Entries from January 2012 ↓

Someone with a similar vantage point to us made this cool time lapse video of the Bay Bridge emerging from the fog yesterday morning. Very cool.

On Friday we received our first invitation to an American football party for yesterday, when the San Francisco Giants were playing for a place in the Big Game, which I think is the SuperBowl. I think the whole country comes to a standstill for that. We umm’d and aaah’d a bit about going. The invitation came through a Xero investor and we don’t really know him socially that well but it was a good chance to change that and meet some of his friends. The Mister was reasonably interested in seeing the game, a really big deal for San Francisco, so good to watch it with a bunch of people. Obviously I had no interest, but I packed up my knitting and figured I could amuse myself for 3 hours. THREE HOURS.

It was the second day of rain for the winter yesterday so we got on the bus with several other soggy fans heading to friends houses with pots of chilli and packs of beer. We discovered our friend lived very close to Matching Half so I was allowed to stop for a coffee to ready myself!

The house was full of shouting lads all in their football colors, wives and girl friends at the fringes, some in there shouting, one looking after some kids. There was beer, there were homemade chicken wings (apparently the deep fryer was purchased just for game day) and there were some seriously delicious hamburgers. Our friend has previously owned restaurants and enjoys food and cooking so no wonder his burgers were so delicious. The Mister was wedged on the couch between some boisterous lads and no-one used a knife and fork … that was rather interesting for him! I flitted between chatting with girls and leaning in the kitchen watching the burgers. I only got my knitting out to show someone who was interested to see it otherwise I had enough new people to meet and survived the 3 hours quite well! I didn’t ask what was going on. I didn’t ask if the game was nearly over.

Being from Florida, Kara doesn’t own many woolly things – especially not hats, scarves or gloves. She mentioned she was looking for a snugly woolly hat and of course I had to show off about my knitting. I took my beanie pattern book into work to see if there was one she liked then set about finding some wool. Not so easy here! Shops are not in the city, they seem to be little specialty shops out in the burbs. However, it seems that Patons, a wool I used in New Zealand a lot, could be ordered online here. I picked what I hoped was a good green – she loves green … I didn’t tell her I was making it.

I gave it to her this morning. She opened it and grabbed it and said something like “Holy crap, I’m I’m speechless, I thought if I was lucky I might get something by next winter. I love it. Holy crap. Best. Monday. Ever.” I was happy! And so was she – it was put on straight away!

And didn’t take it off for the rest of the day

The Orange Sister sent me a photo today of her new puppy – so cute! And smaller than a Mac Book! Name to be confirmed but Stella is the fav so far. Can’t wait for a pat in a couple of weeks.

Yes it’s a big deal, only the 2nd or 3rd time in the 6 months we’ve been here and 1st time I’ve worn my rain boots. Still strange to be in winter in January. People outside the Crazy Offices commented on the boots.

Now then – what are we going to do with this bunch of leaves? Looks a bit like horse food.

Might be similar to silver beet but the leaves are much thicker. Wholefoods had a big pile of ‘healthy greens’ with this being listed at the top so we wanted to take a closer look – they had a recipe tied onto them so that made it easier, a rice, ham and collard greens concoction.  We looked up collard greens on Wikipedia (thankfully we were cooking them on the day before Wikipedia went down to protest SOPA … hopefully by the time you’re reading this it will still be there) for some more info about them after I said they smelled a bit like cabbage when I started cutting them and apparently ‘cabbage plant’ is a common term and indeed the leaves are very healthy – vitamin C, fiber etc.

So we followed the recipe to chop them up and put them in a pot with rice, ham and chicken stock.

Simmered away for 25 mins and ta daaaa – a hearty, risotto-type dish, tasted quite meaty and the greens didn’t have an overwhelming flavor, hard to explain but cauliflowerish. Not bad, but not sure if we’d have it again. Plus our gas elements are incredibly frustrating and don’t quite go low enough that everything didn’t boil dry and stick to the bottom of the pot.

We’ve got such a great little team in the San Francisco office now. After the 2 of us being in the office a while it’s great to have the other 4 guys all start around the same time so we can all feel part of the founding team here. We’ve now got a couple of specific customer-facing guys, events and our US MD. Nice having American accents in the office too. Hopefully we’ll look back on this photo in the not too distant future and marvel at how much we’ve grown.

We didn’t eat fish n chips much in New Zealand but lately The Mister has been feeling like some so decided to make them himself. We had to get some non-olive oil, he chose canola, and then figure out what the fish is here. The nice man in the supermarket picked some firm fish but none of the names are familiar to us. Well, there was halibut but we couldn’t remember if that’s the fish we remember from our childhood’s as being used by bait the last time either of our father’s fished!

I was fixated on keeping the place aired – I left The Mister to do the cooking but wasn’t so keen on the ‘huge pot of boiling oil’ but the recipe he had only need 1cm of oil so there wasn’t much splattering and nothing caught fire! I hurried some creamed spinach together and it was a delicious meal!

Went for a walk today over to Ritch Street – a couple of blocks from work – to try out another Blue Bottle place over there and to see the lunch options our colleagues had told us about. Centro serves Blue Bottle and it’s just a hole in the wall, next to it is Little Skillet which turns out to be a tiny take-away version of Framer Brown that we went to with Bev and Dan earlier in the week (yum, I had meat loaf and mashed sweet potato – my god the portions are huge) and near by on the same street is a small parking lot with a couple of different food trucks that visit each day (Indian and Mexican today) and a sandwich shop Darwin.

So quite an interesting little street!

Here’s the holes in the wall Centro and Little Skillet.

The coffee was great – nice Blue Bottle flavor but perhaps lacking the balls and glossiness of the actual Blue Bottle outlets. We sat on a loading dock across the road and had our coffee in the sun.

Stopped at Darwin and got a mozzarella and basil baguette to share for lunch. Made fresh in front of us – man it was good!

Centro, 330 Ritch Street, San Francisco, @centro330