Scrabble, Tomatoes, Is This Mine or Yours?

It’s been quite a nice weekend. Friday night, Lee K. and I played a game or two of Scrabble at our regular café on Valencia St. She won, as usual, but we had a fun time. There are always many people in the café, but besides us chatting and giggling, all are dead silent, most bathed in the eerie white light of their laptops, and one or two Luddites reading.

Yesterday, Saturday, I sprang out of bed at nine or so and rode my bike to the farmers’ market at the Ferry Building, which is much smaller than the vast farmers’ market I remember from my youth in Ann Arbor, where there were piles and piles of produce and jug after jug of apple cider. I bought chard, a red onion, carrots, apples, kiwis and some tomatoes I didn’t need, but which were of such a hallucinatory otherworldly glowing redness that I couldn’t resist.

They were absolutely beautiful but didn’t taste quite as good as tomatoes of decades ago, though it’s still early in the season. I’ve never tasted a tomato as good as those my mother grew in her vegetable garden except for incredibly tasty cherry tomatoes served at the wedding last year of Tom’s brother Steve.

On my way home, I saw Tom’s niece, Sarah, at a bus stop on Market St.

When I got home, I whipped out my calculator (as the child of two engineers will tend to do) and discovered that I’d paid nearly twice as much at the farmers’ market than I would have at Rainbow.

There were some booths at the market selling products that are available at Rainbow, like Bariani olive oil from Sacramento, which I switched to after another of Tom’s brothers, Dan, gave me a bottle of it. This tells me that Rainbow is doing a pretty good job of stocking the wares of not-too-distant farmers, and therefore, and I don’t mean to dis the farmers’ market or anything, but I might as well do all my shopping at Rainbow, and just try to pay attention to where an item comes from and if it’s in season or not.

Next I went to see a friend who lives on Bernal hill, and her daughter, who I believe is 13, and who, as a young toddler, made three remarks that I still think are the funniest baby remarks ever.

She was at my apartment one day and spotted something she liked (a brightly colored plastic toothbrush container). Her solution was elegant. Instead of sticking it in her pocket and rather than throwing herself on the ground and shrieking, “I want that!”, she casually inquired, “Is this mine or yours?”

When the three of us were getting into my friend’s car one day, as the daughter was being set into her car seat in back, she magnanimously announced, “I’m not going to drive.” (“Good,” said my friend, “because you’re not allowed to drive.”)

And her mother told me about the same time that her daughter had announced gravely to a complete stranger, “I don’t play with knives.”

After our visit yesterday, I went to get the Marin from Freewheel (again; this time it was having its rear wheel rebuilt) and then I went to Rainbow to do my non-produce shopping and then I came home and cooked.

I made butter cookies, half with nuts in them and half that I was going to put peppermint frosting on, but the mint frosting experiment was a failure (alas, as a bottle of mint flavoring probably is going up the same way vanilla extract is). Baked tofu was another semi-failure. I made a glop out of soy sauce, garlic, ginger, toasted sesame oil, red pepper flakes and a bit of brown sugar to put on the tofu slabs while they baked. Halfway through, I turned the slabs over and put a bit more of the glop on top; the glop on the bottom ended up burning. I’ll have to rethink my method. Maybe I should use that as a marinade instead.

I also made brown rice and I chopped veggies and washed apples.

To work this week I will bring containers of brown rice with garlic, olive oil and soy sauce; in each container will be slices of reconstituted shiitake mushrooms (I guess that’s redundant), and a slab of semi-failed baked tofu. I’ll also bring zucchini (left over from last week), carrot slices, a sliced apple, a bit of tuna salad, and three homemade cookies. Yum.

Today I slept until about noon and then I got up and had a tomato from the farmers’ market, sliced and with a bit of salt and pepper, and brown Crimini mushrooms sautéed in butter with balsamic vinegar and soy sauce. Now I’m going to psychologically prepare for the Oscars, which I’m going to watch with Tom. I haven’t watched the Oscars in about 25 years, but it seemed appealing this year for some reason.