Tag Archives: travel

Dinner With Elaine

We had a chance to visit with Ron’s third sister (he has four of them – lucky man as they are all amazing women!), Elaine, in Los Gatos, CA, on our recent visit in the area. Elaine is a brilliantly talented lady (as are all four of Ron’s sisters), with a burning passion for travel, art, culture, and decorating. Her taste is extraordinary and she is truly a remarkable woman.

She invited us to her new home and we shared a wonderful evening with her and two of her friends: Mary, who she has travelled to Cuba with on several occasions for cultural expeditions, and Nancy, a long-time friend and talented hair stylist. Instead of going out for dinner, Elaine prepared and served a delicious dinner of BBQ grilled salmon, oven-grilled broccoli Romanesco, asparagus, onion and tri-colored carrot, and boiled corn on-the-cob. When we asked what we could bring, she said that we could do the sauce for the salmon.

Ron and I had enjoyed a wonderful chimichurri sauce before we left Cabo, so I immediately thought that would be the perfect accompaniment to the grilled salmon and mixed vegetables. Elaine had all the ingredients and I used this recipe from New York Times Cooking app as my basic guideline: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015299-chimichurri-sauce. Although my picture of my plate doesn’t include the chimichurri, it provided great color and flavor to the salmon and all the vegetables Elaine served. Delicious!

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Leftover chimichurri can be used as the base on toasted baguettes for appetizers, mixed in with beaten eggs for scrambled eggs (green eggs and ham, perhaps?) or omelet, as a pizza or flatbread sauce, or tossed with cooked pasta. It really is a versatile and healthy sauce and I highly recommend you try it! A little taste of Argentina – wherever you are in the world!

When You Point Your Finger At Others

I’ve always said that you need to be careful when you point your finger at others because, when you look down at your hand, you’ll see there are three fingers pointed back at you. The reason I bring this up is that, while driving past the oilfields south of King City, California, I am reminded of the finger-pointing so many celebrities have done towards Canada and the Canadian oil sands.

While the open pit method of extraction is not pretty and the area of the oil sands currently appears like a lunar landscape, Canadian remediation and reclamation is among the most stringent in the world. Those areas will be cleaned up and returned to a standard that other countries can only aspire to, including the United States. I have always been appalled at the lack of regulatory control in the U.S. as this field of pumpjacks and surface pipeline, with no spacing control or apparent standard of maintenance, amply illustrates.

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How do celebrities travel while they’re criticizing other countries’ practices? I’ve always said that, unless we’re prepared to live like the Amish and renounce our dependence on fossil fuels, we need to support North American petroleum operations and reduce our dependence on the Middle East for supply. We all need to do our part to find alternative energy sources, but while we’re still highly dependent, let’s not point our fingers at others unless we know we aren’t being hypocritical.

Enjoy the Journey!

I LOVE cookbooks and had a massive collection of them in my past life. Wherever I traveled, it seems I picked up a new cookbook and got to explore the foods and flavors of the places beyond the trip itself. I also chose cookbooks of places I hadn’t yet traveled, but LOVED the cuisines, like India, Thailand, Africa, the Mediterranean, etc. I kept a precious few cookbooks when I purged my belongings last year and gifted all of the remainder to charity – paying the incredible gift of amazing food with others who might not otherwise get to experience travel and/or a variety of cuisines of the world.

One of the best ways to get to know a country, a culture and its people is through food and drink. Everything we do socially is centered around them: a first date with drinks and dinner perhaps, holiday meals shared with traditional recipes and loved ones, bringing food to a family to offer comfort and support during difficult times, a business meeting over coffee or lunch, etc. Nourishing our bodies and our souls with good quality food is one of the most important things we can do to honor ourselves and to show our love for others.

It takes time to plan, shop for and prepare good food. The investment is worth it and cooking is one the things I truly love to do. It’s meditative and creative. Like anything, learning the basics and the techniques are important to make the process more enjoyable. Some people have a natural flare and others have to work at it. Absolutely no one knows it all and there is always more to learn.

I worked really hard to write my three cookbooks and I loved doing them. Been there, done that and wrote three books! Now, I’m enjoying preparing food from other people’s recipes or creating things in our kitchen from my imagination (or from memory of foods we’ve enjoyed). This is an exciting new chapter in my life and I’m enjoying trying new recipes immensely.

I’m travelling lighter these days with very few cookbooks but a world of recipes at my fingertips with the internet and some fabulous food sites. One of my favorites is the Cooking App from the New York Times. It has become one of my main sources of inspiration and an absolute delight to cook recipes from. We LOVE Melissa Clark and her fun, fresh approach to food. Her recipes are delicious and videos capture her delightful personality.

As I prepare and play with new foods and recipes, I promise to share them with you. I’ll share great food and hopefully save you the process of finding the best recipes, food and flavors as I find them. I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I delight in sharing it!

On The Road To Land’s End – Again!

Every year, Ron and I head up to the BNP Paribas Open Tennis Tournament in Indian Wells, California (www.bnpparibasopen.com).  As always, we watched some fabulous tennis and had an opportunity to catch up with many special and long-time friends (Bonnie and Don, Pete and Tony, Judy, Peter, Bob and Roxy, Bob and Winnie and so many more).

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We drive to and from the tournament every year, which is approximately 1300 miles each way.  We’re on the road home as I write this and I’m remembering how much fun we had with my Mom on this same trip to Cabo last November.

My Mom has always loved every aspect of travel and makes every experience a great adventure.  It’s such a delight to be on the road with someone who takes everything in and enjoys every aspect.  She has a child-like sense of wonder and curiosity – it’s a true gift at any age and especially for someone now in her 80’s.

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We planned our trip down in November, just as we’ve done on this trip, to get to Mulegé to spend Saturday night at the Hotel Serinidad, a fly-in hotel that has been a Baja classic for decades (www.hotelserenidad.com).  Every Saturday night features the Serinidad’s famous pig roast, which lures people with small planes to fly in from the States or other parts of Mexico and for people like us who are driving, to plan our overnight stop for this weekly event.

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The staff at the Serinidad know how to do a pig roast well, and it has become a real highlight on our many trips up and down the Peninsula.  Mom LOVED it, and she enjoyed every aspect of this legendary and iconic hotel.  There are some great memories and stories at this hotel, with pictures on the walls from famous guests of years gone by like John “Duke” Wayne, June Allyson and Dick Powell.  We’ll stay overnight and get an early start to ensure that we arrive home in Cabo tomorrow night.

We wish Mom was with us again on this trip and we’ll be thinking of her tonight.  Hopefully she’ll be with us again for this amazing trip next November!

Cataviña and Cabañas Linda (NOT!)

Back in November, our little convoy of two vehicles (Ron in the lead and Mom and I following behind) left Ensenada in the cool of morning.  The air conditioning was working in the Lincoln now, so Mom and I knew we would be comfortable as the day progressed and the heat of the desert intensified.

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Driving the Baja can be extremely treacherous as shoulders don’t exist and the road is extremely narrow.  Highway 1 is the only highway that connects the US to the southern tip of the Baja, so there is a lot of tractor/trailer traffic combined with passenger vehicles.  Defensive driving is absolutely required as you take the winding roads and twist and climb through the mountains.  We travel using walkie talkies, and there have been many situations when Ron has told me it is clear to pass when any sane person wouldn’t even consider it!  Mom was a great sport and never showed any nervousness or concern – bless her for her faith and confidence in both of us.  The many white crosses and memorials along the way are vivid reminders of the inherent danger this highway presents its travellers.

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The beauty of this desert landscape is awe-inspiring.  The variety of cacti and scenery will surprise anyone visiting this apparent “last frontier” for the first time and I am amazed and thrilled every time we have the opportunity to see it.  There are so few people to have actually driven the Baja, and my precious Mom is now among them.  It is an incredible experience and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to share it with her.

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One of the contests that Ron and  I play when we drive the Baja is “Who Can Spot The First Boojum”.  This is what  CaboBob.com says about the boojum (otherwise known as cirio):

“The boojum looks like nothing else.  It is often described as a giant carrot growing upside-down, with its root sticking up to fifty feet in the air.  It has a trunk and leaves, but o branches until it’s at least a hundred years old, when the trunk divides into two of more whip-like tops.  A fifty year-old specimen might be a foot thick at its base, and less than five feet tall.  It’s one of the slowest growing plants in the world, at a rate of a foot every ten years, which means a mature fifty-footer may be more than 500 years old. 

This photograph by Eliot Porter, entitled Cirio Near Las Tres Virgenes Volcano, Baja California (1966) is from the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

After plentiful rainfall, the boojum “candle” sprouts a flame of yellow blossoms at its tip, and its trunk is covered with small green leaves.  When water is absent, it sheds all its leaves to preserve moisture within the trunk.  The boojum is abundant in this two hundred mile strip of desert, but the only other place it grows is a small patch at the same latitude across the Sea of Cortez, in the State of Sonora.”

Ron sees people and families when he looks at boojums and I see dancers.  They are rare and special and no two specimens look alike.  Mom enjoyed them immensely as well as the elephant trees, the cardón (the largest cactus in the world that can grow to over sixty feet tall – often mistaken for its northern cousin, the saguaro), and the hundreds (literally hundreds!) of other cactus varieties found throughout the Baja.

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Mom and Alberto beneath a massive cardón.

We’d had a long day driving and it was starting to threaten sunset.  We’d planned on getting to Cataviña by nightfall as the last thing you want to do is drive the Baja at night.  We caught a glimpse in the twilight of the Boulder Field of Cataviña, sorry that we’d missed them in the last light of afternoon but excited to know that we would instead see it in the early morning light the next day.

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There is a charming hotel, the Desert Inn, just off the highway that we’d planned on checking into.  It is an identical twin to a hotel in San Ignacio to the south and both form part of a group of six hotels from Ensenada to Loreto that were formerly called La Pinta.  We should have called ahead – the Desert Inn was fully booked as the Baja 1000 was well underway.  Lots of racers, chase and support teams and had taken up all of the rooms.   We quickly got back into our cars and raced back up the road to secure a room in the only other motel in this little town called Cabañas Linda (not the kind of place that you want as a namesake, believe me!).

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The word “linda” in Spanish means beautiful and, believe me, this motel was FAR from that description!  Other than driving on to Guerrero Negro, we really had no other choice unless we wanted to sleep in our cars.  Since that wasn’t an option, we secured the last two rooms available.

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The rooms were princess pink – from floor to ceiling – PINK!  We were laughing with some racers that were staying in a room next to our two rooms – a double bed and bunk beds that were top to bottom princess pink.  Hilarious!  Doors that wouldn’t lock, furniture that was picked up, we’re sure, at roadside flea markets, bedding that you definitely wanted to keep your clothes on to lay upon, and bathrooms fixtures that you stood well away from!

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Mom was a great sport about it all – in fact, far better than her daughter.  It was her first truly authentic Mexican experience outside of the tourist destinations that my parents traveled to over the years.  She said it reminded her of a story that my Dad told of staying somewhere once where he listened to the sound of beetles falling from the ceiling all night.  Sometimes you’re tired enough that you can sleep anywhere – literally!

At eleven o’clock, the motel turned out the generator that ran the lights and power and I worried that Mom would have trouble finding the bathroom when she got up in the night.  I thought knocking on her door to tell her what happened would scare her even more, so trusted that she would be careful and find her way safely.  Lesson learned: always have a small flashlight in your travel bag!

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The motel knew what they were doing as no one would stay there past day break and they had ample time to turn the rooms over.  They had a café on site that only served instant coffee, so everyone staying at the motel headed south to the Desert Inn for our cup of java instead.   We drove a short distance north again to take in the Boulder Field in the morning light.  Boulders as big as large buildings and cacti growing out of nothing but rock – absolutely amazing!

Cataviña Boulder Field

Cataviña Boulder Field