by Caroline
As Pete Wells recently wrote, our generation matured into a sad time without cocktails. It was all wine and beer. I participated, but aside from my junior year in England I’ve never really been a beer drinker, and red wine, sadly, gives me headaches.
But slowly, happily, the world has started to swing back to cocktails. First, there was our trip to Italy a year after our wedding. We traveled with another couple, and met up, too, with Tony’s brother and his mom, Nancy. An evening with Nancy started around 5 or 6 at her hotel; we would gather from our sight-seeing and share our adventures. She’d drink a martini; Tony (in honor of his late father) would drink a campari and soda; I’d sip a glass of Prosecco. It’s important to have a little bowl of salty snacks — cashews or olives, perhaps– to accompany the drinks. We dubbed it Nancy Hour and it continues to this day, long past Nancy’s passing, whenever we meet up with these same friends.
Then a couple years ago, I gave Tony a bottle of George T. Stagg Kentucky bourbon whiskey for his birthday, a bottle that recently inspired his friends to host a blind tasting of 6 bourbons (now all in our bar) for his 40th. We started watching Mad Men (along with the rest of the country), and discovered San Francisco bartenders mixing up interesting drinks. And so it was that on a recent camping trip with three other families, we brought a full bar and several bottles of wine. I made a batch of these vodka-spiked cherry tomatoes with pepper salt to accompany our drinks, and we stirred up cocktails every night while the kids ate dinner—gin and tonics or sazeracs, sidecars or margaritas on the rocks — and sipped bourbon around the campfire after the kids were down. We carried all the wine back home at the end of the trip. Now I’m no extremist, and there’s still a place in my world for wine, but please don’t cut short the cocktail hour.
One of the first things my husband Tony and I learned about each other on our first (blind) date was that our fathers both made wine. His dad actually used grapes. A regular event during Tony’s childhood involved taking delivery of a load of zinfandel grapes, stomping them into juice in the backyard and then – well, Tony’s version skips right to the burritos (a rare takeout meal after a long day of grape-mashing), while his father continued to do all the work to make and bottle wine that we still (on very special occasions) enjoy today.
My dad, influenced by Euell Gibbons’ books like Stalking the Wild Asparagus, made wines from elderberries, dandelions and blueberries. He kept burlap bags in the back of the car so that he was always prepared to gather materials – you never know when you might run across a nice patch of dandelions – and his foraging habit almost stopped before I was old enough to be embarrassed by it, but not quite. I do remember helping him decant it sometimes, holding the tubing that carried the wine from a 5-gallon carboy into the wine bottles. It spilled all over me once and I still remember the pungent smell of the fermented blueberries, vinegary and sweet.
Tony and I do not make wine. We don’t make our own bitters or beer, as some of our friends do, nor limoncello, like Lisa and her family, nor even root beer, as my family did when I was little. The beverage that gets the most care and attention in this household is probably Tony’s morning cappuccino, which he learned how to make at his father’s elbow as a child, and which he is now teaching the boys how to make. And maybe it’s the influence of that morning cappuccino that has the boys lately making complicated milk drinks. It started one hot day with Eli adding ice to his milk, and has now evolved into a recipe that involves a sprinkle of cinnamon, a few grates of nutmeg, and sometimes a spoonful of Ovaltine and/or vanilla. It reminds me a bit of those old Colonial milk punch recipes (but without the booze). And it’s the only way Ben will drink milk, so I’ll keep putting the ingredients out.
(Tune in later for a post about the mixed drinks the adults are drinking around here)
What’s a summer without ice cream? No kind of summer at all. Last week we made our own It’s-Its, this week, we stopped in at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (where everybody has a good ti-ime) and tried out the ice cream treats on offer there.
Ben, no doubt still dreaming of It’s-Its (and also realizing that everything tastes better when served on a stick), went for the chocolate-dipped “sandae”:
Eli just went for sheer size, choosing the Super Sundae Cone:
He even ate the maraschino cherry off the top, and declared “This is the goodest moment ever!” Which made it a really good moment for me, too.
We decided to drive to San Diego so my husband could attend ComicCon, and once we figured out that it was too late to reserve a camping spot halfway down, we decided to stop in Solvang. For us, if it’s a toss up between a tent and a great deal on a hotel with an excellent restaurant and spa, we’ll take the hotel any day.
We left at 5 AM. That’s right, before dawn, because 1) we wanted to be in Solvang for breakfast and 2) Ella gets carsick, so we figured the more hours asleep in the car, the better. I had a bag packed with boxed milk, strawberries, and bagels to tide us over until breakfast. Of course, the kids were so excited that once we were in the car there was No Chance in H— of Sleep. To combat Ella’s carsickness, I gave her Seabands, which proved miraculous. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a pair for Finn, and about halfway into the trip he moaned, and turned green, and threw up. So that was the end of the food on that leg of the journey. He eventually slept, and we did, in fact, arrive in Solvang in time for breakfast at Paula’s Pancakes. I was basically underwhelmed by the restuarant, but the kids quickly got over the sleep deprivation and Finn bounced back from the queasiness, and they loved this place. They both ate impossibly huge stacks (adult servings, actually) of pancakes and blueberries…
which kept them fueled for the rest of a really fun day visiting the Hans Christian Anderson Museum (ok, not their most favorite part of the trip):
riding a bicycle surrey with fringe on top(really!):
and taking funny pictures of windmills and other such Germanic-Scandanavian things:
We tried to think about eating ebelskiver, and fudge, and ice cream, which everyone around us seemed to be enjoying, but we had no appetite for anything after all those pancakes, not a single one of us.
That evening, we had a really lovely meal at the Hadsten House, which I enjoyed all the more after a terrific massage/body treatment, and then it was on to San Diego. The kids ate breakfast at the hotel, which made me quite nervous, naturally, but we got Finn a pair of Seabands at the local CVS, and they worked miraculously for him, too. No carsickness for either child for the rest of the trip, which left them free to munch on the granola bars, plums, and piles of pistachios I had packed. Yes, the car was a mess, but they were happy & not too junk filled. On the way home, we ate lunch at In ‘N Out burger, the one fast food we allow ourselves, and for which we all, admittedly, have great weakness.
The trip was not supposed to be about food, but it was about me not having to cook for nearly a week (which was an excellent vacation in itself, mind you). I was wary of theme park food (which was only truly horrible on one occasion), and I had brought cereal, milk, juice, fruit, bread, peanut butter and jelly, and snack crackers for our hotel room, which proved a really efficient and economical way to deal with breakfast and the occasional lunch. The food at San Diego Zoo was more than tolerable, at SeaWorld was abysmal (and you can’t bring a lunch in), and we avoided the crowds and junk at Disneyland by making reservations for 2 sit down meals (Blue Bayou and Big Thunder Ranch BBQ, both of which were pricey, but we found worth it for the decent quality food and the down time both places afforded us).
For most of the rest of the trip we visited with beluga whales & dolphins:
where the kids (& I) were truly smitten at the Shamu show:
enjoyed very cute pandas who really did eat bamboo:
met various Superheros & other denizens of the 2 & 3-D world:
consorted with fairies in Pixie Hollow:
rode rides with abandon (including every roller coaster at Disney & Space Mountain (twice), with both kids, and no, for some inexplicable reason, Seabands were not necessary…):
and just generally enjoyed watching Finn vanquish Darth Vader (which video I can only link to for size restrictions, but below is a preview…):
But we did have a few absolutely memorable family food experiences, which will be chronicled here in the coming days, including two excellent local San Diego spots, the kids’ first exposure to truly fine dining, and then the antidote to fine dining: room service.
It’s not, despite the jingle, Rice-a-Roni. No, the true, old school, San Francisco treat is an It’s-It, a chocolate-covered oatmeal cookie ice cream sandwich, originally invented by George Whitney in 1928, and sold for decades at San Francisco’s Playland-at-the-Beach. Now that the playground is gone, It’s-Its are made in a small factory near San Francisco airport. We’ve been driving past the factory for years, and finally the other day I looked at the website to see if they offer factory tours. Sadly, no. We drowned our sorrows in homemade It’s-Its:
