung.  In the tea garden is a tea house.  I went there first, and was the first there.  From the modest but ample menu, I ordered gen-matcha and ochazuke.  It was my first ochazuke, and it was perfect.  Rice, with puffed rice for crunch and seaweed for salt, is bathed in steaming hot green tea.

You would have loved the plush green, finely manicured garden.  Japanese in its attention to detail and design, quiet in the middle of a city.  My peace was interrupted by a generous Frenchman who first asked the time and then kindly offered to escort me through the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit next door.  

An older woman cackled her way up the gentle slope to the tea house.  Panting, she reminisced about how much more quickly she made it here as a young lady so many years ago.

A cuddly couple, honeymoon style, came and went.  Americans, oversized camera lenses projecting from their bellies, trundled through.  It was time to go.

After a quick walk up to and through the Conservatory of Flowers, it was back to the car for the drive to wherever, and whatever it was that needed tending.

Lobster Tale

“Now, people ask me, what rituals can we have today? My answer is, what are you doing? What is important in your life? What is important, they say, is having dinner with their friends. That is a ritual.” – Joseph Campbell

It’s a given that at least once every summer Dad will make Lobster Dinner.  This has been going on, with some regularity, for decades.  If he doesn’t make it at home, we go out to get it.

In the early days, when we spent our weekend days in Maine’s coastal towns, we discovered Barnacle Billy’s.  This was, and could still be, the kind of place where you pushed your way forward through the crowd and then hollered your order up to the cook behind the counter.  Meantime, someone in our party would troll the weatherbeaten restaurant for an equally weatherbeaten wooden table.  The lobsters came out of the kitchen hot and red with limp claws draped over paperboard bowls, accompanied by sides of corn, piles of steamed clams, and small pools of melted butter.

Last summer, Lobster Dinner took a new twist.  Dad acquired a recipe from a friend who apparently has created quite a following of his own with it. 

Preparing lobster in this manner is a multi-step process: first, you pour a large martini and drink it to get up the nerve to cook the poor buggers by plunging their writhing bodies into a boiling cauldron of water.  (I never look.  It’s murder.)  After they're cooked, you pin their bodies, belly up, to a cutting surface while you use a strong knife to score each down the length of its body.  (Don’t worry, it’s already dead.)

Once scored, you generously brush melted butter with garlic in and all around the lobsters' nooks and crannies.  If there were a recipe to the buttery sauce, I would give it to you.  But after several requests, it was revealed that there is none.  It's more of a style than a recipe.  

Grill the lobsters.  Not too much. Serve with bowls of melted unsalted butter, grilled corn, carrots and potatoes in broth, steamers, and cole slaw.  Beer, white wine.

Breaking All the Rules + Oysters

Okay, I've broken one of the golden rules of blogging by letting 10 months--10 whole months!!--go by without a single post.  I'm crawling back into your arms, humbled.

I got busy.  Like, busier, because I have a business that got really busy.  I am going to experiment with a new approach to DustSnowCoffee.  Briefly, it's going to get brief.  Not as brief as Twitter (@dustsnowcoffee), but with a lot more pictures and less prose.  That's the plan anyway.


Let's do it!


We've got a lot to catch up on.  In small bites.


Which leads me to a meal, the real subject of this post.  I've been meaning to share it with you for months (six, not ten!).  

Do the cranberries give away that this meal took place on Cape Cod?  I was visiting my parents at their cottage on the beach, and they experimented with two newly discovered recipes, one of which was martinis with cranberry garnish.   We transported this exciting cocktail twist to the Coonamessett Inn in Falmouth, MA. It hasn't made its way to California yet, but I expect to see it in every chic lounge on the West Coast for the next cranberry harvest.

The real gems of the meal were the oysters.  To make the dish: start by whipping up your favorite aioli recipe.  Then shuck.

  
Freshly shucked oysters are key, right before you prepare the dish.  If there is no way you're going to shuck oysters yourself, the fishmonger will do it for you, but you risk losing a lot of juice.  Gently sautée a mix of chopped mushrooms, preferably fresh from the market, in olive oil and garlic with some salt and pepper.  Pile the mixture onto the shucked oysters.

Drop a teaspoon or two of the aioli onto the mushroom mixture, and broil until the aioli is just right--lightly brown but not burnt.

This is not an oyster.  It's a clam shell that is hosting a colony of smaller mollusks.  A micro community on South Cape Beach.

After you eat, you have to walk.  Otherwise, you risk making (and consuming!) another crispy-chilled martini with cranberries and a lemon twist.