nuff said.

And I’m not even really clear what it is.

Cleared tech and BS inspection, and one practice session complete!

Today marks 10 years of togetherness for Leslie and me. Wow! We put together a retrospective of a few pics on gallery. What a ride! Here’s to the next 10.

As viewed from Pt. Isabel.

A last bit of independent touristing before we head to Seville.

Well, we’re a week into our Spanish tour and achieving new levels of awesomeness every day. I won’t try to give a blow-by-blow; for a pictorial description that’s more than you wanted to know, even before we’ve had time to add comments, check out the gallery.

Yesterday, we picked up our car, an adorable A-class Mercedes hatchback, and began our first foray into international road tripping. For the record, I had a beer and a coffee with lunch, and so started this experience with a double buzz. Leslie pointed out that this was probably for the best: a beer to relax me and a coffee to hone my attention.

I was mentally prepared for all kinds of hassles renting the car, but in fact it was considerably easier than in the states. Our credit card covered insurance, and they didn’t even try to upsell us on gas. The car is a diesel with a 6-speed manual transmission, but the clutch is very forgiving and it’s easy to drive. With only mild terror, we pulled into traffic and out of San Sebastian.

We were meant to stay in San Sebastian two nights. Our first night, we had a bit of a frustrating time trying to find good pintxos (pronounced something like “peenchos”), little snacks set out on plates at bars all over Basque country. There was no shortage of places serving this, but we learned quickly that if you could walk in and help yourself, they were bound to be old and probably not that impressive. Here’s an example of vast but not so good pintxos:

Leslie had researched several excellent pintxos bars, and you could spot them from down the street by the crowds boiling out onto the streets in front of their doors. Also by the fact that inside, there were no pintxos to be found, just hungry people waiting to pounce on the next plate to be brought out. Un pocito como asi:

If you know anything about Leslie and I, you can guess that this wasn’t exactly our scene. We retreated somewhat sheepishly to a nearby bar bar, like with drinks and stuff but no pintxos.

Another aside here, about drinking in Spain. Beer is expensive. Wine is cheap. It’s like bizarro land. A 0.4L glass of beer, which is considerably shy of a pint, will set you back 3-5 euros. And this beer is pretty crappy–some generic local pilsner, usually. The best mass-market one we’ve found so far is Keler, which was only served in Basque country. One night out of sheer luck we stumbled into the “Cat Bar” in the old town of Barcelona, which it turned out was run by a British ex-pat beer nerd (the tables were all covered in Brew Dog labels carefully removed from empties). Even he couldn’t provide good draft beer, but he pointed us to the one and only real beer bar in Barcelona, also in old town, which served a selection of German and American craft beers on tap! Haha! Also lots of bottles from Rogue, belgians, etc. So, I’m declaring that there’s no beer culture in spain. Fine, whatever. Our first day in San Sebastian, we got 3/4 bottle of totally drinkable Tempranillo for $6 and I officially gave up on beer :)

So anyway, we’ve retreated from the good pintxo bars on Friday night in San Sebastian, and stumbled on a bar serving two Keler beers for 3€. Holy shit, now we’re talking. We drank four while working on an increasingly difficult Sunday NYTimes crossword, then stumbled to what was the best  fine-dining experience so far in Spain at Bodegón Alejandro, another one of Leslie’s finds.

The restaurants in San Sebastian work thusly: they open at 8:30 and close promptly at 10:30. So luckily we arrived by 8:45, and ended up as one of the last couples seated, and left well after 11. So it’s like there’s just one seating for every restaurant… weird and a seemingly lost opportunity since the streets of San Sebastian were thronging with people at 6:30pm, and I bet a lot were hungry. Spaniards just lack that capatalist killer instinct, I guess.

Unfortunately, after our excellent meal, we had to return to our pension with shared bath. We slept fine, woke up a bit hung over (and in Leslie’s case, with the beginning of a cold), and remembered that we didn’t have any towels, and they weren’t supplied in the bathroom, and so we had this sort of hilarious shower where we dried off using Leslie’s scarf, which worked even less well than it sounds. All our clothes were dirty. Our tasks for the day included finding and using a laundromat, renting our car, and then finding a place to park it overnight in bustling San Sebastian, which task you can understand the hilarious impossibility of by browsing our pictures of the town.

Fortified by a dose of cafe con leche, we floated the concept of getting the hell out of San Sebastian that day and sleeping somewhere else (there were a total of zero real hotel rooms available in San Sebastian). When we breezed through the car pick up and they said we were welcome leave it in the rental lot for a few hours, our spirits rose. While our laundry tumbled, we researched and booked a somewhat random hotel in the rural hills south of the coast, all on our fully internet connected US iPhones.

Ah, the phones! Time for another aside. Quite optimistically, we each brought our shiny new iPhone 4S with us, hoping that we’d be able to buy a local SIM card with data service and just pop them in. While stocking up on supplies for our stay in Barcelona, I hit up every major local carrier: Vodafone, Orange, Movistar, asking if I could buy a pre-paid SIM for the iPhone: these were some of my earliest substantive conversations in Spanish, and while halting the message was clear: no SIM for you! The iPhone 4(s) uses a microSIM, which is actually just a normal SIM with less plastic, and no one could provide one. I retreated to the hotel, and Googled a bit, and found a thread about a more pragmatic, multicarrier phone vendor called PhoneHouse. I went there, and for 20 euros a piece got prepaid SIMs that included high-speed internet access. But they weren’t micro! No problem, because they had a little device that just chopped them down to the right size. Amazingly, Sprint did not lock the SIM slot, and so we just popped them in and it worked. In fact, it’s much cheaper and better service than we have through Sprint in the US. And that is the story of how we were able to carry around our little internet-connected computers through our whole trip to spain.

So we’re in the laundry, and we book this hotel, and we tell the pension that thanks but no thanks we’re blowing town, and we pull out onto our first Spanish highway. And we’re in the mountains, and it’s beautiful. The drive proceeds like the beginning of a video game: You Can Drive In Spain. Level 1 is huge, wide highways. Level 2 is smaller local highways, Level 3 is Roundabouts: No Traffic Version. Level 4 is Now You’re Driving on Windy Mountain Roads and Level 6 is Now You’re On A Full Blown Dirt Road In The Mountains How the Fuck Can This Really Be The Way To The Hotel. But our Garmin GPS (a.k.a. the Marriage Saver) is not wrong, and after a quick inquiry with the friendly locals (who luckily speak Spanish in addition to Basque), we find the hotel. The hotel which is, in fact, a beautifully renovated 14th century blacksmithing building next door to a 14th century mansion. And we’re basically the only guests (in fact, we think we’re the only guests until halfway through dinner when one other couple comes out to eat). Highlights of the blacksmith include real, old-ass walls, amazingly friendly husband-and-wife staff, and a tiny puppy skittering around who quickly became Leslie’s best friend and confidant.

…heart of the Spanish wine country, drinking German beer. Prost.

We returned to our favorite lunch spot today: the huge boqueria along la rambla. Here is the seafood counter where we ate: a pile each of fresh shellfish, mushrooms, and peppers, grilled, salted, and served. Heaven on earth. Also obtained: jamon iberico and xorico (that’s Catalan for chorizo).

Just after the morning walk with the dog…

We’re reviving ourselves here after our 8.85 mile walk through the Met and the park (yes, I’m wearing a pedometer; I won’t go into it). At least we’re burning off some fraction of the rich food we stuff ourselves with at every meal.

I love eating in NYC.

George got married yesterday–hooray! My contribution to the wedding was bringing pulled pork for the dinner. I’ve made pulled pork about half a dozen times now, but this was only the second time I was using my sweet new Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker (aka “Weber Bullet“). As you’ll see, though, I couldn’t fit all the pork (about 75 pounds all told) into it, and there’s no way in hell I was going to do two batches, so Nelson (my pork shoulder mentor/idol) lent me his bullet as well for dual smoking action!

I started with 3 pounds of molasses and 4.5 pounds of salt mixed with three gallons of water for the brine.

Our biggest cooler was just capacious enough to contain the 9 boneless pork shoulders as they brined overnight:

On Friday evening after work, I pulled them out of the brine. They were visibly plumped and brown from the molasses. Then I started in on making my secret rub, which is not actually a secret. In fact, here’s a picture with all the ingredients. OK, I’ll just admit that this is the Cook’s Illustrated basic barbecue rub. Are you happy? Didn’t you find it more intriguing when it was a secret?

I rubbed the shoulders and tied them to get them ready for the grill. Check out the awesome leather apron that Leslie got me for the occasion!

Next, I prepped the two smokers, filling the water pans and adding cold charcoal to the fire rings. I started a chimney worth of coals and added just about 10 hot coals to each ring. These 10 would light the others and slowly spread the fire over the next 8-10 hours before the first time I had to add fuel–this amazing technique for no-maintenance fires is called the “Minion Method,” and I can’t say enough good things about it. It almost sort of lets you sleep through the night.

With the fires lit, I stacked the pork two stories high in both smokers, and we were off.

(Not pictured: the next 15 hours of maintaining the smokers’ temperatures within 10 degrees of 225 with the help of just one remote thermometer, a headlamp, and a light touch on the air vents surrounding the fire rings. Let’s just say I was pretty tired by the time we got to the wedding.)

And just like that, we’ve got barbecue!

Leslie and I were forced to do a quick taste test before serving it the the wedding guests–just looking out for their well being!

You heard that right, folks: Leslie and I finally made it out to that ultimate west-coast food Mecca: The French Laundry. The trip was sort of a combination long-delayed graduation celebration combined with an anniversary dinner. That’s enough justification, right?

It would take quite a while to describe the whole meal (officially nine courses, but also two bonus amuse bouche and an extra dessert course). If you really wanna know every detail, here’s the menu with our notes:

We arrived about half an hour before our 9pm reservations, figuring there would be stuff to see. And sure enough, there was! Right across the street from the restaurant is the incredibly well manicured restaurant garden, where they get a lot of their produce. Representative pic:

The garden was right off the road, in the middle of town, almost like a public park. It had no gates or entry control at all, so we just walked around through it. Very fun. So I guess what it takes to support sustainable urban agriculture is… to use it to supply a super-high end restaurant across the street.

The food itself was… well, just plain outstanding. It was course after course of expertly combined ingredients (LOTS of them, and never one repeated!), always in harmony, always with high-art-grade presentation. The second amuse bouche was a “coronet” of salmon, but obviously it’s supposed to look like a tiny ice-cream cone. So fun!

I got pictures of several more of the courses, but not all of them, and posted them on gallery. I’ll put one more in here for fun, though, check out this crazy-ass dessert (too many ingredients for a succint name… maybe just “anglaise?”):

The interior of the restaurant itself was pretty interesting… it was in an old house, and it felt pretty cramped (the staff and diners were constantly impeding each other up and down the narrow stairs, for example). I overheard one of the servers say it had 16 tables, which sounds about right. Most were 2 and 4 tops but there were a few bigger, and a private dining room with a table for 10 (every table was constantly occupied, of course!).

We sat down promptly at 9, after I was fitted with a borrowed jacket. Such an anachronism, requiring jackets for men, at a modern restaurant on the west coast! My shirt, tie, and slacks made me better dressed than many of the other male diners I saw, but there’s still something magical about a ratty sport coat that makes you acceptable I guess.

As for drinks, they initially brought out their wine list, on an iPad I shit you not. There we were, in this elegant restaurant, with the blue glow of a frickin’ iPad blinding us. I guess in someone’s demented mind (Thomas Keller? Yep, I’m sure this was his idea) this was trendy and a cool solution. Luckily, we didn’t really have to interact with it: we just gave our server a budget ($150/person, wince) and she brought all the pairings, which were great on the whole. They even included a champagne made exclusively for the French Laundry! They’re mostly written in our notes on the menu.

After working our way through every last course, we speculated as to the time and were pretty shocked to discover it was 12:45am–we’d been eating for almost 4 hours! I guess that’s the kind of marathon meal of relentlessly excellent food you’d want to have experienced before being handed this:

Yeowch! At least the tip was included.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. There wasn’t anything about any individual dish that was unlike what we’ve eaten before–we’ve had courses at several places (most recently Commis in Oakland) that could go head-to-head with anything served at the French Laundry. The difference was the scale of the meal, the ambitiousness and variety of the ingredients, and the complete consistency of the flavor and presentation.

Will we go again? I doubt it… when we eat we’re more interested in exploring new things than seeking out extremes. It was a fun adventure, but I think there’s more to learn by eating everyday examples of regional food from all around the world (plus, that’s the stuff we could actually cook!).

Still, I’ve got to say: The French Laundry is a shining example of what complete, single-minded obsession with great food can yield. Wow.

A couple of weeks ago, for a contest at work, I created a full 360-degree panoramic picture of our backyard. I used Hugin to stitch together over 140 shots from our dinky little Canon point-and-shoot. I decided to convert it to a “little planet” projection (also known as a stereographic projection) because I think it captures the sensation you get of having your own little world in our backyard on these beautiful Saturdays.

This weekend, I teamed up with Laurel (swimmer extraordinaire) and Debbie (cycling master) for a sprint triathlon at Lake Barryessa. Besides getting up at 4:30am to make it to the start line, it was an awesome time. We took 2nd place in the co-ed relay division! As a bonus, I also ran my best 5k ever at just under 21 minutes. Here’s the team soon after our glorious finish:

Debbie has more pictures on her flickr page.

Well, we raced and survived again! The car performed beautifully with no mechanical problems and the drivers did even better, with only a few light touches and one black flag for the entire race. Here’s a pic from just after the checkered flag; more to follow soon. Can you guess our theme?

This made my day: Kathack. It lets you play Katamari Damacy on any webpage. Katamari overt now!