It rained lightly both heading north and back. Since rain is such a rare event in these parts, I got out my camera.

I-5 in the rain

These two shots are of the windshield on the way back. Don’t worry–John was driving. The first is with Interstate 5 in the background. The second is while we were being passed by a truck.

Passing Truck, Rain

The Breakfast Spread

Starving Artist’s Plate

My photographs in the exhibition

And then it was finally time to go inside and preview the exhibition. Here’s my wall in the exhibition. Tonight there’ll probably be a few hundred more people at the opening, so it won’t be so easy to document the exhibition view.

Landscaping Around the Gallery and Library Complex

The gallery itself is part of the complex that houses the Carlsbad Public Library. Landscaping there is a mix of native sycamore trees and exotics–spiky sedges, biomorphic hedges and myoporum for groundcover. Like the library and gallery complex, it’s modern without trying to be particularly avant-garde. Nicely done, I thought.

The Overhead Screen

Running around the perimeter of the buildings is a screen wall that is set several feet from the main walls of the complex. Joining the two are these overhead screens cut out of patinated metal. The branches on the screens curve in arabesques that reminded me of Art Nouveau, but the triangular frames give them a geometrical edge that joins them comfortably with the architecture.

Isn’t it a shame most people are so busy looking down they never notice the branches–or artwork–overhead?

Post on the work in the show
The Cannon Gallery

For any vegetarians out there: How many times have you heard this bit of reassurance, only to go to the table and be faced with plate after plate of beautifully-grown vegetables that have been transformed into something other than a vegetable dish?

Green beans and onions cooked with chicken stock and sprinkled with bacon?
Spinach with…bacon?
Mashed potatoes with…bacon?
Brussels sprouts with…bacon?

Fortunately I’m not the strictest of vegetarians. If the only options are veggies with bits of meat incorporated into the dish, I’ll try to leave the meaty bits on the plate or eat around them. But there are plenty of folks I know who would decline the offerings.

We veg-heads are used to bringing our own dishes to these gatherings. We also try to help out in the kitchen and tactfully try to make gentle suggestions for substitutions. But at a time of year when people focus on traditions, this is a delicate issue that risks fracturing a family into upstarts and traditionalists.

There’s one easy suggestion that might please almost everyone at the table: Instead of putting bacon in every dish, why not fill a condiment dish with crunchy bacon bits that people could heap on top of their veggies? The vegetarians would avoid it, leaving even more for everyone else! Also, you could offer a flavorful sauce on the side that could keep the bacon fans happy.

And of course, trying new preparations could come up with new family traditions. This Thanksgiving probably the most unusual dish was something Olinda next door shared with us: a sweet and aromatic preparation of sweet potatoes and guavas. The plate looked similar to traditional yams, but everything was heady with the aromas of fresh-baked guavas, something that reminded me of the perfume of flowers.

Olinda ran a Mexican restaurant until her recent retirement. Although sweet potatoes and guavas is a traditional celebratory dish in Mexico, it unfortunately wasn’t one that ever showed up on the menu of her restaurant. And I doubt that you’d ever see it offered at any mainstream Mexican eatery.

I’m working on Olinda to get her to divulge her recipe, but until I’m successful here’s a link to a recipe in the Texas Monthly that looks very similar. Yes, it looks like a lot of sugar. This is a sweet dish, but I’m sure you could adjust the sugar to your liking. But whatever you do, don’t scrimp on the guavas!

(If you don’t have access to fresh guavas, there are a number of recipes on the web that use the somewhat easier to find guava jam.)

The orderliness required to plant, grow, harvest, process, pack, store, monitor, administer, transport, display and sell the produce in a supermarket is simply staggering, and the expended energy intense.

As an example, tomato production in the US consumes four times as many calories as the calorific value of the tomatoes created…

Even before its sea voyage, the calorific value of US wheat is only twice the amount of calories expended to produce it. Compare this with cassava production in Tanzania where 23 times the calorific value is gained for each calorie of human energy input.

Of course, you can’t derive nutritional benefit from drinking diesel fuel or some of the other power inputs necessary to produce food in the industrial American agricultural system. But that would be fuel that could be devoted to something more important–or kept out of the atmosphere entirely.

(The statistic on farmed tomatoes has shades of the title of William Alexander’s book, The $64 Tomato, a book I haven’t read yet. It’s on my list…)

Plum tart

Early last week, while I was working, John had a chance to go up to Northridge and visit his aunt for a few days. As part of the long weekend he was able to go to the aunt’s sister’s house and raid her plum tree. “You couldn’t tell I touched it,” John said, referring to the number of fruits the tree still had on it. He came home with maybe five or six pounds of them.

When you have a small crop of anything you savor every single fruit. But with this many I could splurge, and breakfast Sunday included a plum tart. Photographing something purple-black against a white background turned out to be a little too much contrast to make the picture look that appetizing. But hot out of the oven it wasn’t bad. (I must admit, though, that John might be getting tired of this blogging thing, with me going, “Wait a minute. We need a picture before we eat it…” I can just see the next tell-all book to hit it big: I married a blogger…)

Lycoris squamingera on bare stem

Outside, things were blooming. The first of the month brought this big burst of Lycoris squamigera Amaryllis belladonna, which along with a passel of other common names is called naked ladies. The plant grows actively in the fall through spring, putting out long strap-shaped leaves, but no flowers. The flowers come now, in midsummer, after the plant has gone dormant and dropped all its leaves. The lone flower stem comes up from the bare earth, completely unadorned by leaves–hence the common name. Another of its common names is “surprise lily,” which also makes a lot of sense–Imagine seeing this after writing the plant off as a goner. Edit: “Surprise lily” refers more to lycoris, which I’ve decided this plant isn’t after all, after a couple discussions.

Because it grows in the winter, when it’s wet, and is basically dormant in the long rainless summer, it gets by with minimal supplemental watering, making it a perfect bulb for Mediterranean climates like Southern California.

Other species in the genus Lycoris are sometimes called naked ladies as well, but the plant around here that is most commonly referred to by that name is the rounder, taller, more buxom Amaryllis belladonna.

The rental house next door which often gets zero yard care has a patch by their front door. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong with mine. Why were mine shorter? And why did mine bloom for a somewhat shorter (but more intense) period? Then I put the pieces together…totally different species. I suppose there’s something of that grass always being greener thing going on here.

Now that I’ve figured it out I like mine just fine. In fact I think these, my kids, are much more wonderful than anyone else’s… See the species correction above. I’ve decided this is Amaryllis belladonna after all!

Lycoris squamingera closeup

Caprese salad tomato tower

Before I add this to the menu at Spago, I’d try to be sure the tomatoes were more similar in both size and shape. Also, cleaner, more uniform cuts through the buffalo mozzarella would have made for a neater presentation.

Here’s the loot from the Saturday: the first Early Girls, as well as some Mr. Stripeys.

They made for a tasty, quick black bean salad for lunch. But they really came into their own sliced up with some Mozzarella di Bufala Campana (a.k.a. buffalo mozzarella), olive oil, basil, pepper and a smidge of salt–your basic caprese salad.

Simple, uncomplicated foods, fresh and delicious from the back yard. Summer doesn’t get much better than this! If only I had some water buffalos to make my own fresh cheese…