Serious Coffee

Irie and I are really enjoying our road trip north. We started in Eugene and spent the first night in Portland with some friends. The next day we headed to the Olympic Penninsula and spent a couple of days there enjoying the rain forest and the most north western coast of the continental U.S. After that we took the ferry across from Port Angeles to Victoria, BC on Vancouver Island. We love Victoria. We're enjoying the incredible food and the many coffee shops. One local coffee shop chain is called Serious Coffee and here is Irie in the doorway waiting for our Soy Mochas to be made.



Speaking of soy mochas, Victoria is very vegetarian/vegan friendly. We found the ultimate restaurant: The Reef. The Reef serves Caribbean food and has vegetarian options for almost everything. I had the Tofu Jerk and it was unreal. Usually Jerk is chicken so I've never had it before. Along with the tofu jerk I got some rice and beans and the tastiest vegan coleslaw ever. The Caribbean atmosphere is accented by sweet roots reggae music playing all the time. Rastafarians tend to replace part of a word with the letter "I", for example, "natural" is "ital". At The Reef they used "ital" on the menu to refer to the vegetarian options. We loved this of course.

Today we drove up the coast checking out more of Vancouver Island while taking sort of a knitting shop tour. Tomorrow we head to Vancouver (the city) where Irie will stay for two months doing her yoga teacher training and on Saturday I'll head back to Eugene.

No-Knead Bread: Third Time

I made some more no-knead bread last weekend and it was sooooooo good!

Here it is just out of the oven and you can see the cast iron pot I'm using. The ceramic pot that Karen and Dick so graciously gave us broke in the oven while heating up on the second attempt so we bought the cast iron pot. I guess it's not a good idea to heat the pot with the lid on. Lesson learned.



And out of the pot:



The other change I made this time was to use corn meal in the towel for the second rise. This limited the amount of caked on flour on the crust.

Modest Mouse

As previously mentioned, the new Modest Mouse album features my favorite guitarist from The Smiths, Johnny Marr. I also said I wasn't a fan of Modest Mouse but would check it out anyway.

The album is out now. I listened to samples over and over on Itunes trying to get it. Then all of a sudden I was getting it. I started hearing Marr's guitar and his influence and then suddenly the singers voice wasn't so bad. I bought the CD yesterday and I just love it. I haven't been this excited about a new CD since I got Coldplay's X&Y.

I already missed the Portland shows for this tour but since it's their home town perhaps they'll play again there soon. I never got to see The Smiths live and I once had front row tickets for a band called Electronic that Johnny Marr was in - that show was canceled so I've never seen Marr play live. I will do my best to get out to a Modest Mouse show.

My first loaf of Jim's No-Knead Bread

A New York bakery owner came up with a way for regular people to easily make bread as good as you can find from professionals. An article was written in the New York Times about it and it spread fast. Karen and Dick let me know about it and even gave us the crock pot that we needed. Thanks Karen and Dick! Over the weekend I made my first one and it was incredible. Irie and I ate the whole thing!

Ok, so this was actually my second attempt. The first I attempt I followed the recipe exactly and the dough ended up in the trash. The problem was that the original recipe calls for 1 5/8 cups of water and the dough was too wet - 1 1/2 cups of water seems to be the correct amount and many a food blog confirms that. The other problem was that I didn't realize there was a difference between "Instant Yeast" and "Active Dry Yeast". The recipe calls for the former and I used the latter and didn't activate it in luke warm water first. The result was that the dough ended up too wet too handle and it didn't really rise.

I fixed those problems on my second attempt and made this unbelievably tasty bread:



Here is what it looks like sliced. You'll notice the crispy crust and airy chewy center. What can't be conveyed in the pictures is just how good it tastes.



If you're going to use Active Dry Yeast I read that you should use a 1/3 more yeast than the recipe calls for which 1/4 teaspoon. For this loaf I used 1/4 teaspoon and I think the loaf could have risen a bit more so that sounds right.

Here is a video of Jim showing us how its done:

Asylum Street Spankers

I went and saw the Asylum Street Spankers tonight. They are a really great band from Austin, Texas. See them if you can.

The other bonus to this band is that 2 members were in my favorite-desert-island-movie-of-all-time-ever: Slacker. I'm telling you I've seen this movie tens of times and quote it often. Love it. You should see if you haven't although you probably won't become obsessed about it and have almost every line memorized .... um, yeah. So anyway. Most of the people in this movie were not actors and pretty much played themselves. It has a unique narrative structure and no plot. Richard Linklater made this movie for $23,000 on maxed out credit cards. It has made millions and he has gone on to make big time movies; most recently, A Scanner Darkly.

I was uneasy about approaching either of them and professing my love of this obscure movie that they each had a small part in back in 1991 but I decided it was probably my only chance and I went for it. I approached Scott Marcus and said that I was really embarrassed but Slacker is my favorite movie and I wanted to say hi. He was really cool about it and told me how he got his part and we talked about drums and music a bit.

I tried to find Scott's scene on youtube but it's not there. Instead here is the scene with the character called "We've been on the moon since the 50's":

Straight Flush over Boat

I went to the weekly poker tournament thrown by a friend at work on Friday and I won. The best part though is the winning hand. I was heads-up with the host of party with a 2:1 chip lead. I was holding 7c 8c and I raised pre-flop about 3 times the big blind. He raised all-in, I called and he flipped over Kh Ks. At this point he was a 80% favorite. The flop came 10c 6h 9c which gave me a straight. I was now a 90% favorite. The turn brought a 6s giving him 2 pair and 4 outs to improve to a full house, however, one of those outs (the 6c) would give me a straight flush. And of course the river came 6c and I won the tournament with my first ever straight flush.

Here is a picture of the actual hand: