lingering summer hues

Oranges and pinks seem to be congregating in my life at the moment.

1. A bouquet of farmer's market flowers. I fell in love with the large pink dahlias, and the safflower's tiny orange bursts of petals seemed to complement the golden cores of the dahlias.

2. A pile of thank-you notes ready to send out to wedding guests.

3. The fabric that will hopefully become my first sewing project, an apron, one day. I sewed the cut edges with a zig-zag stitch, and put it through the wash last night. Tomorrow night in class I will iron and start cutting the pattern pieces.

welcome fall

Well, our wedding has come and gone, and we are enjoying married life so far. It feels like the quiet after the storm. Planning a wedding was a lot of work, it turns out. There is plenty I would do differently if I could do it again, but it was a perfect day for us.

I hope to post plenty of the wedding-related photos that I never got around to between my last post (in May), and today--the first day of fall--my favorite season!

There is lots of change brewing this season. I'm taking a drawing class and a sewing class and am already enjoying the opportunity to use new parts of my brain.

Above are some new linens, from Alex, new wooden spoons, and my kitchen's dirty floor.

belated cake update

Well, I've got a whole folder full of photos to post since I haven't had much time for blogging this past month. Wedding planning has been put on hold for now since we've gotten the big-ticket items sorted out (venue, caterer, dress, invites, etc.) and will probably start devoting more time to the details (decorations, play list, . . . ) once the summer starts. But I never followed up on the outcome of our quest for yummy cake, so I thought I'd share that we ended up going with Satura Cakes in Palo Alto, much to my surprise.

When I first saw this place I thought it was a bakery that specialized in Asian-style cakes, which tend to be not as sweet as American cakes. This actually isn't the case at all (although the cakes were not overly sweet, they were very Western in flavor). The owner is a Japanese man who apparently he visited the states many years ago and noted a lack of French-style bakery shops where one could pop in and order a pain au chocolat in comparison to Tokyo (which has a slew of pastry chefs trained en France). He decided that if and when he made his millions, he'd come back and start a bakery.

In addition to their fabulous product presentation and packaging, their cake itself does not disappoint. It is delicious and the tasting was a real pleasure to attend--ample servings of a wide variety of cakes, and no pressure to make a decision. Their cakes are all very unique, we ended up selecting four for our wedding. The main wedding cake will have 3 tiers and 2 different flavors--red velvet (dense rich cake, with cream cheese frosting between the layers with fresh blueberries and raspberries to add a touch of tartness), and a very light white cake with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. In addition we'll have a tray of tiny cake "squares" made of two torte-like sheet cakes. The "Yuna" is a chocolate hazelnut confection, and the other is a coconut cake with layers of mango creme. Mmmm!

Flavors aside, what won me over with this bakery was their great ingredients and commitment to freshness. Our cake will be made the afternoon before our wedding and frosted/decorated the day-of.

the whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead

Michael Pollan visited Stanford today and Andres and I went to hear him speak. He was scheduled to begin at 7:30pm, and since the event was free and open to the public we showed up almost an hour and a half early (ironically, or perhaps appropriately, with "to go" burritos in tow).

By 7pm all the seats were gone and people were starting to fill the aisles. Michael's host, Christopher Gardner, a professor of nutrition science at Stanford, informed us that it was "not illegal" to have people in the aisles, provided no one brought any additional seating into the hall, but urged everyone to be mindful of the obvious fire hazard. I heard a few folks behind me grumbling about the reality behind this statement, but I'm guessing that in the end they would have felt it was worth the risk.

Michael gave a great talk. What a pleasure for me to discover that not only do his ideas about food and the politics that surround it resonate with me in a deep way, but he seems like a cool guy as well (check out his sneakers in the photo!) He's smart, articulate, funny, and has a compelling, though not at all strident, humanist message that comes out through his lucid and fresh prose.

He explained that the motivation for his most recent book, In Defense of Food, was that after writing the Omnivore's Dilemma (an exploration of where food comes from in America, and what it implies about our society) he kept having readers come up to him and complain that they weren't able to finish the book out of fear that once they did, there would no longer be any food that they could eat in good conscience. So he set out to deliver some broad principles for eating. He also examines (and criticizes) "nutrientism", what he sees as a western reductionist approach to eating, and offers instead a handful of heuristics to help guide our food choices.

All of the rules he offered, e.g. this post's title and, "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food", have the result of emphasizing tried and true "whole" foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and of urging us to trust in our tastebuds. I have some more thoughts about how many of his complaints about nutrition science apply more widely to the medical sciences, but will have to save them for another day. All in all it was so exciting to see that a someone could (over)fill such a large auditorium with a book expounding the virtues of produce. Hooray for the yam!

let them eat cake! (part 1)

No doubt that cake tasting is the part of wedding planning I have been most excited about. I've had a sweet tooth since forever (I used to eat crazy amounts of sugar after swim practice in high school, e.g. half gallons of Breyer's mint chocolate chip and row upon row of double stuff Oreos), and now that I've more or less purged sugar from my pre-wedding diet I was all the more ready for a sweet treat. So last weekend we had a tasting at The Prolific Oven and today we tried the offerings at The Palo Alto Baking Company.

I wish I had my camera with me--the PABC had six beautiful little mini-cakes for us to try. I've been a fairly loyal patron of this place since I moved to the Bay Area b/c they have some of the best croissants in town (it was previously owned by a French couple, and the new owner, Charles Whelan, has kept their recipes alive) but this was my first time trying the cake. It was extremely fresh and light, and the fresh fruit, buttercream, chocolate ganache and whipped cream were all excellent. However, the cake itself was almost too airy and light for my taste, I prefer a denser cake, and the flavor was quite mild so it was really more about the fillings, which were home-made (except the raspberry filling which is imported from Sweden or something) and tasty. I got to try fondant for the first time too, which was neat. I wasn't a fan of the sugar stuff, but the white chocolate fondant was really good and surprisingly chocolate-y (for white chocolate, which apparently doesn't even contain cacao, but does have cocoa butter I believe).

Overall I'd say that the cake at Prolific Oven is more my style, which is to say, dense and sugary. They only use cream cheese frosting which is creamy, rich and delicious, but you really can't eat a ton of this stuff b/c it's soO sweet. The cake itself at Prolific Oven is really unique, it's light and dense at the same time, and very flavorful. Our top choices there were the carrot cake and the chocolate rum cake.

We've got two more shops to try, one of which is the top-rated cake place on the Project Wedding forum. Right now we're thinking we'll do a Prolific Oven cake and supplement that with a few tarts/tortes from Tartine, a great place in the city but they don't do wedding cakes).

rain rain go away

This weekend was cold and soggy, which was frustrating because my internet doesn't seem to work when it rains. This must be a physical issue with some wire getting, well, wet or something, no? Still, the indoor weather was a good excuse to upload some recent photos from our trip to Long Beach to visit Bets and Brad.

I love the textures in the tree and side walk that the rain brought out. Also, next time you find yourself in Seal Beach, save some room for breakfast at Nicks:
The breakfast burritos here are DELISH. Again, I think the texture is key--the insides are all chopped up and interspersed into a tasty egg/chorizo/bacon/potato/cheese amalgam, then the package is neatly wrapped in a homemade tortilla. By far the best breakfast burrito I've encountered (and apparently I'm not alone, so be ready for a line)!

beginnings...

I'm facing so many these days, including the beginning of the end of my time at Stanford and my career as a neuroscientist. All this flux is both exciting and scary to me, and I'm trying to spend time focusing on the former adjective. I hope to use this space as a way to exercise my creativity and to document the changes I'm facing, the plans I'm making, and the stuff I'm enjoying along the way*.

I'll start with this photo, in tribute to my title, which means "Sweet Potato" in Japanese:


* Note: For the next several months many of my posts may be wedding-related. I'm a bride-to-be whose head is spinning (with glee!) at all the beautiful choices I get to make. However, in general I expect this stuff to focus on fabric, photos, food, the occasional fact or two, along with various other assorted fluff.